Full transcript of “Every Path After High School Explained — Who Actually Won at 40?”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 High school does not prepare you for life. It prepares you for the next institution, college, military, a job, and it never tells you what each of those institutions actually does to your finances, your freedom, and your future by the time you hit 40. Here is what they left out. There are six paths most American kids take after high school graduation. Six roads. And for decades, one of them has been sold as the obvious choice. The safe bet. The thing responsible parents push their kids toward. But the data from the last 10 years tells a very different story. So today we are going to go through all six, one by one, and look at exactly where each one ends up. Path one, college. Let's start here because this is the one everybody knows. You graduate high school, you go to a
0:47 four-year university, you get a degree, you get a job. That was the deal. That was the promise. Here is what actually happened. The average college graduate in 2025 is leaving school with $37,000 in debt. That is not a down payment on a house. That is not a car. That is a number that follows you into your 30s and in many cases into your 40s. And for a large portion of graduates, that debt is not being paid off by a high-paying career. According to recent data, 40% of college graduates are working in jobs that do not require a college degree at all. 40%. That means four out of 10 people who took on that debt, who spent four years of their life in school, are doing work that never
1:32 required the credential they paid for. I want you to sit with that number for a second. The class of 2025 had a 9.7% unemployment rate among recent graduates. That is nearly identical to the unemployment rate for high school graduates in the same age group. For the first time in 50 years, a college degree is no longer statistically separating people from those who never got one. The Washington Post ran a headline about exactly this. For the first time in half a century, college grads are losing their edge. Now, I want to be fair here because college is not a scam for everyone. If you go into engineering, you start at around $70,000. Computer science, higher. Medicine, law, nursing, these are fields where the degree is the career. But, those are not the majority of degrees being handed
2:17 out. The most common degrees in America are in business administration, communications, and general studies. And those graduates are starting at 45 to 55 thousand dollars while carrying 37,000 in debt while competing for entry-level positions that are being squeezed from both sides by AI replacing white-collar work and by a job market that simply has more graduates than good jobs. So, who wins on the college path? The top 30% who pick high ROI degrees and finish on time. The other 70% are either breaking even or losing. Path two, military. This one is underrated, and I think it is underrated specifically because the people who look down on it the most have never actually
3:04 run the numbers. Here is what happens when an 18-year-old enlists. They get paid from day one. No tuition, no debt. Housing is covered, health care is covered, food is covered, and they are building towards something called a pension, which barely exists anywhere else in the American economy anymore. A soldier who serves 20 years and retires at 38 gets a monthly check for the rest of their life plus full health care, plus education benefits through the GI Bill that can pay for a degree with zero additional debt. The average enlisted soldier at the E-4 level earns around $47,000 in base pay in 2025. But, when you add the value of housing, food, health care, and benefits the real compensation is significantly
3:49 higher. And over 40% of veterans end up in management and professional roles after service. They enter civilian life with discipline, leadership experience, security clearances in many cases, and no student loan payments. I know what some of you are thinking. You are thinking about the risk. And yes, military service carries real risk depending on assignment and era. That is a legitimate factor. But when we are talking purely about financial outcomes at 40, the military path is one of the most underestimated roads in this conversation. Path three, trade school. Here is where the data gets genuinely surprising for a lot of people. A trade school program costs between $5,000 and $20,000 total. Total, not per year. Total. A four-year college degree at a
4:36 public university costs around $35,000 per year, which means over four years you are looking at $140,000 before room and board. An electrician completes their apprenticeship and starts earning around $61,000 a year. By the time a college student is graduating, the electrician has been working and earning for two years already with zero debt by age 30. The electrician has accumulated between $500,000 in cumulative earnings with no debt. The average college business graduate has accumulated between $400,000 and $450,000 minus their student loan payments. By the time both of them hit 40, the gap has started to close as college graduates move into higher paying mid-career roles. But here is the thing
5:22 that nobody talks about in high school guidance counselors' offices. 47% of skilled trades workers now earn more than the median college graduate. 47% and in fields like elevator installation, master electricians, and HVAC, you are looking at 80 to over $100,000 a year. The trades won and nobody told your kid. Path four, straight to work. This is the hardest path to talk about, honestly, because it contains two very different groups of people. The first group made a strategic decision. They started working right out of high school in a field they understood, built skills, moved up, and by their late 20s were earning solidly. These people exist. They are not the exception. Many
6:08 of them are in sales, real estate, logistics, construction management, and entrepreneurship. The second group drifted. They took whatever job was available, stayed in entry-level positions, never built a specialized skill, and 20 years later are still in the same place. The labor force participation data shows that young people who enter the workforce without any post-secondary credential or training have an unemployment rate of 20.4% in the first two years after high school. That is the highest of any path. The difference between the two groups is not luck. It is intentionality. Did you enter the workforce with a plan, a skill you were building, and a direction, or did you just start showing up somewhere because you needed money? Path five,
6:53 entrepreneurship. This is the path that everybody romanticizes and nobody explains honestly. 90% of new businesses fail within the first 10 years. That statistic is real, but here's what people get wrong about it. Most of the people who fail once try again, and the ones who eventually succeed almost never succeed on the first attempt. The 18-year-old who starts a business right out of high school is almost certainly not going to make it on the first try. But if they treat that failure as tuition, and they build skills, understand money, learn sales and operations, the ceiling on the entrepreneurship path is higher than any other path on this list. The problem is the floor is also lower. There is no pension, no guaranteed paycheck, no safety net. The entrepreneur at 40 is either doing very
7:40 well or explaining what went wrong. There is very little middle. Who should take this path? People who have already proven they can sell something, build something, or solve a problem someone will pay for. Not people who have a vague feeling they are meant for more. Path six, no plan. Every year a percentage of high school graduates walk across that stage with a diploma and no idea what comes next. No college applications submitted, no job lined up, no trade program enrolled, just summer and then more summer and then suddenly a year has passed. The data on this group is not kind. At 40, the gap between people who took any structured path after high school and those who did not is significant across every measure, income, housing, health, relationships. The absence of a decision
8:28 is itself a decision and it tends to compound in one direction. Now, here is the part that matters most. None of these paths are sealed at 18. A college dropout at 22 has become a billionaire. A military veteran has gone back to school at 35 and entered medicine. A trade school graduate has started a company and hired 50 people. The data shows outcomes, not destinies. But the data also shows something your high school never showed you, that the path sold as the default, the four-year degree, is no longer the automatic winner it was presented to be. That the path dismissed as a backup, the trades, is quietly out-earning college graduates in dozens of fields. That the path celebrated in movies, entrepreneurship, has the highest ceiling and the lowest
9:14 floor. And that the military, which gets the least attention in guidance counselors' offices, may be the single most underrated financial decision an 18-year-old can make. High school handed you a diploma. It did not hand you this information. Now you have it. If this video made you think about the path you took or the path you wish someone had explained to you, subscribe. Every week I break what the system was supposed to tell you and didn't. Drop a comment below. Which path did you take? And at this point in your life, would you make the same choice?
