The College Trap: Credentialed… and Still Stuck at $20 an Hour
There is a better way
If you’re about to sign your kid up for the “default path” — four years of college because that’s what decent families do — you’re not buying an education.
You’re buying a risk profile.
And lately, the risk is showing up in the data.
One headline that should stop you cold: Americans with four-year degrees recently reached a record 25% of the unemployed.
Now, read that again carefully — it does not mean “25% unemployment.” It means one out of every four unemployed people now has a four-year degree.
That’s the punchline nobody wants to say out loud:
We’re producing more credentials than competence the market is willing to pay for — especially at the entry level.
The real scandal isn’t unemployment. It’s underemployment.
Even when a degree-holder is “employed,” the problem is often that they’re employed below the level the degree was supposed to unlock.
The St. Louis Fed summarizes it bluntly: more than half of recent college graduates start out in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
That’s not a temporary inconvenience. It’s the start of a track.
Because early career years are when you build:
hard skills
a portfolio of real work
professional credibility
income momentum
If you spend those years doing “degree-required” busywork (or work that doesn’t require a degree at all), you don’t just lose money.
You lose trajectory.
“But college grads have low unemployment!”
For the overall adult population 25+, bachelor’s degree holders do have relatively low unemployment: BLS data shows ~2.8% in the September 2025 figures for “bachelor’s degree and higher.”
That’s the stat colleges love.
But it’s not the stat parents are actually buying.
Parents aren’t paying for a 2.8% unemployment rate at age 45.
They’re paying for the promise that at 22, their kid will step onto the moving walkway: good job → higher pay → adult competence → stable life.
And that promise is cracking right where it matters most: entry level. LinkedIn’s workforce data shows hiring is still down 17% compared to pre-pandemic (May 2019).
When hiring is tight, the least experienced get squeezed first.
Which is exactly why so many young grads are “employed” but not launched.
The “job in your field” illusion
Here’s another gut-punch statistic: a Cengage report says only 30% of 2025 graduates found jobs in their field (41% for 2024 grads).
Again, yes, it’s survey/report-based — but it matches what hiring managers quietly admit: a lot of degrees don’t map cleanly to a job that trains you and pays you.
And when the mapping fails, people improvise.
Some improvise well. Many don’t.
ResumeBuilder reports that among Gen Z bachelor’s degree holders, 34% are currently working in blue-collar/skilled trade work, with another 3% planning to pursue it.
That’s not a moral judgment. It’s a signal: the labor market is rewarding practical skills and durability.
The cost problem is real — and it’s not just tuition
The sticker-price “budget” for a private nonprofit four-year school now averages around $65,470 per year — call it $262k over four years.
Public four-year budgets are lower, but still easily drift into six figures across four years depending on choices and location.
And yes — you might not pay full sticker. Aid changes the number.
But here’s what doesn’t change:
You’re still paying with years.
Four years of your kid’s most energetic, moldable, trainable years — right when they could be stacking skills, building confidence, and learning how the world actually works.
So what do you do instead?
You build a young man who is competent.
Not credentialed. Not “well-rounded.” Not fluent in the latest academic fashion.
Competent.
That’s the thesis behind The Preparation: How to Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous.
It’s not “anti-college” so much as it is pro competence and independence.
Because here’s the truth:
College can be a great tool — for the right person, in the right field, at the right price, at the right time.
But as a default pipeline? It’s turning into a high-cost holding pen that too often produces adults who are:
dependent
anxious
broke
risk-averse
professionally unproven
And then we act surprised when they can’t get traction.
The Preparation is a different operating system
Instead of “four years of classes,” The Preparation is built around real-world competence — the kind that produces options.
It’s organized into themed cycles (quarters) with concrete skills, real projects, and measurable outcomes — the kind of things you can do, not just claim.
Following the path laid out in detail in the book not only produces a young man of competence and confidence, it produces impressive young men.
I should know. My son is the beta tester for the program.
In just two years he became an EMT, worked on wildfires, learned a second language and how to play the guitar, he knows how to fly a plane, he sailed from the Falkland Islands through the Straight of Magellan. He launched his own business, learned to scuba dive and so much more. At the moment he’s in Thailand at a training camp for Muay Thai. No he’s not just travelling around and doing fun stuff, he’s following a program designed to turn him into the man he wants to become. The man any parent hopes their son might be.
He’s halfway through his journey and already he’s a valuable man to have around and is totally independent at just 20 years old.
Here’s what the program in the book looks like in plain English:
1) You learn to produce value, fast
Not “study value.” Produce it.
Learn a skill someone will pay for
Prove it with a project
Build a portfolio
Get paid (even small at first)
Level up
2) You become physically capable and psychologically steady
This is the part college avoids — and life punishes.
Competence isn’t just knowledge. It’s:
carrying responsibility without melting down
solving problems without a committee
doing hard things when nobody claps
3) You earn independence — financially and socially
A young man who can fix things, sell things, build things, and lead himself is hard to trap.
He can move cities. Change industries. Start a business. Join a crew. Ship value.
He doesn’t need permission.
The pitch (and I’m not going to romanticize it)
If your kid is 16–22, the world is about to get less forgiving.
Entry-level white-collar paths are not guaranteed. Hiring is choppy. The credential arms race is escalating.
Meanwhile, the economy is still full of people who can’t find someone reliable to:
show up
do the work
communicate
solve problems
finish the job
That gap is opportunity.
The Preparation is designed to push your kid into that gap — on purpose — with structure, standards, and a real roadmap.
A simple challenge for parents
Before you sign the college paperwork, ask your kid two questions:
What can you do — right now — that someone would pay you for?
If college disappeared tomorrow, how would you build a life anyway?
If the answers are vague, you don’t need more brochures.
You need a plan that produces competence.
That’s what The Preparation is.
Best wishes from a proud father,
Matt
Powerful reframe. The underemployment stat is way more damning than the unemployment number, because it reveals the trajectory problem not just the employment problem. I've seen this firsthand with friends who got degrees in communications or business admin and ended up doing work high schoolers coudl handle. The four years of skill-building time is the real cost nobody talks about, not tuition. Building portfolios of real work in your early twenties sounds obvious but goes against everything colleges sell.
The college trap isn’t education, it’s mispriced optionality.
Credentials promised mobility, then quietly became debt with a dress code.
What’s breaking isn’t learning, it’s the assumption that signaling equals skill.
Capital is already voting elsewhere: portfolios of proof, not parchment.
The gap between what we were sold and what compounds is where the real lesson sits.