You probably have seen charts like this one that send a fairly simple message: More education means more money in the long run. If you want to think and grow rich, you’ll need to stay in school long enough for a J.D., M.B.A., M.D., or any other string of extra letters after your name. Insert alphabet soup here.

The problem, however, is that this chart only tells half the story. This goes back to the last post about how your electrician may not know differential calculus, but he must be intimately familiar with properly wiring complicated circuits together or his work may, quite literally, go up in smoke. Trades rely on skills that cannot be learned from a textbook. The training to become a master plumber and a Master of Arts take about the same length of time, but the plumber spends most of that time on the job site instead of in a classroom. For this reason, he is lumped together in the chart with McDonald’s fry cooks and Walmart cashiers, who vastly outnumber him and strongly skew the statistics.

Customers pay tradesmen based on their skill, not their theoretical knowledge. Furthermore, the longer a tradesman works, the more opportunities he will have to learn more specialized skills that pay even higher. Underwater welding, medical gas pipes, computerized precision machining, and solar panel installation are just a few of the rapidly progressing, in-demand skills for aspiring tradesmen. For this reason, many tradesmen at the top of their profession can earn six-figure salaries.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the other side of the coin and see what our erroneous graph predicts for the erudite holders of fancy degrees. For many of them, the dream job is a prestigious academic post—but often, these jobs simply aren’t there because the few jobs are already filled. This isn’t just the case in the arts and humanities—think about how many astronomers you meet. (Here’s a hint: They’re outnumbered by astrologers ten to one.) 73 percent of college faculty jobs hiring today are non-tenure track. For others, the years of school pile up student loan debt they may never be able to repay. There may be the potential to earn a little more as a Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at Yale than as a crane operator, but which is a more realistic goal for most of the population?

Trades certainly pay enough to live a comfortable life, to raise a family, and to save for retirement. They may not make many billionaires, but neither do the vast, vast majority of MBAs.

This is probably the biggest misconception that drives people away from technical careers. I have been dissuaded by guidance counselors, teachers, and relatives from pursuing a trade on the grounds that “you won’t be challenged, and you’ll get bored”. At the time, I believed many of them. I believed that to use my talents, I would have to understand five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory, Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy, and oxidation of Grignard reagents. I believed bricklaying and diesel mechanics to be the territory of stoners and slackers.

Then, in 2017, I took a welding and masonry class (primarily to impress my dad, a maintenance man). In the first week, I realized just how much I had to learn: shield gases, eye protection ratings, sand-to-cement ratios, screeding techniques… These were all things that the “slackers” in my class were very familiar with, while I was burning holes in my khakis with my pathetic welds.

The same thing happened two years later with my small engines class. I knew the physics of why they worked, but that didn’t help me when I spent four months fixing a water pump. I really prided myself on passing AP Biology when I fumbled my way through my agriculture production final, demonstrating how to give a cow an embolism by injecting medicine the wrong way into a stuffed toy. Meanwhile, the other guys in that class were rebuilding four-wheelers and restoring antique tractors. I learned a great deal about mechanical work in those classes, but what was more important was that I learned that the rednecks in my class knew at least as much as I did. In fact, I would say that they likely knew more because they were able to apply it to real-world problems, which I will spend at least four years in college to learn to do with my major.

A college degree does not substitute for a brain, and neither do greasy hands. Tradesmen must have a great deal of practical knowledge to do their jobs correctly. Otherwise, they will produce wobbly tables and contaminated pork chops. Besides, many tradesmen still enjoy exercising their minds in their free time. I know a mechanic who taught himself Spanish at 55, a carpenter who composes classical flute music, and a trucker who has written his own fantasy novella. Trades, therefore, are not just for the “C” students who struggle to find the cosine of an angle or balance a chemical equation. They should be seen as a viable alternative for anyone who is looking for a practical career.

Fig 1. Hess, Randy. A cap, worn during Elizabethtown College’s 2014 commencement, that no doubt expresses a parent’s hope.

Today, America is more educated than ever before—and the amount of debt that its college graduates are saddled with is staggering. According to Forbes, the total student loan debt of America is in excess of $1.5 trillion, and more than one in ten graduates with loans has defaulted on them. We have built up a tremendous academic culture that prizes erudition: the likes of Noam Chomsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, Toni Morrison, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson—certainly, masters of their fields. But while countless students attempt to follow their paths and make radical changes, the roads they walk to class are full of potholes. Their water still flows through 6 million miles of lead pipes, the computers they write on are built overseas, and the ceiling fans in their offices have frayed wiring.

The solution to this problem is not to encourage more high school students to enter the bachelor’s-internship-office job pipeline. Instead, I believe that we need to drive education in the other direction and begin promoting the trades just as much as white-collar careers.

The young generation is not unemployed because they were handed a hopeless economy; they are unemployed because they are looking for jobs in the wrong places. Mike Rowe, a prominent advocate of the trades, has stated that the misconceptions surrounding trades—low pay, unintelligent workers, miserable conditions­—are turning away desperately needed potential employees. Instead, sadly, they opt to squabble over the few prestigious positions in business and academia. Those who fail will spend forty years working for companies they don’t care about, with degrees they will never pay off—and I think we can all agree this is far more miserable than smelling like diesel fuel every day.

Fig 2. Palmer, Alfred. “Big Pete” Ramagos, rigger at work on dam.

In this blog, I’ll examine several of these misconceptions surrounding the trades and vocational education. My mission is not to denigrate higher education, but to present a viable alternative option that rarely receives the credit that it is due. In fact, this option is one that I plan to pursue after I graduate from Penn State: I hope to go on to a trade school to learn a skill and work for several years before returning for graduate school. Our philosophers and astrophysicists certainly have produced great work, but they cannot repair America’s infrastructure alone. For that, we need the carpenters, bricklayers, and machinists that we so often make a footnote next to the architects and engineers.

Fig 3. Ebbets, Charles. Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.