I’ve noticed something weird online: a huge percentage of the people aggressively telling young people to “skip college and learn a trade” don’t actually work in the skilled trades themselves.
They romanticize it from the outside.
They’ll point to union electrician or lineman wages like that’s the standard outcome, when in reality those are often some of the best-case scenarios, not the norm. If you actually look at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, most tradespeople are *not* making $150k+ a year.
And a lot of the “6 figure tradesman” stories conveniently leave out:
* insane overtime
* travel work
* years of apprenticeship
* inconsistent employment
* physical wear and tear on the body
People talk about trades like they’re some cheat code to financial success while ignoring the reality that many of these jobs are physically brutal. Knees, backs, shoulders, hearing, joints — there’s a reason older tradesmen constantly talk about pain.
Another thing I notice is that people making these arguments almost always compare trades to the absolute worst college outcome imaginable — usually some vague “useless liberal arts degree.”
Well yeah… obviously becoming an electrician is probably a better financial decision than taking on massive debt for a degree with weak job prospects. That’s not exactly a shocking revelation.
But they rarely compare trades to:
* engineering
* accounting
* nursing
* computer science
* finance
* healthcare
* other in-demand degrees
They also act like every college costs $30k-$80k a year when there are way cheaper paths:
* community college
* in-state tuition
* scholarships
* employer reimbursement
* transferring after 2 years
A lot of people graduate without life-destroying debt.
Then there’s the constant “AI will replace all white collar workers” argument.
Maybe some jobs change, but people talk like offices are about to disappear overnight. If companies could massively eliminate white collar labor that easily, they probably would have already started doing it at scale years ago.
So far it seems more likely that AI increases productivity — meaning the same employees can simply handle more work faster, not that entire industries instantly vanish.
And honestly, one of the biggest tells is this:
A lot of skilled tradesmen themselves encourage their kids to go to college if they can.
That doesn’t mean trades are bad. Society absolutely needs skilled labor, and some people genuinely thrive in those careers. But the internet has swung so far in the anti-college direction that people act like college is always a scam and trades are guaranteed wealth.
Neither path is guaranteed.
Both have pros and cons.
But the online conversation around trades feels heavily romanticized by people observing from the outside.
They romanticize it from the outside.
They’ll point to union electrician or lineman wages like that’s the standard outcome, when in reality those are often some of the best-case scenarios, not the norm. If you actually look at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, most tradespeople are *not* making $150k+ a year.
And a lot of the “6 figure tradesman” stories conveniently leave out:
* insane overtime
* travel work
* years of apprenticeship
* inconsistent employment
* physical wear and tear on the body
People talk about trades like they’re some cheat code to financial success while ignoring the reality that many of these jobs are physically brutal. Knees, backs, shoulders, hearing, joints — there’s a reason older tradesmen constantly talk about pain.
Another thing I notice is that people making these arguments almost always compare trades to the absolute worst college outcome imaginable — usually some vague “useless liberal arts degree.”
Well yeah… obviously becoming an electrician is probably a better financial decision than taking on massive debt for a degree with weak job prospects. That’s not exactly a shocking revelation.
But they rarely compare trades to:
* engineering
* accounting
* nursing
* computer science
* finance
* healthcare
* other in-demand degrees
They also act like every college costs $30k-$80k a year when there are way cheaper paths:
* community college
* in-state tuition
* scholarships
* employer reimbursement
* transferring after 2 years
A lot of people graduate without life-destroying debt.
Then there’s the constant “AI will replace all white collar workers” argument.
Maybe some jobs change, but people talk like offices are about to disappear overnight. If companies could massively eliminate white collar labor that easily, they probably would have already started doing it at scale years ago.
So far it seems more likely that AI increases productivity — meaning the same employees can simply handle more work faster, not that entire industries instantly vanish.
And honestly, one of the biggest tells is this:
A lot of skilled tradesmen themselves encourage their kids to go to college if they can.
That doesn’t mean trades are bad. Society absolutely needs skilled labor, and some people genuinely thrive in those careers. But the internet has swung so far in the anti-college direction that people act like college is always a scam and trades are guaranteed wealth.
Neither path is guaranteed.
Both have pros and cons.
But the online conversation around trades feels heavily romanticized by people observing from the outside.
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