At the edge of a parking lot in the Arkansas Delta, LaDonna Glass slipped off her work boots and exchanged them for a pair of rainbow Crocs.

Glass, 23, had just finished her shift as an electrician apprentice in a veterinary school building across the lot. She snaked conduits between electrical boxes and installed wall sockets in an operating room big enough for a horse.

It was a full day of work she had enjoyed. It was also the kind of day she once worried would disappoint her parents and teachers.

“I was pretty brainy in high school, so everybody, I guess, they expected more out of me,” she said. “I felt like if I didn’t go to college, I would have been a failure.”

Glass is bubbly and curious, a lover of fantasy books, late-night workouts and gummy-bear-flavored lemonade. She graduated from high school in 2021 and went straight to Mississippi State University, with the goal of becoming a youth therapist.

But the road ahead seemed long and extraordinarily costly, and she began to question whether the investment would pay off. Her older brother had graduated from the same school with a degree in accounting. Afterward, he went to work as a truck driver.

“The cost of living is making people realize we don’t have four years to sit around and just go to school,” she said.

Glass is among the members of Gen Z who are reckoning with the value of a college degree. Today’s students have watched tuition climb over the course of their lifetimes. Lately they have had front-row seats to a brutal early-career job market that is being further destabilized by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Rather than despair, a growing number of young people have concluded that skilled trades like welding, plumbing and construction might be a pragmatic way forward. Sure, A.I. can write an email, the thinking goes. But can it install a sink? How about solder a ball valve?

A majority of high school graduates in the United States still head right to college — more than 60 percent. But trade school enrollment is ticking upward. The number of students at public, two-year schools that focus on vocational and trade programs grew by nearly 20 percent from 2020 to 2025, according to National Student Clearinghouse data. Apprenticeships and private trade schools have logged increases, too.

Yet members of this new generation of trade workers say they are encountering pushback of the “we just want what’s best for you” variety from family members, school counselors and friends. By choosing to pursue careers in the trades, they found themselves butting up against widespread perceptions that trade jobs were inferior to white-collar work — perceptions they were eager to change.

Glass decided to leave college after a year. After a stint working at Jersey Mike’s Subs, she signed up for a four-year apprenticeship with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. She makes $21 an hour working while taking free classes to become a licensed member of her union. The average yearly pay for I.B.E.W. electricians is close to $90,000.

Back at the job site, she waved goodbye to her co-workers, other 20-somethings in neon yellow T-shirts. She now believes that the people who look down on trade jobs are missing out.

“I’m watching things grow from the ground up,” she said.

Turning Off the College Autopilot

A 19-year-old is welding pipes that will transport yogurt through a dairy plant in Utah. A 21-year-old in Washington is swapping the tires of rally cars at pit stops. A 27-year-old attending barber school in Idaho is learning to use a feather razor and blending shears.

In interviews, a dozen young people in the skilled trades said they had grown accustomed to the advice of guidance counselors and well-meaning aunts that they should go to college instead. But that message was hard to square with what they were seeing firsthand.

They described older friends and siblings with college degrees who were struggling to find roles in the fields they had spent years studying. Many recalled watching A.I. seep into their classrooms, and being warned that it would upend the labor force — although no one could really tell them when, or what to do about it.

Some students saw trade school as a way to be proactive in a rapidly changing employment landscape; to others, it was an opportunity for a generation used to carving its own path to once again defy conventional wisdom. Gen Z-ers had already rejected millennials’ side parts — they didn’t want their student loans, either.

As a high school student in Los Banos, Calif., Logan Bangert imagined himself trying out for the football team at Penn State. He was accepted, but balked at the cost of attendance for out-of-state students: more than $50,000 per year.

“I feel like a lot of people nowadays, they just go to college because their mom told them,” Bangert, 18, said.

His mother, a retail worker, just wanted him to do something he liked. At his senior year career fair he saw a booth for a training program for wind turbine technicians at Universal Technical Institute in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. The seven-month program cost around $21,000, which he paid for with the help of a state grant. He graduated in March.

He now lives in Houston, where he makes $80,000 to $90,000 a year repairing the blades of wind turbines. He sees the intense physicality of his job as an advantage in an era of A.I. disruption. “A lot of people are scared of their jobs getting taken away by a robot and by artificial intelligence,” he said. At least for the time being, he’s not.

Money is on all of these young people’s minds. Many found the upfront costs of college dizzying, and were reluctant to take on loans that they feared they would be paying off for the rest of their lives. The average list price for a four-year college education — nearly $200,000 at current rates of private school tuition — has roughly doubled over the past three decades.

Trade school seemed reasonable by comparison, students said, with many private options coming in at less than $25,000 in total. And industry groups and government agencies are increasingly offering scholarships and other incentives to make it more affordable: Students in short-term vocational programs are newly eligible for Pell grants, a form of federal financial aid.

To be sure, a college degree remains one of the best ways to increase earnings potential in the long run. The median income of a worker with a bachelor’s degree is 1.8 times that of one with only a high school diploma.

“There has been no watershed of people abandoning the four-year institutions, and nor should there be,” said Jerome Grant, the chief executive of Universal Technical Institute, a private vocational school with over a dozen campuses offering skilled trade programs.

Instead, he argued that the school’s programs were especially valuable for students who were not college-bound to begin with, and who may have wound up working lower-wage jobs like driving for Uber.

He sees young people rejecting the idea that trades are “somewhat subordinate to a four-year education.” Their parents can be a different story.

“We’re trying to get them proud to say ‘My kid’s a welder’ at a cocktail party,” he said.

What Will My Girlfriend Think?

Ryan Shikhman lay on the floor of an attic on Staten Island, wrestling what looked like miles of flexible ducts into submission. Shikhman, a 21-year-old HVAC technician, was on Day 3 of a four-day job replacing a heating and cooling system. He alternated sips of iced coffee and blue Gatorade.

Both of Shikhman’s parents have undergraduate degrees: His mother is a physician assistant and his father is an accountant. “In high school, all my counselors were talking about college this, college that,” he said. Family members urged him to study business or finance.

Shikhman shadowed an HVAC technician for a few summers in high school and enjoyed the job’s mix of plumbing, welding and electrical work. When he signed up for a one-year program at Eastwick College, a private vocational school in New Jersey, his girlfriend at the time asked him not to tell her parents that he was going to trade school, he said.

Across the attic, his colleague Eddie Fawakhrji, 25, said he had run up against similar attitudes. “Back in the day, parents would be like, all right, you’re either going to go to college, or you’re a loser,” he said. “I think kids are much more open-minded than they were 30 years ago, 40 years ago. They’re looking at all their options.”

In a report published last year by Jobber, a software company for small businesses, 71 percent of Gen Z respondents said that vocational school carried more stigma than college. Only 7 percent of parents of Gen Z-ers said they would prefer it if their child pursued a trade or vocational program.

Popular culture tends to depict tradespeople in ways that do not emphasize their intellect, said Shana Brunye, the chief operations officer of Bring Back the Trades, a nonprofit that provides scholarships and hosts skills expos for students. She noted the stereotype of a plumber with sagging pants, or images of auto mechanics covered in grease.

But stigma is deterring young people from fields that will need workers in the coming years, she said. Research from her organization has projected that 1.4 million trade jobs will go unfilled by 2030 as a result of a wave of retirements and rising infrastructure demands.

Shikhman has become an evangelist for careers in the trades on TikTok and Instagram, where he posts videos to an account called Trades Over College.

“POV: AI can’t replace HVAC,” reads text over a recent video of him welding a copper pipe to a compressor.

His parents came around after seeing that he was making good money doing a job he enjoys, he said. Since starting his own HVAC business in 2024, he said he was making over $100,000 a year.

He is transparent that the work has its challenges. Temperatures in workspaces can creep above 100, and he and Fawakhrji regularly haul 200-pound units up several flights of stairs. “There’s days I wake up and I feel like I’m 70 years old,” Fawakhrji said.

Both men wonder just how long their bodies will be able to keep up. In the long term, Fawakhrji hopes to transition to starting a real estate business with his brother. Shikhman eventually wants to spend more time on management and less time doing manual labor.

Women and people of color, who have historically made up a minority of the skilled technical work force, can face additional challenges. Glass, the electrician apprentice, said she is usually the only Black woman on her job site. She said that she and another female co-worker had dealt with disparaging comments from an older journeyman who seemed to have a problem with women terminating wires.

Alondra Pantaleon said her parents were initially “iffy” when she told them that she intended to enroll in a welding program at the Universal Technical Institute’s campus in Bloomfield, N.J. “They felt like it was mostly a man’s job,” Pantaleon, 20, said.

She pushed back by showing them videos of women welding that she had found on social media. Pantaleon said she knew her parents, who work at a pizzeria and a grocery store, had been coming from a place of love. “They didn’t want me to go toward the same path that they are in: start working and get paid minimum wage,” she said. “They want me to have a better life.”

She feels like she is on her way to one: Lately, she has been browsing automotive welding jobs that pay more than $25 an hour.

Her parents are proud that she is set to graduate this month. That’s good news for her younger brother, a high school student who is planning to attend trade school, too.