[say_]

"construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job"

Traditional jobs are the first to go in tough economic times.

Trade school is a short term play. The world is only going to get more complex. While trade school might make someone better off in their 20s relative to someone who went to college, in the long term it will severely limit their opportunities.

[ams6110]

The highest income people I know are in the trades... plumbers, electricians, concrete. They make far and away more than the programmers I know.

[jquery]

How much do they make?

[BrandonM]

The roads always need paved. I live in Ohio, where the cost of living is very low compared to much of the rest of the US, and jobs working on state highway projects pay over $18/hr. It's manual labor and it's dangerous to be near the roads, but it's far from the worst job you could have.

[MichaelSalib]

What's competition like for those jobs?

I mean, I'm sure there are some very high paying jobs that don't require a college degree. But there are millions of people that lack a college degree who want to work. Shouldn't we assume that the vast majority of these people will not get high paying jobs and will be lucky to get 30 hours a week of minimum wage work?

[InclinedPlane]

Why should we assume that? Unschooled does not mean uneducated and it sure as shit doesn't mean unskilled. There are more and more people who hold the belief that the age of apprenticeship, of transiting from novice through journeyman to professional entirely through entirely on the job training, is over, but that belief is false as can be. There are many, many people making bank earning as much as 4 year science and technical degree holders are earning who hold nothing more advanced than a HS diploma, and sometimes not even that.

Almost all such jobs involve significant amounts of manual labor, so that world tends to be rather disjoint from the world of college education and office jobs so there is definitely a lack of visibility from one world into the next. But that world does very much exist. The guys fixing your car, mowing your company's lawn, catching your seafood, transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock, resurfacing the asphalt on your street, putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road, assembling your cars, sometimes even the guy working in the deli section at your grocery store, they may be making much more than you previously thought.

[MichaelSalib]

Do you have any statistics on just how many of these high wage jobs exist? Because I know a lot of people who lack college degrees who would kill for a job that pays over $10/hour.

catching your seafood

Fisheries around the US are collapsing. It seems like the seafood catching industry is shedding jobs.

transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock

I believe that trucking has been reduced because of the recession which suggests that trucking jobs should decline slightly.

resurfacing the asphalt on your street

Many municipalities don't have the cash to spend on street repair.

putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road

There's a massive glut of housing stock right now. A few years ago, everyone and their brother was working in construction, building crappy third rate homes with substandard quality and chinese drywall. But then the housing bubble burst and guess what? Most of those sheetrock hackers were tossed out of work.

assembling your cars

There are actually very few jobs in automotive manufacturing in the US. This sector has been heavily mechanized. Have you seen the financial shape the automotive industry is in? It is heading for a major consolidation. And people aren't buying cars at the rate they once did since they don't have disposable income. This sector is likely to be shedding high wage jobs, not gaining them.

[rmc]

> The roads always need paved.

Yes but someone might invent a labour saving device that makes it easier to pave roads. This is what has happened with farms. The paved roads are not as important to humanity as food. Food is the most important thing to humanity, that doesn't mean going into agriculture is a good idea.