December 5, 2025
Among the grandchildren is one of my granddaughters, a high school Junior. To be clear, all our grandchildren here are not above average (channeling Lake Woebegone), but she is. Everything high honors courses , straight A’s, has already been scouted by colleges interested in perhaps adding her to the women’s ice hockey team.
So, I recently visited to watch her play in a national women’s tournament and we had some time to talk about college. She has expressed an interest in either engineering or architecture. And her grandpa said, “Em, I’m not sure how much of a career will be waiting for you if you do.” My thought being that at the rate AI is progressing, much of that work will no longer be done by engineers or architects. “You might be better off at a business school studying marketing, where you’ll have a world of diversified opportunities waiting for you.” That is, like sidestepping a check in hockey, you sidestep the AI check to your career.
Something funny happened on the way to the future we were promised. You know, the one where everyone went to college, got a degree, and lived happily ever after in an air-conditioned office? It turns out that future was mostly hard to forecast (as it always is), and a lot of people are figuring that out the hard way, while plumbers drive past them in brand new trucks.
We’re living through what might be the biggest reassessment of the “college for everyone” gospel since it became a national obsession. And it’s about time. For decades, we told kids that the only path to success was a four-year degree, which working with your hands was for people who couldn’t hack it academically, and that trades were a backup plan for failures. Oops.
The numbers now tell a story that guidance counselors don’t want to hear. The average cost of a four-year public college degree is now over $130,000 when you factor in everything. Add another $100,000 for a private college. Meanwhile, many trade programs cost a fraction of that and get you earning money within a year or two instead of four-plus years. An electrician can be pulling down $70,000 a year while their high school classmate is still grinding through sophomore year and racking up debt.
And let’s talk about that debt. Student loans have become a generational ball and chain. Millennials and Gen Z are drowning in it, putting off buying homes, starting families, and basically living their lives because they’re paying for a degree that—let’s be honest—a lot of them aren’t even using. How many baristas have you met with bachelor’s degrees? How many Uber drivers have a masters? The credential inflation is real.
Meanwhile, Mike the HVAC guy is booked solid for the next six weeks, charging $150 an hour, and sleeping just fine without any student loans keeping him up at night. There’s a massive shortage of skilled tradespeople, which means basic economics kicks in: high demand plus low supply equals good money. When your toilet explodes at midnight, you’re not calling someone with a philosophy degree, you’re calling a plumber and you’re paying whatever they ask.
I recently took the Shelby Cobra to Daytona to have it checked out for engine tuning and so forth. John greeted me with grease up to his elbows (we fist bumped), told me he charges $100/hour and he’d give me a quote. “Skip the quote John, if I can’t get you, I don’t know where I’d take it.” At $100/hour, John makes $200,000/year.
The shortage is only getting worse. Boomers are retiring in droves, and there aren’t nearly enough young people entering trades to replace them. We spent thirty years telling kids that college was the only respectable path, so now we have a glut of liberal arts degrees and a desperate shortage of people who can fix things. Good luck finding someone to install your air conditioner in July.
Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, recently said he has 5,000 mechanics jobs unfilled paying $125,000/year plus benefits.
COVID accelerated this rethinking. Suddenly everyone was stuck at home, doing remote work in spaces that needed renovation, and discovering that contractors were basically unavailable. People who could build decks, finish basements, or install home offices were printing money. Meanwhile, a lot of those “safe” white-collar jobs turned out to be very easy to offshore or automate. Turns out it’s hard to outsource your plumbing to Mumbai.
The cultural shift is real too. There’s less stigma now around skipping college for trades. Social media is full of young tradespeople showing off their earnings, their paid-off trucks, and their debt-free lives. TikTok has blue-collar influencers explaining why they’re glad they didn’t go to college. This would have been unthinkable twenty years ago when everyone was high on the knowledge economy Kool-Aid.
And here’s the thing about trades: you’re learning actually useful skills. You can fix your own house. You can help friends and family. You have tangible abilities that matter in the real world. Compare that to spending $200,000 to learn critical theory or medieval literature. I’m not saying those things have no value (I mean, I studied medieval literature in college as a degree minor), but they have a very specific kind of value that doesn’t necessarily translate to paying your bills.
The thing about a lot of white-collar work is that it’s kind of soul-crushing in its own way. You sit in meetings that could have been emails, writing reports nobody reads, participating in corporate theater that feels increasingly meaningless. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, a carpenter can point to something they built. A mechanic fixed something that was broken. There’s a satisfaction in tangible results that PowerPoint presentations can’t match.
This isn’t to say college is worthless. If you want to be a doctor, engineer, or architect, yeah, you need that degree. But we oversold the idea that everyone needs college for everything. We created a system where employers require degrees for jobs that really don’t need them, just because they can. Its credential inflation run amok, and it’s screwed over a lot of people.
The correction is happening, slowly. More parents are encouraging their kids to consider trades. More schools are bringing back vocational programs they gutted in the ’90s. More young people are doing the math and realizing that four years of debt for a job that pays $40,000 doesn’t make sense when they could learn a trade and be making good money within two years.
There’s also something democratizing about the trades. You don’t need connections or family wealth. You need willingness to work hard and learn. The playing field is more level than in a lot of white-collar careers where unpaid internships and networking matter as much as ability.
I recently took my Yamaha Neo Euphonium to the instrument repair shop for a silver bath and new valve springs. First, I had to drive 1 ½ hours to Waynesville to get one. Second, he was so booked it took a month to get it back. Third, he charged me $320 for three hours work. $106 x 40 x 50 = $212,000/year. I told him he needed help and he told me he’s tried to get kids interested in apprenticeship but they’re not interested.
We’re living through a great skill swap, a rebalancing after decades of pushing everyone toward college regardless of whether it made sense. It’s messy and it’s overdue, but it’s happening. Maybe in another generation, we’ll have found some equilibrium between valuing education and valuing actual skills people need.
Until then, be nice to your plumber.
I mean, you can do without educated-me, but you can’t do without him.
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
