As I said (and apparently hit a nerve with someone with mod points), the college-bound career path has more upward mobility and the actual labor tasks themselves are typically less awful.
If you're talking about how much the most successful 0.1% can make, then sure. Also not very relevant. Awful is, of course, subjective, but stress sucks. We dramatically underestimate the psychological and physical toll of sustained stress. Still, everyone should individually consider what sort of thing they find awful if they had to do it all the time. If working in hot spaces, or just generally outdoors, is awful to you, an office job recommends itself. But for lots of people, bing stuck ditting at a desk all day is more awful.
That's confirmation bias based on the ones you've observed who have succeeded - most don't.
Well, that's true of many fields. Lawyers have a very high failure rate, but that's very poorly known. Something like 90% of lawyers fail to make it to partner, and have to find a new career after 10 years. But it's still true that most people who become master whatevers have their own business.
Heck, the reason I really like software as a career is it's almost unique in that you can make a lot of money without starting your own business. You're just not going to ever make much money in almost any field if you're working for other people, aside from a pretty short list of technical specialties that very few people can actually do.
It's useless telling people to become a software dev or aeronautical engineer for the upward mobility, as it's the very fact that most people can't do those jobs that makes them pay well at the top end. For almost everything, it's the ability to start your own business that gives the upwards mobility, and that applies equally to tradesmen and dentists.
