A Thanksgiving Lesson About College, Careers, and the Future Our Kids Are Walking Into

This whole conversation started right at our Thanksgiving dining room table. The grandkids were buzzing around, grabbing rolls like they were currency, and out of nowhere the talk shifted from football and cranberry sauce to what the kids should study after high school. And I said something I never expected to say when I was their age:

“If you’re going to college, make sure that degree links directly to a job AI can’t replace.”

I’m not against college. Far from it. College is still valuable. But the idea of wandering through four years with a random major and hoping it all works out on the other side — that’s outdated. Not because kids aren’t smart, but because the job market has changed faster than any generation before them.

AI is already doing things none of us saw coming: bookkeeping, customer service, copywriting, paralegal work, product descriptions, corporate reports, data analysis — all jobs that used to be considered safe. And when you sit at the Thanksgiving table and look your own grandkids in the eye, the advice suddenly feels a lot more urgent.

So I told them this:

“Get the degree — but make sure it leads to something that needs a real human being in the room, not a machine in the cloud.”

And here’s the part everyone forgets:

That doesn’t mean you have to become a tradesman.
But even if you eventually run a trade business, you still need to understand the work.

You can have the business degree, the management skills, the entrepreneurial mindset — that’s great. But if you want to run an HVAC company, an electrical company, a plumbing operation, or a construction outfit, you better understand the trade itself. You can hire employees to do the hands-on work, but you can’t lead a business you don’t understand. Not in the real world.

The jobs that are safest — and the businesses that thrive — are the ones tied to physical reality:

• Medicine
• Nursing
• Physical therapy
• Lab sciences
• Engineering
• Architecture
• Mechanics
• HVAC
• Electrical work
• Plumbing
• Carpentry
• Dental fields
• Teaching
• Counseling
• Anything where people depend on your hands, your judgment, your presence

AI can help these fields. It can speed up paperwork, run diagnostics, and save time. But it can’t climb into a crawlspace. It can’t steady a patient’s hand. It can’t look at someone and know something is wrong before they even speak. It can’t walk a jobsite and sense when something feels off.

You don’t have to choose between college and the trades.
You can learn both.
In fact, combining a degree with a real-world skill is becoming one of the smartest moves you can make.

So that was my Thanksgiving message this year — right between the stuffing and the second round of pie:

“Get your education. Go to college. Build your future.
Just make sure you tie that degree to a career path that needs you in it — your brain, your hands, your presence. That’s where the opportunity is. That’s where the stability is. And that’s where the next generation is going to thrive.”