AI Is Eating White Collar Jobs From the Bottom Up. Is Your Kid's College Major in the Way?

Trades are paying six figures. AI is eliminating white collar jobs. The $400,000 degree that was supposed to guarantee a better life is starting to look like a cockroach in the bathroom.

(Photo: My daughter and I at dinner in Cascais, Portugal recently)

Kids and school can be tough, and it’s gettin’ tougher!

My youngest, Tyler, was on the verge of failing out of eighth grade.

I am not talking about a rough semester. I am talking about a kid who had checked out of the system entirely…

Turns out he just had a bad teacher (one with more complaints against her than Trump’s cabinet) and that was affecting him in a negative way.

What do I mean by bad?

She would publicly humiliate him in front of the entire class.

‘We’ve had a lot of similar complaints, but we are just shorthanded, said the school principal.

The school was not working for him and he was not working for the school so we pulled him out, opting for independent study instead.

Best thing we did for him.

His grades shot up to B’s and A’s and put him on a solid re-entry for high school.

Sometimes you have to realize the environment is the problem, not your kid. Although sometimes it IS the kid, it’s incredibly important to do your research.

Fast forward a few years. Tyler is now at the University of Oregon, majoring in business.

He got there because he spent years around my network, meeting entrepreneurs, investors, people who were actually building things in the real world. One of those people was my close friend Kamal Ravikant.

Something clicked. The bug for business bit him.

But I feel for parents today who are raising younger kids because the college math has changed.

For roughly fifty years, the deal went like this. You work hard in high school, you get into a decent college, you come out with a degree, and the degree is your entry ticket to a stable career and above average earnings.

The specifics varied but the architecture was consistent.

College equals credential. Credential equals job. Job equals security and future earnings.

It was not a perfect system but it was legible and it worked well enough for long enough that it became the ambient assumption of an entire culture.

The foundation of that contract is cracking in multiple places simultaneously and the cracks are no longer ignorable for parents raising kids today.

Average private university tuition in America now exceeds $60,000 per year.

A four-year degree at a mid-tier private institution costs $240,000 to $280,000 before you factor in room, board, and the minor detail that your kid’s social life does not fund itself.

The student loan system that was supposed to make this accessible has instead created $1.7 trillion in collective debt held by 43 million Americans, many of whom signed those papers at seventeen or eighteen with approximately zero understanding of what they were actually agreeing to.

Over dinner last night, my daughter was telling me about a friend in grad school who keeps applying for new credit cards to keep the student-debt carousel spinning.

It’s getting harder and harder the same way the future of your kids careers are becoming murkier than New York’s east river.

And AI is coming for entry-level white-collar work first.

Paralegal research, financial analysis, copywriting, basic coding, customer service management, legal (yes lawyers), creative jobs, radiological image reading, accounting functions, the list of knowledge economy jobs being automated or dramatically compressed is growing every quarter.

The credential you spent $250,000 obtaining to qualify for a job that a language model now does faster and cheaper is not the safe bet it used to be.

A licensed electrician in the United States earns a median salary of around $61,000 per year. Master electricians in high-demand markets regularly clear $100,000 to $150,000.

Plumbers median around $60,000 with experienced tradespeople in major metros earning well into six figures. HVAC technicians, welders certified in specialized processes, elevator mechanics, pipefitters, industrial maintenance technicians, all of them are staring at a labor market where demand is structurally outpacing supply because an entire generation was steered away from these careers by a culture that decided working with your hands was somehow less than working with a spreadsheet.

The apprenticeship model that feeds most of these trades typically costs a few thousand dollars, not a few hundred thousand.

It pays a wage while you learn. It produces zero student debt. And it delivers a skill set that cannot be offshored and is extraordinarily difficult to automate, because the physical, adaptive, problem-solving nature of skilled trade work is precisely what AI struggles most to replicate.

Take a look at this chart to understand how dramatically AI is coming for the job you once hoped your kid would pursue.

I am not saying every kid should skip college and become a plumber. I am saying that the reflexive assumption that college is always the right answer for every kid is costing families enormous amounts of money and costing kids enormous amounts of time, often in service of a credential that does not actually align with who they are or what they are built to do.

And this is only getting worse as the chart above demonstrates.

Trades, hard assets, and people who own income-generating assets and AI-proof businesses (HVAC, landscaping, mechanical, etc.) will be a great bet in the future.

The question every parent needs to be sitting with right now is not “what college should my kid go to.”

It is “what does my kid actually light up about that fits in with the future that is coming for them.

And am I creating the conditions for them to discover that, or am I funneling them toward the credential because that is what I know and it makes ME feel less anxious.”

Those are different questions and they lead to very different outcomes.

Before committing to an expensive four-year degree (especially in the future), ask three questions.

First, does your kid have a genuine sense of what they want from it, not a vague idea, but an actual direction?

Second, have they been exposed to enough of the world to know whether college is the right path or whether a trade, an apprenticeship, a gap year, or starting something is a better fit?

Third, does the financial math make sense given the specific degree, the specific institution, and the specific career on the other end of it?

If you cannot answer all three clearly, take a hard reset.

The willingness to slow down and get it right is worth more than the pressure to follow the default timeline and societal pressures.

Artificial intelligence is not a future concern. It is a present one.

The jobs being disrupted fastest are not the ones that require physical presence, human judgment in unpredictable environments, or genuine creative originality. They are the ones that require processing information according to rules and producing standardized outputs.

That description covers a very large portion of what entry-level college-educated workers have historically been hired to do.

This does not mean college is obsolete. It means the system has changed.

A degree in a field with genuine structural demand, pursued with clear purpose, at an institution whose cost is proportionate to the return on the other end, is still a sound investment.

A degree in a field with shrinking demand, pursued because it felt like the thing to do, at an institution charging $70,000 a year for the privilege, is a bet that the old rules still apply.

They do not.

The parents who are going to serve their kids best in this environment are the ones who are willing to ask hard questions, resist the social pressure to follow the default path, pay close enough attention to know what their kid actually lights up about, and trust that purpose, once found, is more durable than any credential.

In Puddle Jumpers I write that purpose is not a trophy you put on a shelf. It is a torch you keep carrying into the next chapter of your life.

Our jobs as parents is not to hand our kid the map. It is to create enough open ground that they find it themselves.

Then get out of the way and let them run with it.

Even if the path they choose does not look like the one you had in mind.

Especially then.

Hope this got you thinking!

Brandon

PS-Please consider ordering my book here…it’s also a great Father’s Day gift…one that dad will actually read, I guarantee it! Thx, Brandon