NORTH BENNET STREET SCHOOL

Plan B!

By JULIA REISCHEL

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Know how much the average piano tuner makes? Around $28,000 a year, according to the Massachusetts Department of Workforce Development. Locksmiths do better, at about $29,000, and carpenters pull in about $35,000. Sure as hell beats waiting tables ($14,000 a year before tips) for the can't-stand-mainstream-college set, eh?

But how do you break into the elite brotherhood of fine craftsmen who keep the locks and lathes of the Commonwealth turning, especially if you've been raised expecting to be inducted into the high priesthood of liberal arts? Simple: Knock together an application to attend the North Bennet Street School, a full-time craft college based in the North End. It has the reassuring red-brick feel of a cozy liberal arts school (the student-teacher ratio is a cushy 12:1), only with workbenches and fume hoods instead of lecterns and whiteboards. The cost isn't quite Harvard, but it's still enough to make your parents think they're investing in something, and the payoff is real: In nine months to three years, you'll emerge as an accredited craftsman in one of eight trades: bookbinding, cabinetry, carpentry (chose either conventional or restoration), jewelry repair, locksmithing, piano technology or violin making.

The school subscribes to the apprenticeship model of teaching, which means that students learn by building. In just nine months, you'll make myriad keys, and in the two-year bookbinding program, over 35 books. There's a three-year time commitment required for fledging Stradivaris, all of whom who must make a cello, a viola and seven individual violins.

Not that the students mind. By all accounts, North Bennet Street School is like crack--no one who enrolls can get enough. The students and faculty "all noticeably loved what they were doing," writes Michelle Stranges, an alumna quoted on the school's website. "I even remember some 'snow days' during the school year, but we all showed up anyway."

So what's not to like about a school that has you making books instead of reading them? Maybe only that it shunts you toward a life of self-employment, since these days, as in the Middle Ages, most master craftsmen work for themselves. But hey--at least they get a living wage for it.

[North Bennet Street School, 39 North Bennet St., Boston. 617.227.0155. nbss.org]