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"Even so, the economic recovery has progressed more slowly for young high school graduates than for those coming out of college." I'd imagine this has somethin

"Even so, the economic recovery has progressed more slowly for young high school graduates than for those coming out of college." I'd imagine this has something to do with the job pool coming out of the recession being heavily seeded with people who already have degrees or degrees plus working experience. Economy takes a nosedive, people get laid off- so when the economy is on the upswing, those with degrees and working experience will be the first to get hired again. I'd be curious about pre-recession numbers of high school grad employment vs. now, post-recession. "He added that vocational schools should no longer be thought of as dead ends, since they can serve as steppingstones to associate degrees at community colleges or to enrollment at four-year institutions." I also think it's a tremendous disadvantage to say "Oh yeah, vocational school can get to you an associate's or a college degree" because at some point we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all. We cannot keep protesting against the tremendous student loan debt burden that's creeping ever bigger on the one hand while touting college degrees as being the ONLY way to get a high-paying "respectable" job. Not to mention there are a shitton of services out there that you don't need a college degree for that are for jobs which are highly skilled and that pay well. There's always going to be a need for welders, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, crane operators, etc etc etc. These are jobs that are absolutely necessary for society to function as a whole- and I think it's really dumb how at some point these jobs were downgraded to being for "dumb people" or people who weren't "rich or smart enough" to go to college.

FussyZeus 10y ago
> I'd be curious about pre-recession numbers of high school grad employment vs. now, post-recession. Don't forget automation, which is behind a lot of the discrepancy between recovered business sales/overall production figures while the jobs numbers lag behind. Automation means fewer employees getting more work done. > I also think it's a tremendous disadvantage to say "Oh yeah, vocational school can get to you an associate's or a college degree" because at some point we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all. This times a THOUSAND, I know plenty of people who make really good money and left their vocational schools with useful, in-demand skills and practically no debt. (I'm a little jealous TBH, though I still prefer my desk job.)
crdoconnor 10y ago
>we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all. We cannot keep protesting against the tremendous student loan debt burden that's creeping ever bigger on the one hand while touting college degrees as being the ONLY way to get a high-paying "respectable" job. It's not "us", it's politicians who service the wealthy that like to lay down those two contradictory pieces of advice ("why did you get a degree if you didn't want debt?" / "why did you not get a degree if you wanted a decent job?").
- rayiner 10y ago
  Oh c'mon. "Get a college degree" is the mantra of baby boomer parents at all levels. It's not the wealthy elite pushing that message.
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  College isn't the end-all, but the education helps, even if it's not purely technical or vocational. Spending a few years just learning how to think about various problems, discipline to study instead of drink (or if you're me, you didn't do well with this), etc. I do think that we over-emphasize the school itself. What I mean by that, at least in my opinion, is that if it's not an Ivy and not the top school in the field that you are 150% sure you will absolutely do (and won't change majors 3x like I did), then take the reasonably priced state option. Time has flown and I recently realized I'm 12 years out of college. My education was ~10k a year at a public school - a decent one, but not even the best one in the state. I would not be materially farther ahead in life if I'd spent 30k a year at UVA or 50k at Georgetown. And I'm not paying off undergraduate debt right now. I am paying off grad (law school) debt, but that's another story - I was a night student and by the time I graduated it didn't make sense to restart my career in law when I was pretty well along in my industry. And the mistake I made was not going to the cheaper, public state school (and I didn't attend an Ivy). By all means, get your education, but control the costs. To an 18 year old graduating high school it might sound like a no brainer to spend 50k at the "good" private school over the state option, but the reality is, there are few circumstances where that's true. I did it the right way once, and the wrong way once, so just my two cents.
Bartweiss 10y ago
It's an offensive joke to tout "vocational school will get you a college degree!" in an article like this. The wages quoted for electricians should make it pretty clear how unnecessary that is - $28/hour is an exceedingly livable salary, and that's just for a journeyman. I think this piece just reveals how ingrained "college is necessary" is for the upper-middle class. Even when they tried to write a post about the power of vocational training the best the NYT could manage is "because maybe it'll send you to college".
- rayiner 10y ago
  The punchline is that 53% of recent college graduates are employed in jobs that don't require that degree: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-recent-college-grads-are-jobless-or-underemployed-how/256237 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-re.... You have an entire generation that's being pushed into getting their degree in journalism and putting together poverty wages with freelance gigs when they could have gotten into a real profession making decent money.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    It's either a joke or a magic trick - you set up a generation by saying one thing, and then reveal that the world has been doing a completely different thing while they were distracted. I grew up with adults suggesting journalism and law as careers for me. I'd have been richer and happier with a vocational education in forestry or advanced mechanical work, but I didn't even know those careers existed until late in high school. I just got damned lucky that software caught my attention instead.
    - galdosdi 10y ago
      Along the same lines, there's the ridiculous cultural meme that is recited to kids: "Follow your dreams" implying that it's a perfectly reasonable and even admirable idea to fixate on some particular career early on in life and pursue it despite any setbacks. This is awful, because a young kid may only have heard of a handful of well-known "classic" careers like journalist, lawyer, athlete, nurse, and then they end up fixating on achieving one of those simply because they committed too early -- before they had a chance to hear about careers less likely to be in a Richard Scary book like forestry, mechanical work, system administration, helicopter piloting, whatever, even though one of those might be just as exciting or more. As a result the "popular" careers that everyone's heard of by the age of ten are all oversubscribed, and all other careers are undersubscribed. Because "follow your dreams"
danielweber 10y ago
If you want to solve this problem in one step, make it illegal for employers to make decisions based on educational background. Maybe make exceptions for doctors or lawyers, just to keep that from distracting us. People will go to college to learn things, not to credentialize. Right now, we are in the middle of a zero-sum credential race, which hurts the poorest the hardest, and bizarrely the only real discussion of helping the poor is how to force them to do better in the credential race.
- inanutshellus 10y ago
  Wow, the idea that you shouldn't ask about educational background is pretty fascinating. If it were placed at the same level as, say, sexual orientation in interview questions (e.g. verboten)... it would be a very effective way to skip straight to your capabilities and make a self-taught homeschooler be on the same playing field as an Ivy Leaguer. The only "problem" would be one of getting off the ground. Currently there's a reasonable ecosystem around interning and recruiting on campuses and so on, which would muddy that "I don't know where you came from" line. Further, when you're straight-out-of-college there's a fair expectation that you're nigh useless at virtually every complex job and will need to be trained, so there's a fall-back that education is essentially vetting-by-proxy and gets you "street cred". e.g. "Hey, look, I managed these activities and was a member of these honor societies and still managed to get a 4.0 GPA, you should hire me because I've proven that whatever I'm in, I kick ass at." If I'm not allowed to talk about school, what the hell do I tell you I've been doing? Still... pretty cool thought experiment.
  - geoelectric 10y ago
    I've actually been convinced of this stance for some years, though everyone I've talked to seems to think it's nuts. The thing is that education--and particularly choice of school--is tightly linked with class, which in turn is linked with race, etc. Add to that the bias of "I graduated from here, therefore I favor people who graduated from similar" and I'm pretty sure there's some bad stuff that comes out of it. We already recognize a little bit of this in that there's often advice not to put the schooling dates on your resume because it implies age, but people somehow don't make the jump to the schooling itself implying other discriminatory factors. Plus the emphasis on schooling filters non-traditional learners and autodidacts. The software industry exploded in part because we historically haven't done that, at least during the high-growth periods that corresponded to high-demand periods. There are obviously some sectors for which you absolutely want formal training (medicine, EIT/PE-type engineering, etc.) but I'd argue that's the exception and not the rule. In most jobs it just matters that you know what you're doing. We should figure out a way to evaluate and select on actual competencies rather than trying to use school as a surrogate for them. For many professions this should be relatively straightforward. Competencies are not the be-all/end-all (as we know from programming interviews) but to the extent that we expect schools to represent them we should be able to evaluate with testing if they're truly anywhere near objective. Unfortunately, that won't happen as long as the easy option is available.
geoelectric 10y ago
Yeah, it seems like they wouldn't be dead ends because they get you to a vocation.

FussyZeus 10y ago

> I'd be curious about pre-recession numbers of high school grad employment vs. now, post-recession. Don't forget automation, which is behind a lot of the discrepancy between recovered business sales/overall production figures while the jobs numbers lag behind. Automation means fewer employees getting more work done. > I also think it's a tremendous disadvantage to say "Oh yeah, vocational school can get to you an associate's or a college degree" because at some point we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all. This times a THOUSAND, I know plenty of people who make really good money and left their vocational schools with useful, in-demand skills and practically no debt. (I'm a little jealous TBH, though I still prefer my desk job.)

crdoconnor 10y ago

>we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all. We cannot keep protesting against the tremendous student loan debt burden that's creeping ever bigger on the one hand while touting college degrees as being the ONLY way to get a high-paying "respectable" job. It's not "us", it's politicians who service the wealthy that like to lay down those two contradictory pieces of advice ("why did you get a degree if you didn't want debt?" / "why did you not get a degree if you wanted a decent job?").

rayiner 10y ago
Oh c'mon. "Get a college degree" is the mantra of baby boomer parents at all levels. It's not the wealthy elite pushing that message.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
College isn't the end-all, but the education helps, even if it's not purely technical or vocational. Spending a few years just learning how to think about various problems, discipline to study instead of drink (or if you're me, you didn't do well with this), etc. I do think that we over-emphasize the school itself. What I mean by that, at least in my opinion, is that if it's not an Ivy and not the top school in the field that you are 150% sure you will absolutely do (and won't change majors 3x like I did), then take the reasonably priced state option. Time has flown and I recently realized I'm 12 years out of college. My education was ~10k a year at a public school - a decent one, but not even the best one in the state. I would not be materially farther ahead in life if I'd spent 30k a year at UVA or 50k at Georgetown. And I'm not paying off undergraduate debt right now. I am paying off grad (law school) debt, but that's another story - I was a night student and by the time I graduated it didn't make sense to restart my career in law when I was pretty well along in my industry. And the mistake I made was not going to the cheaper, public state school (and I didn't attend an Ivy). By all means, get your education, but control the costs. To an 18 year old graduating high school it might sound like a no brainer to spend 50k at the "good" private school over the state option, but the reality is, there are few circumstances where that's true. I did it the right way once, and the wrong way once, so just my two cents.

Bartweiss 10y ago

It's an offensive joke to tout "vocational school will get you a college degree!" in an article like this. The wages quoted for electricians should make it pretty clear how unnecessary that is - $28/hour is an exceedingly livable salary, and that's just for a journeyman. I think this piece just reveals how ingrained "college is necessary" is for the upper-middle class. Even when they tried to write a post about the power of vocational training the best the NYT could manage is "because maybe it'll send you to college".

rayiner 10y ago
The punchline is that 53% of recent college graduates are employed in jobs that don't require that degree: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-recent-college-grads-are-jobless-or-underemployed-how/256237 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-re.... You have an entire generation that's being pushed into getting their degree in journalism and putting together poverty wages with freelance gigs when they could have gotten into a real profession making decent money.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  It's either a joke or a magic trick - you set up a generation by saying one thing, and then reveal that the world has been doing a completely different thing while they were distracted. I grew up with adults suggesting journalism and law as careers for me. I'd have been richer and happier with a vocational education in forestry or advanced mechanical work, but I didn't even know those careers existed until late in high school. I just got damned lucky that software caught my attention instead.
  - galdosdi 10y ago
    Along the same lines, there's the ridiculous cultural meme that is recited to kids: "Follow your dreams" implying that it's a perfectly reasonable and even admirable idea to fixate on some particular career early on in life and pursue it despite any setbacks. This is awful, because a young kid may only have heard of a handful of well-known "classic" careers like journalist, lawyer, athlete, nurse, and then they end up fixating on achieving one of those simply because they committed too early -- before they had a chance to hear about careers less likely to be in a Richard Scary book like forestry, mechanical work, system administration, helicopter piloting, whatever, even though one of those might be just as exciting or more. As a result the "popular" careers that everyone's heard of by the age of ten are all oversubscribed, and all other careers are undersubscribed. Because "follow your dreams"

danielweber 10y ago

If you want to solve this problem in one step, make it illegal for employers to make decisions based on educational background. Maybe make exceptions for doctors or lawyers, just to keep that from distracting us. People will go to college to learn things, not to credentialize. Right now, we are in the middle of a zero-sum credential race, which hurts the poorest the hardest, and bizarrely the only real discussion of helping the poor is how to force them to do better in the credential race.

inanutshellus 10y ago
Wow, the idea that you shouldn't ask about educational background is pretty fascinating. If it were placed at the same level as, say, sexual orientation in interview questions (e.g. verboten)... it would be a very effective way to skip straight to your capabilities and make a self-taught homeschooler be on the same playing field as an Ivy Leaguer. The only "problem" would be one of getting off the ground. Currently there's a reasonable ecosystem around interning and recruiting on campuses and so on, which would muddy that "I don't know where you came from" line. Further, when you're straight-out-of-college there's a fair expectation that you're nigh useless at virtually every complex job and will need to be trained, so there's a fall-back that education is essentially vetting-by-proxy and gets you "street cred". e.g. "Hey, look, I managed these activities and was a member of these honor societies and still managed to get a 4.0 GPA, you should hire me because I've proven that whatever I'm in, I kick ass at." If I'm not allowed to talk about school, what the hell do I tell you I've been doing? Still... pretty cool thought experiment.
- geoelectric 10y ago
  I've actually been convinced of this stance for some years, though everyone I've talked to seems to think it's nuts. The thing is that education--and particularly choice of school--is tightly linked with class, which in turn is linked with race, etc. Add to that the bias of "I graduated from here, therefore I favor people who graduated from similar" and I'm pretty sure there's some bad stuff that comes out of it. We already recognize a little bit of this in that there's often advice not to put the schooling dates on your resume because it implies age, but people somehow don't make the jump to the schooling itself implying other discriminatory factors. Plus the emphasis on schooling filters non-traditional learners and autodidacts. The software industry exploded in part because we historically haven't done that, at least during the high-growth periods that corresponded to high-demand periods. There are obviously some sectors for which you absolutely want formal training (medicine, EIT/PE-type engineering, etc.) but I'd argue that's the exception and not the rule. In most jobs it just matters that you know what you're doing. We should figure out a way to evaluate and select on actual competencies rather than trying to use school as a surrogate for them. For many professions this should be relatively straightforward. Competencies are not the be-all/end-all (as we know from programming interviews) but to the extent that we expect schools to represent them we should be able to evaluate with testing if they're truly anywhere near objective. Unfortunately, that won't happen as long as the easy option is available.

geoelectric 10y ago

Yeah, it seems like they wouldn't be dead ends because they get you to a vocation.