PHILADELPHIA -- On the first payday of the rest of his life, Kevin Gallagher, age 19, high school graduate, apprentice carpenter, takes home a check of $232.50.

"Taxes," he says, folding the check into the pocket of his well-worn jeans. "Taxes will kill me."

Welcome to the work world, kid. While the rest of his friends from the class of 1994 at Archbishop Ryan High School in northeast Philadelphia are going to college, Kevin Gallagher is going to work.

He is learning a trade passed down from his father and making his way into the job market without a college degree. He's hauling lumber, fetching coffee, banging nails and paying his dues in a four-year quest to become a unionized journeyman carpenter.

And he's not alone.

As late summer falls, much of America turns its attention to the nearly 1.5 million teen-agers bound to college for the first time. These are freshmen who load their hopes, CD players and much of their parents' bank accounts into cars, setting off on educational paths that many hope will lead to successful careers.

But there are nearly 900,000 others from America's high school Class of 1994 -- about 38 percent -- who are skipping college and going straight into the work force. Many of them are unknowingly at economic risk, courting what statistics show to be a downbeat work-life that could lead to a series of dead-end jobs and shrinking opportunities.

Yet those like Kevin Gallagher are willing to play the odds, confident that they have the skills necessary to make a living in America.

"College is not for me," he says. "I've always wanted to be a carpenter."

He likes to build things. He likes to work with his hands.

"The best part," he says, "is seeing what you've worked on completed."

The yearning for hard work, Kevin Gallagher says, is buried somewhere in his genes. The Gallagher family provides a snapshot of the American dream, where for two generations sweat and persistence have equaled success.

But the third generation, Kevin's generation, finds itself facing an altered American economic landscape. It's a place where even a college education is no guarantee of future success.

Kevin's grandfather, John Patrick Gallagher, born in Ireland in 1902, landed in America in 1918 and worked 40 years in the shipping department for General Electric. Even into his 80s, John Patrick would haul bricks up a ladder.

"He was my idol," Kevin says. "He was always my hero."

Kevin's father, John, went straight from high school into the Marine Corps and then into the carpenters union. For 26 years, John Gallagher has helped build many of the high-rises that dominate the Philadelphia skyline. John, 47, and his wife, Veronica, 45, have also carved out a solid middle-class life, raising a family in a well-kept split-level home in the Bustleton section of northeast Philadelphia.

But as they sit at their kitchen table, the Gallaghers worry about ++ the future of their sons: John, 24, Brian, 22, and Kevin.

"I don't think Americans realize how much the country has changed until they see their children go out in the work force, and there is nothing there for them," the father says.

John, the eldest son, has attended community college but is only now enrolled in a registered nursing program. Brian is a senior at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He will graduate next spring with a degree in accounting and $11,000 in student loans.

"Right now, Kevin's job prospects are better than mine," Brian says. "He has a job."

Two jobs one with benefits

Actually, Kevin has two jobs: working days as a carpenter's apprentice and three nights a week as a stock clerk at Super Fresh. The grocery store job might be mind-numbing, but the pay is good -- $10 an hour -- and the benefits include health insurance.

At 6 feet 1, 185 pounds, Kevin is lean and limber, able to shrug off the aches and pains of a long, long workday. For nearly four years, Kevin harbored the idea that he would not go to college. It was only when he decided against taking the Scholastic Assessment Test that his friends realized how serious he was about pursuing a career as a carpenter. At a graduation party, they gave him gifts he might be able to use for a lifetime of work: a hammer and screwdriver.

Kevin's childhood ended when he graduated from high school )) on June 6 and told his father that he really, really wasn't interested in going to college. A month later, he passed the carpenters exam and was in the apprentice program.

"Kevin told me it would be a waste of time for him to go to college, and he told me not to waste the money" his father recalls. "I always wanted to show my sons that there were many things they could do, many ways for them to go. I wanted to show them all what was out there. College. Working.

"I'm very happy that Kevin made his own decision."

Up before dawn

Kevin is a workingman now, still living at home, up before dawn, sometimes home after midnight. He has a car, but he can't drive it because he is unable to meet a staggering $5,000-a-year insurance payment. So he hitches rides with his father to work, takes the bus home, and often walks a mile to and from the grocery store. Meanwhile, his friends are still students, encountering the first gridlock of registering for classes, who have gone off to college, to places like Penn State and Kutztown University.

"A lot of my friends think they'll have high-paying jobs when they get out of school," he says. "They're in it for the money. I hope the best for them."

He admits that he has a trace of jealousy for the lives his friends will lead in college. Sure, he'll visit them weekends, but already he has detected a growing gap between himself and some of his friends, even though school has barely started.

"Some of them are acting like they're better than I am," he says. "It doesn't really bother me. But I try to pump myself up a little more, and tell them that I'll do better than they will, that I've got a job and they don't. But really, around now, all of us are wondering, 'What are we go ing to do with our lives?' "

Now, instead of attending classes with friends, he's associating with co-workers, many of whom are decades older than he is.

"It's a different atmosphere," he says. "Different talk. They talk about bills, about paying for their homes and their cars."

The carpenters who have met Kevin on his first job at Frankford Hospital also offer him advice that can be whittled down to four words: Go to college, kid.

"I've spent 30 years in this business, and I'm sorry that I didn't go to college," says John Wynne, 50, who shows Kevin how to quickly put up drywall around a heating duct.

"We torment Kevin about college because this is not an easy life, especially with the way the economy is today," he adds.

There are 7,000 union carpenters in the Philadelphia area, zTC subject to the economic and seasonal battering. During the past winter's brutal weather, nearly half the force was temporarily laid off. The work can be dangerous, too. When Kevin's father was an apprentice, he fell off a roof, tumbled three stories and smashed into a concrete block. The accident left him with a broken back and no pay for six months.

"For the past four years, I've missed four months of work," says Scott Conover, 26, of Washington Township, N.J. "This kind of work runs you into the ground. It used to be a brotherhood. Now, it's every man for himself."

Mr. Conover says he looks at Kevin and sees himself eight years ago -- young, eager, out of high school, straight into the work force. He has regrets.

"There's nothing wrong with physical work," Mr. Conover says. "But if you went to college, you wouldn't be out here busting your chops. Kevin should go back to school. If he waits four or five more years, he's almost hooked, hooked for the money.

"But, you know, there are a lot of owners of companies who once had carpenters belts around their waists."

The education experts say that Kevin should heed the advice of this chorus of carpenters. Maybe he doesn't need to go to college now, they say, but he should consider it in the future. To compete in the work force of the next century, he will need to continually update his skills. And that means he will need to take some college-level courses, perhaps in business or mathematics.

In many ways, though, Kevin Gallagher presents a textbook case of how to enter the work force from high school. His academic credentials -- a C average in a college-preparatory program -- are solid. At Archbishop Ryan, the nation's second-largest Catholic high school, he was well-schooled in the rigors of trigonometry, algebra and geometry, the mathematical building blocks of carpentry. He is also in an apprentice program that will provide him with training that will lead to a $20-an-hour job within four years.

Dead-end jobs

But in America, Kevin Gallagher is the exception. All too often, highschool graduates are ill-prepared to enter the marketplace.

"The greatest difficulty of kids who move from high school to work is they tend to get dead-end jobs," says Harold Howe II, former senior lecturer in education at Harvard. "These kids are in a secondary labor market. It may be a legitimate place to start, but few of the kids are able to move ahead."

On average, those workers with only a high school diploma earn nearly 50 percent less than those who hold an undergraduate college degree. The more education the worker receives, the greater the average pay.

But the pay disparity doesn't mean that a worker bearing only a high school diploma can't succeed in the marketplace.

Stronger vocational programs

In Maryland and some other states, vocational programs are being beefed up, with students now required to take higher-level academic courses in order to receive a high school diploma. Maryland has also instituted a tech-prep program, melding technical and academic studies in high school and community college.

The Educational Testing Service has also instituted a Work-Link program in two states, where employers can go on-line to peruse the academic credentials and work experience of high school students headed straight into the labor market.

"We don't want to suggest that this is the best path into the work-life," says George Elford, the program's creator. "But this gives kids something to build on while in high school."

Others say the country must do more with this pool of workers, from bolstering technical schools to providing more widespread apprentice programs. But before any changes can be implemented, they say, America must once again honor those who work with their hands.

"Does everyone have to go sit in a classroom and learn Chaucer? Or do we need to provide and honor different forms of learning that blend the mind with the hand?" says Joan Wills of the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington.

Looking ahead hopeful

For Kevin Gallagher, the son of a carpenter, the grandson of a hard-working Irish immigrant, there is a nobility, a calling in making something with his hands. He is learning, trying to master a craft, trying to save his money to get car insurance, but even more, saving for the day when he can own a home.

In his first week on the job, he built a drop ceiling in a hospital basement, and for days after, kept going downstairs to see what he had completed. But he had little time to stand around. There was lumber to lift and coffee to fetch and another job to go to.

"I learned so much this week," he says, a grin breaking across his face.

Two hours later, he was at Super Fresh, stacking cartons of milk, beginning a seven-hour shift that would end at midnight and leave him little time to sleep.

The second workweek of the rest of his life was due to start before the next dawn.

:. He was back on the job at 6 a.m. -- sharp.