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Once upon a time almost every high school had a shop program that would expose kids to the various trades. And vo-tech high schools designed to begin their training so they could apprentice upon graduation. Those have been dropped in most places in favor of "everyone should go to college."
I think the value of apprenticeships varies dramatically from location to location as well. I am in IL now and here I will have skilled tradespeople come out with apprentices regularly. I know the local pipefitters union has posted signs as well that they were training new folks. This is hard work, but pipefitters do make a decent salary. When I was in Florida, I saw none of that. I remember speaking to someone in FL who told me her brother was wanting to go to a vo-tech program. It was after high school, but apparently it was very popular and could take a year or two to get in. It seems like the demand for people to learn is popular, but there isn’t always the option.
The issue with a lot of these skilled trades is that you often have to get in at a fairly young age because they can be hard on your body. Getting in at age 40 may not be practical if you have kids and are not in great shape.
Those with degrees are probably doing white collar jobs for corporations that can be done remotely. Those without degrees are probably doing in person jobs for small companies that were shut down during covid.
I think the idea of getting a degree without knowing what you plan to do with it might not make sense anymore due to the high cost of getting a degree. When I went to college I was paying $300 a year tuition at a public university. When I graduated I wound up working at a liquor store. But I didn't have student loans the size of a house mortgage to worry about.
The degree finally had some use when I applied to work for major corporations. It apparently ticked off some HR boxes that got me in the door. Except for those with a specific career in mind, doctor, engineer, nurse, lawyer, teacher, most of us in liberal arts had no clue what we would do once we graduated. It reminds me of the scene in the movie "The Graduate" where Dustin Hoffman is at a party and older men are pitching career ideas at him like go into insurance, go into plastics. Sometimes you have a plan only to have that plan fail, so at that point you have no plan.
Then after graduating there was a couple of years of the typical catch 22 of not being able to get hired for a good job with no experience and not being able to get experience without being hired. Eventually, with enough perseverance you learn how to navigate the rapids and get your foot in the door somewhere.
But with that same perseverance you can get your foot in the door without a degree as well, in civil service like fireman, parks dept., sanitation, clerical positions, or in sales, or starting off in the trades as a helper in construction or hvac or electrician or plumber, or working for a utility in the field laying cable, or reading meters, or in customer service, or in technical fields in the health profession like an xray tech or phlebotomist. You just have to develop a plan. All of these jobs can lead to good salaries and advancement in the field, like foreman or supervisor or lead mechanic, where the new guys do the grunt work.
As a college graduate I had no plan because college was only about college and nothing else. Actually while in school I had couple of plans that failed, so by the time I finished school I was adrift and on my own.
...The days of large steel mills and coal mines are gone and they have not been replaced.
They are gone because our then-elected representatives WANTED them gone, and enacted laws and regulations aimed at forcing them offshore.
For them, it was "Mission Accomplished."
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Originally Posted by jtab4994
...There were people who recently tried to promote the idea of bringing manufacturing jobs back from overseas, including pharmaceutical manufacturing jobs. Not sure what happened to them or why it's not being talked about much these days.
International site selection is a complex decision. I was involved in it in the semiconductor manufacturing business. The knee-jerk reaction of many people who are not involved in this is "US labor is too expensive." The semiconductor manufacturing business doesn't care about labor rates for semiconductor wafer fabrication factories called "Fabs." The cost of labor is in the noise - it isn't even a rounding error.
In most other countries, the prospect of a high tech wafer fab (a $12 Billion investment) is met with open arms. Those countries realize that a high tech waver fab can be a springboard to economic development. In contrast, in the US, elected leaders view it as a source of tax revenue if allowed to be built, but they do everything in their power to prevent it from being built in the first place, throwing up all manner of roadblock.
Yes, even when a degree is not a formal requirement for a job, those with a degree are more likely to be hired. Even with a generic degree such as Liberal Arts, a degree demonstrates discipline, reliability, that the person can stick with challenging tasks and that they have some critical thinking skills. Those without the skills or degree are still out of work because they do not want to work in those jobs for which they are qualified, such as retail and fast food, especially if they can make more on unemployment . . .or disability.
Exactly what I say, why work when they can be on unemployment or welfare, maybe even both due to COVID. There's jobs out there at Walmart and Sam's club, they need personal shoppers
Quote:
Originally Posted by jtab4994
But what do you do with people who are really only suited to flipping burgers or working in a factory? What good would college, or should I say "an attempt at college", do them?
I shopped for sneakers this past weekend. I could have bought a pair at $55-$70 made in Indonesia or Vietnam but in the end I plunked down $170 for a pair made in U.S.A. That may be a quixotic waste of a hundred bucks but at least I'm trying to help.
I am acquainted with Appalachia and there are good paying jobs for HVAC repair & maintenance, auto mechanics, heavy equipment operators, and truck drivers. The days of large steel mills and coal mines are gone and they have not been replaced. "Learning to code" or going to college is not the answer for people who 100 years ago would have worked in a coal mine or a blouse factory. There were people who recently tried to promote the idea of bringing manufacturing jobs back from overseas, including pharmaceutical manufacturing jobs. Not sure what happened to them or why it's not being talked about much these days.
Totally agree, not everyone needs to go to college or wants to go. They have to get off of their a$$es and find what they're qualified for. DirecTV used to train when my son started there in 2006, I wonder if they still do that. He's with Comcast now. With DTV about 7 years
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Originally Posted by jtab4994
We had a burner service tech come out about 2 years ago. I internally rolled my eyes when this young kid showed up, but it turned out he really knew what he was doing, was very articulate and very thorough in explaining everything to me. I asked where he learned his trade, and he said he went to our local Vo-Tech. I realized that was my tax money being well spent.
Are school de-emphasizing Vo-Tech in favor of the "everybody has to go to college"? Is school administrator performance based on how many kids get accepted at community or state college?
Many of the doofus parents are single mothers who have all they can do to hold down a job and keep the kids in school, let alone guide them to a career or to higher education.
I don't know about that. You're asking a guy (let's face it, it's mostly guys) to sit out 2-4 years of earning a living while he takes enrichment classes at college. I do admit I don't know what classes are mandatory at community college for someone who's on a carpentry career path. But my own son, who was a Math major at a state college on a 4-year scholarship nearly wrecked his GPA by purposely neglecting an Art History class that was a mandatory elective. I can picture 19 year old blue collar guys not really paying much attention to courses like that.
There is a national crisis among young people in America. Many of them cannot hope to pay back the student loans they took on for college. I think it's high time we turned the focus to non-college track individuals and help them out. They are the ones who will end up addicted to opioids and on permanent disability after the college kids get bailed out by the government.
I totally agree. Enough about everyone deserves college or they have to go to college. Look at $1.57 trillion of dollars people are in debt from student loans. which continues to grow daily due to COVID and people not paying on those loans. They're buying houses with their loan money because even if COVID didn't affect them, they still don't have to pay, so bought a house.
There's a thread in current events where a woman had like 26 loans totaling $90,000. How in the world did she even qualify for that much of student loans to get 2 degrees that she doesn't use because she's disabled, has custody of her grandson who had autism. She was able to declare them in bankruptcy court so she didn't have to pay it.
My high school in NJ started in 8th grade. We had to take every shop they had in the 8th grade. I can't recall if a shop was required every year. I learned wood shop, printing, sewing, cooking.
I then went to vo-tech for beauty culture in 11th and 12th grade on the tax payers because I couldn't afford college, while I did get my cosmetology license, worked in a few shops for 4 years, I had a car accident that ruined my left shoulder and my hair career. I went back to my dad's gas station to pump gas until I moved away at 28.
I worked at a plant grower who taught me how to drive a fork lift. Fork lift drivers get decent money.
I also did not get a ton out of undergrad that ended up applying to my career. What I did get was time and a piece of paper that qualified me for jobs I would not have otherwise been qualified. Those jobs led to other jobs, which eventually landed me back in school. I got TON out of graduate business school. Well worth the time, effort, and money and my MBA cost over $200,000. It paid for itself almost immediately.
College is like many other things in life: you get out of it what you put into it. The caveat is to make sure you are putting your effort into something useful.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 07-25-2021 at 01:36 PM..
I learned a lot in college, but it wasn't from classes or teachers or the curriculum. I was a liberal arts student and majored in Political Science and English Literature. A simple test is that I can't remember any of what I learned in the classroom. So what did I learn?
1. I learned how to water ski and also got a life guard certificate in two of my PE classes. I never did water ski again but the certificate allowed me to be a camp counselor in the summer after my senior year.
2. I learned how to cram a whole semester's worth of learning into a couple of days before mid terms and finals and fake my way through the midterm and final exams by memorizing the table of contents of the text book and peppering my essay answers with reference to the various chapter headings. This was a valuable skill in the corporate world, working under extreme time pressure and faking it.
3. I learned how to work my way through college with part time work during the year and full time work in the summer. A good introduction to the world of work and paying my own way.
4. I rowed crew and fenced for a year each. Crew taught me that when your brain says I can't go on, I'm going to die, the heart says I'd rather die than quit and you break through that wall and you don't die.
5. I learned about the girls I dated. I learned I had very little in common with coeds, but a lot in common with girls who didn't go to college and worked as secretaries and office workers.
6. I learned to be a heavy drinker and hold my liquor. Another valuable skill in the corporate world.
7. I learned the faculty and administration could care less whether you lived or died, and that once you graduated you were totally on your own to figure out the next step.
8. I learned to stick with it and not quit regardless of the hardships, absurdities, and setbacks. Another extremely valuable skill in the corporate world.
In the one year of law school I completed. I learned I didn't want to be a lawyer so I never returned for the second year.
In obtaining my MBA I learned about probability and statistics, which was valuable in understanding a wide array of issues for the rest of my life. Probably the only subject in all of my education that stuck with me. My company paid for my MBA through tuition reimbursement. They paid for tuition as long as you got a C or better in the class. I only paid for books, and for two grad school courses I got a D and an F in. I retook those classes in my last semester and got A's in both classes (Calculus and Finance).
Finances were never a problem. I attended state schools for undergraduate and law school, back in the '60's and 1970 when tuition was low enough that you could earn your way through school by working. (In the 50 years since, tuition has increased 40 to 50 times, while salaries and most other things have only gone up 10 times.)
I lived at home for the first two years of undergrad, and paid for my own apartments near campus for my last two years of undergrad and my year of law school. I took out student loans but used them for living expenses rather than tuition. My total school loan debt was less than $8K for undergrad, law school and grad school combined. I paid all of them off within a few years after completing grad school.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 07-25-2021 at 01:37 PM..
There's sometimes more to it than labor costs. Back in 2006 I worked for 6 months as an IT contractor for a major pharma company. I monitored and maintained servers that did about a million dollars an hour in online business to business wholesale purchases. We had a small group, less than a dozen people who worked 24x7x365. Near the end of the contract I helped in setting up our function in India, where the job was scheduled to be shipped when they were fully trained and ready to take it.
I figured the total cost of maintaining our group and the equipment in our data center was about $30 million a year, a drop in the bucket, so I wondered why the job was shipped overseas. Later I found the pharma company entered into a deal with an Indian company to manufacture pharmaceuticals in India. So I believe the move was a quid pro quo, giving the Indians a data center and a few IT jobs, in exchange for allowing the pharma company to make a greater profit on the pharmaceuticals manufactured in India rather than in the US.
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Originally Posted by WRM20
Why does Nike have factories in China, Viet Nam, and other developing countries? Because the labor costs are 25% or less of what they are here in the US. It's not just factory work that's moved overseas. I know of Fortune 500 companies that have very few back room employees (accountants, IT, etc) here in the US. Why would you pay an American $100k per year when you can hire an equally qualified college graduate for 25 to 30% of that in South America, Central Europe, or Asia?
... The caveat is to make sure you are putting your effort into something useful.
One of high school pals went to the Univ of PA in Phila where he achieved a PhD in Classical Archaeology; not many jobs for that degree but he could tell you all about ancient coins in between classes at his job with the city of Baltimore teaching Latin to gifted students.
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Why does Nike have factories in China, Viet Nam, and other developing countries? Because the labor costs are 25% or less of what they are here in the US. It's not just factory work that's moved overseas. I know of Fortune 500 companies that have very few back room employees (accountants, IT, etc) here in the US. Why would you pay an American $100k per year when you can hire an equally qualified college graduate for 25 to 30% of that in South America, Central Europe, or Asia?
Well, the employers don't.
But some people believe these jobs should be reserved for Americans, foreigners are stealing jobs, the corporations shouldn't be allowed to outsource jobs...and they also believe in free market, deregulation, among other things. Familiar talking points? It's not relevant with the thread though, but people tend to bring it up whenever they see the chance.
I believe college education in general has value, a lot of jobs need college educated workforce, but it doesn't mean everyone who goes to college is guaranteed monetary return. Personally I learned something in college, but I know people who didn't learn anything and they blame college education.
I also believe college isn't for everyone.
America isn't the only place on earth where there are colleges and universities. Jobs in accounting, IT, etc as you mentioned are outsourced to college educated people in third world countries. Simply because college education is dirt cheap in China, India and Romania doesn't mean people educated there cannot do the job. So, paying big bucks for higher education doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a lucrative career.
As a society, making college education affordable to young people is critical.
As an individual, going to college is like investing in the stock market, some people win some people lose. Personally I'd suggest most people getting college education as cheap as possible, taking courses at cc in the first two years, transferring to a state university, that sort of thing.
At the other end of the spectrum, high achievers or very affluent people don't need to worry about money by going to Stanford, that's a whole different story and I'm sure they won't whine about "the value of college education".
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It's not relevant with the thread though, but people tend to bring it up whenever they see the chance.
