I can only speak for Pennsylvania, where education of potential artisans is not included in any fast-track academic program.

Harvard doesn't have a Trades chair, so why should high-achieving academic students be steered toward a trades education? The message goes out loud and clear that vocational-technical school isn't for the brains, and often isn't even for the well-behaved. People "wind up" in vo-tech as a kind of alternative school, located in a separate building from the places where calculus, chemistry and literature are taught.

This segregation began because this training required specialized tools and other equipment that school districts by themselves could often ill afford, so the Dept. of Education's Intermediate Units (groups of school districts affiliated by geography) established a number of vocational-technical facilities to be shared. However, the result was a tiered educational system in which kids who were low-achievers (including those whose achievement was hampered by their own misbehavior and lack of social connections) were steered to vo-tech.

I have known parents who have actively discouraged their kids from pursuing education in artisan/technician fields not because of the work itself, but because they were concerned about the friends their children would make at the school. It's not like the older apprentice system, in which students learned in shops from knowledgeable adults who were more settled masters of their crafts. It's more like reform-school lite. Those with the skill to learn and the backbone to keep out of trouble (more difficult when many more of your classmates than average are headed that way and you have a 15-year-old brain) get to the shop. . . eventually.

Vocational/technical schools need to be reaffiliated, physically, with their parent schools, so that people who want to study these crafts can also get some of the more academic subjects with the university bound students. It will allow vo-tech majors to make friends and other connections across a wider social group, and it will also allow the future professionals to appreciate their hands-on contemporaries as more than just "the guy (or girl) in the coveralls". If we're to respect each other as adults later in the greater community, we need this. If, in the bigger picture, we are to continue as an operating democracy, we need this.

The art departments become similar ghettos, but for different reasons, and because of the romantic nature of art in our culture, with different results. The 21-year-old is in a 4-year art college, breezing through her non-art requirements because the school knows the type of education their undergrads got in high school as artists. Her high school education was a bit more rigorous than her classmates': her parents insisted on it. Then again, she was also in music, which has yet another effect.