One Big Beautiful Policy Proposal to Put Gen Z to Work, Solve the Student Loan Crisis, and Reskill the Workforce
An easy solution to the AI job apocalypse that could actually work
AI is going to take jobs and it’s going to take them fast. AI-related layoffs are already underway and the pace is likely to pick up in the next 18 months.
It’s clear we are going to need a New Deal-style plan to retrain workers at scale, but it’s unlikely Washington will deliver on such a plan before AI takes everyone’s job. Politicians know never to waste a good crisis. They’ll let everyone lose their jobs first, then heroically respond to the crisis after it unfolds.
Unlike during the Great Depression, workers aren’t just going to need help finding new jobs this time around. Workers are going to have to be completely retrained. Former management consultants and financial analysts are going to have to learn an entirely new set of skills and it’s likely they won’t be able to learn them fast enough to make them employable.
A decade ago, workers were told to learn to code, something they could easily do at a three-month bootcamp – and they did. But now that AI agents are coming online with entry-level capabilities, whatever cognitive skill you can teach yourself at a bootcamp, an AI agent can probably already do it better.
Workers will have to reskill doing new types of work AI can’t do, things like carpentry, plumbing, or electrical wiring. While anyone can master a trade, it takes time. Similar to a doctor, once someone completes a trade school program, they’ll have to spend several years in a low-paying apprenticeship role practicing their trade before they become proficient enough to earn a wage that supports themselves and their families.
It seems to be increasingly clear that trades are going to be a core part of the future of work; the challenge will be reskilling workers fast enough to make the trades a viable alternative to white collar desk work.
Although the idea of rapidly reskilling the workforce may seem daunting, I think there’s a novel solution that doesn’t require any capital investment or political will.
Over the weekend I watched Peter Santenello’s coverage of how Western North Carolina has recovered from Hurricane Helene. Even though it’s been seven months since the hurricane laid waste to remote Appalachian communities, roads, bridges, and homes in some of the hardest hit areas have yet to be rebuilt:
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the recovery effort was led by the federal government. But the long-term rebuilding effort is being carried out by volunteer organizations, small businesses, and religious groups, all of whom are volunteering their time, equipment, and expertise at personal expense. Whatever supplies they need are being covered by donations, however, because Hurricane Helene is no longer in the news, donations are beginning to dry up.
As I watched Peter’s coverage of the still-present scars left behind by Hurricane Helene, it dawned on me that there could be an opportunity here. Workers reskilling in trades need hands-on practical experience; communities recovering from natural disasters need skilled workers to help them rebuild.
The problem isn’t a lack of people to put to work or a lack of will to work – it’s money. Workers have families to support and need to get paid for their time but victims of natural disasters don’t have the resources to pay them.
I think there’s a solution here that could kill multiple birds with one stone. You can help victims of natural disasters, reskill the workforce, and get Gen Z the jobs they desperately want all without money changing hands.
That’s what this essay will dive into. It’ll bring attention to different dimensions of the employment crisis we face today and present a couple of novel solutions to solving those problems. We need a New Deal-style effort to mitigate the impact of technological job displacement and I think this could be it.
The Problem: Young people are struggling to find work and millions of workers are crippled under a mountain of student debt.
Gen Z is going to be hit hard when AI takes everyone’s jobs. Older Gen Zers who have already graduated from college can’t find work. 41% of Gen Z are currently underemployed. Meanwhile younger Gen Zers who are still in high school will have zero professional prospects once they graduate.
Like the rest of us, Gen Z made the same Faustian bargain, mortgaging the cost of a college degree on the prospect of a future high-paying job. Those jobs are non-existent (and I’m skeptical they actually existed for most workers in the first place). Gen Z is saddled with debt they can’t repay, rendering them economically immobile.
It’s not an accident that more than one-third of Gen Zers are still living at home with their parents. And the ones who are trying to make it on their own are doomspending to create the illusion that everything is just fine – even though their bank accounts say otherwise.
The system is clearly broken and while we all know it’s broken no one is doing anything about it. If anything, the Department of Education may be exacerbating the crisis. By enforcing collection against borrowers who don’t have the means to pay back their loans, a growing number of young adults are becoming uncreditworthy.1 If there’s anything worse than not having a job that pays the bills, it’s being excluded from credit markets.
This is a bubble that will inevitably burst. But because Gen Z represents the foundation of the economy, ignoring the high rate of underemployment and financial insolvency of young people will result in a structural collapse of the economy in the very near future. You need a new generation of young people to spend in the economy and if they don’t have the means to do so, you simply won’t have an economy anymore.
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The Other Problem: Every year disaster strikes and the federal government is woefully incompetent to meet the needs of those impacted by natural disasters.
In the last seven months, there have been two major hurricanes – Helene and Milton – a wildfire destroyed communities in southern California, and a recent spate of spring tornadoes has cost billions in damage across the American heartland.
We all assume FEMA will step in to help people affected by natural disasters – and FEMA does in the immediate aftermath – but they aren’t there for the full decade it could take to rebuild a community. Just look at Lahaina. In 2023, wildfires ripped through Maui, destroying over 2,200 structures in Lahaina. As of February 2025 – two years after the blaze – only six homes have been rebuilt on the island.
Six.
While everyone looks to FEMA for support during natural disasters, the reality is FEMA doesn’t have the skills or expertise to meet the needs of impacted communities when they arise. FEMA is burdened by bureaucratic red tape and crippled by politics. During last year’s hurricane season, a FEMA employee was fired after telling staffers to skip homes with Trump signs in their years.
And FEMA doesn’t do a very good job allocating long-term financial resources to help communities rebuild. FEMA issued $750 emergency payments to natural disaster victims who lost everything, including their homes. Meanwhile they spent millions to house illegal migrants in hotels in New York City.2
As a result, areas affected by natural disasters are slow to recover. As new natural disasters replace old ones in the newscycle, older disasters are largely forgotten. Donations dry up – as the residents interviewed in Peter Santenello’s video articulated – leaving residents to manage the recovery effort themselves.
The challenge of rebuilding still exists. There are just fewer and fewer resources to do so.
The Solution: Incentivize volunteer service after natural disasters by allowing volunteers to exchange labor hours for student loan repayment.
It’s clear we have several different problems but they’re all centered around one common theme – money. Student loan borrowers need good paying jobs to be able to repay their student loans but are struggling to find them. Communities affected by natural disasters need resources to rebuild their communities but over time those resources dry up.
Both groups of people need money yet neither group of people has it. A novel solution to both of these problems would be creating jobs that employ young people while supporting the rebuilding efforts in natural disaster zones without exchanging money.
I think this could be done by allowing volunteers to apply volunteer time as a credit towards the balance of their student loans.
Here’s how it would work. Let’s say you register to volunteer with a recognized 501(c)3 organization like the United Cajun Navy. When a major hurricane like Helene hits, you deploy to support the rebuilding effort.
The United Cajun Navy is a volunteer organization. They don’t pay volunteers but they coordinate them to get boots on the ground where it’s needed most.
Every year volunteer organizations like the United Cajun Navy have to complete Form 990 which is an annual information return that is required to maintain their nonprofit status. While this form is designed for tax purposes, because it encompasses a non-profit’s activities, it could also include time. A volunteer organization could submit a log of volunteer hours worked in much the same way businesses report employee compensation to the IRS.
This wouldn’t be difficult to do. There’s a plethora of volunteer scheduling software and time tracking apps out there that an organization like the United Cajun Navy probably already uses. Combined with the reporting mechanism that already exists to maintain nonprofit status, it wouldn’t be inconceivable for an organization like the United Cajun Navy to submit volunteer hours to the federal government to apply as a credit to an individual volunteer’s student loan balance.
Just like an employer issues a W2 or a weekly paystub, a volunteer org could provide workers with documentation that reports uncompensated volunteer time as proof of time served. A volunteer could submit this documentation to the Department of Education in lieu of a student loan payment to have the hours credited to their student loan balance. It would be no different from the current process of self-reporting your income when you file your taxes.
This could work because time is money after all. You earn a paycheck by trading your time for wage. You could convert time into a financial credit that could be applied to a student loan balance.
To keep things simple, let’s say a volunteer hour credit is equivalent to $15. For every hour someone works with an accredited volunteer organization, they could earn $15 that would be deducted from the balance of their student loans. If you spend 150 hours volunteering with the United Cajun Navy, you’d earn $2,250 to deduct from your student loans.
No money ever changes hands during this process, just time. Time is compensated through a deduction from a debt that is already owed rather than as a wage.3 And because this would leverage reporting requirements that are already in place, it wouldn’t add an administrative burden to volunteers, organizations, or the federal government.
The Other Solution: Volunteer service provides real-time on-the-ground training for a workforce that desperately needs it.
As I mentioned above, workers need to be retrained and they need to be retrained fast. While not all workers will pursue trades, many will. Anecdotally, this is already happening:
Meanwhile, high schoolers are beginning to see trades as a viable alternative to college.
Whether we’re talking about beginning a career out of high school or reskilling mid-career, volunteering provides workers an opportunity to gain real-time on-the-ground training.
In most natural disasters, buildings are destroyed and have to be rebuilt. Samaritan’s Purse, for example, is a religious organization that is on the ground in North Carolina rebuilding homes. This provides an opportunity for retraining at scale that has a direct application to future employment opportunities.
Many trades require you to not only complete a program at a trade school but to work as a trainee under a skilled tradesman for a period of time. You need to log a certain amount of hours as part of a certification process that will allow you to advance in your career. According to the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, for example, you need to have 8,000 hours of experience in a plumbing trade to be eligible to take the Journeyman Plumber Examination.
Unless a licensing board explicitly states what qualifies as experience, there is room for flexibility in how hourly requirements are quantified. While fixing your neighbors leaky faucet probably wouldn’t count, working with a licensed plumber on an unpaid construction project for an accredited volunteer organization – such as building new homes for hurricane victims – could.
While volunteer organizations play an important role coordinating post-disaster rebuilding efforts, they’re not the only ones who are part of the reconstruction process. Small businesses often step in where skilled expertise and equipment is required, augmenting efforts of volunteer organizations. In North Carolina, companies like Precision Grading are footing their own bill providing manpower and equipment to help communities rebuild.
You could take the same concept of logging volunteer hours for student loan repayment and apply it to learning a skill. Accredited organizations could establish apprentice programs where trainees log hours under a skilled craftsman, earning credit towards a trade certification. Depending on how such a program is set up, you could either pay an entry-level wage or allow volunteers to convert their time as a credit to be applied to whatever balance they owe on their trade school loans.
As an incentive for small businesses to enroll in such a program, volunteer hours could be eligible for a tax deduction. In this way, small businesses could be indirectly compensated for supporting reconstruction efforts in natural disaster zones. A business that takes on the burden of training workers could deduct their labor hours off their tax bill at the end of the year.
Combining the need for skilled labor after a natural disaster with the need for new employment opportunities could fast track reskilling the labor force at scale all without a single penny ever changing hands.
Final takeaway.
We are facing myriad social and economic problems that are going to get worse before they get better. We need a low-cost, multi-faceted solution to these problems that doesn’t require political will in Washington to implement.
People need jobs and it’s clear there aren’t enough high-paying jobs to go around. Because of the looming threat of automation, the workforce needs reskilling but there’s no political will – or financial resources – to make that happen.
Meanwhile natural disasters will continue to happen. There are enough existing disaster areas that still need help and there will likely be new disaster areas that emerge in the coming years. This creates an opportunity for employing labor and reskilling it without having to compensate it directly.
Volunteering to serve on a natural disaster recovery effort in exchange for a student loan credit or a trade certification credit would give workers experience they need without requiring the government to appropriate any new funds to manage it. While there is an administrative effort of tracking time, because small businesses and nonprofits already create annual financial reports, reporting volunteer time wouldn’t be an extra burden.
The only thing that is required is a greenlight from the government to deduct volunteer time as a credit towards student loan balances.
But while the employment aspect of this could get more people to work and more people reskilled in trades, there’s another – arguably more important – benefit to such an effort: it gives young people a chance to reconnect with their country.
As I noted above, a FEMA worker was fired after instructing their team to skip houses of people they viewed as political opponents during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The animosity and vitriol Americans have for one another is palpable. And the incremental escalation of violence isn’t looking like it’s going to begin deescalating anytime soon.
A nationwide volunteer program could give people the chance to meet their fellow Americans and reconnect with their country. A volunteer from New York City might be surprised to learn that the gun toting Trump supporters in Appalachia aren’t as evil as they’ve been made out to be.
Likewise, seeing a hard-working Gen Zer would dispel the belief that all young people are entitled and lazy.
We need solutions and we need them fast. I can’t say for certain that such an idea would work, but I think we need to start giving out of the box solutions a shot.
What do you think? Could a nationwide volunteer program be the solution we need? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Much of the news coverage on student loan delinquencies focused on students who negligently avoided paying their student loans and are now paying the consequences for their choices. But what hasn’t gotten much coverage is how the elimination of income-based repayment plans are driving up monthly student loan bills for borrowers. Payments that were affordable in the past are now quickly becoming unaffordable, even for responsible borrowers. This is a much bigger problem because responsible borrowers who are being sidelined from participating in the economy – not just irresponsible ones.
While FEMA didn’t spend money earmarked for disaster relief on illegal migrants it should be noted that the agency did have a budget allocated for handling them. That in and of itself is problematic as FEMA was created to manage emergencies and respond to natural disasters. As the migrants were permitted to cross the border and settle in U.S. sanctuary cities over a period of several years, it is difficult to argue that the migrant crisis qualifies as an emergency. FEMA was arguably not the right agency to respond to the migrant crisis and as a result, diverted resources away from natural disaster victims. But that’s a topic for another day.
You could also expand this program and apply it to other federally-held debts such as back taxes to the IRS, as well as other volunteer programs, not just natural disaster relief.