Okay, but let's be real about something you glossed over: not every trade is the same, and your electrical business success isn't universal. I know three people who got into HVAC training programs, and two of them got injured within five years and had no safety net because they didn't have union backing. The physical toll on your body is real, and trade work doesn't always come with the pension or healthcare benefits that white-collar jobs do.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the credentialing system being broken. You're absolutely right about that. But I think there's a risk of swinging too hard in the opposite direction - pretending that the four-year degree path is the only corrupt system when trades have their own exploitative structures. Some contractors work their guys ragged. Some apprenticeships are glorified unpaid labor for years.

Maybe the real issue is that we pretend there's one correct path at all. Some people love intellectual work and academia. Some people love working with their hands. Some people need stable benefits more than they need earning potential. Instead of dunking on the university system, we should be asking why we've made it so financially risky to choose anything.

This is going to sound weird, but reading this made me emotional because my dad is a union electrician, and I watched him feel invisible his entire life. He made good money, bought a house, supported a family. But every single family friend who went to college treated him like he was somehow less intelligent. My mom's sister would literally correct him about things he knew more about, just because she had a degree.

The worst part was watching my older brother feel like he had to prove he was smart by going to college, even though he hated it. He ended up dropping out, felt like a failure, and eventually went into the trades anyway. He's fine now, but he wasted time and money because of the shame.

Your point about the status signaling is real, but I actually think it goes deeper than what you're saying. It's not just that the university degree 'signals' something. It's that our entire culture has decided that intellectual work is worth more than practical work, which is completely arbitrary and frankly kind of elitist. A society needs both. We're going to have a real reckoning when everyone's got a four-year degree and there's no one to fix the pipes.

I don't have the answer, but I think it starts with actually treating trades people as respected professionals instead of fallback options. That's more important than the credentialing question, honestly.

Hard disagree with the whole framing here, actually. You're treating your specific success as if it proves something universal, but you're also kind of proving the point you're critiquing - you're now stuck feeling like you need to justify yourself and might even go back for a degree just for status. That's the system working exactly as designed. It got in your head.

Here's the thing: a degree is valuable not just as a credential but as actual education. I'm not saying all degrees are worth what they cost. The debt is obscene. But learning to think critically, to read difficult texts, to engage with people outside your immediate field - that has value. It's different from learning a trade. They're not equivalent, and I don't think pretending they are does anyone favors.

Also, your 85k electrician doesn't exist in a vacuum. That number assumes you're in an area with strong demand, that you don't get injured, that you can sustain the physical work for forty years, that you navigate running a business successfully. Your friends with degrees might be making less now, but they have more flexibility in what they do with their careers. They can pivot. You can't exactly pivot your electrical license to something else without starting over.

I think the honest take is: both systems are broken. Universities charge too much for increasingly uncertain outcomes. But trade work comes with its own costs and limitations. Stop acting like you found the one true path.

I want to share something because I think it matters for this conversation: I have a four-year degree and I'm deeply aware that it's partly luck. I grew up in a neighborhood where my parents could help with college costs. A lot of my friends weren't in that position, and they made different choices. Some went to trade school. Some didn't.

The weird thing is, the friend I made the most money with (and I'm not talking small money) went to trade school, started his own business, and has been incredibly successful. But you know what? He also got really lucky with timing, had some financial help early on to bridge the gap, and put in insane hours for years. It wasn't automatic.

My other friends with degrees? Some are killing it, some are struggling. It's not like the credential is a guarantee either way.

I guess what I'm saying is, I agree with you that the cultural pressure toward four-year degrees is real and probably not serving a lot of people well. But I also think your numbers are a bit selective. When you talk about electricians clearing 85k, you're not talking about the apprentice who gets injured and can't work, or the electrician who can't find consistent work, or the person who does it for fifteen years and then their body breaks down. You're talking about the successful version.

The same is true for college grads - I'm highlighting the successful ones when I talk about what they earn. Both paths have winners and losers. Maybe the real conversation is about making sure nobody gets destroyed by either choice.

You're not wrong about the system being broken, but I want to push on your implicit assumption that the solution is just giving trade school the same status as college. Because here's what I've seen: the moment we start heavily promoting trade school as a status-neutral alternative, the moment we start treating it as equivalent to a degree, it becomes a marketing opportunity. And then you get predatory trade school programs that cost just as much as college, offer worse instruction, and leave people in the same debt trap.

It's already happening. I looked into a welding certification program last year, and the costs were insane - $15k for a six-month program at a private school. Meanwhile, community colleges offer much cheaper programs, but they're underfunded and sometimes hard to access depending on where you live.

I think your real complaint isn't about trade school versus college. It's about the fact that we've created a system where you have to package yourself as a product and prove your worth through credentials, no matter what you do. The solution isn't to elevate trade school credentials to the same status. It's to stop requiring credentials as proof of capability in the first place.

Which is obviously unrealistic, but that's what I'd actually want to see changed. Not more status for trades - just a world where people could demonstrate competence through work and not feel like they need a piece of paper to be taken seriously.

Look, I think there's something important here that you're touching on but not quite articulating, and it's about class mobility and gatekeeping. The reason universities get prestige isn't because they're inherently better at education. It's because they've historically been where wealthy people sent their kids, and then wealthy people only hired people with degrees, which made degrees valuable. It's circular. It's gatekeeping.

What you're describing with the trade recruiter is someone breaking that gatekeeping. And that's valuable. But the reason it felt revolutionary is because the bar for breaking the system is that low - someone just had to tell you the truth about what you could actually earn. That shouldn't be revolutionary information.

Here's what I'm concerned about though: if we just tell everyone to do trades instead, we're not fixing the system. We're just picking different gatekeepers. We'd end up with trade guilds and unions doing the same kind of credentialing and status-signaling that universities do now.

Maybe the thing we actually need is to stop pretending that there's one correct way to demonstrate competence. Let people prove what they can do through work. Don't require certifications or degrees unless they're actually necessary for safety reasons. Let the market sort it out without artificial gatekeeping.

Is that possible? Probably not at scale. But if we're redesigning the system anyway, might as well aim for that instead of just swapping which credential matters most.

This hits different because I'm living the opposite version of your story right now. I went the traditional route - spent $120k on a degree I don't use, worked retail for two years after graduation while my high school friends who became plumbers were already buying houses. The kicker? My parents made me feel like trade school was beneath me. They were so focused on the prestige of a 'real college' that they never mentioned the practical reality of what those skills actually earn.

The cultural stigma is absolutely intentional, though maybe not in a conspiracy way. Universities have massive PR machines and alumni networks. Trade schools don't. Plus there's this weird class thing where white-collar work got coded as 'respectable' after the industrial era ended. We're only now starting to realize we've built an entire economy around credentials that don't match actual job requirements.

What I find most frustrating about your point is that you're right - we've created a situation where people feel they need to justify themselves no matter what path they take. You shouldn't need to prove your capability or earnings to feel legitimate. But also, universities shouldn't be so expensive that taking that route feels like financial suicide. The real problem isn't trade school vs. college. It's that we've made both systems extractive in different ways.