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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 pret

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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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"
    - SilasX 11y ago
      Also, any academic post-graduate role is oversubscribed because too many people go to college, and in college, hear a disproportionate amount from people who did well through the post-graduate route. (Though that's changing as the actual instructors are increasingly made of famished adjuncts and TAs.)
- jowiar 11y ago
  It's funny you mention journalism. As a software engineer, I'm often wishing I studied journalism -- I feel like a newspaper serves as a pretty decent model for how a software team should function.

rayiner 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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"
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Also, any academic post-graduate role is oversubscribed because too many people go to college, and in college, hear a disproportionate amount from people who did well through the post-graduate route. (Though that's changing as the actual instructors are increasingly made of famished adjuncts and TAs.)
jowiar 11y ago
It's funny you mention journalism. As a software engineer, I'm often wishing I studied journalism -- I feel like a newspaper serves as a pretty decent model for how a software team should function.