Two-Thirds Bet on Trades Over College. Here's the Catch.

Two-thirds of Gen Z now believe skilled trades get you to a $100,000 salary faster than college does. That’s the headline out of a new survey OnePoll conducted for Wolverine Worldwide as part of its Project Bootstrap initiative, published September 11 across Stacker’s news network on outlets from KTVZ to KIRO 7. Only 32% of the 2,000 respondents, ages 16 to 28, still think choosing university over an apprenticeship was the right call.

Here’s the part almost nobody repeating that headline seems to have noticed. The same 2,000 people, in the same survey, estimated that a skilled trades worker actually makes $57,005 a year. Not six figures. Barely half of it. Your generation is making a $100K bet on a road it doesn’t actually believe pays $100K.

The short version

What’s true	What it means for you
OnePoll surveyed 2,000 Americans ages 16-28 for Wolverine Worldwide, June 8-17, 2026	This is a real, sized survey, not a TikTok poll
Two-thirds believe trades reach $100K faster than college; only 32% think college was the right call over an apprenticeship	Trades-over-college is now the majority opinion among people your age
The same respondents estimated average trades pay at just $57,005 a year	That’s the contradiction. You can’t reach $100K faster on a road you think tops out barely halfway there
BLS puts actual 2025 median pay at $63,190 for electricians, $63,800 for plumbers, and $61,010 for HVAC techs	The real number beats Gen Z’s own guess — but it’s still nowhere near $100K on its own
76% called earning income while learning “very appealing,” and 31% said they’d never even considered a trade before	The appeal is real. The math underneath it isn’t finished yet

What the survey actually found

Read the numbers slowly, because the contradiction is the whole story here. Sixty-six percent of 16-to-28-year-olds say trades are the faster route to $100,000. Thirty-seven percent cite hands-on experience as the draw. Thirty-five percent cite earning money while you learn. Thirty-six percent cite avoiding student debt. Seventy-one percent of respondents not already working a trade said they’d consider one now.

That’s a real shift, and I don’t think it’s a fad. I’ve written before about why your generation is rethinking the trades — AI risk, burnout, the sheer size of student debt — and none of that reasoning has gotten weaker since spring. This survey just confirms it’s gone mainstream. Fifty-eight percent — I had to read that one twice — believe trade jobs are becoming more appealing to people their age. Almost a third had never even considered the option before someone put the question in front of them.

Belief and math are two different things, though. This survey accidentally proved it by asking both questions to the same room.

Do trades really pay more than college?

Trades can pay more than a typical entry-level college job, but “more” isn’t the same as “$100K.” Actual median pay for licensed trades in 2025 runs $61,000 to $64,000 a year — solid money, no debt attached, years ahead of a college grad’s earning curve. Six figures is real in the trades, but it mostly belongs to licensed specialists and business owners a decade in, not to the apprentice starting next fall.

Here’s the plain version, if you want it in one place:

Entry-level trade pay runs $35,000-$45,000 in year one of an apprenticeship, climbing at set wage-progression milestones.
Median journeyman pay lands around $61,000-$64,000, per BLS data for electricians, plumbers, and HVAC techs — the actual number Gen Z’s own survey undershot by six or seven thousand dollars.
Six figures shows up almost entirely on the ownership side — running your own crew, holding a specialty license, bidding your own jobs — not on a wage stub working for someone else.

That third line is the one the survey never asked about, and it’s the one that actually decides whether the $100K bet pays off.

The gap nobody’s naming

Sixty-six percent think trades hit $100K faster than college. The same people peg average trade pay at $57,005. Do that math and it doesn’t hold together — you can’t reach a number faster on a road you believe tops out barely halfway there.

I think I know what’s happening. The $100K belief comes from the algorithm — the electrician on your feed showing off a truck and a job that paid $140K this month. The $57K belief comes from something closer to a gut sense of what a normal trades job pays. Both numbers live in the same head at once, and nobody forces them to agree with each other until a survey comes along and asks both questions on the same page.

That gap is worth sitting with, because it isn’t really about trades. It’s about how easy it’s gotten to hold two contradictory beliefs about money at once, as long as neither gets stress-tested. The moneymaxxing trend has the same blind spot — good habits, floating free of the arithmetic that would actually tell you whether they’re working.

What actually closes the gap to six figures

None of this means the survey’s instinct is wrong. It means the instinct is unfinished. Three things separate the $57K trades worker from the $100K one, and the door you walked through at 18 isn’t one of them.

The license. A general apprentice makes journeyman pay. A journeyman with a specialty license — high-voltage, medical gas, industrial refrigeration — makes journeyman-plus. The license is the actual raise, and almost nobody mentions it in a thirty-second video.

The ownership. I said this back in the spring and it’s still the load-bearing fact: the electricians clearing $200K aren’t swinging a tool bag for somebody else. They bid the jobs, run the books, hire the crew. The ceiling in the trades is real, but it lives on the business side, not the wage side.

The years. Median pay of $61-64K isn’t a ceiling — it’s roughly where a journeyman sits a few years in. A decade in, with a license and a growing client list, the math looks completely different. The survey asked 16-to-28-year-olds to estimate “average” pay, which flattens first-year apprentices and twenty-year veterans into one number. That’s part of why $57K feels low. It’s an average of people standing at very different points on the same road.

I’d tell you the same thing about college, honestly. A four-year degree gets you an entry-level salary somewhere in the $50s. It’s the specialization, the promotions, the decade of showing up that eventually turns that into six figures — not the diploma by itself. Whichever door you walk through, the ladder inside it has already changed shape from the one your parents climbed. Neither path hands you $100K on day one. Both hand you a floor and a long runway.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

Picture two 24-year-olds. One’s a second-year journeyman electrician making $58,000, no debt, on a crew doing mostly residential rewires — a soft-market number for that milestone. The $70,000-$90,000 figure I cited back in the spring for the same career stage assumed a strong market or a higher-paying specialty; residential work in a slow region lands well below that. The other’s two years into a marketing job making $54,000, carrying $31,000 in student debt. Right now, on paper, the trades path is ahead — lower debt, similar pay, a physical skill nobody’s automating this decade.

Neither one is at $100K. Neither one is close. What decides who gets there first isn’t the door they walked through at 18. It’s whether the electrician goes after a specialty license and eventually bids her own jobs, and whether the marketer moves into a role that actually uses what she’s built instead of drifting sideways for six years. The credential mattered less than what each of them did with the next ten years of it.

What to do this week

If you’re weighing trades against college right now, look up actual median pay for the specific trade or degree you’re considering — not a TikTok number, not a survey average. BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook has real figures for almost every job you’d consider.
Ask anyone already in a trade what their income looked like at year one, year five, and year fifteen. The gap between those three numbers is the real story — bigger than the gap between trades and college.
If you’re already in an apprenticeship, ask about the specialty licenses in your trade and which ones actually pay more. That’s the real lever, and most apprentices never ask about it.
Don’t let a single survey statistic decide a four-year commitment. Read the whole picture — including what the college math looks like right now, too — before you sign anything.

I know it’s tempting to want one clean answer here — trades win, or college wins, pick a side and stop thinking about it. It’s not clean, and I’d be lying if I told you it was. What I want you to walk away with instead is smaller and more useful: whichever door you pick, the license, the specialty, and the follow-through are what actually get you to $100K. The door itself just gets you started.

The takeaway

Two-thirds of your generation is right that trades deserve a real look. They’re wrong about the shortcut — there isn’t one, on either side of this choice, and their own survey proved it by accident.