20 ms·

Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

• bruceb 9y ago
  Remove the social stigma of not going to college. Hardly any tv shows that show young non college grads as positive.
  • jrs95 9y ago
    I dunno, I thought The Wire was good. And the only guy who went to college in Game of Thrones is sort of a dork. Seriously though, while this is part of the problem, I think the motivations behind this sort of thing are typically not really about what’s in the best interest of the working class. It has more to do with increasing political polarization of universities and a desire to reduce public spending on education, especially public education. The more straightforward solution is to ensure people can afford higher education if they want it. But if you’re more concerned about the short term bottom line, it’s easier to just let people either borrow absurd amounts of money for it or give up on that and go to a trade school.
    • Retric 9y ago
      I see Jobs that could be done with a high school diploma that now request a masters degree. This creates an insane hurdle for someone to get into the upper middle class. Having people enter the workforce 4+ years sooner not only reduces debt it also allows them to be productive generating a lot of wealth. Consider what it means if doctors skip an undergrad degree, it's not only less debt, but also more working years.
      • jstewartmobile 9y ago
        My sister had to get a masters in library science to be a librarian. It is insane, and there's almost a Stockholm syndrome around it. No one could possibly exercise literacy, problem solving, and rational thought without going for at least another $20k+ of student loan debt!
      • s0rce 9y ago
        Yup, and many STEM jobs that once provided on the job training and needed a bachelors now require a PhD.
        • AstralStorm 9y ago
          Thus we get garbage doctorates. A doctorate was supposed to be the culmination of a scientific career.
          • s0rce 9y ago
            Not just garbage doctorates, even PhDs from top 10/20 schools in STEM fields that did reasonable interesting research go off to be process engineers or other non-scientist positions that likely don't need a PhD.
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Social stigma is not the problem. Employers requiring degrees for jobs that don’t require a degree are the problem. They force the cost on the student, and with demand for college education then bring inelastic, colleges have all of the pricing power to charge whatever they want.
    • coredog64 9y ago
      I've said it before and I'll say it again: Degree requirements are the last bastion of socially acceptable racism.
      • GhostVII 9y ago
        How is a degree requirement racist?
        • berbec 9y ago
          "The 6-year national college graduation rate is 59% for White students, 51% for Hispanic students, 46% for Black females, and 35% for Black males."[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_...
          • GhostVII 9y ago
            There are racial differences with pretty much everything in the US. Are benefits for poor people racist because they disproportionally help black people? Is having a required entrance average for universities racist because black people have statistically lower grades/graduation rates? Sure, if you are choosing to filter applicants based on criteria where the only effect of the filtering is changing the racial distribution, it may be racist, but that certainly isn't the case when you are filtering based on whether or not a person has a degree.
            • EADGBE 9y ago
              I wonder what those numbers look like without race and with income brackets.
  • Apocryphon 9y ago
    Maybe frame it in a positive way. Remove the stigma of going into the trades and becoming a skilled "blue collar" craftsman.
  • InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Improve the quality of average public high schools so that a high school diploma is a guarantee of basic literacy, science knowledge, basic schools, etc.
    • barry-cotter 9y ago
      Politically impossible. Any plausible alternative has to pay a weirdness tax too because if you’re smart enough to go to college, why wouldn’t you? That makes high school irrelevant. And the UC system, among others, is working on making just having a Bachelor’s a poorer signal of literacy and numeracy.
    • rlanday 9y ago
      College degrees only work as a selection tool for employers since not everyone has one. High school degrees are currently nearly worthless as such a tool since nearly everyone (the current high school graduate rate in the US is about 83%) has one. You still need to get one, of course, since if you don’t have one, people will assume you dropped out either because you got addicted to drugs, or because you’re well below average in intelligence and/or conscientiousness. College degrees are eventually going to suffer the same fate as the high school diploma due to all the pressure on people to go to college. And eventually, there will be political pressure in the US to make the government pay for universal college the same way it pays for K-12 education. Eventually, we’ll be encouraging extremely marginal students to spend eight years getting a bachelor’s degree and however long it takes such a student to get a master’s degree, and Social Security will collapse since no one will actually be working.
      • InclinedPlane 9y ago
        College degrees are not merely used as a selection tool for higher skilled jobs. In many instances they are used as a basic competency filter for literacy, ability to work in an office environment, etc. Indeed, many jobs merely require "some college" as a credential, not even a degree. That alone is enough of a filter. This means that jobs that require skills that any high school graduate should have are today out of reach for those people because they've been given a sub-standard education with a degraded market value. Which means that in order to be in any way competitive in the job market, even to get an entry level office job, often requires expending additional time and money, saddling oneself with college loan debt, and so forth. Today entering the job market from the bottom is a lot more difficult and more costly than it used to be, with significant deleterious effects on career/wealth advancement through life.
  • aphextron 9y ago
    >Remove the social stigma of not going to college. Hardly any tv shows that show young non college grads as positive. Or just make college useful and accessible. Give people the option of a European style undergrad where there is no liberal arts breadth, only technical courses. If we had accredited colleges doing 3 year bachelor degrees in STEM, the system would be much more efficient.
    • flukus 9y ago
      > Or just make college useful and accessible. Give people the option of a European style undergrad where there is no liberal arts breadth, only technical courses So just turn college into a trade school? All that would do is make trade schools more expensive.
      • dagw 9y ago
        I wouldn't call a "European style undergrad" a trade school. The only difference is that for example a math 'major' in Europe spends 90-95% of their time taking math courses, while in the US they might spend maybe 60-70% of their time on math courses. Thus you can get through the same 'relevant' course load in 3 years instead of 4.
    • barry-cotter 9y ago
      If you think credentialism is bad now, wait until the only thing stopping people getting Master’s and doctorates is their parents’ willingness to pay their living expenses. Separate college’s education and credentialism functions. If the US government says it will recognise anyone who passes X test as having a Bachelor’s degree in X, for some value of X, there will be a reasonable number of people getting four year degrees in three, two or one.
    • austenallred 9y ago
      Honestly we'd be fine with 1-year degrees for most things.
      • roel_v 9y ago
  • sandworm101 9y ago
    >> Hardly any tv shows that show young non college grads as positive. Really? See Friends. And looking at a list of top current Sitcoms, RickAndMorty, Bobs Burgers, OrangeIsTheNewBlack, TheGoldbergs, KevinCanWait, even TheBigBangTheory has a leading character without any college education. The setup of the educated character being one-upped or taken down a peg by the more socially aware character is a standard sitcom trope.
    • thaumasiotes 9y ago
      > Really? See Friends. > The setup of the educated character being one-upped or taken down a peg by the more socially aware character is a standard sitcom trope. That trope is common on Friends. But out of the cast of six, there are four college graduates and two non-graduates, and the non-graduates are depicted as raging idiots.
  • romanovcode 9y ago
    Same with the stigma that trading-schools are somehow worse then college. Pretty sure it comes from elitism that people in colleges have towards non-college grads.
• jrs95 9y ago
  It doesn’t need to be one or the other. Just because trade schools are good doesn’t mean we should ignore the needs of everyone who wants a 4 year degree or has a mountain of student loan debt.
  • jerf 9y ago
    It's even better than that. If trade schools can recover some prestige, and more people who would be happier and better off for going there do go there, then colleges can become better colleges, too. Colleges trying to be both is doing a disservice to everyone.
    • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      More than that: If the people who would be better off going to trade school go there, and so fewer people go to college, the price of college can go down, just due to supply and demand.
• Apocryphon 9y ago
  Isn't Germany, one of the more booming economies of Europe, a place that promotes the trades and provides educational tracks for interested students to easily get into apprenticeship programs? And where there isn't stigma against entering such a field?
  • jstewartmobile 9y ago
    Germany also has strong protections against international competition and public/private enterprises like Airbus to keep all of those trades-persons busy. Do that in the US, and we'll just end up with blue collar wage slaves instead of white collar ones.
  • barry-cotter 9y ago
    > And where there isn't stigma against entering such a field? This isn’t true. Germany is the second most credentialist, title obsessed country in the world, with a class structure as obvious as in the UK, if different.
    • Justin_K 9y ago
      Completely untrue opinion of yours.
    • analog31 9y ago
      As an amusing factoid, Germany is the country where my spouse would be addressed as "Frau Doktor Doktor."
      • derda 9y ago
        Those days are long over. The behaviour might still remain in some small circles (60yr old trophy wifes in a golf club) but is basically unheard and frowned upon pretty much everywhere else in society.
        • roel_v 9y ago
          My last experience was 10+ years ago, so maybe there has been a drastic revolution, but I once worked on an 'account profile' page for a large, national company (in Germany) and one of the meetings went into this topic - should there be a 'doctor doctor' entry in the dropdown with all the titles someone could choose to be addressed as (so Prof, Dr, etc.). I, the barbaric foreigner, then proposed we just get rid of the field all together - more to fill in, more to get wrong, and who cares anyway? Jeebus, I might as well have kicked a puppy in the nuts right there on the table. How was a letter to Prof. dr. Mustermann ever going to end up in the right mailbox, if they couldn't specify whether it was Prof Dr, Prof dr, Prof or just Dr. Mustermann? These people spend hours coming up with the most ridiculous UI ideas of multiple comboboxes, check list boxes, what have you. So after a few hours I said 'then why don't we just put in a free form text field, so that people can just type whatever they want?'. Well that was the one suggestion I could have made that was even more ridiculous than leaving out the field. What if somebody would type in 'poopyhead' (or whatever the German equivalent is), and they would send a letter to Poopyhead Mustermann, and somebody would take a picture of that letter and send it to the newspaper, mocking the company for doing such idiotic things? (in those days they were more concerned about newspapers than websites). I don't even remember what they choose in the end. I think just a dropdown box. I probably told them I'm make the list of titles to choose from configurable in their backend system and they could make it however they wanted later - which nobody probably ever bothered to do.
• 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  If people are going to make more money, where does the demand come from? Or is this about American manufacturers gaining market share from/in other countries? I don't know much about macroeconomics, so maybe this is a silly question.
  • fny 9y ago
    If people make more money they will be able to demand more since they can buy more things. There's not much to it. If you mean demand for labor, that's an entirely different beast.
  • zachrose 9y ago
    There are five electricians in town, they each make $40/hour. They have a hard time finding qualified apprentices. After education, there are 7 electricians. The same 5 electricians still make $40/hour, but the two new electricians make $25/hour. Turns out there's a previously unserved market for a cheaper and less experienced electrician.
    • ChuckMcM 9y ago
      Exactly this. There is a lot of unmet demand in trade labor in even "low rent" places like Las Vegas.
      • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        I don't know why you're getting downvoted. There's a lot of demand for the blue collar equivalent of CRUD apps that isn't met because there are no "cheap" blue collar professionals around. A lot of people would be willing to pay a plumber to fix their sink, an electrician to replace a light fixture with a ceiling fan or a welder to build hand railings if there were more options for those services that fell between "licensed, insured and too expensive for you" and "questionable quality, affordable prices and nowhere to be found it it breaks"
        • conductr 9y ago
• SeaDude 9y ago
  Trade apprenticeship + cultivated curiosity in tech = exactly what hold industries need. Unfortunately, old industries tend toward new "talent" + degree in something cool sounding in hopes of disruptive "yahtzee". they, or at least mine, largely ignore the ones who know the business rules/needs the most in gavor of who "should know the future best". Oops.
  • matt_wulfeck 9y ago
    What’s “new” of today is the legacy codebases of tomorrow!
• thisisit 9y ago
  > Researchers are investigating how the United States can become more competitive in the manufacturing industry in the age of artificial intelligence. > Manufacturing employment has fallen in both countries, yet in Germany, manufacturing's value added has stayed around 22 percent in the last 20 years. So Germany has done well even before the age of AI. But are they well prepared for the AI disruption? Because currently the article seems to be relying on past data from Germany to predict a future solution.
  • sandworm101 9y ago
    Germany has seen many revolutions, each of which was declared the demise of labor in manufacturing. AI is just the latest panic. Germany does well because Germany believes in the value of people. Unlike American companies, German companies are not bent on divesting themselves of employees. They see AI as a tool to leverage their workforce, not a reason to scrub people off their books. From that perspective AI is not a falling-sky moment.
  • adventured 9y ago
    It's a bizarre premise, because US productivity has outpaced both the EU and Germany over the last 25 years. In 1995-1996, US and German GDP per capita were almost equal, at $30,000 to $31,000. Today the US is about 40% higher. US manufacturing has grown substantially over that time. The vast gains in productivity are precisely the cause of the employment plunge in manufacturing. Real manufacturing output is up 78% since 1991. Germany has maintained its outsized manufacturing export base in part through high degrees of protectionism and riding an artificially cheap currency (cheap for Germany, not for Spain, Portugal, Italy or Greece), to the detriment of Eurozone rivals.
    • AstralStorm 9y ago
      Productivity is not the end all measure for the society. Suppose the Moser productive society would be made out of robots working 24/7 at high efficiency. Is that superior to a society where "inefficient" research happens? Likewise GDP (even PPP) does not matter if it is distributed highly unequally. You get a handful of people with huge economic power, that's it. Albeit in the case of Germany you're somewhat right (protectionism mostly designed to force manufacturing to happen locally), US productivity has not brought improved living standards where it should have.
• Overtonwindow 9y ago
  I sometimes think, with deep regret, that most people living at or below the poverty line at 30, their chances of rising above that are quite low. At 40+ it's next to zero. This may also be very generous. The amount of education, training, and opportunities would have to line up perfectly for someone to pull themselves up. Multigenerational, the odds appear much better.
  • uselessbro 9y ago
    Upward mobility is a lie. There are tons of studies and books on this - Thomas Piketty might be one.
    • matt_wulfeck 9y ago
      That’s a pretty absurd thing to say so matter of factly. 62% of US billionaires are self made [1]. Many of us tech workers have experienced incredible upward mobility. 1. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269593 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269593
      • mediasavvy 9y ago
        What percentage of self-made billionaires started out as millionaires? what percentage of poor people become self-made billionaires? What percentage of poor people who become self-made billionaires do so by going to trade school?
        • smallnamespace 9y ago
          I think people argue past one another a lot about this because both facts can be simultaneously true: the US really is a land where a hard-working, smart, and motivated person (with a big pinch of luck) can work their way up from the top, and yet it's also a place where most people at the bottom aren't simultaneously hard-working, smart, motivated, and lucky. If they were, they would've moved up the rungs already. I mean, if you lived in a strict feudal society, the nobility as a class was CLOSED. Commoners not admitted. End of story. At the same time, even if say 20% of people at the bottom quantile of the wealth/income bracket make up into the next 20% every generation -- is that enough social mobility? Not enough? Should we just not have any poor people at all? If the goal is to have no people who are poor, doesn't the fact that we admit millions of (relatively) penniless legal and illegal immigrants make that goal much harder to achieve?
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  With the constant ads for mutual funds with outrageous up-yours fees for just tracking the S&P 500, the endless shilling and apologetics for investment banks and hedge funds, the perpetual armchair quarterbacking of the market by overpaid newsreaders who really wouldn't even be working there if they even halfway understood what they were talking about... why does anyone watch or even pay the slightest attention to what CNBC has to say?
  • TylerE 9y ago
    Well, on this they are dead right.
  • uselessbro 9y ago
    I approve your message.
  • loeg 9y ago
    This is a tangential attack on the source, not the content. Please address the article, not the publisher.
    • jstewartmobile 9y ago
      It is not a tangent. The source is unreliable. If I must address the article, it is the same kind of ham-handed shilling I have come to expect from them. "Researchers" say this. "Researchers" say that. Then at the very bottom, regard: "Note: Working papers have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications." Scam the kids into college! Wait, no, scam them into trade school! Scam them into whatever lego shape industry thinks that it needs at the moment. That, and the whole "Germany does this, Germany does that" angle is also highly disingenuous. Even skippy at CNBC knows good and well that Germany is a protected market, and that any kind of directed effort towards cranking out more tradesmen in the US of A is going to result in underemployed tradesmen and big discounts for the few places that actually employ them.
      • freddie_mercury 9y ago
• indubitable 9y ago
  Another idea, indirectly related, is to simply stop treating all university degrees equally. The whole reason student loans are so broken right now is because they cannot be dismissed, so lenders are incentivized to lend with reckless abandon. In the worst case scenario the loan converts into a lifetime rent on an individual that automatically adjusts for inflation. On the other hand, the idea behind creating special rules for student loans is easy to see. By removing any risk in lending, that 'reckless abandon in lending' removes any real up front financial barrier to education and investing in your society's education is as good as investing in your society. The problem here is people are then using this to get degrees that are more recreational than productive. In high school kids are taught that the key to a good life is to get a college degree. And so many people, who are otherwise unmotivated or unambitious, simply choose easy and interesting degrees. The 'soft' degrees absolutely have a purpose, but a person coming from no means choosing to major in a soft degree is not going to meaningfully change their expected earnings. All they're going to do is remain a person of no means who is now also deep in debt that can never be dismissed. So the idea is to maintain the current system, but restrict lending just to degrees that are statistically likely to 'substantially' effect a student's expected earnings. When you remove the illusion of 'any degree is fine' you start to bring the connection between education and earnings back to reality. And you also push students towards a path of greater capability which is not only good for themselves, but also for the nation as a whole.
  • analog31 9y ago
    In my view, this idea runs the danger of creating a planned economy, with characteristic boom-bust cycles and scams. The choice of which degrees to fund has to be made on either past data or some sort of current fad. The list of preferred degrees will of course create competition to get into those programs, but it may also encourage colleges to create watered-down or even fake disciplines that can absorb more students. Hypothetical example: Assuming that computer science is on the "hot list," a low-tier college creates a fluff degree in Computer Technology Studies, that gains access to loan money but leads to marginal employment prospects. Closer to home, the K-12 schools in my locale have a new program that creates career tracks at the high school level. The first track that has become available is health care. Granted, it sounds like a good idea, what can possibly go wrong?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dogruck 9y ago
  The real question is how can we reduce the cost of education (or training) while simultaneously better aligning training with the most valuable careers. Trade schools are much cheaper than college. In addition, we don’t have enough trained craftsmen.
  • analog31 9y ago
    In my view, demand for trained craftsmen goes up and down with economic cycles, and is at risk of job loss due to automation.
  • roseburg 9y ago
    There is a shortage of trades workers, and it's only going to get worse because the bulk of the workers are currently older and are retiring much, much faster than they are being replaced. We are just at the beginning of a crises level shortage. Labor prices will continue to rise and this will be absorbed by everyone.
    • AstralStorm 9y ago
      In a supposed American model this means there should be more competition, right? And the companies will be happy to pay those increased wages to US workers? (I'm being facetious devil advocate here.)
      • roseburg 9y ago
        :) They are having to pay higher wages. The wealthy in bigger cities are able to absorb these higher costs. It has a much bigger toll on the middle class in smaller cities because they have the same shortages, but less money to pay the increased costs. There won't be more competition in the short term because still, only 3% of graduating high school students are even considering a career in the trades. It's going to take quite a while for the ship to turn around.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• austenallred 9y ago
  It should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever been to college that the model there isn't exactly one of "efficiency." My first two years were a good time, but if you're a 45-year-old man trying to get skilled as quickly as possible to put food on the table, taking three credits of Shakespeare just seems silly (and I absolutely adore Shakespeare). Not to mention the fact that the notion that you should decide what you want to do for the rest of your life when you're 18 and have never worked or experienced a job market just seems completely insane to me. The fact of the matter is we're going to need widespread adult re-education, and the current four-years-at-18 model is woefully inadequate for the future that we can all see coming. In fact, the future that's here. Why can't I be prepared for a job in 6 months or one year? Can I take just the part of a college education that helps me be skilled? IMO the blue collar jobs of the future will be many of the white collar jobs of today. I actually include "coding" in that. Relatively simple programming is something most people can learn to do relatively quickly, provides immediate value, and has rising demand (even the code bootcamps flooding the market still, somehow, leave huge gaps). My company, Lambda School, (shameless plug, I suppose - YC S17 https://lambdaschool.com https://lambdaschool.com) is trying to solve some tiny portion of that by providing a live, online, skills-based education and job placement program that's completely free until you get a job. Soon it will be available entirely after hours. We've literally seen students go from applying at McDonalds to six-figure job offers; not because we're the best teachers in the world, but because they were already smart enough to become that person, they'd just never been given that opportunity, and for very practical reasons four years of college and expensive student loans were out of the question. But we're still relatively expensive, still at the higher-skill-level-but-more-difficult end, and we can only cover a tiny portion of the market. In the next 10 years I hope there will be a booming industry of college alternatives that can get people placed, so long as they're not crushed by licensing and regulation (neither of which I think are a bad thing in proper amounts). If you can move people from unemployed or minimum wage to regular living wage, the value created in that movement is enough that you can take a piece and everyone is way better off, and the cost of doing so is orders of magnitude less than college costs now. I really think we're going to enter a golden age of educational innovation, because the current system is broken enough folks are looking elsewhere. I would love to see someone do that at a serious kind of scale for high-paying trades: plumbing, welding, etc.
• metaphor 9y ago
  Relevant TL;DR summary: > Note: Working papers have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
• teslabox 9y ago
  > "There are too many four-year colleges serving too many students, The Screwing of the Average Man [0] said that college used to be something the upper-class sent their children to so they'd have a leg up on the "uneducated" masses. Then the congress provided the GI Bill to subsidize college for WWII veterans. This kept disgruntled veterans occupied while the economy retooled to peacetime production. Thus began the college price spiral. My great-grandmother played prohibition well, and sent all 4 of her children to teh college during the great depression. After WWII, the one grandfather didn't need any more college degrees and used the GI Bill to learn to fly small planes. My other grandfather had no interest in any college, so he didn't utilize his tuition credits... He certainly would've done better financially if he had... [0] https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0553129139 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0553129139 The only class I enjoyed in my public school experience was my 8th grade "technology" class. This semester was broken up into woodshop, welding/metal working, "computers", photography, and (don't remember). 45 minutes of appreciated learnings, 5 days a week, for one semester. Everything else was busy work. I learned a few things, here and there, but not enough to justify the countless hours of boredom. College was kind of a scam. I have an expensive diploma that doesn't mean anything. I learned a few things, here and there, but not enough to justify the $100k+ spent on my behalf. John Gatto [1] says it's better to skip as much of the early years of schooling as possible: some children learn to read when they're 2, some when they're 8, and by the time they're 12 you can't tell the difference. I met a man a few months ago that was traumatized by not being able to "read" on the teacher's schedule when he was in 1st grade. He learned to read eventually, in spite of his school's efforts to force him to read before he was ready. Allowing young children to have experiences in the real world instead of more classroom time would be much more valuable than giving young adults a choice of a trade school vs. more academics at age 18. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760 edit: clarification
  • ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    Sudbury and Montessori schools offer a model that seems to encourage students to learn at their own pace Provides a positive feedback loop that seemed to have positive results in the real world as well
• sunstone 9y ago
  Trade school get's you license. A medical degree or a legal degree get's you a license. A regular four year college degree is just an invitation to compete in a race to the bottom.
• mankash666 9y ago
  It's the other way around - a college education should be at least as useful as trade school - i.e. decent employment shouldn't be a luxury
• bsder 9y ago
  Um, where are the statistics showing that wages in the trades are rising? Everything I have seen indicates that wages in the trades are stagnant which implies that they don't need any more people. Dumping a whole bunch of people into a system already at close to optimum employment will not benefit workers.
  • roseburg 9y ago
    They are rising all across the country because there is a big shortage, and it's only going to get worse. Boomers are retiring faster than they are being replaced. Optimum employment? When someone wants to get a project built in Portland Oregon the wait time this past year was about 3 months until you were lucky enough to land a contractor. Contractors can't find enough skilled help so everything takes longer.
    • bsder 9y ago
      > Contractors can't find enough skilled help so everything takes longer. No, contractors can't find enough CHEAP skilled help. If there is an actual shortage, wages will rise sufficiently to pull people into the field or cause people to move around to fill the holes. The fact that these slots are not being filled says that they aren't paying enough NOT that there is a shortage.
  • soundwave106 9y ago
    The BLS data that I've looked at between 2010 (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/home.htm) and 2016 (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/home.htm) seems to show a median pay rise of roughly 10% over that time period. (I only sampled a few trades -- carpentry, electrician, and plumbing -- to get that figure.) This is honestly less of a wage increase than, say, computer programming, over that time period (see BLS data, 2010 https://web.archive.org/web/20120401201347/https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/home.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120401201347/https://www.bls.g... vs 2016 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...). But it is certainly better than, say, the modest 9% average increase in wages for cashiers and retail workers (2010 -- https://web.archive.org/web/20120409173908/http://www.bls.gov:80/ooh/Sales/home.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120409173908/http://www.bls.go... vs 2016 -- https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/home.htm). (Pity the poor modeling occupation, pay has actually decreased 33% during this time period). Generally speaking, I still see a fair bit of "college premium" in the BLS data -- I would think it would be incorrect to interpret the headline advice overly broadly. However, I do think it's true that not all college degrees are equal, and that some vocational degrees might work out better as ROI goes. "Trade school degrees" is also quite a broad term. For some reason, the construction trades are emphasized on HN when this topic comes up, but it's worth pointing out that "trade school degrees" also include occupations like some medical careers (nursing, dental hygiene, technicians), police and fire services, paralegals, and plenty of other career paths with fairly bright prospects as of now. The BLS shows growth rate in plumbing to be faster than average, but the same goes for RNs and paralegals.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• roseburg 9y ago
  I would simplify it and say that learning trade skills is a better investment for most people than attending a 4-year college. Trade skills can be learned at a young age, right from home, where there is room and time to explore and enjoy the learning process. Why we wait until after high school to teach kids in-demand skills boggles my mind. All the pressure in the world arrives after high school. It's time to start paying the bills and to grow up. It's no wonder most kids go off to college because they have zero marketable skills upon hs graduation and college is a way to get an extra 4 years to acquire some skills. The sad part of that is all the kids that get caught up in the college wave. They get pressured to go to a 4 year school, take on a mountain of debt for a degree (if they are fortunate to graduate) they most likely won't use. So many students would be better off exploring the different trades and finding one that they really enjoy. There are hundreds of them. I've been working on a project lately to help people explore and learn the trades online. Tradeskills.io It started as a side project for me a number of years ago teaching people how to get into the appliance repair trade. I've had over 600 students all across the country and Canada go through my training. The trades can be learned online and I think tech will need to play a big part in this area of education in the coming years.
  • Consultant32452 9y ago
    One thing that has really opened my mind on this is Amazon Home Services. Basically, if you're incorporated, insured, and can provide a few references proving you do decent work, Amazon will shovel business your way. And you can limit the services you provide. For example, one of the services you can buy on Amazon Home Services is "Door knob replacement." This is a VERY low level skill that requires only the most basic tools. The price in my zip code is $77. Amazon takes 20% off the top, so your business makes $61. By the time you include travel time, fuel, etc, you're probably making $20-30/hr doing ENTRY LEVEL labor. And there's a ton of services you can offer through the AHS portal: home theatre setup, house cleaning, lawn maintenance, plumbing, computer repair, electrical etc.
    • dionidium 9y ago
      What's amazing to me is that there are people who don't feel like they're capable of changing their own doorknob. (I get it; there are some people who would rather just pay, but surely some of these people just don't feel like they could manage this task. That's wild.)
• holydude 9y ago
  Germany is the country that lost the battle but won the war. I am not saying Germany is not full of hard working and smart people but consider this. Germany wreaked havoc on its neighbors effectively killing huge % of their populations,destroying trillions of $ worth of infrastructure and industries and much more. Yet they only paid dimes to these countries because someone smart people decided they must be the balancing force against the Soviets. Also consider this. Germany is effectively dominating the markets of its neighbors solely because of weak euro, its industrial scale, "open" (anti-protectionist) laws and ...corruption. There are many many other factors of course.
  • dba7dba 9y ago
    Victors tried making Germany pay for causing destruction to other neighbors, after WWI. And that contributed significantly to the rise of Hitler and WW2. The Marshall Plan was created because of lesson learned from end of WWI. And yes, with the rise of Soviets, Germany was the only 'reliable' force to reply on to counter Soviets. No one after WW2 would've thought of relying on the French to counter the Soviets. Nothing against the French, and you should also note France effectively left NATO over disagreements with other NATO allies. AFAIK, no NATO member left NATO except for France.
    • holydude 9y ago
      I know. I am not that salty about this though I hate it when Germany is presented as a role model because in many things it is not and its success cannot be replicated. It is what it is.
      • mantas 9y ago
        Their apprenticeship model could be replicated though. A lot of service economy or other non-outsourcable/exportable jobs could implement it. Even IT. The old StackOverflow was somewhat like apprenticeship actually. Learning from the masters, although not working together.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• forapurpose 9y ago
  As is often the case, the answer is built into how the question is framed: If we frame the question as, 'what is the most efficient way to train people with directly salable skills', then college is inefficient and probably not the best solution. But if the question is, 'how do we best prepare people for life, including critical thinking and knowledge about the world, and to improve our society', college blows away any trade school. Four years spent studying the leading thinkers, thinking, and critical approaches in a diverse array of fields, tutored by leading experts, is an incredible way to sharpen your mind, knowledge, and critical thought. Also, as most in IT realize, learning specific skills in IT is far less valuable over the long run than learning theory which then can be applied even as technology changes. Consider the liberal arts as the 'theory' of other fields. Many people on one hand bemoan the political situation, the ignorance, and the inability to discern propaganda from fact; while on the other hand they dismiss liberal arts as useless. The latter has developed, almost precisely, as the solution to the former. Society doesn't just work; we need to advance it, which requires understanding the world, its problems and their solutions. These are very hard problems, and learning Java or physics won't solve them.
  • Double_a_92 9y ago
    The problem is that most people are not actually that smart to profit from that. It just lowers the level if everybody basically HAS to go through college.
    • forapurpose 9y ago
      Using collegiate critical thinking skills, I wonder: What is that argument based on? Are 'smarts' really an important factor? Maybe it's just work, or opportunity, or preparation, or a million other things. I tend to think that anyone who wants to do it can do it; they only have to work hard enough.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > Four years spent studying the leading thinkers, thinking, and critical approaches in a diverse array of fields, tutored by leading experts, is an incredible way to sharpen your mind, knowledge, and critical thought. It is. How many people actually get that when they go to college? (More than get it in trade school, sure. But if that's the promise of college, I'm not sure that college delivers all that well...)
• dba7dba 9y ago
  I entered high school in California right as woodshop classes were being shuttered due to lower funding and also people wanting the students spend more time preparing for college, not in a woodshop. I think some might have benefited more by going to woodshop classes. Who knows?
• erikb 9y ago
  A financial gap of any kind comes from unfair advantages in a vastly complex system. How could something like that be solved by attending another kind of school. Imo these are two totally independent things.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    A different kind of school can leave you prepared to exploit a different kind of gap. If that gap is the one that is currently widening, then being positioned to exploit it can be a wise choice, in two ways. First, it can be wise for you. There's a lot of money to be made in filling that gap. Second, though, it can be wise for society. That gap is growing because there aren't enough people going into that area to keep up with demand. That is, society needs more people doing that. It can help society function to have people meet that need.
    • erikb 9y ago
      That sounds reasonable. But is a gap of capital really exploitable without capital?
      • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        Skills are a kind of capital.
• galfarragem 9y ago
  I believe that nowadays - at least in developed countries - you can have a stable income way above average as a tradesman. The shortage of reliable people in these areas is unbelieavable. As an anecdote I knew a self-employed poolboy that before crisis was earning more than most managers. According my experience (I used to help my father during work peaks) I think that we arrived here because ALL talent is nowadays directed to academia. To complicate the situation this is not easily undone, once people get used to be intellectually challenged they see trades as a terribly boring job. And don't forget the stigma..
  • rasz 9y ago
    Sure, but manager works sitting in front of a computer making couple of phone calls per day sipping coffee. Poolboy scrubs dried shit off the pool tiles in hot sun. People go to college because they dream of getting paid for sitting on their asses. Manual labour is for proles!
    • Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      Actually, I think a lot of managers are stuck making fast food and working retail and can very easily mean doing a lot of physical work. This is particularly true if you decided to go into business management instead of business administration. Lots of those jobs are retail.
• olivermarks 9y ago
  I reacted strongly and positively to the headline of this piece...and even more positively to the article. Apprenticeship was once considered more important than academic degrees in many areas. The balance has gone too far towards academia, and blue collar 'workers' don't get nearly enough respect IMO
  • roel_v 9y ago
    So what trade did you learn?
    • olivermarks 9y ago
      If you are asking me I was a graphic designer, mostly print work initially. It's a hybrid trade/skill set that gave me a good business grounding. I grew up in a generation where a lot of my peers in the UK were apprentices at Rolls Royce, Jaguar etc. I have no visibility into apprenticeships and how they are organized today...
      • roel_v 9y ago
        It was just a snippy remark hinting at the many people in this thread saying how great trade skills are, yet very few of them actually do a job like that. I mean, commenters here mention 'the social stigma' and how unfair it is - but being a plumber is just a, well, shit job. Construction work isn't fun, when it's your job, and you're not the boss. There's a reason all those middle and lower middle class parents tell their children to get a degree - it's because they want their children to do better than they do. Working a high-skill office job is in pretty much every way 'better' than doing somewhat-skilled things like, I don't know, garden maintenance or HVAC installation or operating a printing press. Yet here are all people commenting (from their cushy office jobs, probably) how great those sort or jobs are. How many people here would tell their children 'yeah forget about that LSAT and MCAT, do a one-year part time course in swimming pool construction, much better!'? Very few, I'd reckon. What's good for the good is good for the gander, right?
        • 9y ago
• throwaway318434 9y ago
  Another layer on top of an already terrible curriculum. Just make the damn schools better; the rotten prison system whose only arguable purpose has been to keep the unemployment figures down. There is way too much social inertia and disdain for people who won't play the asphyxiating game (and we're supposed to be "tolerant, diverse" and all that jazz), that I wish, very much like Miyazaki, that the world experience another great deluge.
• puppetmaster30 9y ago
  Yeah, but from career politicians POV: we want liberal arts. STEM or trade skills.... that is risky. They may want a smaller gov. So no way politics will go this way. For example, the Dirty Jobs guy? His video is banned by Google. True.
  • mantas 9y ago
    Any source on Dirty Jobs dude and Google ban? Never heard about it.
    • maxerickson 9y ago
      https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/posts/1680626875280782 https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/posts/1680626875280...
      • EADGBE 9y ago
        > The gist of my argument goes like this: > 1) Passion is a critical component of job satisfaction and overall happiness. However... > 2) Just because you’re passionate about something, doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it. Which means... > 3) Following your passion doesn’t always lead to lasting happiness or true job satisfaction. Ergo, my advice to graduates is... > 4) "NEVER follow your passion, but ALWAYS bring it with you." It's a shame it was censored. I could have used that advice. I've been considering a career transition into the trades, anyway.
• trisimix 9y ago
  We should close down business colleges in my opinion. Like learn a skill for fucks sake.
• malbs 9y ago
  I wish I'd taken my step-dad up on his offer and done an chippy apprenticeship when I was 17. Instead I flailed around, did some c programming, some web development, never went to uni. I even managed to get myself that first job as a software dev, slowly trading upwards, but it always worked against me that I was a high school drop out and had no degree. Later in life, I looked upon the lack of degree as an asset, I worked harder than the guys/girls who did have a comp/sci degree, because I felt I had to prove myself constantly, to out-do those with a degree. But I always look back and think, man, I wish I'd just done a carpentry apprenticeship. It's not like the systems change underneath you ever few years, that you have to learn a new "circular-saw" to help you cut timber because everyone is using it, even though the job you're working on, you could get away with a regular hand-saw. The analogy is shit, but you get what I mean. Any friends/family who ever say "I'm thinking of being a plumber/sparky/chippy" I wholly encourage them.
  • jlebrech 9y ago
    when we barely avoid armageddon artisans will be the only jobs in town.
    • nickpinkston 9y ago
      Just wait for all the robotic artisans! For real, creativity isn't going to stay a human property, and we'll have to understand what humanity's place really is - maybe not "working" at all.
  • mholmes680 9y ago
    Do you think this is sort of the "grass is always greener" situation though? I find myself regretting not doing something a little more hands-on as a career, so I built some hobbies around it. [edit: Also.. after witnessing the dysfunction of a home builder i worked with last year over basic Project Management work, I can see room for a lot of improvement if a programmer were embedded in their office. Maybe an idea for others identifying with your same situation.)
  • logicalmind 9y ago
    I come from a blue collar family. I was the first person in my family to graduate college. But that wasn't my plan initially. During summers in high school I worked installing HVAC systems. After graduating high school I started a plumbing apprenticeship. It was what I discovered during that apprenticeship that made me decide to go to college instead (during college I had a job doing carpentry as well). I'm not saying all people in the trades are this way, but you find a lot of people who are alcoholics. It often does not impact their job, but people drinking a case of beer a day is not uncommon. If you can avoid drinking, the next problem is the damage you do to your body on the job. You are often lifting heavy things. You will be using dangerous power tools often. Any little loss of focus will lead to serious injury or worse. And even if you avoid that, there is only so much your body can take. Many people need surgeries or become crippled as they age. Many of the people I once worked with have died from alcoholism, smoking, or related cancers. My own father is now forcefully retired due to back and knee issues. He can barely walk. He meets up monthly with the other people he worked with, who are now retired, and it is not a pretty site. I personally don't know anyone in this line of work who is happily retired and living the dream, so to speak. The trades are very much about physical work and physical labor. Not everyone can take that kind of work for a lifetime.
• Raphmedia 9y ago
  So, a bit like the "General and Vocational College" we have here in Québec, Canada. Three-year technical programs for students who wish to pursue a skilled trade at a modest price. The price per semester is a mere $132 and you even have access to scholarships & financial aid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP
• deusofnull 9y ago
  I think there may be value in society providing some kind of fusion of these two things at universities. University has become a sort of coming of age ritual for young people, when they can manage to go. Craftsmanship and trades skills are certainly solid ways to support yourself, especially when paired with a decent, democratic union, but I cant help but feel that theres something about a college experience that is hugely beneficial to people. Even just the interpersonal relations you experience at university are deeply influential. Maybe we could have universities run more traditionally trade school type programs as well as liberal arts, stem, art, and music curriculums? That way the philosophy students have the opportunity to take a class in engine repair and the students in the electrician's school can likewise take a class in Computer Aided Design or Astronomy Lab.
• abrongersma 9y ago
  I attended a 2 year vocational program for CIS in High School. It was heavily focused on passing the CCNA exam but I spent most of my time working running the class websites and learning the ins and outs of the LAMP stack. I had unlimited access to industry standard equipment and the freedom to break things without the risk of getting fired. It provided me with a solid foundation of networking and infrastructure fundamentals. I passed on going to college due to getting an incredible co-op. I'm quite fortunate that my lack of a college degree has yet to limit my career. I give back by volunteering and providing co-op positions for the students of the program. High School students are pushed to go straight to college and get a degree even when they're not 100% sure what they enjoy doing. They're not often provided with information about alternatives like attending a vocational program.
• crispyambulance 9y ago
  Trade school is a great thing for the right number of motivated and capable students. The problem is that the market can only take so many plumbers, electricians and tin-knockers before their pay falls off a cliff. I expect that this would occur long before the wage gap is actually closed. Moreover many trades are still unionized and resistant to new entrants. I think that schools should focus more on getting the basics right. Most of us here on HN have enjoyed a priviledged journey through good to elite schooling. The sad reality is that in large swathes of the country high school education has become a shit-show with reprecussions that will last decades. While it is good to continue to offer votech programs, I think that schools should just make literacy a priority. If you think that's 'aiming low' you haven't seen what goes on in schools today.
• oneplane 9y ago
  This seems rather odd to me. The article hammers on about manufacturing jobs while it has been reported that manufacturing ethos in other countries is better than the USA making it a really bad choice to manufacture there. It costs more, and you get less. At the same time, this seems to be suggesting that anyone could be doing a trade school type of education instead of college, while to me it seems that is is the lower entry into any form of education. If college equals trade school, then college in the USA needs to up it's game. Learning a trade is only useful up to a point. As others have posted, there is no point in having 100 million machinists all being very capable of re-manufacturing tower crane gearboxes. Even a million would not make any sense. There is also a limit to what you can do with your time. While you don't need to be a millionaire to be happy, the limit to what you can earn is comparatively low when you are working at the practical side of things vs. what steering/planning/administrating and up can earn. This does not mean that trade school is by definition 'stupid' and if you don't go to college or university (or is that the same in the USA?) you are therefore not smart, but it does limit your capabilities, at least in terms of growth. Now, if you are comfortable with a trade, if it gets you what you want, there would be no point in going to college. At the same time, if college is too hard, and learning beyond basic literacy and mathematics is not an option, you might be stuck at trade level. One of the bigger problems with 'trade' or 'labour' type of skill is that it often is very limited in abstracted transferrable knowlegde. What if the way some thing are done are replaced. Say you are very good at cleaning chimneys, that's great, but nobody needs your skills. Or what if you are very good at shining shoes. Or driving horse carriages. Or digging holes and putting down outhouses. This is the same for most of the current trade type of work, it is only useful as long as people need you, and when they don't you can't really go do something else because you don't have the theory behind what you were doing to re-implement it somewhere else.
  • srtjstjsj 9y ago
    There's no point in having 100million "business" majors either.
• openthedamper 9y ago
  a great one hour program on NPR 1a call-in program on the trades, apprenticeships here: https://the1a.org/shows/2017-06-12/how-to-earn-six-figures-without-a-four-year-degree https://the1a.org/shows/2017-06-12/how-to-earn-six-figures-w...
• Noos 9y ago
  It's annoying when this is discussed, because people assume all there are only three skilled trades; plumber, electrician, or machinist of some kind. Machine Drafting, for example, was absolutely decimated by the rise of cad/cam, as was graphic design with the rise of desktop publishing and decline of print due to the web. We also have hairdressing, which is ok but shows that many trades are not open to women, nor can many areas not support a decent amount of tradespeople. I went to a vocational high school myself, and many people wound up going to college instead, as maybe half the trades didn't have much of a future. And keep in mind, there were a LOT of tradespeople thrown out of work in the 90s in my area due to military budget cuts, too; many skilled tradesmen tend to piggyback on defense or government spending, which is not sustainable.
• donatj 9y ago
  One of my sisters and I both attended trade school and were quickly happily employed. My other sister went for a psychology major and has since worked service jobs. I went to a small trade school for "Application Development" circa 2005 that has since gone under. They really got an undeserved bad rap, like a lot of for profit schools lately. I genuinely feel I received a quality education readying me for working in the industry. I had what I would consider some of the best educators of my life and lots of one on one time with them. I know a handful of my classmates didn't really take it very seriously and the army was paying for them to be there, but honestly it's lead me into a career I enjoy and allowed me to earn more than I ever imagined.
• kaonashi 9y ago
  Income gap has nothing to do with education, it has everything to do with power differentials. Education isn't going to counter the musical-chairs nature of the economy nor the outsized influence of a handful of ultra-wealthy.
• MR4D 9y ago
  Let’s see.... Learn programming in a trade school or study English at an Ivy League school? My bet would be the programmer will make more money more consistently across a large number of people than the other. They will also probably have less school debt.