The Gen Z revolt, choosing career over college

The Generation Z revolt is here. Each generation has its own way of rebelling against its parents. Baby Boomers rebelled as hippies, while Generation X protested with grunge and wound up becoming yuppies.

Recent data suggest that Gen Z is expressing its dissent by wanting to swing a hammer and make mortgage payments. By a 2:1 margin, Gen Z believes that the trades are a better option than a four-year college degree. Gen Z may be the first generation since World War II to prefer the trades over college.

Its preference for the trades has grown dramatically of late. Just last year, Gen Z saw the trades as a better option by only an 11-point margin. This surge in conviction over such a short time has come almost entirely from those who had previously said that they were not sure which option was best.

What happened in the past year that made Americans aged 13 to 24 decisively decide that college is no longer the best path for them? It is unlikely that most Gen Z-ers have ever heard of celebrities like Mike Rowe, who has championed the trades for nearly two decades. Nor has the emergence of generative artificial intelligence platforms like Chat GPT played a role in this shift — Gen Z is the most optimistic of all generations that AI will enhance its careers.

Driving the shift in Gen Z’s attitude toward college is a desire for “less debt” and a “better chance at finding a job.” The motivation appears to have been inspired by unwitting policymakers, who have sent inflation surging and destabilized the economy.

As Gen Z has begun graduating high school, student loan rates have doubled, while inflation ravages the economy. In the past year, more than two-thirds of middle-class families report either having stopped saving or digging into their savings to make ends meet. A little over half of recent college grads even have a job.

Pennsylvania is home to over 2 million Gen Z residents, closely split between those under and over 18 years old. The younger half of Pennsylvania’s 1 million Gen Z residents is evenly split between middle schoolers and high schoolers.

And yet, of those half million Pennsylvania Gen Z-ers in high school, only about 35,000 are enrolled in a career and technical education program. That’s fewer than 7% of all public school students.

In fact, Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s lowest career and technical program enrollment rates. Considering Pennsylvania’s proud heritage as an industrial powerhouse that built America, this is a perplexing statistic. So where is the disconnect?

Look to geography: the majority of Pennsylvania’s Gen Z residents and their parents live in the in growing, Democratic-leaning suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which are home to some of the world’s best colleges and universities. Meanwhile, less than a quarter of Pennsylvania’s CTE schools are located in the suburbs. The majority of Pennsylvania’s CTE schools are found in places where voters still fly Trump flags and the population is declining.

Education is a primary political dividing line. Gen Z’s parents prefer college over the trades by a 3:1 margin for their children, while Democratic parents overall prefer college by a 10:1 margin. So, with its emerging preference for the trades, Gen Z is primed to rebel against its liberal parents.

But that doesn’t mean that Gen Z-ers are primed to be conservatives. Another wrinkle to the Gen Z rebellion is that it is the least patriotic generation in America today. Given its experience of lockdowns, financial panics, and political polarization, Gen Z’s skepticism of American exceptionalism is not hard to understand.

As America looks to reindustrialize, Gen Z’s shift in career outlook could not come at a better time. CTE skills may be more needed now than at any other time since the New Deal. Time will tell if Gen Z’s personal investment in rebuilding America through CTE careers will kindle a newfound patriotism as well.

Gen Z did get lucky in one respect. The Trump Administration’s low interest rates enabled older Gen Z-ers to track ahead of their parents’ homeownership rate at the same age. Gen Z is becoming invested in stable communities and rising home values, typically associated with strong families – and miter saws and mortgage rates are not typically associated with teen angst.

This is how Gen Z is choosing to rebel. America may wind up stronger for it.

Now, if only Gen Z’s music was listenable.

Athan Koutsiouroumbas is a managing director at Long Nyquist and Associates and a former congressional chief of staff (on Twitter @Athan_K).