With high school graduation season in full gear, young adults are shifting their attention to the rest of their lives. Which, if you ask anyone over the age of forty, is a tad ambitious.

Thankfully, they are living in a time when society is placing less pressure to make a singular decision about what the next fifty years of their lives will look like. This is certainly the result of the lessons we have learned from the student debt crisis. But I imagine there are other factors contributing to this. 

When I graduated from high school way back in the twentieth century, ceremonies and publications honoring graduates focused almost exclusively on where students would attend college. The only exception was for those entering military service.

For everyone else, the word “undecided” loomed like a scarlet letter beside their names. 

However, some of my classmates in this category didn’t have undecided futures. They already had jobs lined up on farms, in oil fields and in factories, complete with on-the-job technical training. By the time I finished college, some of them already had mortgages, retirement accounts and children preparing for kindergarten.

In recent years, these paths out of high school have become more common. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that post-pandemic, trade school enrollment is increasing while traditional college enrollment is, at best, stagnant. 

Anecdotally, I have seen this trend play out on social media. For the past month, my high school’s Facebook page has featured profiles of this year’s graduating seniors, including what is next for them. The majority include attending traditional universities and community colleges.

But it isn’t a vast majority. 

Several graduates plan to work in the oil fields, attend cosmetology school, and enroll in welding and electrical engineering training programs. Some will continue their already-established careers at grocery stores, while others will study to be lending or real estate officers.

There are many reasons why these trends are positive. I have already mentioned the student loan crisis that has financially crippled a large swatch of Generation X and Millennials. There is also a growing sense that human resource departments are deprioritizing college degrees as prerequisites for employment.

But, most importantly, this trend destigmatizes certain choices and ways of being in the world that have been deemed as nonnormative.

Marketing departments at U.S. colleges and universities spend billions of dollars every year to convince young people that traditional degree programs are the only pathway to the “good life.” Many high school graduates are calling their bluffs and dismantling the hierarchies of young adult life decisions. This is a good thing.

However, there may be some flies in the ointment.

Many graduates who bypass traditional higher education in favor of professional trade programs will enter the workforce making much higher wages than their classmates who pursue liberal arts degrees will ever make. But at what cost?

Corporate interests in our country are nearing the successful completion of their generations-long war against labor unions. They have gutted basic protections against wrongful termination and compensation for workplace injuries.

The well-documented wage gap between corporate executives and workers has skyrocketed. In 1989, the average CEO-to-worker wage ratio was 59-to-1. In 2001, it was 399-to-1.

There are good reasons to interrogate the bill of goods that universities have sold to generations of young people. But this doesn’t mean we should automatically ascribe virtuous intentions to those voices calling for more high school graduates to skip college to do “dirty jobs.”

We also shouldn’t pretend these voices are any different than college marketing departments. They are selling something as well.

It is not insignificant and I don’t believe it’s an accident that calls for young people to eschew higher education come from the same corners that demonize programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. They are usually also from those who question intellectual frameworks that help us understand the racialized violence of our past. Both of these movements find fertile ground to grow and flourish in the academy.

There are economic interests in our country that rely on increasingly fewer people reading the books and asking the questions that colleges and universities encourage.

And it isn’t just about issues regarding race and other marginalized identities. Critical thinking skills that are honed in a classroom setting may lead a student to wonder whether the opioid epidemic is due to U.S. workplace conditions rather than open borders. In college, young people may be exposed to research showing the primary cause of poverty is low wages, not a lack of churches with a food pantry.

None of this is to suggest that college is the only place where good books can be read and important questions are explored. But it is one of the only places left that has the cultivation of the mind as its primary goal. (Well, “co-primary” with making money and winning at sports.)

However, there is a larger conversation looming in the background than just whether or not we should prioritize trade programs over traditional education. It involves the future of work.

It is no secret that emerging technologies, including but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence, are upending the ways societies function. Over the course of human history, new developments have never significantly eliminated the need for humans to clock in for the day and make a paycheck.

But this moment feels different.

Couple all this with longer lifespans and thus, longer potential tenures in the workforce and it is hard to escape the reality that we will have more humans competing for fewer jobs. What will this do in a culture and economy that bestows ultimate value on a human based on their ability to produce?

Can we imagine a world without work?

A more revolutionary question: Can we create a world without work? What makes this question revolutionary is that we have created a world without work for those with accumulated generational wealth, much of which was built on the backs of blue-collar workers.

But we can’t seem to come to a place where we believe that everyone should be able to thrive unless they are producing. This was never more evident than during the pandemic when many of us were paid to stay at home, while others had the label “essential workers” slapped onto their bodies.

These are economic and cultural matters, yes. But they are primarily spiritual ones. 

For those of us who try to follow the way of Jesus, we claim a faith that believes we are beloved and worthy of dignity before we attempt anything to earn it. And nothing we do to earn it adds to our belovedness. 

As we have been told, the ground is level at the foot of the cross. But do we also believe it is level at the dinner table, in hospital billing departments or in spaces for rest?

More importantly, if we see the ground isn’t level in those places, will we be courageous enough to get out the shovels and backhoes and level it ourselves?