Young Man Who Skipped College to Become an Electrician Now Makes Six Figures
“I had a general interest in working with my hands, fixing and making things, as well as a basic understanding of electrical theory from my time in AP Physics class”
We would be so much better off as a country if more young people made choices like this.
Fortune reports:
Meet a 23-year-old electrician who was a ‘good student’ but skipped college to join Gen Z’s blue-collar revolution. He makes 6 figures
Growing up in Concord, North Carolina, just outside Charlotte, Jacob Palmer was a classic academic achiever. “I was a good student,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “In high school, I participated in all types of extracurriculars, student leadership, I did a lot of public speaking. I had all sorts of friends.” But he said something changed during the pandemic. “School looked drastically different doing online classes and Zoom calls. It felt very intangible.” He said he figured out pretty quickly that online college “didn’t work for me. I hated it.”
Palmer said that instead of sticking with college, he tried things out, including a stint at a FedEx warehouse for several months, and a change of scenery at his grandparents in rural Virginia, where he worked at a factory for a few months.
When he returned home, in need of a job, his mom was putting in a hot tub and she mentioned the electrician working on it was “super passionate and loved his job.” Palmer said he sounded him out, estimating that the electrician was about 29 at the time, and Palmer liked that he worked for himself.
“I had a general interest in working with my hands, fixing and making things, as well as a basic understanding of electrical theory from my time in AP Physics class,” he said. Soon afterward, he started as a full-time apprentice at a small, Charlotte-based contracting firm, earning $15 an hour at first and working his way up the ladder.
He was far from alone. Palmer’s micro-generation abandoned college in droves during the pandemic, driving 42% of an overall 15% decline in undergraduate enrollment between fall 2010 and fall 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Overall, college may have peaked, as experts have predicted a “demographic cliff” ever since 2007, when Americans started having fewer children with the coming of the Great Recession, and birthrates have not recovered since, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Palmer was part of a movement deciding to try something else instead of college.
“I spent a few years just untangling the extension cords and doing the grunt work,” he said, earning hours en route to sitting for an electrical license. But even though he didn’t become a college student, he still found himself studying hard, because he had to pass his licensing exam, in January 2024. Just a month later, at 21, he opened his own business, Palmer Electrical. By the end of that year, according to profit and loss statements reviewed by Fortune, he grossed nearly $90,000. This nearly doubled to $175,000 in 2025 and he said he was “thinking $250,000 is a good goal for 2026, but my main focus is still to continue learning and make new opportunities.”
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Comments
almost every “college student” in the nfl can say the same thing (and add in a 7 figure salary )
Regretfully, higher education in America has become higher indoctrination. Professional skills in carpentry, auto repair, plumbing, electrical work, welding, etc., would seem to provide a far better education and be far more lucrative to college-age students without the overhang of life-long college debt.
DEI has totally destroyed “higher education” in the United States.
That’s why I call it higher indoctrination.
Be a little careful of how you talk about “indoctrination”. There are two kinds. Good indoctrination should start at birth, and taper off until late teens. Bad indoctrination should never occur.
What we have in most government K-12 schools is Bad indoctrination.
There are a few that haven’t been destroyed. But yes.
When I moved into this area 26 years ago, the high school offered a wood shop, auto shop, welding, and possibly other hard trades programs I did not have the opportunity to learn about… and they were in the inexplicable process of phasing them out. I had arranged for private welding instruction with their teacher, and managed to get only two lessons in before he got the news that he was being riffed and left for another state.
Last week, I attended their activities fair for incoming freshman, and discovered that they were adding such programs again. Culinary, video and audio editing, Python coding, an agricultural program (soon to include welding), FBLA, and they are awaiting final approval from the DOD to offer AFROTC(!)
It’s about time. They never should have stopped.