If you were a high-school student any time between the 1970s and now, and you had your eye on the prize of a good, well-paying job, you knew you had to go to college to get there. But, is that still true for millennials?

As Bentley’s Chief Enrollment Officer Joann McKenna blogged recently, economic necessity is influencing the burgeoning professional aspirations of many young people for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and NPR have all recently joined the debate, too, weighing the merits of a four-year degree as the burden of student loans continues to balloon and universities are still failing to properly make students job-ready after graduation — 66 percent of millennial college grads themselves say they’re unprepared for the workforce, according to our PreparedU survey.

In his piece for the Washington Post, writer Jeffrey J. Selingo [“What’s the purpose of college: A job or an education?”] featured Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, who points out that “the erosion of the middle class has put a lot more pressure on parents and students to make it big in the world or the consequences are dire.” When Roth graduated from college, his father, who didn’t go to college, wasn’t concerned if his son ended up driving a cab for a while to figure things out. Now, coffee shop baristas with a philosophy degree are subjects of mockery.

Which is why more and more economists say that millennials should consider careers in the trades, according to NPR. Many economists say a big missing piece of the economic puzzle is apprenticeships that give high school graduates access to good-paying, higher-skilled jobs in the trades, like some of those we featured in our coverage of millennials returning to Made in USA manufacturing jobs.

Innovative partnerships, for example, between Boston-based energy company NSTAR and Bunker Hill Community College, which costs students just $1,200 a semester, invigorate vocational programs and prepare more young people for good, well-paying jobs in the trades — industries where baby boomers are retiring in droves and job openings could number more than 300,000 in the next decade.

While the unemployment rate is still nearly twice as high on average for Americans with a high-school diploma as it is for those with a four-year college degree or more, Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says that the problem with those averages is that people who work at Best Buy or Target get lumped in with master carpenters and electricians.

“You can get a particular skill in a particular field and make more than a college graduate,” Carnevale explains. For example, he says the average electrician makes $5,000 a year more than the average college graduate. And the country is going to need a lot more skilled tradespeople.

That’s probably not the answer for college graduates from places like Wesleyan, Bentley, Georgetown, and other institutions that boast placement rates approaching 100 percent and average starting salaries well in excess of $50,000. But for many students who question whether college is right for them, it represents an option that they may not have known existed anymore.

April Lane is a freelance writer.