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

Generation Z is becoming less invested in university and more interested in skilled trades.

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Apprenticeship schemes are attracting young people like Ms Lona Hughes to skilled vocations. A trainee machinist, she took part in the National Trades Competition in France in October. Many young Americans say universities do not teach relevant skills and are too expensive, a US poll shows. PHOTO: AFP

(PHOTO: AFP)

Mr 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-19 pandemic for Mr Palmer, who grew up in North Carolina, to realise that university was not 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 US$155,000 (S$200,000) in revenue in 2025, of which 10 per cent 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 does not 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.