I learned a trade before I realized college was a better fit for me and I do think there’s a bit a “grass is always greener” phenomenon when it comes to people thinking about the trades.
There are plenty of hardworking, skilled welders who have pretty unpleasant, low-paying jobs and originally intended to get a lucrative oil rig job but couldn’t seem to get an offer. Ironically the ones I knew talked about how they were learning python on the side.
The trades have their own problems.
MrEff@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I feel like this is the biggest thing everyone overlooks. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers used to be the biggest paying jobs for boomers and going into genX, so later genX and millennial thay followed the blueprint of “if you want to make a lot of money, go I to these fields” found out the hard was how the prisoner’s dilemma is more than game theory. Now we have millenial doctors, lawyers, and engineers getting jobs that pay 60k with over 100k of student loans that they were told would be easy to pay back with theirbhigh paying jobs.
The trades have a good chance of doing the same thing. Right now you can make bank in the trades with no college debt. Just wait until we feed this to an entire generation and we have an excess of them and they are the ones making 60k (but at least no student loans? Normally…) and then they will tell their kids some variation of what they were told and repeat the same cycle.