Nonsense, but you may have been brainwashed into believing it. An enormous disservice to American school kids for the past forty years has been the ad nauseum

Nonsense, but you may have been brainwashed into believing it. An enormous disservice to American school kids for the past forty years has been the ad nauseum repetition that you either graduate college or you’re a failure who’s a complete drain on society. This is bollocks. After training a few years, work in some skilled trades pays six figures. Others are easily making upwards of $70k. If you can’t survive on that, tighten your belt or move to a lower cost-of-living area. Just like everyone you went to college with wasn’t a fit for med school, not everyone you went to high school is cut out for college. Learning a trade in vocational training may be exactly what they’re looking for and is definitely a path to good jobs. Earning a decent, respectable living is fine and in no way a comment on the person’s character or value or intelligence, but by painting it as “alternative school” with the connotation of a one-way track to Loserville, axe grinders have made the situation far worse. Now, it’s true that being a fry jockey — or any other job where anyone can walk in off the street and do the same task with little training — is not economically survivable, but a career that peaks at unskilled labor is far worse than ordinary.