04/17/2026
If school wasn’t for you or if you need to take out thousands in student loans to attend college, maybe college isn’t the best path for you. For those willing to get their hands dirty, the trades offer great pay without the debt.
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5.7 million Americans are making $100,000 or more without a college degree. The trades aren't a consolation prize anymore.
A LendingTree study analyzed full-time workers without a bachelor's degree and found that about 9% of U.S. workers without a bachelor's degree are earning at least six figures a year.
Here's what those jobs actually look like.
Elevator installers and repairers top the list with 47.5% earning over $100,000. No degree required. Just specialized training and a skilled trade that almost nobody wants to do.
Add in construction managers, commercial pilots, power plant operators, detectives, air traffic controllers, and first-line supervisors in trades and extraction and you have an entire category of six-figure careers that don't require a single college credit.
Now here's the context nobody wants to add to this conversation.
The average cost of a college education saw a 60% jump between 2000 and 2022, with one year's tuition and fees spiking to an average of nearly $15,000.
Only 22% of U.S. adults now say the cost of college is worth it even if people have to take out loans to pay for it.
So the traditional pitch looks like this. Spend $60,000 to $200,000 on a degree. Start your career with significant debt. Spend your 20s paying it off while trying to build wealth.
The alternative pitch is increasingly looking like this. Spend two to four years in an apprenticeship or trade program. Graduate with zero debt. Start earning $60,000 to $80,000 immediately. Hit six figures within a decade in a field with serious labor shortages and zero risk of being outsourced overseas.
I'm not anti-college. A degree still makes sense for the right person in the right field with a clear financial plan behind it.
But I have four kids and the conversation I'm having with them isn't "go to college no matter what." It's "understand what the degree actually costs, what it actually pays, and whether the math works for the path you want."
The trades built this country. The data says they still pay like it.
