5 ms·

Have you looked at what income you'd get today if you had only the educational attainment of the average man of the last generation at 18 or 20? Or the one befo

by gte910h 16y ago

Have you looked at what income you'd get today if you had only the educational attainment of the average man of the last generation at 18 or 20? Or the one before it? You can't live the same level of life without more schooling now. It's an educational arms race. Graduate degrees and unpaid internships and long stint in "entry level" jobs that last for much of a decade, etc.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
I call BS. If you work in fast food or retail you won't be well off at all. But if you lack a college degree or even a high school diploma and go into construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job (very much the same "meat and potatoes" jobs of older generations) you will actually be making significantly above median wages. As for college, on average I suspect it's a wash, income wise. For every graduate with an engineering, science, or business degree who is able to jump into a cushy high paying job at most a few years after completing school there are 1 or more graduates with less economically advantageous degrees in softer liberal-arts disciplines who gain almost no advantage in job hunting from their degrees.
- say_ 16y ago
  "construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job" Traditional jobs are the first to go in tough economic times. Trade school is a short term play. The world is only going to get more complex. While trade school might make someone better off in their 20s relative to someone who went to college, in the long term it will severely limit their opportunities.
  - BrandonM 16y ago
    The roads always need paved. I live in Ohio, where the cost of living is very low compared to much of the rest of the US, and jobs working on state highway projects pay over $18/hr. It's manual labor and it's dangerous to be near the roads, but it's far from the worst job you could have.
    - MichaelSalib 16y ago
      What's competition like for those jobs? I mean, I'm sure there are some very high paying jobs that don't require a college degree. But there are millions of people that lack a college degree who want to work. Shouldn't we assume that the vast majority of these people will not get high paying jobs and will be lucky to get 30 hours a week of minimum wage work?
      - InclinedPlane 16y ago
        Why should we assume that? Unschooled does not mean uneducated and it sure as shit doesn't mean unskilled. There are more and more people who hold the belief that the age of apprenticeship, of transiting from novice through journeyman to professional entirely through entirely on the job training, is over, but that belief is false as can be. There are many, many people making bank earning as much as 4 year science and technical degree holders are earning who hold nothing more advanced than a HS diploma, and sometimes not even that. Almost all such jobs involve significant amounts of manual labor, so that world tends to be rather disjoint from the world of college education and office jobs so there is definitely a lack of visibility from one world into the next. But that world does very much exist. The guys fixing your car, mowing your company's lawn, catching your seafood, transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock, resurfacing the asphalt on your street, putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road, assembling your cars, sometimes even the guy working in the deli section at your grocery store, they may be making much more than you previously thought.
        MichaelSalib 16y ago
        Do you have any statistics on just how many of these high wage jobs exist? Because I know a lot of people who lack college degrees who would kill for a job that pays over $10/hour. catching your seafood Fisheries around the US are collapsing. It seems like the seafood catching industry is shedding jobs. transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock I believe that trucking has been reduced because of the recession which suggests that trucking jobs should decline slightly. resurfacing the asphalt on your street Many municipalities don't have the cash to spend on street repair. putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road There's a massive glut of housing stock right now. A few years ago, everyone and their brother was working in construction, building crappy third rate homes with substandard quality and chinese drywall. But then the housing bubble burst and guess what? Most of those sheetrock hackers were tossed out of work. assembling your cars There are actually very few jobs in automotive manufacturing in the US. This sector has been heavily mechanized. Have you seen the financial shape the automotive industry is in? It is heading for a major consolidation. And people aren't buying cars at the rate they once did since they don't have disposable income. This sector is likely to be shedding high wage jobs, not gaining them.
  - ams6110 16y ago
    The highest income people I know are in the trades... plumbers, electricians, concrete. They make far and away more than the programmers I know.
    - jquery 16y ago
      How much do they make?
say_ 16y ago
You are wrong. It's not an arms race. It's a genuine increase in the skills and abilities required to create value in the modern economy.
- jerf 16y ago
  Nothing about an "arms race" says "not real"! If they were something you could opt out of they would be a great deal less dangerous.
- gte910h 16y ago
  >It's a genuine increase in the skills and abilities required to create value in the modern economy. In what way is that not an arms race?
fleitz 16y ago
Bs. I do quite fine with high school. The biggest advantage those growing up in today's environment have going for them is that everyone else their age is lazy. You can do far better today with the same work ethic of the previous generation. It is an educational arms race, however in any arms race there is plenty of money to be made selling arms. Fuck unpaid internships, get a job at a small company where results are noticed. When you see something going wrong step in and fix it. I started my career in programming putting together a simple scheduling app in php. I didn't ask permission I went and coded it at home and brought it in one day and demo'd it to my supervisor. After that they didn't want me doing tech support any more and wanted me solving all sorts of other problems instead. Whining about education is a crutch used by those who don't want to fill out resumes or otherwise work. Generally those people feel that now that they have an education all they need to do is sit back and wait for a cushy job to knock on their door. Before one gets a degree they should type that degrees name into a craigslist job board and see what comes up, if nothing comes up then one should not expect to get a job as a result. I wanted to add one more piece of advice, when you decide what you want to do, find the industry where that job is the "profit center" and also in the "profit center" pick the job no one else wants to do. Yeah, sometimes it actually really sucks, but usually there is just a little learning curve, and then it's easy. Never tell them this. You're now indispensable, likable, and if you saved your money properly you also have negotiating power. This means that you're likely to be offered a raise, if you ask for one accepted, and if they decline have the means to make them give it to you or find something else, and surprisingly at the other company no one wants to do X either. Pro Tip: If you've just bought something major on credit (car, house, etc), your boss probably knows about it, this means that you will NOT get your raise for the thing you bought that you can't afford. This is also why if you talk about cars or houses with your boss he may convince you to buy something you don't need. The people who get raises are those who don't need it.
- patio11 16y ago
  Fuck unpaid internships I disagree with the language but heartily approve of the message. Do. Not. Work. For. Free. For-profit corporations can pay you wages -- that is what they are for. This goes triply for everyone here, since most of you have skills that the market actually needs rather than the collection of non-skill represented by your typical coffee gopher trying to break into publishing. However, people expect engineers to be congenitally incapable of negotiation and to work for free because they love their jobs, and they'll tell you that this is not merely permissable but morally praiseworthy and a good thing for your career. People who tell you this are lying to you. Do not listen to them, even if they are folks you otherwise respect, even if they are telling you that their OSS-using corporations are more morally deserving than e.g. Microsoft or Oracle.

by gte910h 16y ago

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I call BS. If you work in fast food or retail you won't be well off at all. But if you lack a college degree or even a high school diploma and go into construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job (very much the same "meat and potatoes" jobs of older generations) you will actually be making significantly above median wages. As for college, on average I suspect it's a wash, income wise. For every graduate with an engineering, science, or business degree who is able to jump into a cushy high paying job at most a few years after completing school there are 1 or more graduates with less economically advantageous degrees in softer liberal-arts disciplines who gain almost no advantage in job hunting from their degrees.

say_ 16y ago
"construction, landscaping/yard maintenance, plumbing, automotive work, or a factory job" Traditional jobs are the first to go in tough economic times. Trade school is a short term play. The world is only going to get more complex. While trade school might make someone better off in their 20s relative to someone who went to college, in the long term it will severely limit their opportunities.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  The roads always need paved. I live in Ohio, where the cost of living is very low compared to much of the rest of the US, and jobs working on state highway projects pay over $18/hr. It's manual labor and it's dangerous to be near the roads, but it's far from the worst job you could have.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    What's competition like for those jobs? I mean, I'm sure there are some very high paying jobs that don't require a college degree. But there are millions of people that lack a college degree who want to work. Shouldn't we assume that the vast majority of these people will not get high paying jobs and will be lucky to get 30 hours a week of minimum wage work?
    - InclinedPlane 16y ago
      Why should we assume that? Unschooled does not mean uneducated and it sure as shit doesn't mean unskilled. There are more and more people who hold the belief that the age of apprenticeship, of transiting from novice through journeyman to professional entirely through entirely on the job training, is over, but that belief is false as can be. There are many, many people making bank earning as much as 4 year science and technical degree holders are earning who hold nothing more advanced than a HS diploma, and sometimes not even that. Almost all such jobs involve significant amounts of manual labor, so that world tends to be rather disjoint from the world of college education and office jobs so there is definitely a lack of visibility from one world into the next. But that world does very much exist. The guys fixing your car, mowing your company's lawn, catching your seafood, transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock, resurfacing the asphalt on your street, putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road, assembling your cars, sometimes even the guy working in the deli section at your grocery store, they may be making much more than you previously thought.
      - MichaelSalib 16y ago
        Do you have any statistics on just how many of these high wage jobs exist? Because I know a lot of people who lack college degrees who would kill for a job that pays over $10/hour. catching your seafood Fisheries around the US are collapsing. It seems like the seafood catching industry is shedding jobs. transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock I believe that trucking has been reduced because of the recession which suggests that trucking jobs should decline slightly. resurfacing the asphalt on your street Many municipalities don't have the cash to spend on street repair. putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road There's a massive glut of housing stock right now. A few years ago, everyone and their brother was working in construction, building crappy third rate homes with substandard quality and chinese drywall. But then the housing bubble burst and guess what? Most of those sheetrock hackers were tossed out of work. assembling your cars There are actually very few jobs in automotive manufacturing in the US. This sector has been heavily mechanized. Have you seen the financial shape the automotive industry is in? It is heading for a major consolidation. And people aren't buying cars at the rate they once did since they don't have disposable income. This sector is likely to be shedding high wage jobs, not gaining them.
- ams6110 16y ago
  The highest income people I know are in the trades... plumbers, electricians, concrete. They make far and away more than the programmers I know.
  - jquery 16y ago
    How much do they make?

say_ 16y ago

You are wrong. It's not an arms race. It's a genuine increase in the skills and abilities required to create value in the modern economy.

jerf 16y ago
Nothing about an "arms race" says "not real"! If they were something you could opt out of they would be a great deal less dangerous.
gte910h 16y ago
>It's a genuine increase in the skills and abilities required to create value in the modern economy. In what way is that not an arms race?

fleitz 16y ago

Bs. I do quite fine with high school. The biggest advantage those growing up in today's environment have going for them is that everyone else their age is lazy. You can do far better today with the same work ethic of the previous generation. It is an educational arms race, however in any arms race there is plenty of money to be made selling arms. Fuck unpaid internships, get a job at a small company where results are noticed. When you see something going wrong step in and fix it. I started my career in programming putting together a simple scheduling app in php. I didn't ask permission I went and coded it at home and brought it in one day and demo'd it to my supervisor. After that they didn't want me doing tech support any more and wanted me solving all sorts of other problems instead. Whining about education is a crutch used by those who don't want to fill out resumes or otherwise work. Generally those people feel that now that they have an education all they need to do is sit back and wait for a cushy job to knock on their door. Before one gets a degree they should type that degrees name into a craigslist job board and see what comes up, if nothing comes up then one should not expect to get a job as a result. I wanted to add one more piece of advice, when you decide what you want to do, find the industry where that job is the "profit center" and also in the "profit center" pick the job no one else wants to do. Yeah, sometimes it actually really sucks, but usually there is just a little learning curve, and then it's easy. Never tell them this. You're now indispensable, likable, and if you saved your money properly you also have negotiating power. This means that you're likely to be offered a raise, if you ask for one accepted, and if they decline have the means to make them give it to you or find something else, and surprisingly at the other company no one wants to do X either. Pro Tip: If you've just bought something major on credit (car, house, etc), your boss probably knows about it, this means that you will NOT get your raise for the thing you bought that you can't afford. This is also why if you talk about cars or houses with your boss he may convince you to buy something you don't need. The people who get raises are those who don't need it.

patio11 16y ago
Fuck unpaid internships I disagree with the language but heartily approve of the message. Do. Not. Work. For. Free. For-profit corporations can pay you wages -- that is what they are for. This goes triply for everyone here, since most of you have skills that the market actually needs rather than the collection of non-skill represented by your typical coffee gopher trying to break into publishing. However, people expect engineers to be congenitally incapable of negotiation and to work for free because they love their jobs, and they'll tell you that this is not merely permissable but morally praiseworthy and a good thing for your career. People who tell you this are lying to you. Do not listen to them, even if they are folks you otherwise respect, even if they are telling you that their OSS-using corporations are more morally deserving than e.g. Microsoft or Oracle.