Time to Consider Becoming a Bricklayer
· The Atlantic
Imagine that you’re one of the 3.8 million American teenagers on track to graduate from high school next spring. You have been told your whole life that knowledge work is the future and that a college degree is a high-speed ticket to the middle class. The average worker with a B.A. or B.S. makes 68 percent more a year than the average worker without one, translating to $1.2 million in additional earnings over a lifetime, if not more. Virtually all of the country’s wealthiest people have a university degree, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and other famous dropouts notwithstanding.
But now tech titans including Gates and Altman are warning about the impending eradication of office jobs, and hard data are showing that generative artificial intelligence really is smashing the lower rungs on the white-collar career ladder. The jobless rate for young college graduates has ticked up for the past four years; the cohort’s underemployment rate currently sits at a recessionary 42 percent. While the demand for 20-something legal associates and HR assistants has plummeted, the demand for 20-something pipe fitters and crane operators has soared. In many regions, early-career blue-collar workers are making six figures a year. For the first time in recent history, high-school graduates are experiencing shorter jobless spells than their peers with a college degree.
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What’s a high-school senior to do? Bet that AI won’t be too disruptive, student loans will be worth it, and the knowledge workforce will keep growing? Or skip the exorbitantly priced degree and train in one of the trades? Granted, most Americans in their late teens aren’t choosing between being a forensic accountant or a boilermaker. Still, figuring out whether or not to go to college has suddenly gotten much harder.
For one, high-school seniors are contending with the implosion of the college wage premium. For decades, workers with a college education have outearned workers without one, creating a large, lifelong, and compounding earnings differential. A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that every dollar a young person spent on a four-year degree returned 12.5 percent a year, making a degree a better investment than the S&P 500.
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Yet the rising cost of tuition began to fray this value proposition in the aughts. Student-loan debt made it impossible for many Millennials to build a nest egg or purchase a home, eliminating the college wealth premium. For-profit colleges enrolled a growing share of students with promises of fatter paychecks that never materialized. The wage premium has plummeted since the release of ChatGPT. In just four years, it has fallen 10 percent, back to the level it was at in the mid-1990s.
This gets to the second conundrum young people are facing: White-collar work isn’t what it used to be. Over the course of the 20th century, rising numbers of Americans went to college to ease their entry into service and knowledge careers. Not all white-collar work ended up being highly remunerative, but nearly all highly remunerative work ended up being white-collar. Office jobs offered other advantages too: a buffer against recessions, the chance to sharpen highly adaptable skills. (Most businesses need a great accountant; fewer businesses need a great foreman.) Outsourcing and technological change also posed less of a threat. IT increased demand for thinking work, whereas robots made a lot of factory work obsolete.
Yet now AI is threatening to make thinking work obsolete. The Stanford economist Erik Brynjolffson describes recent college graduates as “canaries in the coal mine.” Consultancies, marketing firms, software developers, insurers, and logistics companies are rapidly deploying generative-AI systems that are doing the spreadsheet-massaging and paper-pushing that inexperienced employees used to do. For young workers in “AI-exposed” occupations, one in five jobs has disappeared. Two in five recent graduates are working in gigs that do not actually require their degree, many in restaurants or retail stores. The AI-exposed cohort’s aggregated earnings have fallen by more than 10 percent.
Third, a bust for computer-science majors has coincided with a boom for shop-class specialists. In the 20th century, technological advances and globalization gutted the United States’ manufacturing base and hollowed out the Rust Belt. Power plants, mines, refineries, and ports became far more efficient too, requiring fewer workers than they did when the Baby Boomers were starting out. (Residential construction is a curious exception; industry-wide productivity has fallen as a result of land-use regulations.)
AI has turned this trend around. Despite interest rates sitting at fairly high levels, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are pouring trillions of dollars into the construction and maintenance of data centers. Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, an economist at Columbia University, projected that AI-related capital expenditures will make up 3.6 percent of America’s GDP each year through 2032, “larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms.” The build-out has created 216,000 construction and contractor jobs over the past four years, Goldman Sachs estimates.
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Demand has gone up while supply has gone down. The blue-collar workforce has been aging out and into retirement; the Trump administration has throttled the number of roofers and welders coming in from abroad. Companies are begging young people to get into the trades. A design-build firm in St. Louis is offering to pay off the loans its trainees might have taken out for community college or trade school; an industrial consortium in Rochester is offering $5,000 incentives to future carpenters, bricklayers, drywall finishers, and machine operators. The federal government is trying to get more young people into blue-collar work too, increasing financing for vocational degrees and allowing Pell Grants to cover short-term training initiatives.
Young people are heeding the call or, more to the point, following the money. Enrollment at public two-year vocational-training colleges climbed nearly 20 percent from 2020 to 2025. Enrollment at public four-year colleges rose just 2.1 percent. But the country still needs thousands more high-school graduates and early-career workers to gravitate toward these professions. And it needs to create significantly more training capacity too.
If you’re a high-school senior able to make sense of all these numbers, you should probably head straight to the econ department. For everyone else: Start by viewing college with a healthy degree of skepticism. It still provides a tremendous earnings boost to most who go, though teenagers might want to think twice before taking out a huge loan to become a translator or a graphic designer. Consider blue-collar work, in particular roles with options for career advancement. Think about “gray-collar” jobs that require specialized training and physical prowess too. Robots and algorithms have not figured out how to do what police officers, master electricians, and paramedics do—at least not yet.