How many jobs do you know have a paid apprenticeship program nowadays?

Grocery. Meat cutters, hell even cashiers are getting paid to climb a wage scale. The wage ceiling is only $19ish/hour unless you want to manage (which is usually not worth it IMO), but it's livable.

Take four years in college, and you get out with $50k in debt and the modern job market. Outside of a few growing fields, you might truly get stuck working for $10 an hour with that degree. But live like a poor college student and save half of what you make your first four years in a union job, and you will have banked as much as you would have spent on college if not more. A nest egg means early/easy home ownership, which is really the starting point for financial success - you will have it paid off before you hit a normal retirement age. As soon as you are vested in the UFCW pension, you will have a pension to go with your social security. You can spend all those years getting matching 401k contributions to build another nest egg. You can accrue massive amounts of paid vacation time for sticking with the same employer. You have insanely good benefits, especially medical if you plan on having kids.

What's hilarious is that people shit on those kinds of jobs as inferior things you would do while you beat your way through school, but the total compensation over an entire career as a cashier is on par with what a bachelor's degree in most fields will get once you factor in the costs of going to school and not generating a real income those four years. But that works out great for us career people: industry turnover is so high that 5 or so years means enough seniority for a cashier in a busy store (like a Kroger) to more or less pick their own schedule.