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 figuresGrowing 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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