Thousands of high-paying blue-collar jobs that don’t require a college degree sit empty because too many people think college is necessary, according to the Hechinger Report.

“While a shortage of workers pushes wages higher in the skilled trades, the financial return from a bachelor’s degree is softening, even as the price, and the average debt into which it plunges students, remain high,” the higher education news outlet reported.

So many high school graduates have been coached and primed to get a bachelor’s that highly paid jobs requiring less expensive and time-consuming training are not being filled. This “poses a real threat to the economy,” according to the news outlet.