5 ms·

I have said it a million times before and I will say it as long as necessary to fix our employment-education conundrum: you do not learn how to work by sitting

I have said it a million times before and I will say it as long as necessary to fix our employment-education conundrum: you do not learn how to work by sitting in class, you learn to work by going to work. We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force. There is a place for higher education - I must say so, for it is my employer - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class. My grandfather was a combat engineer in WWII and quit his unenthusiastic GI Bill college career to start a successful restaurant instead. College doesn't work for everybody - working does.

ci5er 11y ago
> We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force. Public assistance and loan guarantees is how we got outrageously expensive college programs in the first place. Any system will suck up any free floating dollar made available to it.
quaffapint 11y ago
The whole idea of you need to be well-rounded and take those $$ general ed courses is such a money grab. You want people to be able to speak, so let them take speech courses. I'm all for apprenticeships - you learn by doing - but will there be enough companies willing to participate?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Essentially it's a more integrated earned-income tax credit, where the government pays for X% of the employee's wages. All sorts of businesses could take advantage of this, from scaling startups who can't afford to be wrong about their hires as they grow rapidly, to restaurants that experience high turnover among line chefs and have to train new cooks from scratch.
tosseraccount 11y ago
Public subsidized? Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.
- cesarbs 11y ago
  > Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Are you kidding? Almost every public school I know of has to run fundraisers because government funding is not enough to last through the school year.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    Cut down on administration costs.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      I work in higher Ed as an app developer with a focus on standardizing web apps across the college and it is very very hard to get the disparate forces within to work together. My parents have been academics their entire careers and have told me throughout my childhood the very same thing. Trust me when I say that it is much more complicated than you think. There is no "cut down on administrative costs" magic wand. We have people paid to do things for a reason.
      - x0x0 11y ago
        No, no we don't. Administration spending has massively increased over the last 30 years. Spending on faculty that does teaching hasn't. Somehow we managed to run colleges 30 years ago w/ half the administration.
        rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        Students want more than they did before. More counseling, more recreational activities, better housing. There are still a lot of other gaps too that students are demanding to be filled, like workers compensation for graduate students who run labs and get injured when things explode in their face. Universities also partake in expensive undertakings like performing research and hosting conferences and the like, the cost of which tend to increase more than the price of bread and gas over time. I think people see higher education as a huge bill that just has to be cut because it's big. It is much more complex than people think. I have been a part of this system literally my entire life, starting from my birth while my mother was in law school. If you have suggestions on how to reduce the cost of higher education, I am all ears. Just know that people who come in and think they can run it "like a business" are a laughingstock from California to Cambridge.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Jormundir 11y ago
Apprenticeships aren't a good answer either, though. They create too much of a caste system, and are very restricting. What if at 18 I don't actually know what I want to do? If I join an apprenticeship I'm learning one thing. What if I don't like that one thing? What if I get 5 years into an apprenticeship and realize I can't get to the level I want to be at? I have to start over from zero in another field? I don't like the college system we have now, but switching to the extreme of apprenticeship is definitely not a good answer. Right now I'm an engineer, but with my rounded education, if I don't like it, I can go and switch to a myriad of other fields that I'm educated enough for. The world already had apprenticeship systems, and it's not some magical system we forgot about. Apprenticeships lead to weird power dynamics that aren't very good for the individual, such as being indentured to your employer for providing the training. The main problem I see with our education system is that it's inefficient, and growing too large and slow to keep up with modern needs. This doesn't mean a well-rounded education is a problem though.
- justizin 11y ago
  apprenticeship via a union is class conscious, organized labor in software engineering would also help us to be a part of opposing our employers' doing things that harm the community / world, even if unintended consequences, and connect us with workers in other industries. why do i feel a class separation from a BART maintenance worker? because they are organized and conscious and probably see us, fairly rightfully, as bougie.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Many of the reasons you point to are the result of guilds, which were very territorial about their workers and markets. What I am proposing is for apprenticeships to be democratized by being made available for any employer willing to accept the wage subsidy. So if you decide after 5 years that engineering sucks, you can always find an apprenticeship elsewhere (assuming your former employer doesn't give you a dreadful reference)
  - Jormundir 11y ago
    This is an interesting topic to brew on. There would certainly be a lot of problems that would be tough to address using apprenticeship, but it's not like our current education system is lacking in problems. I wonder, though, how apprentices would fair in competition with people having general education and degree focus. Fields require skills to change over time, and quite quickly now. I wonder if an apprentice would be stronger in the short-term and outpaced in the long-term. Also, where does the wage subsidy you talk about come from? Would people be paying for their own apprenticeships? The government paying for some like public institutions?
Silfen 11y ago
I agree with the thrust of your argument. Pretty much no one gets job training from university, they get it when they start actually working. There is a big problem, however, and it's only going to get worse. If all your training is in a specific industry, what happens when that job gets outsourced or automated away? I'm not sure I completely buy it, but there is a case to be made for generalist education as preparation for a changing world.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Here's how I see it: people should be guaranteed apprenticeships regardless of the job market or results of automation. However I also think that some portion of their income should be accrued into a college-only account, should they choose to expand their general education. This is just my opinion and I would welcome responses.
- xlm1717 11y ago
  I would say that's a risk that someone who goes through specialist training should factor into their life plans.
jasode 11y ago
>We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force. There is a place for higher education - [...] - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class. Unfortunately, your apprenticeship idea does not address a key driver of why college institutions act as gatekeepers of desirable employers. It's not so much the "training" but more of the "signaling".[1] As a thought experiment, let's pretend that the USA de-emphasizes college and promotes apprenticeships. The USA has roughly 3 million high school graduates every year. It's safe to say that most of them are not really interested in college purely for the "skills", or "well-rounded education" including Shakespeare and Calculus III. They'd rather just earn a middle-income salary right away and college is just that "hoop to jump through" to make it happen. Well, businesses like Google, Ford Motor, Goldman Sachs, etc are not going to be interested in dealing directly with a vast sea of undifferentiated high school graduates to offer internships. They need a pre-selection process. Therefore, a new "clearinghouse" institution would naturally emerge in the marketplace to "evaluate" (test) and "filter" (rank) these hopeful apprentices. (Perhaps Donald Trump could create a spinoff business to do just that.) Once the clearinghouse is in place, the hopeful candidates will want to demonstrate "talent/smarts/whatever" so they get the best internship offers. That will then lead to tutoring, coaching, preparation, etc and all those services cost money. Because of how humans work, we'd just be replacing variable $FILTER="college" with $FILTER="clearinghouse+coaching". That new model may cost less overall to society because C+C doesn't spend 4 months dissecting Shakespeare but let's not kid ourselves that this new model is "more fair". A future complaint would be, "I took out a $20k to pay for clearinghouse coaching but instead of landing a coveted apprenticeship slot at Google Inc, I'm a barista at Starbucks. It sucks because The Whole Point of the apprenticeship system is to TRAIN me!" You see, the core problem remains because companies don't want to "waste internship training" on poor candidates. Everybody wants the best of the best and apprenticeships don't fundamentally change that human desire. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

ci5er 11y ago

> We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force. Public assistance and loan guarantees is how we got outrageously expensive college programs in the first place. Any system will suck up any free floating dollar made available to it.

quaffapint 11y ago

The whole idea of you need to be well-rounded and take those $$ general ed courses is such a money grab. You want people to be able to speak, so let them take speech courses. I'm all for apprenticeships - you learn by doing - but will there be enough companies willing to participate?

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Essentially it's a more integrated earned-income tax credit, where the government pays for X% of the employee's wages. All sorts of businesses could take advantage of this, from scaling startups who can't afford to be wrong about their hires as they grow rapidly, to restaurants that experience high turnover among line chefs and have to train new cooks from scratch.

tosseraccount 11y ago

Public subsidized? Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.

cesarbs 11y ago
> Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Are you kidding? Almost every public school I know of has to run fundraisers because government funding is not enough to last through the school year.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Cut down on administration costs.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    I work in higher Ed as an app developer with a focus on standardizing web apps across the college and it is very very hard to get the disparate forces within to work together. My parents have been academics their entire careers and have told me throughout my childhood the very same thing. Trust me when I say that it is much more complicated than you think. There is no "cut down on administrative costs" magic wand. We have people paid to do things for a reason.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      No, no we don't. Administration spending has massively increased over the last 30 years. Spending on faculty that does teaching hasn't. Somehow we managed to run colleges 30 years ago w/ half the administration.
      - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        Students want more than they did before. More counseling, more recreational activities, better housing. There are still a lot of other gaps too that students are demanding to be filled, like workers compensation for graduate students who run labs and get injured when things explode in their face. Universities also partake in expensive undertakings like performing research and hosting conferences and the like, the cost of which tend to increase more than the price of bread and gas over time. I think people see higher education as a huge bill that just has to be cut because it's big. It is much more complex than people think. I have been a part of this system literally my entire life, starting from my birth while my mother was in law school. If you have suggestions on how to reduce the cost of higher education, I am all ears. Just know that people who come in and think they can run it "like a business" are a laughingstock from California to Cambridge.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Jormundir 11y ago

Apprenticeships aren't a good answer either, though. They create too much of a caste system, and are very restricting. What if at 18 I don't actually know what I want to do? If I join an apprenticeship I'm learning one thing. What if I don't like that one thing? What if I get 5 years into an apprenticeship and realize I can't get to the level I want to be at? I have to start over from zero in another field? I don't like the college system we have now, but switching to the extreme of apprenticeship is definitely not a good answer. Right now I'm an engineer, but with my rounded education, if I don't like it, I can go and switch to a myriad of other fields that I'm educated enough for. The world already had apprenticeship systems, and it's not some magical system we forgot about. Apprenticeships lead to weird power dynamics that aren't very good for the individual, such as being indentured to your employer for providing the training. The main problem I see with our education system is that it's inefficient, and growing too large and slow to keep up with modern needs. This doesn't mean a well-rounded education is a problem though.

justizin 11y ago
apprenticeship via a union is class conscious, organized labor in software engineering would also help us to be a part of opposing our employers' doing things that harm the community / world, even if unintended consequences, and connect us with workers in other industries. why do i feel a class separation from a BART maintenance worker? because they are organized and conscious and probably see us, fairly rightfully, as bougie.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Many of the reasons you point to are the result of guilds, which were very territorial about their workers and markets. What I am proposing is for apprenticeships to be democratized by being made available for any employer willing to accept the wage subsidy. So if you decide after 5 years that engineering sucks, you can always find an apprenticeship elsewhere (assuming your former employer doesn't give you a dreadful reference)
- Jormundir 11y ago
  This is an interesting topic to brew on. There would certainly be a lot of problems that would be tough to address using apprenticeship, but it's not like our current education system is lacking in problems. I wonder, though, how apprentices would fair in competition with people having general education and degree focus. Fields require skills to change over time, and quite quickly now. I wonder if an apprentice would be stronger in the short-term and outpaced in the long-term. Also, where does the wage subsidy you talk about come from? Would people be paying for their own apprenticeships? The government paying for some like public institutions?

Silfen 11y ago

I agree with the thrust of your argument. Pretty much no one gets job training from university, they get it when they start actually working. There is a big problem, however, and it's only going to get worse. If all your training is in a specific industry, what happens when that job gets outsourced or automated away? I'm not sure I completely buy it, but there is a case to be made for generalist education as preparation for a changing world.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Here's how I see it: people should be guaranteed apprenticeships regardless of the job market or results of automation. However I also think that some portion of their income should be accrued into a college-only account, should they choose to expand their general education. This is just my opinion and I would welcome responses.
xlm1717 11y ago
I would say that's a risk that someone who goes through specialist training should factor into their life plans.

jasode 11y ago

>We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force. There is a place for higher education - [...] - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class. Unfortunately, your apprenticeship idea does not address a key driver of why college institutions act as gatekeepers of desirable employers. It's not so much the "training" but more of the "signaling".[1] As a thought experiment, let's pretend that the USA de-emphasizes college and promotes apprenticeships. The USA has roughly 3 million high school graduates every year. It's safe to say that most of them are not really interested in college purely for the "skills", or "well-rounded education" including Shakespeare and Calculus III. They'd rather just earn a middle-income salary right away and college is just that "hoop to jump through" to make it happen. Well, businesses like Google, Ford Motor, Goldman Sachs, etc are not going to be interested in dealing directly with a vast sea of undifferentiated high school graduates to offer internships. They need a pre-selection process. Therefore, a new "clearinghouse" institution would naturally emerge in the marketplace to "evaluate" (test) and "filter" (rank) these hopeful apprentices. (Perhaps Donald Trump could create a spinoff business to do just that.) Once the clearinghouse is in place, the hopeful candidates will want to demonstrate "talent/smarts/whatever" so they get the best internship offers. That will then lead to tutoring, coaching, preparation, etc and all those services cost money. Because of how humans work, we'd just be replacing variable $FILTER="college" with $FILTER="clearinghouse+coaching". That new model may cost less overall to society because C+C doesn't spend 4 months dissecting Shakespeare but let's not kid ourselves that this new model is "more fair". A future complaint would be, "I took out a $20k to pay for clearinghouse coaching but instead of landing a coveted apprenticeship slot at Google Inc, I'm a barista at Starbucks. It sucks because The Whole Point of the apprenticeship system is to TRAIN me!" You see, the core problem remains because companies don't want to "waste internship training" on poor candidates. Everybody wants the best of the best and apprenticeships don't fundamentally change that human desire. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)