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As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people d
by sandoooo 7y ago
As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people doing those jobs shouldn't need to spending four of their most productive years not working and accumulating debt. They should just start four years earlier, or get vocational training for a few months to a year.
Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no-strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.
- harimau777 7y agoThose jobs tend not to pay as well as jobs that require a career focused college degree (e.g. business, engineering, computer science, and even teaching).
- sandoooo 7y agoI think getting four years of head-start would make up for it a lot. Plus, not everybody is suited to the career focused college degrees and not everybody should be in them.
- harimau777 7y agoI agree with you that everyone shouldn't have to work the sorts of jobs that require a degree. However, as long as college is the most effective way to a better job, I think that people are going to keep preferring to go to college. Hmm, it's a good point that having a four year head start would help balance things. However, I think in the long run things would probably workout in the favor of the person that went to college. Especially in the higher paying majors such as business, CS, and engineering.
- sandoooo 7y agoA barista is never going to make as much money as a CS major, but not everybody wants to spend all their time coding, and not everybody will be good enough at it to get paid. Lots of people want to be baristas and are capable of getting paid for making coffee, though, and society still needs baristas.
- harimau777 7y agoI agree, but in many locations society doesn't pay baristas enough to own a house, pursue their hobbies, and raise a family.
- burfog 7y agoSociety doesn't need baristas. Machines can do the job, or people can drink something else. Being a barista is a reasonable job for a 14-year-old. Adults shouldn't be taking jobs from teens.
- rossdavidh 7y agoThere are plenty of college degrees that pay no more, or considerably less, than several of those jobs.
- harimau777 7y agoSure, but those are generally degrees which are well known for having poor employment prospects (philosophy, art, history, etc.). Doesn't that just change the advice from "go to college" to "go to college in one of the majors with a track record or leading to a good career"?
- hogFeast 7y agoYep, some plumbers are making way more...even than grads in "majors with a track record" (whatever that means). The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).
- rossdavidh 7y agoFor the record, I know many cases of philosophy majors getting good jobs (as computer programmers). Apparently some employers find that people who take Logic classes can be taught to program, and then cost less (at least for a while). But your point stands, that most people have a reasonable idea of which majors give good employment prospects, and if they don't they can nowadays find out online what they are. But, and here's the kicker, there are a lot of people who lump all college degrees together, either mentally or in their writing on the topic, and then justify going into debt to get a degree based on that. "Go to college" is not that easy to swap out with "go to college in one of the majors with a track record of leading to a good career", not least because there are numerous colleges (Fine Arts, some parts of Liberal Arts, etc.) where if that were the way people thought, that college would shrink to half its current size or less. Which, maybe is what needs to happen, or maybe we need to find another way for society to fund people who study those topics (my preference), but either way it's not what's happening now, and those closest to the university system are generally the ones most hostile to the idea of looking plainly at the facts about the current situation.
- meej 7y agoUnions might be able to do something about that.
- pjkundert 7y agoThis is primarily because manufacturing has been moved, and there are no manufacturing apprenticeships. A low-wage manufacturing job can lead to high-wage automation and tooling maintenance and eventually design positions, or shop steward, training or mentoring. And “learn to code” should be a basic school curriculum topic! It is well, frankly, disgusting that such a universally powerful, useful and accessible skill has been withheld from the vast majority of students, and now made almost into an “epithet” meaning disrespect toward lower-skilled people. I don’t know any job, no matter how menial, that couldn’t be improved by some automation of it’s most repetitive book-keeping tasks.