Name: Why These Gen Zers Are Ditching College Degrees For Blue-Collar Careers
Uploaded: 2025-04-26T15:31:33.000Z
Duration: 8 min 26 s
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A historic drop in U.S. college enrollment.

U.S. college freshman enrollment is on the decline.

Many schools have seen those enrollment declines already.

Since the last half of the 20th century, a college degree has been touted as a must-have for a stable and successful career.

I did grow up around a lot of people telling me college was the route that you should go.

My parents were always hounding me about going to college.

All the teachers reminded you about making sure you get good grades so you can pass elementary school, middle school, and go to college.

But earning that degree has become less and less attainable.

Over the past decade, the average annual cost for a four-year private college has risen by about 42 percent.

For public universities, it's gone up by about 30 percent.

And jobs that traditionally require college degrees are no longer as reliable as they once were.

Google, Amazon, and others announced cuts earlier this month.

PayPal is the latest company to announce job cuts, slashing around 9 percent of its global workforce.

The market has really rewarded companies that announced layoffs.

So it may not be surprising that many in Gen Z, the youngest generation in the workforce, are saying no to the college experience.

Instead, they're entering blue-collar jobs in skilled trades that don't require a four-year degree.

They're gaining skills that allow them to then go out and start their own business.

And that really allows them the opportunity to set their earning potential as they go forward.

And as older blue-collar workers begin to retire, it may be that Gen Z rises to fill the skilled labor gap.

As a teenager, Morgan Bradbury was weighing going to college for either engineering or physical therapy.

But it was while she was working on becoming an Eagle Scout that she discovered what would become her new career.

They had a welding mirror badge there, and I was like, oh, fire, that sounds pretty fun.

I just immediately was mesmerized by the fact that I could have the ability to build things with my own hands and kind of put together the engineering side of my brain and the hands-on side of my brain.

I thought it was just instantly something really cool to do.

Instead of going to a four-year college after high school, as she was planning to do,

Morgan took a nine-month welding certification course at Universal Technical Institute, a for-profit trade school.

The $22,000 price tag for tuition wasn't cheap, but it was also a fraction of what she would have paid for four years of university schooling.

A lot of what people don't realize is welding isn't just welding.

There's a lot more science behind it than I think people think.

I was really interested in the metallurgy and how, like, the magnetic field works while you're welding, and I think it's helped me a lot in my job today.

Morgan landed a job as a third-class welder with BAE Systems before she had even finished her certification.

At 19 years old, she was earning about $57,000 a year.

Now, two years later, she's a second-class welder working on U.S. Navy ships in Norfolk, Virginia.

Currently, I'm working 7.15 in the morning to 4 o'clock in the evening.

So every day here looks very different for me, especially because I have certifications in almost every type of welding that we do here.

You're on this boat this day, another boat another day.

You might be doing two or three different processes in a day.

It's anything from high-pressure steam pipes to, like, a stud on the wall.

It's just whatever they need for the day.

Morgan isn't alone among her peers in choosing a blue-collar career over college.

So there are about 2 million fewer students in a traditional four-year university now than in 2011.

And the reasons might not be super surprising.

So the total all-in cost for a four-year public school is about $110,000, whereas for a private school, it's about $225,000.

Fall undergraduate enrollment was about 1% higher in 2024 than it was in 2019.

But vocational school enrollment was up by about 18% over that same time.

Tremper says that Gen Z is also responding to a market that is much more in need of skilled labor than it was in the past.

For the last 20 years, there's been a decrease in interest in the trades, specifically around millennials.

There was the Great Recession, which caused building to stop for a couple years.

Starting in 2020, there's been an increased attention from federal policy about investing in infrastructure.

Think of things like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

Think about the Science and STEM and CHIPS Act.

All things that were really created to invest in the future of American infrastructure.

Since 2019, average starting salaries for skilled workers has risen over 25%, from $1,870 an hour in 2019 to $2,343 an hour in 2025.

Over that same period, net hiring for new blue-collar workers during graduation season has remained consistently higher than for white-collar workers of the same age.

It also saw its biggest bump in 2020 and has remained strong, even as hiring for white-collar jobs has cooled over the past two years.

They're able to find work because we need it.

They're also gaining skills that are going to be increasingly necessary as baby boomers and older Gen-X workers start aging out of the workforce.

And it's time to really start starting their own businesses.

He started his lawn care business in Westchester, Pennsylvania at a young age.

When I got started in the landscaping industry, I was like 12 or 13 years old.

So it grew from just 10 to 13 lawn mowing clients my first season to by the time I was 18, 19, I had about 75, 82-ish.

I convinced my mom to let me do online high school.

I would work on my business two to three days out of the week.

I'd go work for someone else the rest of the week and then come home every night and do my online schooling while I ate dinner and on the weekends.

And so this obviously helped me increase my income.

And I think by like 16, 17, it was around 85 grand in revenue, 100 grand in revenue I was doing that year.

And the very next year, my senior year, I think we brought in like 125 total.

By the time he graduated from high school, Chase says he had $120,000 in savings.

Rather than spend it on college tuition, he decided to invest it in starting his own business.

And I just kind of looked at the numbers and said, listen, I'm not going to go stop my business and pay for college.

I said, hey guys, if you're not going to pay for college, don't force me to pay for something I don't want to pay for.

In 2024, Chase's business, CMG Landscaping, brought in over $1 million in sales.

Chase says he earned about $491,000 through his salary and owner's share.

So we work with about 100 clients on average a year.

My crews are bringing in anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 per crew per day.

Our busiest time of year is from March 15th to June 15th.

To give you an accurate guess on how many hours a week I work during that time,

But I will tell you it's from when I wake up to when I go to sleep.

And I swear sometimes in my sleep I'm drafting up emails.

Chase's ambitions go beyond his landscaping business.

I want to turn myself into a private equity firm.

And I want to buy or partner with home service companies and sell them to larger private equity firms.

So that's where I see my future going, is using my online presence to partner and acquire and grow companies.

Morgan Bradbury says she plans to stick with welding for the long haul, but also wants to pass along her skills to others.

I think it might be cool to have some sort of non-profit startup for getting more females into welding.

I think there needs to be more outreach of getting people into trades.

I think that's a really important thing that I want to eventually step into.

The immediate future for skilled workers like Morgan and Chase may be challenging, especially if possible tariffs by the Trump administration put a strain on blue-collar industries like construction.