[_delirium]

Unemployment rates for blue-collar workers are pretty high too, so I'm not sure that's a good solution---or necessarily a good career bet, unless you carefully target a subset of blue-collar work that you're pretty sure will continue to be in high demand.

Construction jobs, for example, are pretty much none to be had at the moment, and wages have been significantly falling in real terms for some decades. My grandfather made a middle-class wage as a carpenter working on house construction in the 1950s, but the crew that built my parents' recent-ish suburban home were all making minimum wage assembling factory-cut materials (and there's oversubscribed demand even for those jobs). Auto mechanic is not a particularly good job market at the moment, either. Skilled welding is indeed in demand, but it takes a substantial amount of time to build up the level of skill that's currently in demand (with the prevalence of machine welds, there's no longer a smooth on-the-job skills progression).

I'm not sure it's actually a better bet than getting an English BA and looking for an office job, though. Both have high unemployment rates currently, but blue-collar-worker unemployment rates are even higher than English-major unemployment rates.