Workers with college degrees are constantly being pitted against workers without one. But such a zero-sum debate obscures the need to protect everyone in every workplace.
Graduates during the commencement ceremony for UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences at the Bren Events Center in Irvine, California, on Friday, June 12, 2026. (Jeff Gritchen / MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
For decades, generations of Americans have been told the same thing: Go to college, and the career opportunities will come.
It’s not hard to see why that advice was given. College graduates make more money and also live longer. Especially after World War II, America’s four-year colleges and universities grew exponentially—doubling from just 1,500 in 1960 to almost 2,700 in 2020. The student population at these institutions went from 2.7 million people in 1960 to a high of 13 million in 2010. And as deindustrialization gutted factory towns and slowed wage growth for workers, college became an even more attractive option.
But things are changing. Student debt, rising unemployment, and economic uncertainty, as well as a hostile governmental and media landscape, have put higher education under pressure. Between 2010 and 2020, the student population fell by 2 million. And the Trump administration has now supercharged this decline by making sweeping changes to student borrowing, severely limiting research grants, subjecting universities to investigations, and limiting the number of visas for foreign students.
Meanwhile, a college education has become a marker of elitism for politicians on both sides of the aisle. Earlier this year, Ted Cruz (a graduate of Princeton and Harvard) described the Republican Party as the “party of truck drivers, steel workers, cops, firefighters, waiters & waitresses—men and women with calluses on their hands” and Democrats as elites who drink “soy lattes.” Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez (a graduate of Smith College) has frequently said that some of her colleagues “don’t care about people who work for a living” (i.e., people who work with their hands, like woodworkers), suggested that populist FTC Chair Lina Khan didn’t hire non-college-educated people, and opposed student debt relief.
This newfound appreciation for manual labor is more based on aesthetics than on actual material realities. The reason many were told to go to college—whether they are the children of immigrant delivery drivers, migrant farmworkers, or factory workers in middle America—was not just because of the earnings potential but also because it allows people to work without destroying their bodies.
A number of studies have shown that life expectancy for those with a college degree is about a decade longer than that of those without a college degree. These disparities were found across the country—in urban and rural counties—and the disparities are increasing.
Manual labor can be a very dangerous thing. According to the most recent statistics collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs with the highest mortality numbers are construction, transportation (including small pilots and helicopter pilots), and trucking. When we look at the numbers, logging is the most dangerous job in America (with a rate of 110.4 per 100,000), followed by fishing, hunting, and roofing. Non-fatal injuries make it clear that service work is also incredibly taxing—the BLS reports that the industry with the highest rate of non-fatal injury is healthcare and social assistance (553.8 per 100,000), the retail industry comes in second with a rate of 339.8.
Still another story is told by the type of injury that is reported. According to data collected by the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration—the employers that reported the most severe injuries (this is defined as an eye injury, an amputation, or anything that requires an overnight hospital stay) were the United States Postal Service, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, and then Tyson Foods; indeed, a number of meatpacking companies are included in the top 20 companies that report severe injuries—a more damning fact when you consider their workforce is far smaller than the top offenders’. All of this contributes to an average of 27 workers being amputated or hospitalized each day.
Researchers have looked at the relationship between the type of job someone has and the educational disparities in health that are reported. One study found that work characteristics (the physical workload, the hours, etc.) were attributable to 44 percent of the disadvantage that high school graduates had compared to college graduates and 57 percent of the disadvantage that people without a high school diploma had.
Another study looked at Black and white workers, the relationship between education and mortality, and the type of work people were engaged in. It found that for white men, the relationship between higher education and lower mortality was explained by lower hazard on the job. For white women and Black men, this relationship was explained by higher complexity on the job. However, for Black women, there was no mediation effect for job hazard or complexity. This suggests that there is a protective effect of both working less physically demanding jobs and working in jobs that require more knowledge work, though how this manifests differs between groups due to existing health and resource disparities stratified by race and gender.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and a struggling economy, it is possible that college degree holders may be forced into jobs that are more demanding and pay less. Some research has looked at people with college degrees who got jobs different from their fields of study. Those who got jobs that required a college degree but in a different field fared far better than those who got jobs that didn’t require a college degree (such as an engineer working as an accountant versus a scientist working as a retail worker). The latter group was more likely to develop obesity, start smoking, and experience psychological distress.
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It would be tempting to think that manual labor jobs are inherently dangerous and that’s just how it is. But it has not always been so bad; one study found that while life expectancy increased for all groups in the 1990s, it started to decline for those without a college degree in the 21st century, while it continued to increase for the more educated group. The authors attribute some of that increase in deaths to deindustrialization and wage depression. The mortality differences between college and non-college-degree-holders also evaporate once you control for income. Low-wage workers are more likely to work hazardous jobs and also have few supports to deal with any issues that may arise, from general stress to injury.
Take overdose death rates, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are extremely high among those involved in construction, food preparation, personal care, maintenance, and materials transport. If someone does not have good healthcare or paid time off, they put themselves at a higher risk of getting injured. If they get hurt on the job and they can’t get or afford medication, then they may turn to whatever they can get off the street to cope with the pain—which could potentially lead to addiction and overdose.
This lack of healthcare, good wages, and worker protections may be the reason why, despite the United States and Europe having similarly educated populations, the mortality disparity for education is much higher in the United States than in Europe.
Jobs can be dangerous, but we can mitigate their impact if people have additional support. Unionization is one way of getting there. A study published last year found that, especially for older workers, an additional year of being in a union decreases mortality by 1.5 percent and that this protection is especially pronounced for those who don’t have a college degree.
The conclusion to draw from this is not that manual labor is inferior. Rather, it’s that some jobs are inherently more dangerous and therefore the consequences of not having good healthcare or wages are even higher. Society will always have a need for blue-collar jobs, and what those workers deserve is not aesthetic romanticization but better working conditions, healthcare, and pay. It’s fine if you think that working with your hands is more honorable, but you can’t support that and oppose Medicare for All. At the same time, education is a public good in itself—and if people choose to pursue higher education, they should do so without the burdens of debt; working-class young people should not be ferried into manual labor jobs because the cost of getting an education is too high. Whether someone chooses manual labor or to go to college, people should be able to live a good life and be taken care of.
What we have now is instead a race to the bottom. Politicians will continue to send their children to elite schools, while bashing the idea of a college education and keeping it unaffordable. Some of those who go to college may end up being underemployed, and meanwhile, manual labor workers will continue to bear the burden of low wages and bad healthcare while in jobs that are prone to injury, disability, and death.
Differences between college and non-college-degree workers are material, even though the focus is on the cultural. The response to this misdirection is simple—whether you hammer a nail or hammer away on a keyboard, everyone deserves to be protected.
Abdullah ShihiparAbdullah Shihipar is a writer and researcher based at the Brown University School of Public Health, where he directs Narrative Projects and Policy Impact Initiatives at the People, Place & Health Collective.