In 2023, Lucinda Carroll graduated from Vassar College with a degree in geography. But rather than pursue a job in that field, or in one of the school’s most popular career paths—finance, education, and medicine—she opted to break down 150-pound pig carcasses at Hudson & Charles, a whole-animal butcher in Manhattan’s West Village. Today she’s doing the same at Prospect Butcher Co., in Brooklyn. Her dream is to one day open her own shop.
Carroll is not alone. To the surprise of some pearl-wearing, Yale-marrying Vassar graduates of decades past, starting a professional life with a manual-labor job is becoming increasingly common for recent graduates of liberal-arts schools, including Bard, Barnard, Pitzer, Middlebury, and George Washington University.
