Trade schools may have higher up-front costs than four-year schools, but offer a more specific career focus that can lead to gainful employment quickly.
Words like paying, gainful, remunerative, and lucrative are all used to describe ways to bring home the bacon, but each term suggests a different amount of bacon being brought in.
A principal argument for shorter hours that gained prominence during the 1930s was the notion that scarce opportunities for gainful employment ought to be shared among the largest possible number of workers.