We spoke with young people about the eternal “college or trade” question in the current moment
A Financial Times survey shows joblessness among college-educated men in their twenties is about the same as those without a degree. Today, many wonder if they should have gone to trade school.
For unemployed men between the ages of 22 and 27, a college degree makes little difference. Overall, about seven percent of men in this age bracket are unemployed. And according to a Financial Times analysis, the rate of joblessness was the same whether or not they had gone to college.
Earlier this year, I was DOGE’d out of my job in public media. I’d worked as an investigative editor at Radio Free Asia, and then the place had been targeted by Elon Musk’s team. And now, I’d learned from the FT that education makes no difference for people in certain demographics. There’s no question about the numbers. Millions of people have lost their jobs, and they’re (we’re) struggling. But it fits neatly into an anti-college narrative, the one that says higher education is useless. I wanted to find out more.
One of the big questions was: would it have been better to go to vocational school, or maybe not go to school at all?
“Had I invested my wasted tuition money into rental properties, indexes or god forbid BitCoin I’d have generational wealth by now. It’s pretty much entirely a scam unless you’re in a STEM degree,” posted one user on Reddit.
But the Reddit discussion was part of a bigger campaign, intentionally or not. President Trump has unleashed a full-on assault on higher education. His administration has tried to crush DEI programs and expunge what they consider to be liberal bias from the curriculum. Justice Department officials have investigated universities for civil rights violations. At the same time, Trump has praised trade schools.
“I am considering taking THREE BILLION DOLLARS of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. His criticism of higher education resonates with his base.
Dylan Duru, 21, a senior at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, tells me that he has experienced first-hand how Trump supporters diss college. He works in retail during summer breaks in a New Jersey town, not far from Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster. Some of his customers are club members, wealthy people who own businesses and did not go to college, he says: “They think I’m a little soft boy because I went off to college.” Now that unemployment is high, he says, “It’s even more ammunition. Now, it’s ‘Oh, you can’t get a job, and you went to college.’”
Still, the question about college remains a salient one. Dyllan Savage graduated three years ago from Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He moved to New York. For a while, he worked at the Met Opera. He also worked in restaurants, and he went to auditions. The most money he has earned in any single year since his graduation, he says, is $22,000.
“Should I have gone to trade school? I mean, of course that thought crosses your mind. I just feel, like, you go into plumbing, and you have a job, and you make money. Now that I’m 25, I’d like to someday have a family, get married. And it’s, ‘Oh, I’m fucked.’”
Chase Dumolt is someone who made that decision early. As a high-school student in New Lexington, Ohio, he decided to become an electrician.
“I’m a go-getter, and I want to get my life planned out and started as quickly as possible. Now I have a great job where I’m getting paid well for my age and earning a pension already,” he wrote. “As I work my way up this pathway, I’m going to be making more money than a lot of other kids who graduate college with student debt.”
Those like Savage, and others who chose college over trade school, have doubts about their path. “The secret’s out. Everybody hates their college, especially people who are in the arts,” Savage says. But he is thinking about going back to school and he hopes someday to work in education.
The fact that the unemployment rate is currently the same for college and non-college educated people doesn’t mean that one path is inherently better than the other. Everyone should choose the path for them, and in the face of Trump’s rhetoric, whether you’re a grad student or an electrician, the fight for labor rights is more important than ever.