we have US schools teaching creationism and denying evolution too . in the bible belt . yep . <| sep |> Because they aren ' t really lost , they ' re bought by goblins , but they pay in pocket lint and we don ' t realise . <| sep |> if i breathed <| sep |> I ' ve been considering this for my teenage sons . I really think traditional blue collar skills e . g . welding , machining have almost completely vanished from the US . Everyone is going to college to work in a cubicle and nobody is learning these skills . I was a bit surprised to learn that many government schools no longer have shop classes either . I mean how can there be no shop class ? just blows my mind . I can ' t recommend these blue collar skills though . I looked at how much these types of jobs are currently getting paid and they are barely above minimum wage . I really don ' t understand how this can be such a rare skill nowadays , yet it pays nothing . Perhaps it ' s because it ' s easy to learn ? My real advice to you and my children is to go into operations engineering . The necessary skills are in the areas of cloud services e . g . Amazon web services , VMware , linux administration and database administration . I don ' t mean one of these things , but all of them . If you get certification in all four of these areas , then I can promise you you will never be without a job in the next 1520 years and you will be a top earner .