Recent College Graduates Are Embracing Manual Labor

For some college graduates, collecting a diploma is an essential step towards a high-paying or professionally fulfilling career. (Maybe even both.) But others are taking a less expected path, finishing up their academic careers and pivoting to blue-collar jobs involving manual labor, including farm work and construction. Does this represent a loss of ambition — or is it more a case of doubling down on what really matters?

Writing at Air Mail, Jeanne Malle explored the growing phenomenon of Gen Z graduates deciding that office work really isn’t for them. The recent grads Malle spoke with opted for a wide range of jobs that you might not expect to be highly sought by people in their early 20s, including farming, butchery and wildlife work. Malle described the appeal of “trades that feel ethically grounded and carry little social risk” among the twentysomethings seeking out jobs in those fields.

This shift isn’t without precedent, though. The last 15 years have seen the publication of a number of acclaimed books that made the case that working with one’s hands can be deeply fulfilling. Both Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work and Nina MacLaughlin’s Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter are compelling books that challenge the conventional wisdom of what a meaningful job can be.

It also seems like no coincidence that Malle’s article was published at a time when there’s a wide-ranging national discussion happening on the subject of higher education. Is the purpose of college — and, more broadly, of education — simply to instruct someone in a trade, or is it to impart a wider range of knowledge and spark a lifelong process of discovery? The graduates profiled in this recent Air Mail article certainly seem to know where they stand.