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This story is part of the New Boom series on millennials in America.

As the economy continues to recover, economists are seeing stark differences between people with high school and college degrees. Four-year college graduates are nearly twice as likely to have a job compared to Americans who just graduated high school and stopped there.

But economists say that doesn't mean everybody needs a 4-year degree. In fact, millions of good-paying jobs are opening up in the trades. And some pay better than what the average college graduate makes.

Learning A Trade

When 18-year-old Haley Hughes graduated from high school this past summer, she had good grades; she was on the honor roll every year. So she applied to a bunch of 4-year colleges and got accepted to every one of them. But she says, "I wasn't excited about it really, I guess."

"The baby boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials."

- Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

So instead of going that route, Hughes is taking a different path: an apprenticeship through the big New England power utility company NSTAR. In one of her recent classes at an NSTAR facility outside Boston, the classroom work was actually quite exciting.

Lara Allison is one of the instructors teaching Hughes and the other utility worker apprentices how to protect themselves if they're down under a manhole cover, in an underground electrical substation and something bad happens.

"An arc flash, that's the thing we worry the most about," Allison says.

An arc flash is a highly energized bolt of electricity, an explosion of electricity in a sense, that jumps from an energy source to another spot that's grounded or that the energy can flow into. Allison tells the students that if they wear the wrong clothing and they get hit by an arc flash, their clothes can catch on fire and get seared into their skin. "It's really, really hot," she says.

On her apprenticeship Hughes already has been down working in those underground substations.

"I loved it, it was great," she says.

Hughes says another thing that's great is that taking this path into the high-skilled trades is a lot cheaper than a 4-year college would have been.

$40,000 Vs. $2,400 Per Year

"The student loans would be ridiculous," Hughes says during a break from class. "The schools I was looking at ... were like $40,000 a year." In the long run she thought that was just too much.

By comparison, NSTAR is partnering with nearby Bunker Hill Community College. The students end up with a 2-year associate degree. Hughes has some scholarships and NSTAR pays some of the cost. It works out to about $1,200 a semester. Hughes says she's been paying that herself and so she expects to graduate with no debt.

Hughes is also getting a lot of on-the-job training and taking a wide range of courses at the community college: English, math, a computer science course and even a psychology group dynamics class. Then there are the classes directly related to power utility work: DC theory, AC theory, physics, engineering and business etiquette. Not bad for $1,200 a semester.

'Averages Lie'

At the NSTAR apprenticeship program, 90 percent of the students get jobs with the power utility at graduation. Starting base pay is about $58,000 a year.

On average, it is certainly true that people with a 4-year college degree make more money than those with a 2-year degree or less. But there is plenty of nuance behind that truth.

"Averages lie," says Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

He says the problem with those averages is that people who work at Radio Shack 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," he says. For example, he says the average electrician makes $5,000 a year more than the average 4-year college graduate. And the country is going to need a lot more skilled tradespeople.

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"The baby boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials," Carnevale says. He says there are 600,000 jobs for electricians in the country today, and about half of those will open up over the next decade. Carnevale says it is a big opportunity for that millennial generation born between 1980 and 2000.

With so many boomers retiring from the trades, the U.S. is going to need a lot more pipe-fitters, nuclear power plant operators, carpenters, welders, utility workers — the list is long. But the problem is not enough young people are getting that kind of training.

Not Enough Training

Utility apprentice Haley Hughes says she chose to work in the trades, in large part, because she went to a vocational high school. A lot of her friends are going into the trades. She got comfortable there with wiring light switches and doing basic electrical work and learning about the industry. But, there aren't nearly as many of these types of programs in high schools as there used to be.

"We made a mistake," Carnevale says. "Back in 1983, there was the 'Nation at Risk' report in which, quite rightly, we all were appalled at the quality of education in America."

After that, he says, most high schools focused on academics and getting students ready for college. For a lot of parents, they wanted their kids to have a 4-year degree. But Carnevale says, in the process "we basically obliterated the modernization of the old vocational education programs and they've been set aside."

Carnevale says we should bring those programs back and we need to be preparing a lot more young people for good, well-paying jobs in the trades. And he says that means we need better training programs at high schools and community colleges in partnership with businesses in scores of different industries around the country.

apprenticeships

Parents on the hunt for great kids' books get some help each year when the American Library Association gives out its youth media awards. On Monday, the association announced a long list of winners in a variety of categories. The two that get the most attention are the John Newbery Medal for most outstanding contribution to children's literature and the Randolph Caldecott Medal for picture book artistry. This year's Newbery went to Kwame Alexander's The Crossover, and the Caldecott went to Dan Santat's The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend.

The Crossover

by Kwame Alexander

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Alexander says he couldn't sleep Sunday night knowing that he had a chance of winning the Newbery. "I know we hear that it is all about the journey, and it was," he says. "But I so wanted the journey to end in a really cool place."

His winning novel is a story about twin brothers who love each other and basketball in equal measure. Alexander knew a story about sports would attract reluctant readers, especially boys. And he wrote the novel in verse because he started out as a poet.

He says, "When I set about the task of trying to write a novel, of course I went with what I knew. And I said, 'Oh, well I know how to write poetry so I'm going to be able write a novel in poems pretty easily.'"

But it was a lot harder than he expected. He says he wanted to embrace a variety of forms so that kids would be introduced to different kinds of poetry, though he's surprised when he hears people describe some of the verse as rap.

"That's so funny," he says. "You know, I hear people say ... that there's rap in the book and of course, when I was writing it, there was no rap in my mind."

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The Adventures of Beekle is the story of an imaginary friend who goes in search of a child who needs him. Author and illustrator Dan Santat says, "I found it interesting that no one had ever taken the approach from the imaginary friend's point of view."

He remembers when his own son first went to school and worried about making friends. He says the book is really a gift to his son, and winning the Caldecott just makes the whole experience sweeter.

The Adventures of Beekle

The Unimaginary Friend

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"I would have been perfectly fine knowing that my son would have been content growing up and maybe possibly having his own children and sharing the book and saying, you know, 'This book is a love letter from your grandfather to me.' But now it's going to have a sticker on [it] and now it can be shared, you know, with the world," he says. "It's beyond words. I'm thrilled."

Other winners announced on Monday include:

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Coretta Scott King Author Book Award)

Firebird by Misty Copeland and illustrated by Christopher Myers (Coretta Scott King Illustrator Book Award)

Viva Frida by Yuyi Morales (Pura Belpr Illustrator Award)

I Lived on Butterfly Hill by Marjorie Agosn and illustrated by Lee White (Pura Belpr Author Award)

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson (Michael L. Printz Award)

The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet (Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award)

Read an excerpt of The Crossover

Peter Fredell carries an unusual wallet. It feels a bit like leather, but the material is pale and thin. He pulls it out on a street corner in Stockholm, Sweden.

"I actually made it myself," he says. "It's an eel that I fished up. And I used the skin and stitched it together."

This eelskin wallet carries personal significance — but it does not carry cash.

Around the world, cash is fading. Electronic transactions are becoming a bigger part of the economy every year. And one of the leaders in this trend is Sweden, where more than 95 percent of transactions are digital.

Fredell is the CEO of a company called Seamless that designs payment systems for cell phones.

Back in his office, I asked him to recall the last time he needed cash.

He thought for a bit.

"My son plays ice hockey, and I had to give something to the ice hockey team, and so I gave them some cash," Fredell says eventually. "But as a matter of fact, that will disappear too."

He says the ice hockey team has just started taking cell phone payments.

I decided to see just how far this goes.

So, we stuck our heads out of Fredell's office to the open-plan workspace. I ask if anyone has cash on them. Person after person shakes their head no.

Finally we found one employee with cash — an engineer named Wilhelm Svenselius.

He says he needed it for a party the previous weekend. It was held at a bar that doesn't take cards, and Svenselius had to get cash especially for the occasion. He says that happens once a month or so.

i

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically. Camilla Lindskog/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Camilla Lindskog/AP

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically.

Camilla Lindskog/AP

Of course, these people work for a digital payment company.

But national data show that in Sweden, they are not unusual. There are churches that pass a digital payment system with the collection plate. Some homeless people who sell newspapers on the street take digital payments.

Ruth Goodwin-Groen runs the Better than Cash Alliance, which the U.N. and major global foundations are funding as part of an effort to move the global economy away from cash toward digital transactions.

"This is a means of helping achieve many different goals," Goodwin-Groen says.

Electronic transactions are more transparent and more accountable, she says. They cost less, and they're more secure. It's a global trend, from the developing world to the biggest, most advanced economies.

But there are holdouts.

Ron Shevlin is a senior analyst at the Aite Group, a financial services firm in Boston.

"For some consumers, and especially older consumers, they prefer cash and don't prefer to use cards or mobile payments," he says.

And people making illegal purchases on the black market will always prefer cash.

Plus, he says, digital transactions do raise security concerns.

"In some respects, the economic impact is negative because of the propensity for data breaches and fraudulent transaction," Shevlin says.

Back in Stockholm, Fredell is already imagining ways to make cashless transactions completely secure.

"My favorite payment actually is DNA payment. You spit in a cup next to the cashier," he says.

That spit-system doesn't exist anywhere yet.

"But it's the absolutely safest way, right?" Fredell says. "Someone would have to copy your DNA."

It's a dream — but not one that he sees happening any time soon.

sweden

воскресенье

In a move aimed at breathing life into Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, thousands gathered at the city's Victoria Park today in open defiance of Beijing's insistence that it have final say on candidates for the territory's next leader.

Organizers said 13,000 attended the rally, but police claimed the figure was 8,800. Regardless, the number is far fewer than the tens of thousands that came out for past protests calling for free and open elections in 2017 to choose a new "chief executive" for the former British colony.

In any case, The South China Morning Post says it's "the first major post-Occupy Movement mass rally."

According to the SCMP:

"[Placards] and balloons all paying homage to the "Umbrella Movement" abounded. At 2.20pm, the march began with the head of the rally leaving Victoria Park's eastern entrance through Tin Hau.

"Leading the charge were key figures of the Occupy Central movement including Benny Tai Yiu-ting, Chan Kin-man and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Others at the front included Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee Chu-Ming as well as Daisy Chan Sin-Ying."

Reuters reports that some 2,000 police flanked the protesters as they marched through the city's glitzy shopping and financial districts, "seeking to avoid a repeat of the so-called Occupy Central campaign that saw demonstrations shut down key roads for 2-1/2 months."

Beginning in August, the mass protests attracted international attention amid fears of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown that never came. However, Hong Kong police did move aggressively on several occasions to try to break up the mass protests that paralyzed parts of the city.

In September, at the height of the mass protests, we published this primer on the history of Hong Kong and what's at stake for the pro-democracy movement.

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