A College Degree Is Not Required For Success: Here’s Why

The following is an excerpt from the book Blue Is the New White: The Best Path to Success No One Told You About — Until Now by Josh Zolin.

I’d like to introduce you to three different people who are all facing the same terrifying question: What am I going to do after high school?

First up is Matt. He has just started his junior year. He’s a good student, getting mostly Bs. It’s just him and his dad at home. His dad works two jobs to support them, and Matt works part-time to help out with household expenses.

Matt has all the potential in the world to be successful but feels trapped. He hates how hard his father has to work to support them. He wants to earn enough for a comfortable living. He wants to be able to support his future family and buy his father his dream house someday.

The key to making more money seems clear: go to college. But going to college requires the one thing Matt and his father don’t have enough of: money. Matt’s a good student but not good enough to win scholarships. Even if he goes to the local community college and continues working while going to school, he will still have to take out substantial student loans to get his degree. The idea of starting his adult life with debt bothers him, but what other option does he have?

Zach, unlike Matt, hates school with a fiery passion. He’s always getting yelled at for sleeping in class or hiding headphones under his hoodie. He spends a good portion of each class period counting down the minutes till it ends. Everyone says college is different, but he doesn’t believe it. It just sounds like more school to him. If he did go to college, he’d probably spend more time partying than actually going to class. He’s barely squeaking by right now with Cs and the occasional D+, so who knows whether he can even get in?

Zach’s biggest issue is that he has no idea what he wants to do. If he managed to get into college, what would he even major in? His parents, who both went to college, are pushing him to just go and decide his major while taking the core classes. Zach doesn’t see how that will help him figure things out. The only thing he knows for sure is that he wants to be successful. But he has no idea how to get there and questions the method everyone tells him is the best.

Samantha — Sam for short — is something of a rebel. She skips class, doesn’t focus much on homework, and is known as the class clown. She’s sarcastic — in a hilarious way, at least according to her — and frequently challenges the authority figures at her school, never hesitating to talk back to her teachers. The laughs mean more to her than the consequences, and the reputation means more than the condemnation.

For Sam’s whole life, her parents, her older brother, and her teachers have been telling her what to do, but she has never fit into the neat little molds people try to pour her into. People assume she won’t amount to much, and she feels as if she has to constantly prove herself. But that’s okay because there’s nothing she likes more than proving everybody wrong by doing things her own way…and then rubbing it in their faces.

Her family wants her to go to business school and follow in her father’s footsteps as a corporate bigwig. The last thing she wants to be is an office monkey sitting at a desk all day. Whatever she does, she wants to actually be doing things, and she wants to have a life outside of work, unlike her parents, who regularly put in sixty-hour weeks. Sam’s parents assume she will go to college, but she’s not so sure. College seems like the default option, and Sam has never been one for the default.

Three students — one who can’t afford college, one who is lost and confused, and one who likes blazing her own path — they’re all different. However, they have one important thing in common: college is not the only, or even the best, path for them.

If any of these people sound like you, then this book was written for you. If you’re an educator or parent, and any of these young people sound like your kid or your students, then this book is for you too. Pay attention, because you want the best for those you influence, right? Even if that means admitting you aren’t sure what “the best” is.

The Problem With College

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with college itself — college is the right choice for a lot of people. The problem is the attitude that if you want to be successful, you have to go to college — that it’s the golden ticket. We’ve all heard this song and dance through our already confusing high school years. It’s college or bust — college or driving an Uber for the rest of your life. Frankly, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I didn’t go to college, and guess what — I don’t drive for Uber. I have a beautiful family, a wildly rewarding life, and a business that just made the Inc. 5000 list for fastest-growing companies in the United States. So, yeah, college is not the only path to success.

In fact, going to college is sometimes a terrible choice because while college has its pluses, it also comes with some big downsides:

1. College is expensive, really expensive, like ruin-your-life-if-you-don’t-pay-it-back expensive.
2. A college degree does not guarantee a job, let alone a career in or around your major.
3. Coursework does not prepare you for actual work.

How Expensive Is It?

According to the College Board, a moderate college budget (to cover tuition, books, and supplies, as well as living expenses) for an in-state public college for the 2017–2018 academic year averaged $25,290.1 Over four years, that’s a total of $101,160, and more and more students are taking longer than four years to finish.

Depending on where you live, you could buy a house with that amount of money! Or you could buy four new cars, a fancy coffee drink every morning for the rest of your life, or 50,580 Powerball tickets, which could end up having a better return on investment than a college degree.

Nearly 70 percent of students take out loans to help pay for school.2Collectively, students in the US have racked up $1.5 trillion in debt.3 Is it any wonder that student loan debt has gotten so bad in this country that it’s now classified as a crisis?

Part of the reason higher education is so damn expensive is that colleges are increasingly being run like businesses. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, and don’t even get me started on the outrageous price gouging of textbooks. Colleges are designed to make money, and the way they do that is through students. Just as a business wants more and more customers, colleges want more and more students, regardless of whether those students will truly benefit from the education. I’m sure there are exceptions, but most colleges care more about making money than ensuring their students’ future success.

I Got My Degree—Now Where’s My Job?

Once upon a time, a college degree guaranteed a stable, well-paying job. “Once upon a time” — that’s how fairy tales start, and for many a college graduate, that’s exactly what a good job has become: a thing of fiction.

A study found that in 2010 only 62 percent of US college graduates had a job that required a college degree, and just 27 percent of college grads had a job that was closely related to their major. It’s like the sad joke that English majors end up working at Starbucks after graduating. I find that pretty ironic, considering it’s the only place in the world where the word tall means “small.” Maybe they should start teaching that in English class!

A college degree no longer guarantees a good job because colleges and corresponding job markets have become far too saturated. Students pour tens of thousands of dollars into their education with the expectation that they’ll be making $60,000 or more when they graduate. When they actually enter the job market, they’re hit with the cold, hard truth that the good-paying job doesn’t exist, and they still have to pay back their loans, which, by the way, will even follow you through bankruptcy.

Worse, many students drop out before graduating, and they don’t even get the pretty piece of paper to show for their troubles. All they get is crushing debt — and maybe exceptional beer pong skills and a full understanding of what a sock on the doorknob means.

Well, Crap! Turns Out I Hate This Job

Even those students who do end up obtaining jobs in their chosen field don’t always get a happily-ever-after ending.

Colleges teach a lot, and they create great students, but great students are not always great workers. Far too often, the coursework of a given major does not reflect what a day-to-day career in that field will be like. Imagine if someone only explained to you how to drive a motorcycle, then dropped you full speed on the highway your first time out. Good luck!

This starts right from the beginning, at registration, when students are given a list of majors and are told, “Okay, pick one.” What does an “applied mathematics” or “molecular life sciences” major mean in the real world? Who cares? Just pick one! That’s what my wife did. She went to college with no idea what she wanted to do, and she picked “communicative disorders” off a list because she thought it would enable her to work with kids. It didn’t take her long to realize that the majority of her career would likely be spent rehabbing stroke and accident victims. That’s not at all the kind of job she had in mind, so she ended up dropping out in her first year. Kudos to her for recognizing that before spending any more time or money.

You might put in your four (or more) years of higher education, and then when you get your first job, you quickly realize that while you enjoyed studying to become a lawyer, accountant, or whatever, you actually hate being one. But at that point, too bad. You’ve got loans to pay off, so you have to get to work, whether you like it or not. And now you’ve traded more than money; you’ve traded your happiness.

How does college sound now? Not quite the safe, secure option many believe it to be. In fact, the overwhelming focus on college as the best career path hasn’t only resulted in problems for students, but it has also created a significant deficit of skilled tradespeople.

The Skilled Trades Gap

People don’t talk enough about the skilled trades as a career option, with the result that not enough people pursue the trades. Across nearly all skilled labor industries, there isn’t enough talent for the jobs that need to be done.

For employers like me, this gap between demand for work and supply of good workers is challenging as hell. It’s hard to find good people to hire, and trust me, I compensate them very well for their work (we’re talking up to six figures here).

This gap is also bad news for consumers. Anytime there’s high demand and low supply, what happens? The price goes up. The skilled trades are a necessity. If you need your toilet fixed or your lighting rewired or your concrete driveway repaired, you have to call tradespeople, and if those tradespeople have more work to do than hours in a day, you can bet your ass they’ll be charging premium rates for their knowledge and expertise.

You know who does benefit from the skilled trades gap? The tradespeople themselves. There’s plenty of money to be made in the trades, and they are some of the fastest-growing fields in the country.

The fact is that people (1) don’t know about the trades or (2) don’t want to be in the trades. This is great news for those who do pursue this line of work. Why? Because their skills are in demand, so they earn more. Much more. They’re just as good at cashing checks as they are at their jobs! If you haven’t considered the trades as an option before, it’s time to start.

A Different Option—What This Book Covers

When someone doesn’t know what they want to do after high school, what are they told? “It’s okay. Just go to college anyway. You can figure out your major later.”

Is that really the best answer? Sure, college works out for some people, but for many, it ends up being a really bad investment. In fact, per the Institute of Education Sciences, the six-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who started in fall 2010 was only 60 percent. I bet the 40 percent who didn’t get a degree within six years wish they’d gotten different advice about college.

Let’s say I have a giant box that has a 40 percent chance of being empty and a 60 percent chance of having a car inside. If the box does have a car inside, it might be a Porsche, but most likely it’s a Prius or a Camry. If you give me $100K, I’ll let you open the box and keep whatever is inside. Would you give me the $100K? If so, please email me right away, and we’ll close the deal. Really, though, unless you love risk and think you’re really lucky, then you’re probably not stupid enough to roll those dice. So why would you invest that much money in a college degree when only 60 percent of students end up even getting a degree and only 62 percent of those graduates actually end up working in their chosen field?

The better response to those who are unsure about their future path is, “Let’s work to figure out what direction you want to take your life before you go spend a shitload of money and dig yourself a huge hole of debt.”

Students, you need to know all the options available to you before making what is arguably the most important decision of your life so far. Parents and educators, it is your duty to set up your kids and students to achieve success — their definition of success, not yours. You don’t do that by pushing them into the path that you think is best; you do it by explaining all the options and letting them choose, assuming, of course, that they don’t aspire to be an illegal arms dealer or a drug kingpin or…a politician.

Of course, you don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s what this book is about. Drawing on my decade of experience in the trades, I’m going to explain why the trades are not only a viable career option but a damn profitable one. As the title of this book says, blue is the new white. For many, a blue-collar career in the trades is a surer path to success than white-collar careers that require college. You won’t have to just take my word on it, because I’ve interviewed successful tradespeople who will share their thoughts on the trades as well.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Chapter 1: What Are the Skilled Trades? We’ll start with the basics of what the skilled trades are and why they’re important, with a focus on common misconceptions.
• Chapter 2: Show Me the Money! In this chapter, we’ll look at a cost comparison of entering the trades versus going to college and talk about how much you can earn in the trades.
• Chapter 3: It’s More Than Money: The Other Benefits of the Trades. Here we’ll cover all the nonfinancial benefits of going into the trades, including work-life balance, personal fulfillment, exercise, and the chance to travel and learn valuable skills.
• Chapter 4: Who Should Go into the Trades? This chapter discusses the types of people who should consider the trades and provides an overview of the different paths after high school.
• Chapter 5: How to Enter the Trades. Here we’ll discuss what you need to do in order to enter the trades, including an overview of trade schools/technical colleges and apprenticeships.
• Chapter 6: Finding Success in the Trades: Potential Career Tracks. This chapter talks about where a career in the trades can lead. You’ll find that a trade can take you as far as you want to go, even to becoming a chief executive officer (CEO) or entrepreneur.
• Chapter 7: What Do I Do Now? Here you’ll find out what students, parents, and educators can start doing right now to make the trades a viable career choice.

How I Got Here

Remember Matt, Zach, and Sam from the start of this introduction? When I was in high school, I was a mix of all three of them. Early on in high school, I was a pretty insecure kid. I was smaller than almost everyone around me, so I was always out to prove myself. I couldn’t change my stature, and I couldn’t stop the other kids from making fun of me, but there were plenty of other things I could do, like jump off a fifty-story building and set myself on fire. Yes, I mean that literally — I actually set myself on fire for an English project in eleventh grade. Only got a B on that — thanks, Ms. Van Oss.

My parents and my maternal grandfather were all stunt people. My grandfather was one of the first prominent stuntmen in the industry. He doubled for Charles Bronson and Elvis Presley, and he actually opened the very first stunt school. My mother taught at the school, and my father was a student there, which is how he and my mom met. The stunt industry was basically the family business. Starting in elementary school, I spent my free time stage fighting. By middle school, I was getting lit on fire. Then in high school, before I could even legally get my driver’s license, I was rolling cars. Whenever a movie was being filmed in the Midwest, nine times out of ten, I was on the set.

I never really considered college as an option. As far as I was concerned, my path was obvious — I was going to be a stuntman. Honestly, even if my future wasn’t mapped out like that, I wouldn’t have gone to college. It just wasn’t my personality. Ever since the second grade, I’d hated school, and I was pretty vocal about it too, to the dismay of my teachers.

After high school, I saved for about a year or so, sold nearly all my stuff, threw what I had left in the back of a pickup truck, and headed out to California. The stunt industry is not an easy one to break into, but it’s an easy one to break your bones in. It’s very much about who you know and how many lies you can tell on your résumé without getting found out. Luckily, I already had industry contacts from my work in the Midwest, so I had a leg up and landed more jobs my first year in LA than most stunt performers do in their first five years.

As I got deeper into the industry, it lost its appeal. Bragging about it was still awesome, but actually doing it? Not so much. This was right around the time of the big screenwriters’ strike, so I saw the good and bad of Hollywood on open display. I loved the attention but hated the bureaucracy. Sure, being a stuntman is fun, and it’s cool to show people videos of lighting yourself on fire. It even spared me the need for a pickup line many times. But it’s also dehumanizing. At the end of the day, I was a crash test dummy for somebody who was making more money, who was more famous, and who was more valued than I was. My second year, I decided, “You know what? It’s just not worth it.”

Once I realized that being in the stunt industry wasn’t my picture of success, I took a step back, looked at my life, and really thought about what success means to me. I came to the decision that in order to accomplish something meaningful and be validated in the way that I wanted, I had to build something that was my own. I didn’t want to be a fill-in, doing what I was told. I wanted to do something where I got all the credit for my actions, both good and bad.

My father had also gotten out of the stunt industry. Shortly after he and my mother divorced, he got a job as foreman of a Chicago bakery and learned how to repair the equipment. After drowning in work for twelve years, while getting little appreciation for his value, he went to trade school for heating and cooling (HVAC), moved to Arizona, and got into the food-service equipment repair industry. After I left Hollywood in 2008, I joined him in the sunny desert and started out as a food-service technician myself.

I soaked in knowledge from all the people around me and researched how to run a business. In addition to learning the ins and outs of being a technician, I learned about balance sheets, profit-and-loss statements, and all the nitty-gritty details of growing a simple operation. I read books, researched online, and spoke to everyone I could find who knew more than me. Once I got a handle on the whole scope of business operations, my father and I began bringing on more employees.

Together, we expanded his little company, Windy City Equipment (WCE). I worked my way up from technician to vice president with my dad as president. Then in 2014, my dad shifted to the role of chief financial officer (CFO) and put me in charge of the direction of the company as CEO. At that point, we had established a strong foundation, and I had a full understanding of how the repair industry worked. In other words, game on.

From 2014 to 2017, we went from $1.2 million in revenue to $4.9 million, a growth rate of over 300 percent. It landed us at the 1,429 spot on the Inc.5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the US. When I first got the email about making the list, I almost deleted it, thinking it was spam. Luckily, I didn’t! We’re still growing fast, with revenue of $7.5 million in 2018 and projected revenue of over $10 million in 2019, so I’m hopeful we’ll make the list again.

Since 2014, besides increasing in revenue, the company has grown from six people to about forty. I got lucky finding some great employees early on, but as I continued the hiring process, I realized how difficult it was to find people with the skills we needed and the character to match. “What the hell is the problem?” I asked myself. “I’m throwing money at these guys, and nobody wants to do this job.”

Why I Wrote This Book

When I started asking around and doing some research, it quickly became evident that it wasn’t just me facing this dilemma. There was a shortage of skilled tradespeople everywhere in the US. I kept digging deeper and thinking, “Man, someone needs to do something about this! Why hasn’t anyone written a book or something!?” I’m not the kind to leave the job to someone else, so the responsibility fell to me.

In a way, this book started out as a need to find technicians for WCE, but it has evolved into much more than that. The skilled trades have brought me so much, both personally and professionally, that I feel it’s my time to give back. I have a successful and fulfilling career, a beautiful family with my wife and two daughters, a tight-knit work culture, and an endless opportunity to achieve more. The sky is the limit, and the world is my oyster. The trades changed my life, and they can change yours too.

The Path To Success—Know Your Options

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” That’s what we ask kids from nearly the moment they can talk. What a terrible question! Your career shouldn’t be the complete answer to who you are.

A much better question is “What does success look like to you?” or “What do you want to accomplish in life?”

This book isn’t meant to tell you how to live or to force you down a certain path. I don’t want to deter anyone from going to college if what they want out of life requires a college education. I’m not antieducation, not by any means. I’m pro the right education for the right individual.

To choose the right education, you have to know all your options. That’s what this book is about. Here you’ll learn about the trades and what they offer, then it’s up to you to decide what path will take you to the life and success you value. You can’t paint the perfect picture without the right paintbrush.

Before we begin, throw out everything you think you know about the trades. You’re about to find out that they are much more than you ever imagined. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get started.

To keep reading, pick up your copy of Blue Is the New White: The Best Path to Success No One Told You About — Until Now by Josh Zolin.