Wrenching on sportscars

[G.]

My High School senior, soon to be 18 years old (!!), wants to be in racing. He wants to physically wrench on the cars - tire changer, body work, shocks, whatever. He'd love to work up to being the crew chief/strategiest/right-hand-man to the owner, someday, but expects to start at the bottom.

I've tried to talk him out of it, for various reasons, but he has decided. I'm convinced that he WILL be employed in an IMSA series team.
He is planning to get a Mechanical Engineering degree, with an emphasis on performance motorsports.

We live in Illinois, so almost any school would be out-of-state tuition. :(

Any suggestions?

UNOH seems to pop up all the time as the best place to go, but it appears to be a trade school or a transient school (folks go for 6 weeks for some sort of SAE qualification training). I'm sure I'm wrong.

IUPUI is expensive as hell. They have a weird Mech Eng Tech bachelors degree, combined with performance motorsports bachelors, for a double-major (in 5 years). What the hell is am M.E.Tech degree? I'm too old. There's Engineering and there's Technical degrees. (Engineers design, and hand it off to the techs to build a prototype.)

There's apparently a good school for motorosports in Farris, MI.

Any ideas/advice?
He's accepted to Univ. of Northern Ohio (UNOH), but everyone is.
He's accepted to UIPUI.
Colleges are hurting for people to apply right now. Kids are just putting it off due to COVID/being a dumb teen. He still has time to make choices.

Any help is appreciated!

[devilmaster]

The only thing I got may be to look into Casey Putsch and his genius garage.

http://geniusgarageracing.com

Its a work semester type thing...

[nrc]

The good news is that it sounds like he's more interested the in the job than the school. Which hopefully means that he's not tied to having the traditional "college experience." Which is where a lot of the money people complain about is going these days.

Can he move to Indianapolis, get a job, and wait six months to become an Indiana residence? (No idea if it works like that but avoiding out of state tuition is a huge deal.)

Look into Ivy Tech and the "Transfer as a Junior" program that they have with IUPUI. You can save a ton of money on your first two years by transferring credit from a Community College and nobody really cares about where you did that work. Truth be told, after you have a few years of experience, nobody that you want to work for cares where you got your degree.

And on top of that, Community College would probably leave him more time to make rent and get practical experience turning wrenches, which is what it sounds like he wants to do.

[G.]

The good news is that it sounds like he's more interested the in the job than the school. Which hopefully means that he's not tied to having the traditional "college experience." Which is where a lot of the money people complain about is going these days.

Can he move to Indianapolis, get a job, and wait six months to become an Indiana residence? (No idea if it works like that but avoiding out of state tuition is a huge deal.)

Look into Ivy Tech and the "Transfer as a Junior" program that they have with IUPUI. You can save a ton of money on your first two years by transferring credit from a Community College and nobody really cares about where you did that work. Truth be told, after you have a few years of experience, nobody that you want to work for cares where you got your degree.

And on top of that, Community College would probably leave him more time to make rent and get practical experience turning wrenches, which is what it sounds like he wants to do.

We are looking into all of the above (except we are considering a Comm Coll nearby us).

The ONE THING that I'm trying to insist with him, is that he have an exit plan. A lot of the guys I worked with in CART were ready to move on, but where do you go from autosports, when that's all you know? How do you go from spending your entire summer planned out, work long-ass hours in the heat, etc., to a nice office job? So I'm pushing him for an engineering degree, with emphasis on electronics (ie., batteries) and heat management.

Many of the CART guys had technical degrees, and did their job well, but they had a hard time finding quality 9-5:00 work when the wives and babies started to appear. ;)