More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

That said, it's not uncommon to be able to find good blue collar jobs with good employers.

A friend of mine worked a really shitty job for a year, to finally find a much more cushy job, but it's graveyard shift. Eventually they'll put him on day shift. But in the mean time he's earning for his family, he doesn't have to do much work, and he's studying for a degree at night.

If you pick the right field, you have the right skills, and are in a hot market, trades can be very lucrative and you can be drowning in contacts. For someone who wants to be their own boss it can be very rewarding.

Over here in Germany they have well-established apprenticeship programs for many more jobs than in the US. There are apprenticeships for software developers, for bankers, for "Bürokauffrau/Bürokaufmanm" (office clerks/administrators), for media work, for all sorts of medical jobs, and so on. You name it, and there is probably an "Ausbildung" (apprenticeship) for it here. The apprenticeship programs are still somewhat not as "prestigious" as going to university, but they will get you in the door at a company for that job.

Many people even combine the two, opting to do an apprenticeship and follow it up with studies, or vice-versa, or do both at the same time.

I assume you work in software.

How hard does the HVAC guy work? I wager if you compared wages earned per hour worked (not just employed), you come out ahead. You probably beat doctors and lawyers, too.

Large salaries mean nothing if you don’t account for how much effort is expended to earn the money.

Asking about a degree isn't the same as requiring one for the role.

Every employer will ask, but at this point for software devs, it's only ever used as an excuse to disqualify someone for other reasons (e.g. h1b stuff) if they don't have it.

I'd break college programs down into undergraduate and graduate divisions, and divide schools up based on admission price tag. Some issues:

1. The more expensive the school, the more likely it is to be something like a British public school for the inherited wealth class. Interestingly graduate programs are often somewhat neglected at such institutions, and they're not generally great research centers. Basically it's about hobnobbing so you can get a job at your pal's parent's hedge fund or whatever. (#2 on your list)

2. The cutting-edge research universities have inverted that model. Undergraduates are packed into huge auditoriums and taught by adjunct professors with the help of overworked grad students whose professors can't afford to pay them as a lab tech / research assistant. Here it's all about getting the big grant and publishing new research. Students who can negotiate this system successfully can get excellent technical education and experience at the upper-level undergrad / grad student level in fields like CS, biotech, engineering etc.(BS/MS). That's #1 on your list.

3. There's another category of student that benefits from the cheaper state schools, and that's due to high schools in the USA being woefully poor at providing a basic education. These schools - community colleges and state schools - generally have a two-year progam that does little more than revisit material that high schools failed to teach, like reading and algebra and introductory calculus and programming. The fact this is needed just reflects the poor quality of K-12 in so many places.

The little secret that the big research universities don't want people to realize is that you can often get a better quality of instruction at most community colleges, due to small class sizes etc., then for the first two years at a big famous school. Hence it's wiser to do that and, assuming good grades, transfer in at the upper undergrad level for the courses and research lab access that small schools lack.

I don't really know of any apprenticeship program that could give one the same level of experience with cutting-edge technology as something like an MS program in a quality university research program could. And for that you're going to need a college degree first, ideally avoiding massive debt along the way.

As far as the struggle for professorships in the corporatized academic system, that's a complete political-bureaucratic game of chairs that doesn't really reward brilliance so much as it does Machiavellian capabilities. Trofim Lysenko would have fit right in to today's system. Try to avoid ending up in the Lysenko lab, whatever you do.