Jim Farley has one of the most recognizable names in American business. But when it comes to the question millions of parents are quietly asking around the dinner table—is college really worth it?—Ford’s CEO says his own household is no exception.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Farley revealed that his son has chosen to spend the summer working as a fabricator in North Carolina rather than taking summer classes. “He feels like that’s more fulfilling than doing summer school at some fancy college,” Farley said. “I think that’s ironic and also a bit satisfying—that we’re rediscovering the value of these jobs that indeed powered all of us to go to college.”
The comment isn’t Farley’s first on the subject. Last October, Fortune reported on Ford’s Pro Accelerate summit about his son’s skepticism about a four-year degree — surprising him by saying he had just had a fulfilling summer working as a mechanic and adding, “I don’t know why I need to go to college.” Farley has also talked about how he has deliberately structured his son’s summers around hands-on trades work—welding, fabricating, working with his hands.
When told that the story seems to be resonating, Farley said he wasn’t surprised. “The job market’s not easy for young college graduates,” he told Fortune this week. “If you’re a parent of a college graduate, you’re asking the same question that our household is—what’s going to become of our kids and their careers?”
He’s not wrong that the cultural tide is shifting. A November 2025 NBC News poll found that 63% of Americans now say a four-year degree is “not worth the cost”—up from 47% in 2017. Gen Z is acting on that skepticism: Between 2011 and 2023, roughly 2 million fewer students enrolled in four-year universities, and in the first quarter of 2024, Gen Z made up nearly 25% of all new hires in skilled trades. A February 2026 survey found 60% of Gen Zers plan to pursue skilled-trade work this year.
America’s truck for the essential economy
The personal anecdote comes as Farley has made the so-called “essential economy”—the tradespeople, fabricators, electricians, and welders who keep the country running—a central pillar of his tenure at Ford. On May 7, the company unveiled the 2027 Ford Super Duty Carhartt Special Edition, a co-branded work truck built in partnership with the 130-year-old Detroit workwear giant. It was less a product reveal than a celebration of the people who actually use the truck to run their businesses, bringing together some 300 essential economy workers and employees in Detroit.
“It’s not a pretend truck. It’s not a show-off truck,” Farley said. “It’s an F-250 that people buy to go work. But I bet it’ll wind up being a badge of honor for a lot of people who show up at the work site.”
The truck is designed to feel, from the inside out, like wearing a Carhartt jacket. Duck canvas seat inserts, Carhartt Brown and Field Khaki color options, and dual-branded badging carry the collaboration’s aesthetic throughout the cab. Under the hood, buyers can spec the truck with Ford’s 6.7-liter Power Stroke diesel—the most powerful diesel engine in its class—or a high-output 7.3-liter gas V8. A range of Pro Power Onboard options, up to 4.0 kilowatts, lets workers run job-site tools directly from the bed.
Carhartt CEO Linda Hubbard, who joined Farley in talking to Fortune, said the partnership is anything but a marketing exercise. “For Ford and Carhartt, this isn’t a side initiative,” she said. “It’s really core to both of our companies and how we operate.” She noted that Hamilton Carhartt called workers “world builders” when he founded the company in the 1880s. “How do we get young people to think: yeah, that would be a great career for me, and something I’d be proud of doing?”
The origin story of their partnership is vintage Farley, an automotive marketing wizard since the 1990s. Several years ago, he took his daughter—then just starting high school—to the Carhartt store in downtown Detroit. He was struck not just by the apparel but by how Carhartt had consistently portrayed working-class America as aspirational. “I came back to the company and said, ‘Why aren’t we doing a co-branded product with Carhartt?’” When the opportunity eventually materialized, he was all-in. “I’ve never felt a more organic, natural partnership. We’re both from Detroit. We’ve both made it through wars and economic downturns and upturns. We have the same customers and the same respect for those customers.”
Crisis in the third inning
The truck launch lands against a backdrop that Farley and Hubbard described with real urgency. The skilled-trade shortage—the gap between the jobs America desperately needs filled and the workers available to fill them—remains, in Farley’s words, “full-blown.” He placed the country in “the second or third inning” of grappling with it seriously, noting that awareness has improved but solutions remain fragmented. “So many of the real problems are in small companies and small businesses that don’t have the funding,” Farley said. “Trade school is often offered as an option, but it’s extremely expensive. Not everyone can afford it.”
Ford is living that tension internally. As of January, the company had 5,000 open mechanic jobs paying roughly $120,000 annually—positions, Farley says, for which he simply cannot find workers to fill.
The macro stakes are rising fast. As data centers proliferate across the country—a flashpoint in midterm politics and a major driver of essential economy jobs—Farley sees the debate quickly shifting from permitting and water use to something more fundamental: whether America has the workforce to build and power them. “Even if the data centers get built, there’s still a huge question mark about how the energy sector will support them,” he said. “And there’s obviously going to be large shortages.”
Farley said the skilled trades and essential economy debate will only intensify as this dynamic goes from the data-center boom to gridded energy shortages. “In our case, we’re launching an energy storage business,” Farley said, touching on the company’s recently formed subsidiary, Ford Energy.
In December 2025, the company announced it was converting its BlueOval SK plant in Glendale, Kentucky—originally built to produce EV batteries in partnership with South Korea’s SK On—into a dedicated hub for large-scale battery energy storage systems, targeting data centers, utilities, and industrial customers. Ford is investing $2 billion over two years to scale the business to at least 20 gigawatt-hours of annual production by late 2027. It has also retooled its Marshall, Michigan, plant for residential energy storage cells.
The Kentucky conversion came alongside the layoffs of approximately 1,500 workers and a $19.5 billion writedown. And in Marshall, workers are now learning lithium iron phosphate chemistry — skills most never anticipated needing when they took the job. “We are ourselves finding skilled trade shortages as we convert our automotive battery plants to energy storage battery plants in Kentucky and Michigan,” Farley told Fortune.
According to a March 2026 labor market report, the data center industry faces a projected shortfall of up to 499,000 workers, with construction labor costs rising 8%–12% year-over-year. “I think our story is just very similar to what’s going to be happening across the country with linemen, electricians, plumbers,” Farley said, “It won’t be just for data centers, it’ll be for transmission lines, off-grid energy sources. It’s going to get a bigger debate, not a smaller debate.”
The data is more complicated
Here’s where Farley’s argument runs into friction. The case for a four-year degree—at least on pure economics—remains stubborn.
The College Board reported in April 2026 that full-time college graduates earn roughly 60% more than high school graduates, a premium that has held steady for decades. The New York Fed reports median earnings of $80,000 annually for bachelor’s degree holders, compared with $47,000 for high school diploma holders. Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 70% more, on average. Lifetime earnings for college graduates run, by most estimates, more than $1 million higher than for those without a degree.
There is also a career-stage dynamic that complicates the trades vs. college calculus. Skilled trades wages can be highly competitive early on — experienced welders and electricians routinely earn $55,000–$80,000—but the trajectory often plateaus. College graduates’ earnings, by contrast, tend to accelerate significantly through their 30s and 40s. The story of who “wins” financially is heavily dependent on what happens after 35, not at 22.
Farley doesn’t shy away from the nuance entirely. “People are realizing that if you make all these sacrifices to pay for education for your kids,” he said, “at the end of it they’re looking at student debt and a long runway to make it all make sense financially. And we’re under more pressure for the medical care of our parents. There are just a lot more pressures on everyone’s pocketbook.”
For Farley, the macro argument and the personal one have become inseparable—and the essential economy debate is no longer a niche workforce story. It is becoming a mainstream political and economic flashpoint, with figures ranging from Larry Fink to Jamie Dimon now publicly sounding the alarm about skilled-labor shortages threatening America’s growth ambitions. The Ad Council is mobilizing a paid advertising campaign around it. Third-party data investment is growing.
Hubbard put it plainly: “It does seem that business is picking up the mantle and saying, ‘Yeah, we need to move this forward.’”