New survey data from the nonprofit American Student Assistance shows that teen interest in college is down while interest in nondegree paths is on the rise.
Meanwhile, parents are skeptical of options outside the traditional college pathway to work.
Nearly half of all students surveyed – 45% – weren’t interested in going to college. About 14% said they planned to attend trade or technical schools, apprenticeships and technical boot camp programs, and 38% were considering those options.
66% of teens surveyed said parents supported their plans to pursue a nondegree route, compared with 82% whose parents encouraged them to attend college.
Out of residency 200-300k is the starting pay too. Mid to late career doctors, especially the specialist, make major major money. What sucks can be long hours and major responsibility over human lives while being sleep deprived but the long hours can be matched by tradespersons while paying 2-10x less and being more susceptible to market downturns
Tl;dr: If you have a good paying job, you should consider getting over the distance for it and find fulfillment outside of work
One thing I’ve learned with age is that everyone complains about their jobs. Everyone. Even the most idealistic jobs. Filmmakers, painters, community organizers/outreach, your everyday local DJ doing any event that’ll hire them, doctor, scientist, tradesperson, etc.
Anecdotal, but practically every freelance artist I’ve met has been like, “if you can find a steady 9-5 corporate gig, take it so you can have a chance at being able to live a normal life. It’s too late for me.” As in the years of constantly having to market themselves, look for contract after contract, constantly traveling because often times your best shot at making it as a videographer is doing remote shoots weeks at a time, constantly budgeting just to make rent and keep your going to next gig, learning about the costs of health insurance and that it gets higher as you age, every other type of insurance they didn’t think about until they were a freelancer, etc has made them into a bit of a scatterbrain and kind of selfish. Reasonably selfish as it’s unstable work and your relationships are constantly distant and passing. But still selfish. So ya, I always hear don’t be like me as a freelancer because it’s really hard to live the nice idyllic life without the time to build out a committed to home community. Like, “I wish I could work a normal job but mentally I can’t do it anymore so I keep freelancing.”
Community organizers/outreach, non-profits. Anecdotal again but I’m used to hearing from non-management employees about how little they trust organizational leadership to care for them. Very often the phrase I hear is, “these non-profits don’t care about us” and a co-worker say, “preach, amen.” Doing good work but unless you’re in leadership, you’re working poverty wages and at some point most will start questioning what they’ve even accomplished and how much longer can they do this and whether they deserve better in life than poverty wages as a social/political outreach employee. Those that don’t work the job will always gush about the work to them and make it awkward and unlikely for the workers to tell people how they feel about the job rather than the mission. Ideally a fulfilling job turns to a fulfilling mission not job, to then neither and wanting a good paying job
Everyone thinks grass is greener and people think they can just get into the trades and make big money. There’s the cost of training and apprenticeship. Then there’s the grind to journeyman. Then there’s the low chance of being one of the ones to run their own business and doing so is a trade-off of work-life balance. Make more money owning your own trade shop but until if ever you make it to owning a fleet of vehicles hiring a bunch of tradesperson, you’re going to be working insane hours
Work for a company as a tradesperson and you’ll have better work life balance but just solid pay eventually that’ll cap out lower than some office job where you can move up into corporate stuff.
One thing that hit me talking around was a tradesperson telling me that in the trades you don’t have downtime. You can’t let yourself chit chat with a client pausing work or else everything gets delayed, you can’t take as many clients as you need and operations can fall apart by being too social on the job. You don’t have time to just scroll on your phone randomly throughout the day.
The other being hearing stuff like trades jobs feel worse than playing on the line in football. At least in football you’re mostly upright and when you fall you fall but it’s all mostly deliberate and comfortable games and workouts. Trades you’re moving your body to fit places that place weird strain on your body for 8+ hours a day. You inhale all sorts of whatever. You may be doing work where shavings of whatever is constantly flying around getting all over your clothing at least but also any bit of skin that it gets to through the day. Shit can be real loud regardless of ear protection. Could be lifting steel beams that are heavy as shit over and over for hours of the day
Like people will lift weights for 1-2 hours a day cycling muscle groups different days of the week. Take some days off. People will still get workout injuries from overuse or tiny mistakes. Trades, it’ll be the same muscles and joints day in and day out 8+ hours a day
Regardless you got to do what you got to do to survive and trades are good respectable work that deliver a service and can raise a family. Anecdotal but old tradespeople that have gotten over the machismo have always told me I and anyone should get over the grass is greener mentality. They didn’t just start making $100k+ doing a trade. It was mediocre for a decade+ until they sniffed $100k and by then their body was already aching and they could legit try to start their own business where they’d now have to work more hours to hopefully someday just be the boss rather than the boss that also works every job as well
People in office jobs that required degrees that gave them starting wages over like $70k with clear growth prospects looking to get into trades for self-fullfillment, get some hobbies you can do with friends and alone. Make some friends. Use the energy you’re not spending crawling around breathing in who knows what to become really good at cooking so that people want to have cookouts with you