This is a tough one, and it genuinely varies from person to person. Some people are book-smart and some are tool-smart, and no amount of opinion writing changes which one you are. But I want to explore the general shape of it, because this ties into an earlier piece of mine, Is university worth it anymore, and the honest answer to this question has changed a lot in thirty years.

When I was leaving high school, my whole year was at that point of finding a job or finding a degree, and I remember the general consensus clearly: if you were going to do a trade, you were just too dumb to do anything else. I did not believe that for a second.

One of my good mates left school early, about two years early I think, and got straight on the tools as a joiner. A lot of people found it peculiar and quietly wrote him off. Funnily enough, most of them were the ones dead set on university mainly for the title. But he got his experience young and he grinded. Today he runs his own company, with all the freedom that comes with that, instead of sitting at a desk all day as a cog in the wheel of some multi conglomerate.

And the people who wrote him off? I can say with confidence that around 70 percent of the ones I knew left university within the first year. Once freshers week ended and the real work set in, they realised it was not for them. They walked away with nothing but a year of debt, and even the ones who stuck it out came out three or four years behind someone like my mate, who by then was settled, qualified and living very well.

Here is the thing though. I went the other way. Four years, a degree, the lot, and I would do it again. So this is not one of those pieces where a graduate discovers trades exist and declares university a scam. Both routes work. The interesting part is why the maths between them has flipped.

Thirty years ago a degree was rare, so it was valuable. Now half of all young adults have one, and rare has switched sides. While everyone was being funnelled into lecture halls, almost nobody was picking up the tools, and scarcity does what scarcity always does: it raises the price. Try getting a decent joiner, sparky or plumber at short notice and you will see it in the quote.

There is a newer reason too, one that nobody in those school assemblies saw coming. AI is coming for desk work first. The safe, sensible office jobs everyone was pushed towards, the admin, the data entry, the reports, are exactly the things a model can already do. What it cannot do is rewire a house, hang a door or fix a boiler on a freezing morning. The option people called dumb turned out to be the automation proof one.

Before anyone drops out on my say so though, the trade route punishes passengers just as hard as university does. My mate did not do well because he picked a trade. He did well because he grinded from day one and treated the job as his own business in waiting, not just a wage. A lazy apprentice ends up every bit as stuck as a lazy graduate. It is the same rule I wrote about last time: whichever platform you pick, you get out what you extract.

And some doors do still need the ticket. Certain careers simply have a degree as the entry fee, and if that is where you are headed then the choice was never really a choice. But that covers far fewer jobs than the school assembly version of the world suggested.

So, trade or degree? Honestly, wrong question. The right question is which kind of work you would actually get out of bed for, because both roads reward the people who go at them properly and both quietly punish the ones who drift in, whether for the title or because they were told the other option was beneath them. The consensus at my school had it exactly backwards. The write-off from my year has his name on the side of a van and a company behind it. Plenty of people with titles are still waiting for theirs to pay off.