Consider the following recent stories as indicative of the stark contrast between the risk of small business, compared to the relative safety and high-ROI of careerism–a similar patten observed in 2008, 2020, and now 2025 it pertains to Trump’s tariffs:
“The Art of the Price Hike”: Trump’s tariff plan has pushed America’s businesses into a nightmarish experiment.
“What the Top-Earning 5% of Millennials Did Differently”: The top 5% of millennial households by income brought in more than $300,000 in 2023, according to the Journal’s analysis. Archive link.
Pay grew much faster in higher-wage industries than in lower-wage industries between 1996 and 2018, according to a 2024 study in the American Economic Review. Tech is among the lucrative 5% of fields that accounted for more than half of that difference, along with science, engineering and finance.
In spite of the insistence on X/Twitter and the media that ‘college is a scam’, millennial and gen-z college grads are also making all the money, too. It’s not scam; it’s a tradeoff of time and money for better job prospects and wealth.
The ROI for even ‘worthless’ degrees from mediocre-ranking colleges is still strongly positive, taking into account taxes and student loans. The nominal tuition sticker price is almost never paid in full, thanks to generous scholarships and other aid. Even only $100k/year, let alone $300k for the top 5%, far exceeds the interest on student loans. As a caveat, this only applies to graduates. Dropping out confers no benefit, and I agree more needs to be done to discourage likely dropouts from ever enrolling.
The biggest threat to college grads is AI, but not in the obvious way. It’s not that AI will replace white-collar jobs (I argue they won’t, and so far have been right) but that if cheating or ‘AI assistance’ becomes common enough and colleges are unable or unwilling to do anything about it, it will devalue the signaling value of humanities degrees from mediocre-ranking colleges, so these grads may face much worse prospects, as employers may devalue those degrees due to cheating. Elite colleges and STEM will thrive due to the extreme exclusiveness/selectiveness for the former as screening for high IQ, and the latter being more resistant to cheating.
From the post: “Harvard offers free tuition for families making $200K or less: My thoughts”
The strongest counterevidence against college I could find is that low-skilled workers, typically those without degrees, saw a pay bump relative to college grads post-Covid, as evidence of a slight narrowing of the college wage premium. True, college dropouts have a 4-year head start in the job market, but this is negated by a higher unemployment rate for dropouts and fewer promotional opportunities by not having a degree.
-Regarding the typical objection of unemployed or struggling college grads, the same is true for people without degrees who are also struggling. The difference is, having a degree bumps the odds of success. The existence of unemployed college grads does not change the math on the debate.
Conversely, due to Trump’s tariffs, similar to the Biden Covid lockdowns, it’s ‘small biz’ that bears the brunt of bad policy, whereas college grads in nice white collar jobs are much more insulated. This agree with what I wrote a month ago, from the post “The left is still crying wolf about the tariffs“:
Whether it’s 2008, 2020, or now tariffs, small business always bears the brunt of economic instability, uncertainty, and policy, whereas white-collar work is much more resilient. Self-employed work is not safer than salaried work, only that it shifts the risk. Rather than being fired, it’s being in the crosshairs of economic crisis and uncertainty. White collar jobs were the last to be downsized in 2008 and 2020, compared to construction workers during the ’08 crisis, or restaurant workers during Covid.
This is why the college-to-career route is still the best way to get rich, not selling Chinese imported crap online in saturated markets with razor-thin profit margins, which are likely now negative due to tariffs. The irony is that although tariffs are marketed by Trump as helping the lower/middle classes, like every other economic disruption in the 21st century–like 2008 or 2020–it’s the lower classes and small biz that struggles the most, whereas the ‘college careerists’ and ‘big business’ are the most insulated and come out way ahead.
Moreover, I was also right about the tariffs being overblown and no meaningful inflation. The shelves are not empty, contrary to the alarmist predictions. CPI has not increased much.
But aren’t these two contradictory? Not really. Rather than broad-based inflation or the overall economy being hurt, it’s mostly limited to online retailers whose business depends on cheap Chinese imports. The rest of the economy is much more insulated. Also, as mentioned in that post, raw imported materials are only a tiny percentage of the final price of a good, hence why retail such as Starbucks is not affected much.
The usual argument is, “Stores front-loading inventory. The ports are empty and soon will be shelves.” People have been making this prediction every week for the past month of an impending shortage. Maybe there will be some disruptions, but after a certain point it’s time to take ownership of being wrong. What these people fail to take into account is that supply depletion and restocking is not a discrete process, but rather a continuous process over many stores. So we would expect a continuous rise of inflation as some stores restock at the higher prices, until all stores have restocked at the new, post-tariffs prices. But this has not been the case.