So You Think You Could Be An Electrician?

Jesse Smith Funny how the people telling kids to get jobs in the trades tend to be white-collar. There’s a popular story about working in the trades that goes something like this: College prices have spiraled wildly out of control, while trades salaries have skyrocketed, often surpassing those of college graduates. Even if you do get a degree, AI will displace most knowledge work. So why would anyone, the story goes, spend $200,000 on a worthless college education when union electricians make six figures performing work that’s impossible to replace with AI? There’s a populist angle here, too: The nerds with guaranteed B averages who waltzed into high-paying jobs will get their comeuppance as they’re pushed aside by the hard-working blue-collar moderates who ceaselessly toil at the real work of building the country!The skilled trades hold a special place in the public imagination as a route out of poverty. Trades have advocates like Mike Rowe, former opera singer and host of the TV show Dirty Jobs, whose foundation routes smart, hard-working kids into the trades via scholarships. (Today, its website prominently advertises “AI-proof six-figure jobs.”) But Rowe has something in common with most people selling this popular narrative: a college degree. Trades workers tell a very different story. When I was an apprentice over 30 years ago, we would tease the old-timers for badgering us to quit construction and return to school (the “look at these hands” lecture). In fact, one of the most reliable indicators of an apprentice’s low intelligence was being quickly embraced by old-timers, because it meant they immediately recognized that the kid’s greatest potential was in construction.No one understood the physical demands and uncertain rewards of trades jobs better than older tradespeople. So take it from an older tradesman: The story is more complicated than you might think. Less money In the first place, college graduates still earn more than those without college degrees, specifically because of their academic credentials. In casual settings, people often fail to disentangle selection effects, but rigorous causal research actually does find substantial income effects of college graduation, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career, though this can vary across majors. Completion of a four-year degree is critical to the earnings leap.It is also not the case that wages in the trades are rapidly increasing. The college wage premium grew steadily for several decades beginning in the 1970s until the 2000s. There was a brief reversal period around COVID, during which most gains went to a narrow range of subtrades. This is hardly sufficient to warrant an endorsement of trades employment based on income.There are, of course, also potential missteps. Social work majors on average earn much less than their college peers, and the degree places students on a high-probability collision course with a low-yield graduate degree. Nevertheless, for decades the staple advice that high school graduates should attend college has probably been sound. In this regard, the old-timers with calloused hands who pressed me to leave construction were probably right.This holds particularly true when considering the real cost of college. While the median sticker price for four-year college has dramatically increased over the past 30 years, most students pay much less than the advertised price. The average net paid price for public in-state college tuition and fees was under $2,500 per year in 2024 and has been declining since 2016.So: The actual price paid for college isn’t very high and is declining. Obtaining a college degree unlocks higher wages. Plus, white-collar jobs are safe and easy. Courtesy the Library of Congress. More physical harm When I was 20, I broke both my heels in a construction accident. The right one was surgically reassembled using four heel fragments and extra bone from my hip. Workplace accidents seem to have worse outcomes than similar accidents occurring elsewhere, and at the time this specific injury had a generally poor prognosis, so doctors were initially uncertain whether I’d be permanently disabled.When I think about my teenage son or daughter working in construction, my mind often goes to The Accident. I picture my daughter, who’s three years younger than I was at the time, wheeling to The Beer Store in a Workers’ Comp rental wheelchair each day, and coming home to down 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Or I think of my son sleeping with a fan every night to overpower the ringing in his ears. Over enough time, physical jobs exact a physical toll that desk jobs largely avoid.Most white-collar professions have a trivially small risk of death. Even in gray-collar jobs that are widely perceived as dangerous, such as policing, most workplace deaths are caused by motor vehicles. But some trades jobs carry a risk of death or serious injury connected to specific and inherent job demands. That is, something that seems dangerous that you often do is the most likely to harm or kill you.Jobs performed at heights, such as ironwork or roofing, have a high mortality due to falling. Electrical linesmen tend to be killed by electrocution. Arborists can be killed in a variety of ways: falling from heights, being struck by trees or electrocuted. For people in these jobs, these risks are widely understood and accepted. Almost every tradesperson knows someone who’s had at least one protracted absence due to a work injury, and many of us know someone who was permanently disabled or killed. These risks are probably less salient for people who have worked mainly white-collar jobs and know few people employed in dangerous professions.There’s moderate evidence that people in wealthy countries are increasingly risk-averse to things that might kill or harm them. For many folks, this may translate to an unwillingness to take on a nontrivial risk of death or injury via dangerous jobs. And there may be a subtler version of this in which people are reluctant to tinker with physical objects for fear of destroying them. I’ve found that when I coach people through DIY projects, they’re often extraordinarily fearful. And not just of electrocution or falling, but of doing something incorrectly or pushing a broken thing past the point of being reparable. (And this appears to be something that blue-collar people — perhaps due to hubris or ignorance — don’t seem to worry about as much.)While the optimal quantity of risk-taking for a given job probably isn’t zero, it’s difficult to broadly argue against placing a high intrinsic value on human life or the avoidance of pain and chronic disability. People abandoning the trades for safe, high-paying jobs is understandable. Courtesy the Library of Congress. Internal status hierarchies White-collar people often seem attuned to the differences in social status and compensation of white-collar jobs while remaining somewhat oblivious to the same internal dynamics across blue-collar jobs. Most realize that a partner at McKinsey is very different from a bank teller and that the great majority of college graduates have essentially no path toward McKinsey partnership.But they’re often incapable of generalizing this to understanding the trades, or contrasting this against the backdrop of blue-collar employment. The median blue-collar worker isn’t in the trades at all: They’re probably a delivery driver for Amazon making roughly $40,000 per year. If lucrative trades employment is as simple as shaking the union electrician tree until a $125,000-per-year job falls out, why don’t delivery drivers simply pivot toward becoming one? The answer is that within the blue-collar status hierarchy, the union electrician is much closer to the McKinsey partner than the bank teller.Trades jobs are generally among the best blue-collar jobs, and within the trades, specialized union jobs are especially coveted. These jobs are less accessible to people on the lower end of the blue-collar hierarchy. They often require training, social connections, certifications and licensing, and technical competence. I asked several acquaintances in union trades about the selection process for their jobs. Each described an initial process with 100 to 200 candidates, followed by testing and interviews that winnowed the field to one to two dozen. The final selection of between four and eight job entrants was less clear but appeared to include a mix of connections, previous credentials such as military service, and measured ability.Public schools often have standardized tests and exams that allow for objective comparisons between students, but in the U.S., trade schools lack uniform performance metrics. Consequently, the effectiveness of any trade school is hard to determine. But we should be wary of adopting the widespread assumption that training centers — which, for have decades, have acted as a repository for young people who are unable, for academic reasons, to attend college — have better teaching methods than other schools. AGI won’t spare the builders