College Grads Can't Find Jobs. The Trades Can't Find Workers. What That Means for Your Kid Right Now.

Two headlines landed in the same news cycle, and they belong next to each other.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that unemployment among recent college graduates is near its highest point since 2013, outside of the pandemic years. At the same time, the Building Talent Foundation, which represents thousands of construction employers, reports that fewer than half as many people are entering the trades as are needed to fill open roles. Some of those roles start at fifty dollars an hour.

Both things are true simultaneously. That is not a contradiction. That is a diagnosis.

The Credential Was Never the Skill

For the better part of two decades, the advice was simple: get the degree, get the job. The degree was the signal. Employers trusted it. The path was legible.

The path is now less legible. Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, told CNBC that a bachelor’s degree is no longer a reliable path to professional employment, and that this is the first time that has been true in modern US history. The Georgetown Center projects that between now and 2032, more jobs will open than qualified workers exist to fill them, by millions.

None of this means college is worthless. It means a credential, on its own, is not a plan.

What the employers who cannot hire are actually complaining about is not a piece of paper. It is the absence of people who can think through a problem they have never seen before, communicate clearly under pressure, learn a new domain quickly, and exercise judgment when the situation is ambiguous. Those things do not appear automatically at graduation. They are built, or they are not built, over a long stretch of years.

What This Has to Do with a Ten-Year-Old

Here is the part that matters if your kid is between 8 and 16.

They have not made any irreversible bets yet. They have not signed a loan. They have not picked a major. They have not spent four years optimizing for a credential that the market may or may not reward by the time they hold it. The window to build something more durable than a diploma is still open.

The question is what you do with that window.

The honest answer from most schools is: not much that is different from what they were doing twenty years ago. Core subjects taught in ways that prioritize recall over reasoning. Standardized tests that reward the right answer over the right process. Very little deliberate practice in the skills that employers, whether they are hiring electricians or engineers, keep saying they cannot find.

Critical thinking. Real problem-solving. Clear communication. Adaptability. The ability to work with tools, including new technology, rather than just consume them.

Those are not soft skills. They are the hard ones, because they take years to develop and they cannot be crammed in the week before an interview.

The Tool Should Serve the Kid, Not the Other Way Around

One thing worth naming directly: a lot of well-intentioned responses to the future-of-work conversation involve handing kids more screens and calling it preparation. More apps. More passive video content. More platforms that do the thinking for them.

That is not the same thing as building judgment.

The difference between a kid who is prepared for a world with AI and a kid who is not is not whether they have access to AI. It is whether they know how to direct it, question it, and decide when it is wrong. The same principle applies to every tool, from a spreadsheet to a table saw. The kid should be in charge of the tool. The tool should not be in charge of the kid.

Real projects over passive consumption. Judgment over recall. That is the direction that holds up, regardless of what the labor market looks like in 2032.

What Globeskool Is Built For

Globeskool is an online school for kids aged 8 to 16. It covers core subjects and the future skills that standard curricula have not caught up with: critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, creativity, and working with technology in a way that puts the kid in the driver’s seat.

It is not a homework help tool. It is not a content library to browse. It is designed around the premise that a kid who can reason well, communicate clearly, and work through an unfamiliar problem is better positioned than a kid who has accumulated credentials without those foundations.

If you are a parent who has read this far, you are probably already asking the right questions. The next step is finding out where your kid actually stands, not by grades or test scores alone, but by the skills that will matter when they are the one deciding what to do next.

The free assessment takes about 5 minutes and gives you a starting point that is specific to your child.

Take the free assessment