McPherson College in Kansas offers students a four-year auto restoration program.
MPHERSON, Kan. – Paige Miltenberger always knew she would grow up working on cars.
Since she was a child, she has been restoring old cars with her father and grandfather. But as a young woman in St. Louis, she didn’t find the training she needed to restore the classics.
“My technical high school that I went to, it was all new stuff and just general car stuff,” Miltenberger said. “And it wasn’t that niche category of classic cars that I knew I wanted to work on.”
Enter McPherson College, the only college in the country to offer a bachelor’s degree in automotive restoration.
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“I knew I enjoyed working on cars. I knew I especially enjoyed working on old cars. And there’s no other program like it. So in my mind, this is the only place I could have gone,” the sophomore said.
And it seems Miltenberger made the right choice – she is one of the program’s top students, having missed only one test question so far this semester in TE 141 – Engine Rebuilding.
Miltenberger is just one of about 175 students studying auto restoration at McPherson College, a 138-year-old liberal arts college about an hour north of Wichita. Next year the car program will celebrate its 50th anniversary, a milestone for a school contributing to a sector that urgently needs more workers.
According to the TechForce Foundation, 85,581 new auto workers are expected to be needed to meet demand. That number will increase every year, reaching more than 350,000 in 2028.
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Working on classic cars is even more of a niche, which makes McPherson College unique.
“We consider the skills we teach as heritage skills, so they are not things that students learn in shop class, if there is even a shop class at their school,” said Amanda Gutierrez, vice president of automotive restoration and engineering. “And so, from woodworking to hand-crafting metal, all the hand-sewing of chairs and things like that, these are all skills that are disappearing.”
Students learn all aspects of restoration, from rebuilding engines to painting panels, welding joints to sewing upholstery.
“One of my favorites is students who walk into the trim lab and have never touched a sewing machine in their life,” Gutierrez says.
Noah Durham was one of those students. He loves all aspects of restoring old cars, but the attention to detail in the upholstery and the emphasis on every stitch being perfect appealed to him. It is also a field in high demand.
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“Almost every store comes looking for people or asking people to do upholstery,” said Durham, a senior. “A lot of people don’t do that anymore. And it’s become very specialized, especially on really high caliber cars like your Ferraris, Bentleys and Jaguars.”
Durham will graduate in May, but he already has a full-time job lined up. He goes to work as a trimmer at a Pennsylvania restoration shop specializing in European classics, earning more than $70,000 a year.
And he’s not unique: McPherson has a 95% acceptance rate within six months of graduation. And these aren’t just jobs in restoration shops. McPherson graduates are spread across the country and work in multiple disciplines.
“They work in stores, they have their own stores. They work for museums, private collections, auction houses as historical specialists, putting together the research and doing all that,” Gutierrez said.
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And in an increasingly AI-driven world, automotive repair appears to be largely immune to replacement by computers.
“AI won’t replace this,” said Curt Goodwin, the school’s motor professor. “That’s what I talk about when we’re assembling an engine, and you turn that engine by hand and you feel like everything is right, AI can’t replace that.”
Of course, AI cannot replace the practical work, but it is also difficult to find answers online because many of the manuals are not digitized. If you want to know how to rebuild a rare European engine, you have to be a student and go to McPherson’s library and read the physical manual.
“We’re working on the engine project or whatever. And they’ll ask me, ‘well, what about this torque or what are these specs?’ I say, ‘I don’t know. Look it up.’ And so they pull out their phone. I say, ‘No, no. You look it up in the manual, look it up in a book,” Goodwin said. “These cars are one of a kind.”
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There are currently 23 cars being worked on within the university in various stages of restoration, from an ultra-rare 1956 Austin-Healey 100M Le Mans to a 1953 Mercedes-Benz 300S Cabriolet to a 1967 Mini Cooper S. Once the cars are completed, some are sold (with proceeds going straight back into the program), while others join the school’s stable of classic cars who tour the country in shows and parades.
McPherson College’s 1953 Mercedes-Benz 300 S Cabriolet at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in Pebble Beach, California, on August 20, 2022. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Looking ahead, the school for automotive studies hopes to double in size over the next ten years. Gutierrez says it will expand facilities to accommodate expected growth, as well as add new specialized programs in areas such as digital media and automotive engineering.
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And while the money may be good and job security seems stable, for McPherson students it’s about passion.
“You have to do it for the love of it. But it’s a legitimate way to make a living, and you won’t starve, and that job will be safe for a long time, especially if you’re good at it,” Goodwin said. “I’ve always been able to feed my family.”
