Congratulations to the Class of 2017! By now we have paid our dues over the past four (more or less) years as college students and are entitled to enjoy the comfort of routine. We graze through syllabus week with grace, purchase our textbooks late and admire the sight of underclassmen who haven’t yet caught their balance. But unlike our predecessors of the past eight years, we’re scheduled to enter a job market guided by the Trump administration. 

So what does that mean? According to Trump’s proposed economic policy, he plans to create 25 million jobs over the next decade by pushing businesses to return the jobs they’ve outsourced to foreign countries back to American soil.

In other words, it’s the rise of the blue-collar worker. 

During his campaign, Trump catered to the sentiments of the traditional, working class American and has been delivering on his promise so far. We can expect a revitalization of manufacturing jobs and can already see part of that happening with Amazon announcing a plan to create 100,000 new jobs, Walmart adding 10,000 and GM promising to invest $1 billion in American factories.

While there are many reasons, economic or political, as to why people would want to return manufacturing jobs back into the U.S., the main one is nostalgia. In a speech given in a Pennsylvania recycling facility last year, Trump inadvertently summed up this desire by stating, “America became the world’s dominant economy by becoming the world’s dominant producer.”

However, that doesn’t mean that Americans have stopped producing. We’ve just transitioned in how our labor is expedited from physical to cognitive work — hence the white collar worker. 

For prospective graduates, we’re entering a job market where the technology, administrative and office jobs we’ve been preparing for aren’t our government’s priority. While this can be interpreted as healthy competition for job growth between the blue and white collar workers, I feel unsure of where I stand. 

So what does this mean for the Class of 2017? As of now, not much. The unemployment rate is currently at 4.7 percent, the lowest we’ve seen in the past eight years. Rather, my concern lies in how the increase of manufacturing jobs will impact our current social structure. Since I was little, I’ve been told that a college degree is the key to a better life. What my degree has really given me is a set of marketable skills that elevates my value as a worker. Taking this into consideration, I can begin to understand why I feel uneasy about Trump’s job plan, and there is no indication of expanding these blue collar workers’ skill sets. 

America’s greatest strength doesn’t lie in the quantity of jobs or products produced. Our greatest strength comes from our quality. As Americans, our greatest accomplishment is our creativity and how our workers are more than assembly-line workers. It is true that at some point in American history, a factory job could provide a stable income, which is especially appealing to those without a college degree. But the jobs we bring shouldn’t just be monotonous work for the sake of being monotonous. We, as workers, with or without a degree, should be able to have skills that contribute beyond our workplace and help us grow economically and socially.  

Fernandez is a rhetoric and writing and Spanish senior from Allen. She is a senior columnist.