[runako]

This ignores that the reason that people started pushing their kids to college was that the odds are better with a degree than without, and that still broadly holds over a long career. There never have been any guarantees, but the odds in the USA do not favor folks with only a high school education.

For example, people talk about "landscaping or construction" and other trades but don't consider that working as e.g. an economist has a longer expected career longevity than working in construction.

Also remember that the point of college is to broadly educate the individual, not to be a jobs program. That said, there's no reason a college graduate can't start and grow a construction business. A person who makes $200k at a data science job is in some ways better positioned to start a construction business, because they have the ability to accumulate some capital.