As part of the Trump administration’s quest to revitalize American manufacturing, Vice President JD Vance headlined the launch of the Foundry School initiative Thursday, a national workforce program designed to train entrepreneurs, engineers, technicians, and industrial leaders to rebuild our manufacturing base.

According to a State Department briefing, the school is part of Pax Silica, “the Department’s flagship multilateral initiative to secure trusted global supply chains for the technologies that will define the next century.”

The goal is to make American manufacturing great again:

President Trump’s reindustrialization agenda has already brought trillions of dollars in industrial investment to American soil. Foundry School will focus on turning that investment into jobs. American manufacturers will need an estimated 3.8 million skilled workers by 2033 in semiconductors, defense, energy, and beyond, and Foundry School exists to make sure Americans fill those jobs. The program will put American workers first by equipping them with the skills needed to bring manufacturing jobs home and build careers in industries critical to our nation’s economic security.

Vance, delivering remarks at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., echoed television host and skilled-trades advocate Mike Rowe, a proponent of young people getting their hands dirty, not just reading textbooks.

The vice president wants ambitious kids to know that it’s fine if they want to go into finance or the legal profession, but there’s a whole alternate world out there that’s all too often overlooked: building things.

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What we're doing with The Foundry is we're telling America's next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers and just brilliant kids that there is a future, both a financial future, but also a future in the dignity of what you're going to be doing every single day by actually building things.

By leading, not just teams of bankers, but teams of manufacturers and teams of electricians, were sending a message to all of America's kids, both at the leadership level and those below them, that we believe in making things again.

In the second clip (above), he said that Mike Rowe is absolutely right with his message about not everybody needing a PhD to succeed:

I’m friends with Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy. He has this amazing podcast, but he's also working a lot on this idea of why do we have so many people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt, but not the skills necessary to participate in what I think is the beginning of a manufacturing Renaissance in the United States of America.

Previous administrations have watched as manufacturing fled the country to the point where it sometimes seemed like nothing was made here anymore. It’s time to turn that around, Vance said:

And the idea that if you're working with your hands, you're not using your mind is one of the dumbest things that America's leaders ever told a generation of American kids…

Why don't you do both?

Trump’s emphasis on bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. may be one of his more consequential moves over the long term. It never should have been allowed to decline so precipitously in the first place.

Let’s build, people!