The Trade Cycle

A headline in the New York Times recently caught my eye: Mom, Dad, I Want to Be a Welder. Callie Holtermann’s bright and interesting piece (July 13, 2026) told the story of LaDonna Glass, aged 23, who had wanted to be a youth therapist and left college after one year to join a trainee electrical engineer program.

Ms. Glass was loving it — snaking conduits between electrical boxes, installing wall sockets, learning on the job, and enjoying not only feeling useful but knowing that if she joined the union, she might earn close to $90K a year as an IBEW electrician. “The cost of living is making people realize we don’t have four years to sit around and go to school.” A compelling and reasonable statement from LaDonna Glass. Perhaps.

Here was a young woman who had set aside a calling, youth therapy, for a trade that might carry less social prestige but a clearer, faster path to a stable income. She was weighing a trade against a degree; and yet, as we heard in her own words, she was choosing a better life with a predictable financial reward over spending four years “sitting around.”

Whatever else changes in the job market, some kinds of skilled, physical work aren’t going anywhere soon, and that alone might be reshaping how young people choose. Are they weighing the pros and cons of the cost of a four-year degree against a shrinking premium for white collar work, and thus making the wiser bet?

Some of the issues raised in the NYT article remind me of my own family and what choices were available to us in the late 60s and 70s in the United Kingdom. I grew up there with four siblings in a working-class family in England, in municipal housing, in a Silent Generation/Boomer-era world with different rules than the ones LaDonna’s Gen Z is navigating now. Did we have more or fewer choices available to us then?

Perhaps the essential question is about change over time and across culture and class. I broke the mold in my family by attending college. LaDonna is going against a different expectation; some of us might assume that college is the better choice for her, and yet she wants a more immediately sustainable life. Both of us, in our own moments, were choosing against what was expected. If I frame my probing as a question of freedom of choice, the freedom to break the mold, whichever direction the mold points, perhaps I can highlight both the paradox and the need for change in the options available to young people and our ability to embrace that change.

My older brothers and sisters were smart and capable; I expect they could have gone to university if that had been a real option for them at the time. As young people who reached minimum school-leaving age between 1947 and 1972, they left school at 15. They found apprenticeships or trainee positions, in toolmaking, baking, the pharmaceutical industry and retail. They went on to be successful in their industries and as family members, earning enough to build a good middle-class life. I’m not sure, honestly, how much choice they really had. It simply wasn’t the thing for young people in our circle to attend college.

Sometime between my siblings’ era and 2013–15, the minimum school-leaving age in England rose to 17 or 18, and young people were expected, as they are now, to remain in full-time education until then. Ironically, this is a new restriction of choice, for exactly the kind of young person, like LaDonna Glass, who might prefer to start learning a trade at 16 or 17.

In that same window, I reached school-leaving age and chose the opposite path from my brothers and sisters: I stayed on and matriculated to university at 18. I broke the mold for my family at that time, or perhaps moved the bar. My choice was easier than theirs, and I wanted the academic route. LaDonna lives in a different world, sixty years on, where the value of a college degree has visibly lessened, and where young people want to begin building a sustainable adult life sooner rather than later.

What’s new right now is a real, public reckoning with the relevance and the cost of a four-year degree. Holtermann’s article brings that starkly to light. There are smart choices available now to graduating seniors that didn’t carry the same social weight a generation ago: perhaps a trade where you won’t be replaced by AI, a two-year junior college program tailored to your ambitions, or an apprenticeship in a specific work area. Socially and economically, we need to catch up to these choices and treat them as valid, and to respect the training of an electrician or plumber as much as a bachelor’s degree from a decent college. These are places that are somewhat more bullet-proof against AI and may bring the satisfaction and reward that a young person seeks over time.

As I narrow my lens to focus on LaDonna Glass, I think less about whether higher education is failing her and more about the societal mold itself and who gets to decide which way it bends. My family broke it one way, at 15, because the world gave them almost no other option. I broke it another way, at 18, because the UK made it possible at that time financially for people like me to attend university. LaDonna is breaking it again, in a third direction, in a world that finally may have to admit that a college degree isn’t the only route to a sustainable, respected life. It is difficult to see complete freedom of choice in the example of LaDonna Glass or my working-class family. What we shared, however, was the willingness and ability to take the choice available. That, maybe, is the real cycle worth noticing, not trades replacing degrees, but each generation renegotiating what it means to choose well with what’s in front of them, and running with the option they take.

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