5 ms·

Everyone in college isn’t cut out for medical school or law school. This is neither controversial nor a judgment against us laymen. Not everyone in high school

• lotsofpulp 9y ago
  If the "skilled" trades offered enough pay, then they would automatically become honorable. The lack of pay commensurate to the risk of injury, variable work schedules, not being home every night, etc causes the status.
  • adventured 9y ago
    Plumbers earn a median salary of about $54,500 in the US. That's comparable to the median household income in Sweden. It's ~150% higher than the median individual income in the UK. Skilled trades often pay moderately well in the US.
    • chongli 9y ago
      You can't compare US wages to Sweden and the UK. Those countries have robust health care and high quality public education. In the US you're going to pay a lot for those things (or go without and really suffer).
      • lutorm 9y ago
        That depends on whether you're quoting pre-tax or net wages. Those robust health care and public education systems come out of people's taxes, after all.
        • chongli 9y ago
          They do come out of taxes, but the tax based systems are more efficient and if you lose your job you don't have to worry about losing coverage. That's a big deal, especially for people working in high risk trade jobs where injury is common.
  • cmorgan31 9y ago
    Don't you think the rampant degradation of their image in media has played a role in the declining rates? College graduates don't immediately make more than trade careers, and in some cases, the trade careers are a better path to the "American Dream." They deal with more obvious dangers but don't have as much of a sedentary lifestyle which contributes a good deal to health risks both mental and physical.
    • lotsofpulp 9y ago
      If it has, then their pay should markedly be rising, and maybe it is. I know I'm paying a lot more for labor in the past few years than before. The difference is, however, that it has to pay enough extra to offset the luxuries of a stable 9-5 office job or what have you, and this could be a lagging indicator. But do many people want to tell their kid that they're probably not good enough to compete for the cushy jobs, and that they should go for the trades instead?
      • cmorgan31 9y ago
        You may be right if that is how the decision is being framed by their parents or guardians. This is similar to kids who want to go into the Arts. Everyone jokes that the arts are a fast track to being a barista. There exist prestigious private art schools that people are not ashamed to attend, and I think a trade school equivalent without the crippling debt would go a long way to increase employment rates in the trades.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
        Perhaps not, but we do (should) tell our kids to do the work they enjoy. Mine wanted to be a game programmer when he was 12. Now, at 17, he's discovered that he loves welding and is pretty good at it. He wants to get certified and be a professional welder. Living on a farm, he's used to hard work outdoors at temperature extremes and does it without complaint. If he wants to be a welder instead of a software engineer, I'm all for it.
    • mywittyname 9y ago
      No I don't. Tradesman are often portrayed as more manly and Americana than the dull office worker. Those pickup truck commercials don't feature rugged accountants pulling into the office park. The reason young people got out of the trades was entirely due to the Great Recession, which eliminated any opportunity people graduating between 2004 and 2012 had of ever having a career in these fields. There's no reason to take on apprentices when you can get a desperate person with a decade of experience for the same pay. The people who trained in those careers just a few years earlier retrained for new jobs and new people never bothered to get training for jobs they knew didn't exist. The only people that stuck it out were those who were lucky or desperate.
  • jdietrich 9y ago
    Stigma can have a huge effect. The obvious example is funeral directors and undertakers - they don't need a college degree and make an average of $62,000, but a lot of people would refuse to even consider the job. A very large proportion of parents would say that their ambition is for their children to go to college and get a "good" job, with "good" invariably meaning white-collar. There's still a widespread intuition that college is the best or only route into a middle-class lifestyle, but many degrees have a negligible impact on earning potential net of tuition costs. Most college graduates aren't going into six-figure jobs in the tech industry. A large proportion are aspiring to relatively poorly-paid roles in education, healthcare and the service industry. Plumbing pays better than most non-tenure track jobs in academia, but "my son the plumber" carries a very different set of cultural and emotional baggage than "my son the lecturer".
    • theandrewbailey 9y ago
      Healthcare careers aren't poorly paid if a college degree is involved. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home.htm
      • gbacon 9y ago
        Downside: despite their college degrees, they still sometimes have to clean up poop.
        • mywittyname 9y ago
          A lot of them move past the poop-stage mid career. They do the clinical stuff for a bit, get tired of it, and go into admin work.
• maxk42 9y ago
  It's not even medical or law school. The most popular undergraduate degree in the US currently is in psychology. But there aren't that many psychologists.
  • liveoneggs 9y ago
    it's good for management I've been told :)
    • airstrike 9y ago
      Yet somehow managers are usually dicks.
      • jnbiche 9y ago
        (so are most psychologists)
  • xboxnolifes 9y ago
    This claims that Psychology is only (still too high) 4th most popular. This is for 2014-2015 though. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/15/the-6-most-popular-college-majors.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/15/the-6-most-popular-college-m...
  • astrange 9y ago
    I always thought undergrad psych was the degree for HR professionals.
• hinkley 9y ago
  To flip this around: there are very few people in medical or law school that I would trust with a wrench. People like to look down their nose at people whose jobs they couldn’t do if they tried. They also like to pretend like everybody is stupid for doing them. If nobody did any of those jobs, Mr Smartypants, you’d be dead in a gutter somewhere because you can’t take care of yourself.
  • wufufufu 9y ago
    > If nobody did any of those jobs, Mr Smartypants, you’d be dead in a gutter somewhere because you can’t take care of yourself. Are we talking about doctors or plumbers?
  • chrisbennet 9y ago
    My blue collar Dad was always telling me that “Einstein couldn’t tie his own shoes”. I think this sort of attitude is just a way for people to make themselves feel better by bringing other people “down a peg”. I really do think it is wrong that people look down their noses at other people because of their profession or even worse, that society has made some people ashamed of what they do - good, honest work. That is where this resentment comes from. At some point in my life I realized that everyone was ignorant about something (maybe most things!). I wouldn’t look down on people who can’t turn a wrench/program a computer/cook a meal/shoot straight/etc. just because I/you can.