But during the keynote discussion with Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Mike Rowe of the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, Farley revealed how his own family is being impacted. “My son worked as a mechanic this summer,” Farley said while moderating.

Then, Farley added, his son said something that stunned both of his parents: “Dad, I really like this work. I don’t know why I need to go to college.” Farley said he and his wife looked at each other and wondered, “Should we be debating this?” It’s something that’s happening in a lot of American households, he noted. “It should be a debate.”

Math isn’t mathing

Rowe, a longtime vocational advocate, seized on data showing that while two skilled tradespeople enter the workforce, five retire each year. The imbalance, he explained, is “the math that’s catching up to us” as the baby boomer generation ages and birth rates fall.

Rowe cited data from his own life. His own degree cost $12,200 in 1984, he said, whereas today it would cost something like $97,000.

“Nothing in the history of Western civilization has gotten more expensive, more quickly,” Rowe said. “Not energy, not food, not real estate, not even health care, [nothing has been inflated more] than the cost of a four-year degree.”

The Associated Press reported that, yes, many colleges were charging roughly $95,000 per year as of April 2024, but the financial aid system lowers that in practice. Still, it’s by and large true that inflation for college tuition, health care, and housing costs has far outpaced that for, say, televisions, toys, and software, showing Rowe is making a solid point. With costs this high, the value proposition of college is under serious scrutiny.

Fortune has reported on several Gen Z entrepreneurs who dove straight into the trades instead of going to college. One, at 23, was already his own boss and making more than $100,000 per year, and the other, 19, was working his way up to it. Both of them had side hustles as social-media influencers, adding another revenue stream. Marlo Loria, director of career and technical education and innovative partnerships at Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, said she often gives options to students that are different from a traditional four-year degree.

“Our youth want to know why. Why do I need to go to college? Why do I want to get in debt? Why do I want to do these things?” She said that “because I told you so” doesn’t cut it anymore.

A path back to the American Dream?

Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer echoed this sentiment, saying government, educators, and industry must partner to make the skilled trades attractive to young Americans.

“For far too long, we haven’t brought the right people to the table,” she said, emphasizing the need for collaboration so that “businesses are heard, and the American workforce is valued.”

Chavez-DeRemer argued that if the average American wants to have a good-paying job and a mortgage, they should strongly consider the trades.

She questioned: “Do you know that most of our 35- and 40-year-olds are not going to be able to buy a home anywhere near the future?”

This is the time in people’s lives when they’re trying to grow their families, and the current U.S. economy does not set them up to do that, she said. She noted that trade school graduates often emerge earning more than $100,000 per year. The average tradesman will come out making about $11,000 more than a college graduate will, she said.

The essential obstacle, said Rowe, is not just economics but stigma.

“Stigmas and stereotypes and myths and misperceptions have conspired to keep a whole generation of kids from giving trades an honest look,” he said. Until the culture changes and people recognize the dignity and opportunity of these jobs, attempts to fill workforce gaps will be “quixotic or Sisyphean.”

The AI question

Asked about the fear AI and robotics might replace human workers, both panelists were optimistic. Chavez-DeRemer compared the transition to prior industrial and tech revolutions, stating: “We adapt. We are an adaptable people.” She emphasized AI should be seen as a tool that empowers, not replaces, the essential workforce.

“Businesses are retraining their employees,” she said. “The R&D is showing us that [they’re] going to create new types of jobs.”

Rowe added, “AI is coming for the coders, not yet for the welders,” reflecting the resiliency and growing demand in the trades. He argued every “frontline” vocation, from welding to pipe-fitting, is now seeing a boom, and AI won’t touch that. Rowe also cited remarks covered by Fortune from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about the need for blue-collar workers to power the data-center infrastructure underlying the AI boom. He also mentioned BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s comments that his $12 trillion–plus portfolio was dependent on having enough electricians, a sector short of hundreds of thousands of workers.

“The biggest CEOs in our country [are ringing] the metaphorical alarm bell,” Rowe said, calling it a “macro problem” the essential economy can solve.

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Now here’s the good news: A majority in rural regions are ready to seize these opportunities—provided we find innovative ways to give them a chance.

That’s the upshot of fresh research that Generation, the non-profit I run, recently commissioned. We went into the field knowing that midcareer and older workers everywhere – though they are a growing portion of the labor force – are more likely to struggle with long-term unemployment. And knowing also that long-term, persistent poverty is far more prevalent in rural counties than urban counties.

To learn more about this especially challenged subset, we partnered with YouGov to survey more than 500 individuals aged 45 or older who reside in rural areas across 17 states that make up the Appalachia and Delta regions. Almost half were currently unemployed.

We started by confirming what we suspected: Many of these folks are hurting. A house repair, a health emergency, car trouble: such all-too-likely unbudgeted costs are disasters waiting to happen. Sixty-one percent of the individuals aged 45+ whom we surveyed say they would not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $1,000. In fact, 37% do not have enough money to cover their daily needs, and another 32% are just making ends meet. Only one in four say they can meet their needs and save for the future. Unemployment, when it strikes, is a deep hole to fall into. And 45% of the unemployed in our survey have been out of work for more than two years.

Nor was it surprising to find that on the supply side, local economies simply aren’t creating enough jobs. More eye-opening was the way persistent precarity has shaped our respondents’ expectation of what constitutes a good job. Asked to define a “high-quality job,” their answers had nothing to do with the levels of education or technical skills required. Instead, they focused on three essentials: competitive wages, predictable full-time hours and steady employment. Using those basic criteria as their definition, only 6% told us that the area they live in supports “many” such high-quality jobs, while 35% said there are “few or none.”

It was when we began probing for solutions that things got really interesting. One possible option—expecting large swathes of unemployed or under-employed rural

workers to move to where the good jobs are—proved a non-starter. Only 24% in our survey consider relocation a “somewhat likely” option, while just 8% say they would be “very likely” to relocate if a better opportunity came along. That inertia reflects a powerful mix of uncertainty about the potential financial burdens a move entails and certainty about the high emotional cost of abandoning deep ties to families and community. It’s consistent with a broader decline in geographic mobility in the U.S., which recent Brookings Institution research says has hit “historic lows.”

Barring a surge in direct investment in rural America, then, what remains? Just one option: Expanding remote work opportunities. Among the multiple factors that any company would need to consider before making such an investment, we focused on one key variable, the willingness of the local workforce to try something new. And here our survey results offered a big upside surprise.

Specifically, even though 71% of all respondents have not participated in any formal job training or skills development programs in the last three years, 50% told us they are interested or very interested in learning new skills to advance their careers. Even more – 75% – say they would take courses or learn new skills to make themselves more competitive for remote work opportunities.

Seizing those opportunities won’t be easy. Even after companies convince themselves of the business case, they will still need to hone their ability and that of their vendors and partners to create online training programs that are cost-effective, that convey agreed-upon credentials, and that are clearly relevant to securing jobs—all issues that our respondents identified as critical. Any future public funds invested in training will also need to address these concerns.

Still, here’s at least one deeply rooted social problem that doesn’t require a grand new policy program to meet it. Rural midcareer and older workers, our survey confirmed, are ready and willing to gain the skills needed, if and when the opportunity appears.

At the moment, though, the backlash against remote work is spurring a decline in such jobs. As a first step we need to broaden our current debate about the pros and cons of remote work and look beyond the impact on corporate culture, productivity and employee well-being. Yes, managing those trade-offs is complex. But it’s also largely a big city concern.

For rural Americans, the stakes in finding profitable ways to expand remote work are about something far more fundamental—access to today’s job market that otherwise seems sure to leave them even further in the lurch.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.