Before Choosing College or the Trades, Ask Who You're Becoming

On October 2, 2026, Annie Lowrey made a provocative case in The Atlantic: it may be time to consider becoming a bricklayer. The college wage premium is shrinking, generative AI is eroding the entry-level office jobs that degrees once guaranteed, and the trades are booming as data centers go up and older workers retire. Her advice to next spring’s graduates is to view college with healthy skepticism and take blue-collar and “gray-collar” careers seriously.

The economics hold up. The New York Fed puts the underemployment rate for recent college graduates at 42 percent in the second quarter of 2026. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab finds that employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now sits about 19 percent below where it would have been had it kept pace with less-exposed jobs. Meanwhile, enrollment at vocational-focused public two-year colleges grew almost 20 percent between spring 2020 and spring 2025, compared with 2.1 percent at public four-year schools.

Lowrey is right that the old script is breaking. What the debate misses is that we are about to hand young people a new script built on the same logic.

Trading one safe bet for another

For decades, teenagers were told that the safe path ran through a four-year degree. Now a growing chorus is telling them the safe path runs through an apprenticeship. Both messages answer the same question: which institution, credential or job category will protect me from the market?

That question puts the market in charge of the decision. Lowrey herself describes young people as, in her words, “following the money.” Debt is real, and so are six-figure trade salaries. But following the money is exactly how many students ended up in degrees they didn’t want and couldn’t use. Swapping one prescribed path for another doesn’t help a young person evolve. It just changes the uniform.

The question underneath the headline is the one we rarely ask an 18-year-old: what do you naturally solve for?

Some young people come alive solving physical problems they can see and touch. Some are drawn to calm in a crisis, the way paramedics and police officers are. Some love untangling an argument or a spreadsheet. When the choice starts there, college and the trades stop being opposing bets. They become two possible ways to build on who someone already is.

The individual defines the path

For most of the last century, institutions defined the individual. Schools, employers and professions handed people a track and asked them to fit it. I’ve argued for years that the balance has shifted, and that the individual now increasingly defines the institution. The AI economy is accelerating that shift. When machines can learn the routine parts of almost any job, what a person brings that can’t be standardized becomes the most durable career asset they have.

That matters in a trade as much as in an office. A master electrician who loves diagnosing a problem nobody else can find will build a very different career from one who took the job because the pay looked good that year. The same is true of a lawyer or a data analyst. Identity is what turns a job into a path with direction.

Through my work with Teens UnEdited, I spend a lot of time thinking about the scripts young people are handed and how early they learn to edit themselves to fit. A career decision made from that edited version is fragile. A decision made from self-knowledge can survive the next disruption, because the person knows what to carry forward when the job changes. I made a related case in The Best Screen-Time Limit Is a Future Self: young people resist short-term pulls best when they can picture who they’re becoming.

What parents, educators and employers can do now

Lowrey’s practical advice is sound. I’d add three questions to put in front of every high-school senior first.

• What kinds of problems do you lose track of time solving? The answer points toward work worth committing to.
• If two paths paid the same, which would you choose, and why? This separates the money from the meaning.
• What would each path let you build in ten years? Advancement and range matter more than the first paycheck.

Employers have a role too. Firms offering to pay off trainees’ loans are making the entry point attractive. The next step is making the growth visible, so a first job reads as the opening chapter of a career. White-collar employers face the same challenge as AI absorbs entry-level tasks, a point I took up in The Entry-Level Job Isn’t Dying. It Has to Become an Apprenticeship.

The better first question

Whether a young person lays bricks, wires buildings or writes code, the market will keep moving. Degrees will rise and fall in value. Trades will boom and cool. The one constant across all of it is the person making the choice.

So before we ask young people which path is safest, let’s help them answer a better question: who are they becoming? A path chosen for safety changes with the market. A path chosen from identity travels with you.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.