What these men don't understand, and nobody is telling them directly, is that college is how you essesntially conspire to manage (extract value from) the people who didn't go. College education is a tribe initiation, and you are in or you aren't. The pretenses and pretexts of subject matter and socializing are secondary to this one big thing.
Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it, because it's our source of social power, but for young men who need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't. The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to them. As an individual non-graduate, you will always be working against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the ceiling and keep you running on hope.
Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable social status to your kids.
The result is predictable, where they're having their countries, political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them because they didn't realize they needed defending.
If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass. They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably never understand.