Ditch textbooks and learn how to use a wrench to AI-proof your job?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. JACOB PALMER knew little about skilled manual jobs growing up, save that they were “dirty, sweaty" and “definitely seemed like lowbrow". But it took only a year of remote learning during the covid pandemic for Mr Palmer, who grew up in North Carolina, to realise that university wasn’t for him.

He dropped out after his freshman year, spent the next two years training as an apprentice electrician, and started his own business in 2024. Though just 23 years old he now has a warehouse, a pickup truck and a YouTube channel with more than 33,000 subscribers who watch him fix devices ranging from smoke detectors to Tesla chargers. He expects to generate $155,000 in revenue this year, of which 10% will come from YouTube.

Mr Palmer lists the advantages of becoming an electrician: “You get paid pretty well to do it. You get paid to learn to do it." And it creates “massive job security" at a time when many young university graduates are anxious about artificial intelligence (AI) replacing entry-level white-collar workers. Mr Palmer doesn’t worry about that: “I’ll be wiring those data centres, right?" Mr Palmer is not the only member of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) who is rethinking the merits of getting a university education.

Only about one-third of American adults today think that university education is “very important", according to recent polling by Gallup, a pollster, down from three-quarters in 2010. Around a quarter of Americans say they have “very little" or no confidence in higher education. Dig deeper and many of those with little confidence say that universities do not teach relevant skills and that they are too expensive.