The fact that 35% of parents believe career and technical education is best suited for their children represents a major jump—from just 13% in 2019, according to Britebound. While parents still prefer traditional college for their kids, it’s much less so than in the past. The percentage of parents preferring it dropped to 58%—a 16 percentage point drop from 2019.
“Parents are waking up. College doesn’t carry the same [return on investment] it once did, because the cost is outrageous, and the outcome is uncertain,” Trevor Houston, a career strategist at ClearPath Wealth Strategies, previously told Fortune. “Students now face the highest amount of debt ever recorded, but job security after graduation doesn’t really exist.”
One of the primary reasons trade school is becoming a more popular option for students is its potentially strong ROI, especially as college becomes more expensive and fewer traditional entry-level jobs are available. And many can land recent high school grads six-figure salaries.
What’s more, the need for these workers will continue to grow, especially as older generations who work in trades start to retire, Julie Lammers, president and CEO at Britebound, previously told Fortune.
“An aging workforce in the trades and a surge in demand to meet infrastructure needs, ever-growing real estate demands, and changes to U.S. energy production mean that there are considerably more job openings than skilled workers to fill the need,” she said.
“This is a clarion call,” Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement at the time. “If you want to help your country lead in the age of rapid technological advancement, we need you.”
“We’ve got close to half of our population that’s within 10 years of retirement age,” Kupor told Fortune’s Sasha Rogelberg. “So if you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on Dec. 19, 2025.
