One of the jobs I did within the education sector was as a careers adviser in a senior high school in a working class area and this was roughly 2 decades ago. We knew then that Uni was not for everyone and encouraged kids to take a ‘gap year’ to try some different jobs, or go to TAFE and do a course related to their interest to see if they liked it and then use that to help them into uni, or do a traineeship to learn skills, get a taste for the working world, get to know themselves a bit better and get a break from the academic routine before making the decision to choose a particular course at uni or elsewhere (amongst other pathways). It wasn’t unusual for kids straight out of school to find uni overwhelming, or that they’d chosen a course they actually didn’t like and had to drop out or find another course. Nowadays it must be even harder considering the cost of university study. Sometimes, it wasn’t the kids that wanted the uni but the parents who wanted the kids to have what they had not been able to, plus status, etc. I’m surprised they’re still saying that kids are being steered towards uni by schools. There are so many choices. I wonder if the system’s worse than it was.

I think the problems with kids and trades is that, as FE mentions in the other comment here, some kids are still not mature enough plus they get paid a pitiful amount, it takes years to get paid a decent wage and are often not treated well. So many times I’ve heard tradesmen say the usual thing of ‘kids don’t want to work these days’ and that having an apprentice was a hassle. It sounds to me that neither the tradespeople nor the apprentices are getting the support they need.