There's a lot of talk about apprentice pay being too low and the process taking too long. What a lot of people seem to be missing is that being an apprentice is a young man's game, that journeyman wages being bad or good is highly regional, and that the path to running your own business is fairly direct. It's an entirely different path from the two-step college to white-collar job pipeline most of us probably went through. You work hard pulling horsecock wire or cleaning shit out of sewer systems fresh out of high school to have the option of either pushing far and hard after your journeyman's card to make incredibly good money, or making a wage that ranges from kind-of-bad to kind-of-good wholly depending on where you live.

If you had a rough start in life, bad grades, no applicable skills, no money to go to college, no family support, etc. but are willing to show up and get your balls busted for a while while you learn, you could do a hell of a lot worse than the average journeyman's wage, and you stand a chance to make a hell of a lot more.