If I could go back, I’d seriously consider a trade

My second-guessing of my own four-year-degree, especially for the next generation.

---

I’m an accountant. I have the degree, the years in the field, and I’m not writing this to talk myself out of a path that’s worked out fine for me. But fine isn’t the same as optimal, and if I’m being real about the years between 18 and 26, the van, the slow climb, the duplex that eventually changed things, a chunk of that struggle would have looked different if I’d taken a different path at 18. Specifically: an electrician’s apprenticeship, or plumbing, or something along those lines.

I’m not saying “trades are underrated” but I’d like to make a specific comparison, with real numbers, of the path I actually took versus the one I didn’t, and why I think the second one deserves a harder look than it gets from most 18-year-olds and the adults advising them.

---

Side by Side Comparison

Here’s the framing that almost never gets shown, because the two paths get evaluated by completely different people with completely different incentives. High schools are measured partly on four-year enrollment rates. Trade programs don’t have the same lobbying presence in a guidance counselor’s office. So the comparison just doesn’t happen for most kids, and it didn’t happen for me.

The four-year path, roughly as I lived it:

• 3 years of tuition
• 9 years of fees, and living costs, funded partly by debt, funded partly by working like a maniac while in school
• Degree completed around 27
• Entry-level accounting salary $50k range
• Student loan payments starting immediately after graduation, for years (still making these payments!)

The electrical apprenticeship path, as I’d run it now:

• 4-5 years as a paid apprentice, earning roughly 40-50% of journeyman wage in year one, scaling up each year
• $0 in tuition debt, registered apprenticeships are typically debt-free; you’re paid to train, not paying to be trained
• Licensed journeyman electrician around 22-23, with a median wage in the mid-$60s to high-$70s depending on region (higher in many metros, and meaningfully higher with overtime, which is common in the trades)
• Zero student debt to service while that income starts compounding into savings

Run those two timelines forward to age 30 and the apprenticeship path is very plausibly ahead in both net worth and zero-debt position, while the degree path is often still paying down loans from a credential that, for many fields including mine, didn’t move first-year earnings dramatically above what a trade offers.

I’m not saying this is true in every field, some degrees (engineering, nursing, certain accounting and finance tracks at the right firms) clear this bar easily over a career. I’m saying it’s not true nearly as universally as the “go to college” default assumes, and almost nobody runs the actual numbers before committing four years and tens of thousands of dollars to find out. And there are tons of majors that are shockingly low-paid. If I was in one of those, this post might just be my expression of regret.

And that’s all before you get to the impact of AI on our current graduating classes. I don’t have a crystal ball, but over a decade into my career even I am worried about being replaced, and I know that recent graduates are facing very high barriers to get a job, in part because of outsourcing to cheaper labor markets and also because some entry-level tasks can actually be outsourced to AI. Just last month a discussion with the CFO of my company surprised me when he noted I may be managing AI instead of people in the near future.

---

What actually makes the trades undervalued

You’re paid to learn, not paying to learn. This is the single biggest structural difference and it rarely gets said this directly. A registered apprenticeship is a job with a training requirement attached, not school with a job attached. Every year you’re in it, your income is going up, not draining down into tuition.

The skill is directly useful to the exact path this site is about. Every house-hacker, every small multi-family owner, every landlord eventually needs an electrician, a plumber, or an HVAC tech, and pays a premium for it because those trades are in genuine shortage in most metros right now. If your long-term goal is owning property, having one of these skills yourself doesn’t just pay a wage, it removes a recurring cost from every property you ever own, and it’s a skill you can monetize on the side indefinitely, the way I use accounting on the side of mine.

Demand isn’t going anywhere. A meaningful share of the electrician and plumber workforce is aging toward retirement faster than new apprentices are entering the pipeline, in most regions. That’s not a hot take, it’s a labor-market fact reflected in wage growth in the trades outpacing a lot of white-collar entry-level wage growth over the last decade.

The stigma is doing real economic damage to 18-year-olds. A four-year degree got coded as the “smart” choice and trades got coded as the fallback for kids who “couldn’t” do college. That coding has nothing to do with actual lifetime earnings potential and everything to do with status signaling that the people doing the signaling, guidance counselors, many parents, university marketing departments, have no financial skin in being right about. And as a result we’ve had at least 20 years’ worth of kids graduating wondering if it was worth it.

---

Where the degree path still wins

I want to be fair to my own path, because the comparison isn’t one-directional. A four-year degree wins clearly when:

• The field has a genuinely high ceiling that requires the credential as a gate (medicine, law, many engineering disciplines, certain finance roles)
• You have substantial scholarship or grant funding that makes the debt load small or zero (see the companion post on this site about treating scholarship hunting like a paid job, this is exactly why that math matters so much)
• You have a specific, realistic plan for the degree, not a vague one, “I’m getting a nursing degree because nursing is in shortage and pays well” beats “I’m getting a degree because that’s what you do” by an enormous margin
• The career you want simply requires it, full stop, and there’s no trade-equivalent path to the same outcome
• Developing your soft skills, networking at school, having a common experience with a large chunk of the population that is often later employed in roles that can control/influence hiring is a sort of intangible and highly valuable quality for college grads.
• I’m an advocate for learning about ourselves, our world/context, and also for developing our minds (which requires education), in addition to exposure to a diverse range of ideas, cultures, perspectives that are often quite difficult to get outside of higher learning and travel (or both). This is another priceless intangible.

So clearly the problem isn’t that degrees are bad. It’s that “go to college” got treated as the default answer for every 18-year-old regardless of field, cost, or alternative, and a debt-funded vague-major degree is a meaningfully worse financial bet than most trade apprenticeships, for most people, most of the time.

---

What I’d tell an 18-year-old version of myself

I’d tell young me a ton. I’d tell him to bet on the Giants against the Patriots (both times) and then maybe none of this would matter too much. But really, I’d probably tell young me that school is critical, and I should go, but only so far as I can fund it with minimal debt. Work the whole time. Seek out weird lucrative scholarships to pay tuition and other school costs. Pick a degree for a field you are interested in first and foremost, and then, at the end (hopefully with minimal debt), still take a look at median apprentice and journeyman wages for electricians. Complete an internship in your major field, and then maybe after that start an apprenticeship if that internship didn’t reveal a path I’d be interested in.

And take seriously that a path where you earn while you learn, finish with zero debt, and step into a skill that’s both well-paid and directly useful to building wealth in real estate later, is not the consolation prize it’s been made out to be, it means, really, you can do both and make an informed decision. And having a degree is never going to hurt your apprenticeship.

---

This is one person’s reassessment, not a universal recommendation, the right path depends heavily on your specific field, region, and goals. If you’re weighing options, look up real apprenticeship wage data for your state (most state labor departments publish it) before deciding either way.

---

Get the free $0-to-First-Property Roadmap

The five-stage plan I used to go from living in a van to owning a duplex — no rich parents required. Enter your email and I’ll send it straight to your inbox.