A 24-year-old CEO is rethinking and reshaping the hiring landscape – and America’s career pipeline – by taking an outspoken stance on college degrees and an aging workforce.
“Gen Z right now, you have a lot of power. All the corporations in America are trying to cater to you,” Sotira co-founder and CEO Amrita Bhasin told Fox News Digital.
“They’re thinking about: how do we cater towards the next generation? So use that power in ways that are valuable for us and for society.”
Bhasin, who leads an award-winning logistics and artificial intelligence (AI) startup company, warns that the U.S. is “not going to look the same way it will in a decade” if more young people don’t bypass traditional college degrees and pivot to reliable skilled trades.
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U.S. Census Bureau data indicates that the U.S. population is older today than it’s ever been, and the number of Americans aged 65 and older is projected to increase from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050.
Additionally, an estimated 4.18 million Americans will reach retirement age this year, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects about 192 million job openings over the next decade as total employment is predicted to grow just 0.4% annually.
“I’ve started a company in an industry that… is very old-school. [The] supply chain is also extremely ripe for automation. It needs young people,” Bhasin said. “As the older generation ages out, a lot of them express these fears to me. They’re saying, ‘My kids don’t wanna go into this industry,’ or, ‘I don’t want my kids to go into supply chain [careers]. I want my kids to go to college in a big city and get a job in finance.’ And they don’t have anyone to pass their businesses down to. And this is a huge problem, right? It’s a generational problem.”
“College has become so expensive and it’s not even just tuition, it’s the rents in all of these cities,” she added, “your room and board… it was more than the cost of the tuition. We see that because of a variety of reasons: recessions, nearshoring, offshoring, layoffs due to AI, efficiencies now, a lot of people are graduating, and they just don’t have jobs.”
That’s why Sotira has taken initiative in hiring candidates without college degrees, to “train and prepare that workforce for industries where their perspective is needed and where they’re able to make an honest living,” according to its Gen Z CEO.
“We do have folks working [for] us who don’t have degrees or who are dropouts. We’re in the process of hiring more people, and for me, having a college degree is not a requisite to work at a startup,” Bhasin noted.
BLS data also indicates that the majority of trade workers do not have Bachelor’s degrees, and annual wages in 2024 sat at a median of $61,000.
As of June 2025, more than 1 million trade jobs remain unfilled in the U.S., driven by an aging and retiring workforce as well as a societal bias toward college degrees, according to Forbes.
When it comes to the prestige gap between white-collar and blue-collar work, Bhasin argues it’s finally starting to close, driven by skepticism around the long-term value of traditional, four-year degrees.
“I think that there’s a lot more awareness now,” she said. “There’s a lot of layoffs in the white-collar space. In the so-called blue-collar space, we see that a lot of these jobs will still exist. They will still be important. Like, AI cannot do your HVAC job.”
“A lot of these are important practices that we need to, as consumers, pay for recurrently and need within our society… blue-collar industries have a really strong stickiness… And so I think everyone of every kind of economic strata now is kind of seeing the value of these jobs,” Bhasin continued.
“You can get any job that you want with any degree… People message me with this question on LinkedIn, they email me, they ask me in person… ‘What degree do I need to get? What major should I major in in order to get x, y, z job?’ And it just doesn’t matter… What your passion is should always be what you pursue.”
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