Two years ago, Zechariah Osburn sat down to fill out the Common Application for college. He dreaded going to school and sitting at a desk all day, but he’d always done well, so an undergraduate degree seemed like a no-brainer. His parents had pushed it, too. But staring down the application at midnight one night during his senior year, Osburn decided to scrap the plan. “I felt like a fraud,” he tells me.
He didn’t know what kind of career he wanted, and didn’t have the money for college. Instead of taking out student loans and spending a few semesters partying and soul-searching, he decided to focus on growing his landscaping side hustle into a full-time business. Now, at 20, he’s the owner of Z’s Exterior Services, which does lawn care, mulching, power washing, and other landscaping services in northern Virginia. He’s hired a handful of full- and part-time employees and has plans to continue expanding. And, he says, he still gets a taste of the college experience when he visits his girlfriend.
It’s not that Osburn is passionate about mulching, but he does love running the business, and it’s rewarding to make customers happy. “How much work you put in is how much return you’re going to get,” he says. Studying for hours and pouring tens of thousands of dollars into a degree doesn’t always yield the same results, he says, as he hears about people taking on lots of debt and then struggling to find work.
Many Gen Zers are eyeing the ever-rising cost of college tuition, along with roiling uncertainty in many white-collar career fields, and are choosing an alternate path.
Americans are losing faith in the ROI of a college degree. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 36% of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the higher education system, dropping from 57% in 2015. A Pew Research study in 2024 found that just 22% of US adults thought that college was worth it if a student had to take out loans to attend. Zoomers are also most likely to feel that getting a degree is a waste of time and money, a 2025 survey from Indeed found. Per Experian, the average Gen Zer has about $23,000 in student debt. That load is starting to feel heavier now that the perks Gen Zers most want — including work-life balance, financial stability, and a path to becoming their own boss — are disappearing from white-collar jobs. Managers are calling workers back to the office and dismantling the career ladder by assigning entry-level tasks to generative AI bots and agents.
A survey from the early career site Handshake found that 62% of college seniors who were familiar with AI tools said they were at least somewhat concerned that rising automation via AI would affect their career prospects, up from 44% in 2023. Once-stable jobs in tech, consulting, recruiting, and law are all at risk of seeing the entry-level tasks increasingly given away to gen AI. Roles for recent college grads “deteriorated noticeably” in early 2025, with their unemployment rate jumping to 5.8%, up from 4.6% a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. President Donald Trump’s tariffs are creating uncertainty in the market and discouraging employers from hiring new workers, and white-collar workers are feeling stuck in their roles.
Meanwhile, blue-collar jobs — some of which pay a stable six figures — are starting to look more like an oasis.
The proportion of students at two-year colleges focusing on vocational studies compared to other associate degrees grew from about 15% in 2019 to nearly 20% in 2024, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The fastest-growing jobs in the country, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, are wind turbine technicians and solar panel installers, followed by roles in healthcare and some in tech, like data analysts or information security analysts. Jobs in construction, plumbing, electrical work, and transportation are all projected to grow faster than the average job-growth rate of 4% from 2023 to 2033.
Social media has really introduced Gen Z to what working in new fields can be like.Jennifer Herrity
The need for workers in renewable energy, commercial and home construction, and public infrastructure is expected to rise, thanks to projects like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and a global investment in new energy sources. Home prices are soaring in part thanks to construction worker shortages, and wages for those workers are up.
And just as demand is increasing, a swath of skilled, baby boomer laborers are getting ready to pack it up and retire. That will open up more gigs for people who want to work in these in-demand, automation-proof roles such as HVAC servicing, plumbing, and construction — and it’s unlikely you’ll hire a robot to come fiddle with your home’s electrical wiring anytime soon. In fact, many analysts predict these fields could experience labor shortages, which is good news for Gen Z.
And where generative AI is stagnating growth in industries like tech or consulting, it’s accelerating growth for young people who want to start their own businesses. ChatGPT and its ilk have become always-on assistants that help young entrepreneurs automate work like appointment scheduling and generating emails to customers — and they don’t have to be put on payroll. And as the digital-first generation, Gen Z doesn’t need school to train them on the kind of tech that can make these businesses more efficient.
“They’re very used to working with technology; it’s part of their daily life,” says Gary Specter, the CEO of Simpro, which makes job and project management software for field service and trade contracting industries.”You’re seeing a coming together of technology and these hands-on jobs.”
For some, a blue-collar pivot would mean abandoning the college dreams laid out by parents, siblings, and countless coming-of-age movies. As America’s middle class grew, so did the drive for higher education. In 1970, just 11% of US adults had a bachelor’s degree. By 2021, that number had swelled to 38%, according to US Census data. Sending kids to a university became less a privilege and more a given for many middle-class families. But that push ignored other viable career paths and gave rise to a stigma around blue-collar work that persists today, even as rising tuition costs have dampened the appeal of the college dream.
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Ryan Daniels, 22, left behind college at the University of Florida after his freshman year in 2022 to pursue his pressure-washing business full time. “It was really shocking to people that I was going to let that opportunity go,” he tells me. But he’s not alone in that shift. The rate of young people enrolled in college dropped from 41% in 2012 to 39% in 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Enrollment in college peaked in 2010, but has since declined from 18 million students to about 15.4 million in 2021.
Getting young people into the trades will still take a mindset shift. In a 2023 survey of US high schoolers by Jobber, a software for home professionals, 74% said they thought there was a stigma around choosing vocational school instead of a four-year college, and 79% said their parents wanted them to go to college, while only 5% said their parents encouraged vocational school. A Gallup survey found that around 70% of high school students had heard a lot about college, while less than a quarter had heard frequently about apprenticeships and vocational schools. And it may be blue-collar influencers, rather than a vocational school rep at an assembly, who pull more young people into these fields.
“Gen Z really is facing a new set of challenges,” says Jennifer Herrity, who follows career trends at Indeed. “Social media has really introduced Gen Z to what working in new fields can be like.”
Day-in-the-life videos have flooded YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, giving people a peek into careers that many may not have known about unless a family member worked in them. There are some that show consultants or tech workers shuttling from an early morning at Equinox to their offices and then from meeting to meeting, $9 matcha latte in hand, but the more visually interesting videos come from people doing hands-on work in their fields. There are electricians, plumbers, landscapers, and more who show themselves out in the wild getting their complicated jobs done. Osburn tells me he watched videos on social media about starting his landscape business. Now, he has 45,000 followers watching him on Instagram as he drives his trucks around Virginia . Lexi Abreu, an electrician with 200,000 followers on YouTube, walks viewers through tricky wiring jobs and makes tongue-in-cheek visual gags about working as a woman in a male-dominated profession.
While college kids pinch pennies, those who go into trades can start earning immediately. Average entry-level construction jobs start at around $19 an hour, and rise to $45 at the top level, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maintenance and repair jobs start around $14 an hour but can go as high as $44 an hour. The average electrician and plumber make about $29 an hour, according to Indeed. Instead of surviving on cup noodles for four years, Daniels has built a business, RHI Pressure Washing, and can pay not just his own bills, but those of three employees. Already, people are increasingly seeing the value of working in the trades. In 2024, 66% of adults said they believed there were well-paid, stable jobs available to those with only high school diplomas or GEDs, up from 50% in 2018, a survey of about 1,500 people conducted by the think tank New America found.
The blue-collar perks don’t mean college degrees are dying anytime soon. The median pay for a Gen Z college graduate in 2024 was $60,000, based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared to $40,000 for a high school graduate. That gap widens as college-educated workers age and advance through their fields. And some of these stable fields are hiring for college grads, too: The fastest-growing industry for new college grads is in construction, LinkedIn says, and entry-level workers are also rising in number in the utility sector and oil, gas, and mining industries.
Daniels would have graduated from college this month, but in that time, he has instead spun out his high school side hustle of pressure washing into a full business. He spends most of his day running the business side. That means using ChatGPT almost daily, whether it’s to draft responses to customers or mass emails, Daniels says. Gen AI might “take away from white-collar jobs, and it really helps us out here.”
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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