About Not Just College
The person behind it
My name is Jenna Hale. It is a pen name, and it is the name on a line of life-skills books for teenagers. This site is one person: I pick the questions, read the sources and write the pages.
Two things put me in this subject. I have two sons, grown now, and I went through the what-happens-after-school question with both of them from the parent’s side of the kitchen table. And for years I volunteered with a church youth group, which mostly meant long Sunday evenings listening to teenagers describe a plan, or admit that there was not one yet.
Neither of those is a qualification, and I want to be exact about that. I have never pulled wire, hung duct, sat on a JATC panel or held a licence in any trade. I am not a career counsellor, a safety professional or a lawyer. What I bring to this is patience with primary documents: I will sit with the regulation, the wage table or a programme’s written standards until I understand what they say, then put the citation beside the claim so you can go and check me rather than trust me.
What made this worth building
I started pulling on the claims a parent meets on the first page of a search, and enough of them came apart that the pulling became the project.
The rule that nobody under 18 may set foot on a roof turns out to have a written exemption in the federal regulation it supposedly comes from. The lists of the most dangerous trades put electricians near the top, while federal fatality counts put electricians below automotive technicians, painters and plumbers. Wage claims get repeated for years after the survey behind them was replaced by a newer one.
Underneath all that is a second problem, which is who is doing the writing. A parent asking what a sixteen year old is allowed to do on a job site is likely to land on a school with seats to fill, a staffing agency, or a page assembled out of other pages. The questions that do have specific answers, and a lot of them do, are the ones nobody bothers to answer.
Where the lines are
No side taken in the college argument. A degree is the right call for some teenagers and, for others, four years and a loan spent on the wrong thing. Both of those are true at once. Anyone handing you a clean verdict on that has stopped describing and started selling, and that includes anyone selling the trades.
No answer held back. Each page finishes its own question on the page. If something would only make sense as an advertisement for something else, it does not go up.
No figure without a source. Several of the numbers parents most want simply do not exist in any trustworthy national form: what a first-year apprentice earns, what a tool kit costs, what a trade school charges. Where that is the case the page says so out loud and shows you how to get your own real local figure.
Who pays for this
Nobody does. No trade school, union, staffing firm, tool brand or training provider has paid for a mention here, and none has been asked to. There is no advertising, no newsletter capture and no paywall.
There is one connection you should know about, and it is printed at the foot of every page rather than tucked away on this one. The teen books that a few articles link to are mine. Same hands on both. Telling you that is the whole point, because it lets you decide for yourself what it is worth.
The commitment underneath it: a reader who never buys a thing should still leave with the answer. That is testable. Open any page and see whether the question is settled in the opening lines, long before anything is mentioned that costs money.
The numbers, and when they go off
Wages and projections here come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the survey period or the projection decade written into the sentence rather than left for you to guess. Work rules come from the Department of Labor and the Code of Federal Regulations. Injury and fatality data comes from BLS and OSHA.
None of it holds still. The Occupational Outlook Handbook wage set is refreshed once a year, BLS issues a new ten-year projection annually, and state licensing boards change requirements without telling anyone. The editorial standards page sets out exactly what the checked date on a page is claiming, and what has to happen before it is allowed to move.
About the safety pages in particular
Some of the work described on this site kills people. Trenches come in on top of them. Arc flash burns. A confined space can hold air with too little oxygen in it to keep someone conscious. Falls are the biggest single killer on a construction site: BLS counted 370 fatal falls, slips and trips among construction and extraction workers in 2024, part of 1,032 deaths across those occupations, down from 400 the year before. That count covers falls from any height, not roofs alone.
Nothing here is safety training and nothing here stands in for it. Where a page runs into a real hazard it names the hazard rather than smoothing it down, and it points at the agency that regulates the work. For one specific job and one specific teenager, the two places to take the question are your state labor department and the employer, in writing.