I came of age at a time when the value of a college degree was treated as settled fact, and I have spent the four decades since then working alongside people who built successful businesses both with and without one. So when I read the reviews and listened to an interview with Noam Scheiber, the New York Times labor reporter whose new book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class” follows a generation of disillusioned degree holders, I found myself measuring his account against the people I actually know.
Scheiber tells the story of young people who did everything they were told to do and then found themselves stocking shelves or pulling espresso shots with a bachelor’s degree and a pile of debt. Their anger is real and understandable, and it feeds a popular narrative that has become almost reflexive in the media: college costs too much, the degree is not worth it, and young people would be better off skipping the debt and learning a trade.
The hard data tells a different story. The relative return on a degree in lifetime earnings, even after the impacts of the Great Recession and the pandemic, remains significantly greater than it was in the past. What changed is not the economic value of the education but the size of the gap between what was promised and what was delivered. Also, it appears that the variance in individuals’ experience has widened. Scheiber writes about people measuring their lives against expectations that was oversold to them, not against the harder reality of what their prospects would look like without the degree. Life is hard. College doesn’t change that. I conclude that both things can be true at the same time.
There is a third perspective in this debate that rarely gets heard, and it comes from the people I have worked with most closely here in South Jersey. It is fantastic that we are now focused on developing skilled tradespeople and then supporting them as they grow into managers and business owners. This region runs on these people, and I have had the privilege of helping plumbers grow into plumbing companies, watermen into seafood businesses, and contractors into developers. Yet many of the most successful among them, usually late in their careers and usually unprompted, have told me the same thing: they wish they had a stronger fundamental education and understanding of core subjects like math, sciences, law, accounting, and the liberal arts.
The reason becomes clear the moment a tradesperson becomes an owner, because the job changes underneath them. Now they need to read a financial statement and understand what it actually says about the health of the business. They need to evaluate a contract before signing it, write a letter that persuades a lender or a township committee or a state agency, think clearly about risk and insurance and investment, and follow the science behind the environmental regulations that govern their property. None of these are trade skills. They are the compounding returns of a general education, and they tend to show up twenty years after the classroom, at night, under pressure, with money on the line.
The public debate measures college as a financial product with a return on investment. The business owners I know who built their success without it measure something different: everything they had to teach themselves later. They become leaders in their community and find a need for an expanded intellectual skill set. A meaningful part of my own practice consists of sitting with owners and working through exactly those financial, legal, and regulatory questions that their education never covered, and I can tell you the gap is real even among the most accomplished of them.
So my advice to a young person headed into the trades is unfashionable but sincere. The opportunity in skilled work is real, and the path to ownership is open in a way it has not been in decades. But do not let anyone convince you that the fundamentals are optional, because the people who walked that path ahead of you, the ones who made it, will tell you otherwise.