Here's the breakdown:
| Useless degree | Trade apprenticeship |
Requires self discipline | maybe | yes No it does not require a great deal of self-discipline to live at home when you are 23 and study welding or decal painting. |
Working crap jobs six hours a day | yes | yes |
Be resented by people who live differently | yes Its kind of a class thing. If you're in college, you're parents are probably middle class and in bucolic colleges your parents are middle-class and urban or suburban while the locals are often rural poor. | yes |
$50k salary after five years | no (Lawyer? Engineer) | yes |
Live in cramped space | yes | if you want They mostly live at home. Or at least in their hometown. |
Be broke for four years | yes Longer these days. | no This is why illegal immigration derails the lives of these people more than a lawyer |
Move out of your house | yes | yes Not usually. I grew up in Detroit and the welders and pipe-fitters and decal painters lived at home until they joined the guild |
I know it's difficult to believe, but one can learn a trade without looking down on people who have degrees.
I'm 46 and maybe things have changed but it used to be a class thing. The unskilled or barely-skilled were often poor and their parents could not afford college. Then there were those who were middle-class but had problems in high school (Drugs, running away from home, expelled from school, juvenile arrests) that curtailed their education. And then there were those guys who just hit up a girl on the wrong night at age 20. Maybe father children out-of-wedlock now is no big deal.
I'm incredulous that this distinction has to be made, but having kids and learning a trade are not the same thing.
Sure, but the poorest people in the most unskilled or semi-skilled professions are those that start a family at age 18. They're educational or vocational development is cut short by early parenthood.
Not the ones who get pregnant.
Nope.
No, there's very little competition. The reason tradesmen are well-paid in the US is because there are so many available jobs, and so few people willing to do the work.
Its more prestigious to be a lawyer than a tradesman. We need tradespeople more than lawyers, for sure, but being a lawyer carries more respectability.
The reason tradesmen are well-payed is that unions and guilds have not been busted by right-to-work legislation and this varies from state-to-state.
And by the way, if this is true, why is illegal immigration a problem.