The trades are starting to gain appeal right now because people have put more emphasis on getting a college degree in the past decade or so. That leaves fewer people able to take on trade work, which pushes for higher incomes and better jobs to the people who can. At the same time, college educated people are finding it increasingly difficult to find meaningful employment.
Of course, if people follow Rowe's track in the future, it will swing back the other way again soon enough. That is why smart investors go to where nobody is showing interest.
You can see here[1] that this decade has brought on a distinct change in unemployment rates for college graduates. The last four years averaged an entire percentage point higher than the highest rate ever seen before. Since we both seem to agree that unemployment rates are a reasonable metric for determining the difficulty of finding work, it seems pretty clear that it is more difficult now as a college graduate than it once was.
[1] http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/screen-shot-2013-0...
How do you propose we fix things that break and build new things without any trade jobs? Given the prices that plumbers charge for example, it appears that it is both lucrative and quite needed (especially since many people today would have trouble changing a tire let alone replacing a burst pipe.)
Unless you are unwilling or unable to go to college, the numbers indicate that, on average, you will have much lower unemployment and a substantially higher lifetime income.