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There’s plenty of trade schools that can give careers to those not fortunate to get a sizeable scholarship and who would need to take out unreasonable student l

There’s plenty of trade schools that can give careers to those not fortunate to get a sizeable scholarship and who would need to take out unreasonable student loans. For those few I’d recommend getting a career and saving up some money before trying to pay their way through college instead of having their student loan loom over their heads for most of their lives and potentially ruining their credit score with a couple of missed payments.

chongli 7y ago
There are plenty of people who would do well in science or engineering programs that aren't prodigious enough for a full ride scholarship. Telling those people to go to trade school is a huge waste of their economic potential. At the same time, there are plenty of extremely bright people who take a scholarship to study a subject with approximately zero real world applicability. That often doesn't matter though, because they made it through and are now able to signal their status to employers. I happen to own a copy of Caplan's The Case Against Education and I don't buy his arguments for trade schools. People go to school to signal status, mostly because humans engage in assortative mating, and trades offer money rather than status. Besides that, many trades are very physically taxing and tend to cause injuries which result in chronic pain later in life. Who wants that? The epidemic of suicides and drug overdoses in the US is occurring precisely within the populations of older, injured workers who were essentially forced into retirement.