On college and employment (2 of 2): A path forward?

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there's this (mildly lower class) (white) couple who I recognize from them being in a few times, a (bigger) guy with a beard that shoots out all over his face in big tufts, and this (smaller) (thinner) (drawn face) (younger-mom-with-kids-at-home-looking) lady.

And, we were chit-chatting, and it turns out that the guy had worked in restaurants as a chef for years, and then someone he knew had gotten out of it and into industrial solar, and he basically could go through training and start right away, and now he's making like $65 an hour doing multiple jobs, primarily surveying and staking out the postholes where they put in the stands for the panels.

And, it was all around the area, so you don't have to commute far, and they didn't work you to death with overtime, and training was like one town over in some conference center in a (notoriously rundown) (nearby) town.

So, I got his email for my neighbor, who had also been telling me that he was looking for something more outside that might be good.

"And do they drugtest?", I was like, mentioning that that was important to my neighbor, since he was a recreational marijuana user.

"No," the guy was like, and he said he smoked too.

"No way," I was like.

So, like the next day or maybe the day after, I handed that information off to my neighbor, and he was impressed that it seemed quick and that training was nearby, and he said that he had been thinking of looking into trades classes at the nearby community college.

I also said that the guy had said that some people he knows do windmill tech, and that that supposedly pays like $80 an hour after you get your thousand hours in at like $25 an hour during your apprenticeship.

. . .

(Just think of this, by the way, that here you have a kid going to a top-tier nationally-known school with everything paid for, and he's still so dispirited about the economy, and couldn't figure out a path forward in college over the span of multiple years as things were falling apart, and he has now been looking to bus driving and air traffic control and now maybe trades... Just not good.)