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Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. Afte

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you "invent flowers." I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.

nyxtom 7y ago
What is happening with this make for movie story ^ So much here ^ :D
HarryHirsch 7y ago
our bartender Javon had a masters in biology That's de-risking, de-skilling and outsourcing. Back then, in the last century, the US and Europe had a functioning chemical industry. Unfortunately, information technology took off, and investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Also, mergers & acquisitions took off in the same time. Why invest in research when you can buy up someone else's research? Industry research does not exist any longer in the sciences. The sciences are not a good proposition any longer if you want to make a living.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  You don't have to create and improve in a world you have little to no competition with high barrier to entry established. You can keep repackaging the same things without risk and work on perceptive value of people. Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? We're not quite that bad yet but we're already headed down the path in that direction.
  - amiga_500 7y ago
    I know you aren't promoting it, but to answer your question: > Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? Because the entire country is going to implode. 2008: financial crisis 2016: political crisis
    - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
      2008: financial crisis 2016: political crisis 2020: deadly pandemic, inducing a financial crisis, while also collapsing the real economy, on top of four years of political crisis
      - reroute1 7y ago
        Political crisis? Yeah I'll pass
  - N1H1L 7y ago
    In economics this is what is called rent-seeking behavior, and I think it probably is an exceptionally interesting area of research to study how financialization of industries modifies rent-seeking behavior in those industries. My own hunch is that it probably increases significantly.
- mpweiher 7y ago
  The financialization of the economy is more a US/UK thing than the rest of Europe. Lots of chemical industry here, etc.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  Yep, financialisation black hole. Cratering living standards, partially hidden by printing ever bigger numbers next to people's house prices and ignoring that they have no retirement savings. Many of the "industries" beloved by this site are showing they are only viable on top of a backbone of "real" jobs like industry and manufacturing. No N95 mask manufacturers, but we can write how sad we are about this on facebook. And the media won't tell us the root cause, so nothing is learned.
  - kanwisher 7y ago
    3M one of the biggest n95 manufactures in the world, originated and still has factories in America
    - 12elephant 7y ago
      N95 is the US standard, so it makes sense the US makes more of these than other countries. Compare production capacity of N95s in the US with FFP2/3 in the EU, or KN95 in China. Then we'll really see how US production capacity stacks up. To be clear, I have no idea how these production capacities stack up. But if we want to evaluate medical mask production, this is the comparison that needs to be made.
    - amiga_500 7y ago
      Yes and the Greeks invented math, but times move on: https://www.wired.com/story/decades-offshoring-led-mask-shortage-pandemic/ https://www.wired.com/story/decades-offshoring-led-mask-shor...
- jldugger 7y ago
  > investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Considering how many drugs are basically miracles of statistics rather than science: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/7950612/Five-out-of-six-new-prescription-drugs-dont-work-doctor-claims.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/7950612/Five-out-of-...
mywittyname 7y ago
It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80% of those people live in a handful of rural states. Also, a lot can change in the four to seven years it takes to complete school. A recession can drive a large of people into "safe" majors, like accounting, making it more difficult for new graduates to onboard. And other fields can shrink or disappear almost entirely within that time period. That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar. They could have searched employment in tangentially-related fields or learned some more technical skills. They could have also relocated. Maybe those were not options for whatever reason, but in general, those are things successful people do. Because the job market is going to change wildly during the 40+ years you'll be employed.
- twomoretime 7y ago
  >There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors. It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they hear that psychology or sociology are STEM and therefore a meal ticket, and end up taking out loans for a worthless degree simply because they had it drilled in their heads that they needed to go to college and major in something "useful".
  - syedkarim 7y ago
    Why is this being downvoted? Strange. I graduated in 2007 and your observation is the same as mine. Students go to school without really thinking about what is next. I'm guessing that is a result of a middle/upper middle class upbringing. I noticed international students were a lot more driven, on average. I went to a small, liberal arts college that was not highly selective in admissions. Even with the talented and studious, very few had any real idea of what was next. Why do we encourage so much debt just for the supposed sake of edification. I will say, though, that it was a really fun time in my life. So maybe that's worth it?
gwd 7y ago
> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery. There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it's a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they're buying a ticket to a better life is far more vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan. All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.
- brownbat 7y ago
  > All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, I thought so too. This always made me so angry. Last time I posted a rant about that here someone urged me to read the REPAYE Act, and it completely changed my mind. Under REPAYE, students get income based repayment, even down to $0 payments if you're anywhere near poverty level. After a certain number of years of repayment, the government just pays off your entire balance. This solves the same problems bankruptcy is designed to solve without ruining people's credit. It also prevents doctors from declaring bankruptcy right after medschool -- I'm honestly unsure whether that was a real or just anecdotal problem, but income based repayment for a fixed term seems like a better way to let people escape debt while still expecting them to pay what they can.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    This program only applies to federal student loans. Anyone with private student loans (before ~2010 IIRC) is SOL.
    - 7y ago
geebee 7y ago
Thanks for your story. I had a similar moment after college myself. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, in San Diego, which had been hit very hard by defense cutbacks. Almost everyone I knew worked service jobs, and even those were hard to get at times. The only people getting decent jobs - by which, I mean jobs that build careers, I'm not talking about pay - were engineers and a few finance/accounting related majors. Humanities majors who moved (to Washington DC, New York, to a lesser extent San Francisco or Los Angeles) fared better. I agree that "STEM" alone won't get you a good job, and some of the bio majors were not doing a whole lot better than the humanities majors. But overall, STEM was a vastly better place to be, especially the more "numeric" fields - by that, I mean the various majors that require the common two year sequence of math from calculus through linear algebra and differential equations as a prerequisite to whatever upper division specialization happens. Even there, some are better than others in terms of jobs, but they all fared vastly better. Humanities majors from very elite schools tend to weather a recession ok, but otherwise, I think that one advantage to being a STEM major (with the caveat I described above) is that you're less likely to be permanently knocked out of the game by a bad stretch, especially in the beginning. There's a real risk to getting sidelined, and I worry about the young people graduating right now. For instance, my employer has done a hiring moratorium for a year, and there may be layoffs. This, especially if it goes on for a few years, is unusually devastating to the long term career prospects of people just starting out. My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom. If you graduate in better times, you lock in a few good career building years. You may stagnate, you may even be unemployed for long enough that it knocks you off the path for a bit, but you have something to build on. If you graduate when nobody is hiring, and you float around for a few years, by the time things pick up, employers are either hiring the people who have some experience, or going back to recent grads for entry level hiring. That definitely happened to a lot of people I know who graduated in the early 90s in SoCal. I suspect that humanities majors from very elite colleges, as well as STEM majors in very in demand fields from a broader range of colleges, are less likely to be locked out in a bad market, and more likely to be recruited back in when things improve. This is a bit of a guess, though I think it is supported by some research.
- jcranmer 7y ago
wutbrodo 7y ago
I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has been a consistent secret weapon of mine: they're often written off as unproductive, but it's not difficult to turn someone that smart into a solid engineer with a few months of guidance, as long as they're willing to learn. In specific domains, a subset of their actual skills are a good fit (they tend to be great at math), but it just signifies an unfortunate and fairly significant misallocation of resources.
- N1H1L 7y ago
  PhDs though are never self-funded, so almost entirely the loan is from undergrad.
  - skwb 7y ago
    *STEM PhDs are almost always funded.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I didn't mention a loan, and was thinking primarily of opportunity cost (and to a lesser extent, undergrad, though the skills gained in undergrad tend to be the ones directly useful for their current work). I tend to treat opportunity cost like inflation adjustment: in most cases, failing to include it is an error, so I do it by default.
- bradstewart 7y ago
  "AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?
  - burntoutfire 7y ago
    Air conditioning, Ventilation perhaps?
blhack 7y ago
What is the job you do where somebody thinks you make flowers?
- xenomatic 7y ago
  Botanist
baby 7y ago
your comment reads like bukowski
- lanewinfield 7y ago
  was just going to say—I'd read your book.
bachmeier 7y ago
For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment. I could write lots of comments about people without a college degree that live crappy lives and have trouble finding good paying jobs, and people with college degrees that live well and make a lot of money. My prediction is that we'll see changes in the US system. The problem you're pointing out is the risk. Universities are the ones that IMO should be taking on the risk. If you graduate 3000 students a year, most will do okay and some won't, and that would be no big deal if college cost $800 a year. I predict that over the next couple decades we'll move to a system where you pay for college out of your earnings. This would clean up another issue (not pointing any fingers with this). Colleges would nudge students into careers with better prospects. If they'd get paid less from students in certain majors, there'd be fewer of those majors. I could even see a system where "you're on your own" if you major in certain limited prospect fields. Universities that align their interests with those of the students will be the ones that thrive. Disclosure: Professor for many years
- vsareto 7y ago
  No college is going to advocate for taking future income from students over government backed loans or a traditional loan. The former translates to less immediate income. Colleges had little reason to raise tuition since 2000 except for money, I don't see them suddenly moving to forward-thinking strategies.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    They may if they face competition form Lambda School style ISAs (not necessarily just ISAs generally, but ones that are actually good for the student). As a bonus this would make universities better at education since the incentives would be aligned with the students. It would be helped though if the easily available government loans were not available, though with the generally bad politics from both sides on this, I find progress there unlikely.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      You're assuming a lot of faith in market forces. In reality, the incentives should already be aligned with student interest: All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge, and you can easily find out if a school has job placement (and their rates) or merely a "career services" area that will help you write a resume and point you at some other resources. The fact is, the majority of students don't make their decisions of where to attend based on tangible metrics. They make their decision based primarily on the perceived "experience" they will have in college, and only after that do they filter their options based on other factors (if at all). The problem is less with the colleges, and more with the fact that attending college has become less about academics and much more about a stage of transition into adulthood (along with a sort of last "hurrah" farewell to the lesser responsibilities of childhood)
Invictus0 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. Out of curiosity, how did you wind up on Hacker News?
IdiocyInAction 7y ago
While I do not want to be rude, statistically speaking, those with tertiary education still do better on average than those without. It's true that there's outliers and that underemployment is a persistent problem (especially in our over-educated society), but getting tertiary education might still be a better choice than a trade school, depending on your situation. Nothing is without risk and you should inform yourself about your job prospects beforehand though. Not every major will pay and some will only pay to a select few. One should put much thought into major choice (or whether they should go to university at all) - it's one of the more impactful choices in people's lives.
WalterBright 7y ago
I don't understand how people can spend 4 years pursuing a major and never spend 5 minutes googling job prospects and salaries for their major.
ashtonkem 7y ago
College, and the push to send everyone to it, makes much more sense when you view College as both an economic proposition, and a part of social class. The economic aspect has been well covered here, but the social class has not. Social classes are a set of shared values, habits, and beliefs that help cluster people together into a sense of shared social membership. It is completely distinct from economic class, with some of the “lower” classes regularly having more income and net worth than the “upper” social classes. In America, a large portion of the push to send everyone to college has been a push for the supremacy of middle class norms and values over working class norms and values via college. College is literally an indoctrination process into the middle social class, it’s where you learn the norms and values of that class and socialize exclusively with other members of said class. As you’ve discovered, social class and economic class are not one and the same, and you yourself as a member of the working class actually make significantly more money than members of the middle class who went to college but did not reap any economic benefits from the process.
- eternauta3k 7y ago
  Reminds me of this other reference [1] to college being finishing school for the upper classes [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    The first link in that blog, siderea[0] is exactly where I first learned about social class. Definitely worth a read. [0] https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
7leafer 7y ago
People aka the New Oil must have skills, not knowledge. This narrative has been coming out of the woodwork recently. Like, lumberjacks over dendrologists all the way. If we translate this motto from the newspeak, it would be this: the New Oil must flow smoothly without asking uncomfortable questions about the piping.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Actual boilermaker here. Can confirm: earn more than my university educated age group; no education debt; have home and mortgage that I don’t struggle to pay; still have plenty of work during the down turn. Have often thought about living on rice n lentils n going to university to get a degree, but this whole pandemic mess has made me realise: well and truly fuck that for a joke.
- moftz 7y ago
  It's all a betting game. Go to trade school and get a decent job making good money but have little upwards mobility other than opening your own business. Or go to university and hope you pick a worthwhile major and get a great job out of school where you have a lot of upward mobility. University is risky but if you can pick something like electrical engineering and end up at a top firm, you are probably set for life. I've got friends with university degrees that have done very well for themselves and those that just couldn't find a job in that field so now they work in retail. Some of them did everything right but just couldn't find high-paying work (computer science), others choose majors that fit their passions but don't have any immediate real world use (english). I think some people have huge expectations for what their degree will get them that just aren't reasonable. I picked a engineering major that would pay big but also fit my passion, got the job I wanted, and have constant work lined up for me for the next 5 years. I got very lucky at the university betting game. If I hadn't gotten into college or decided to drop out when I had to take an semester off due to grades, I probably would have decided to try trade school.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    Carpenter 1. Work 2. Buy house 2b. Rent house out 2bb. Problem? Fix it with your carpenter skills or trade school buddies (plasterer, electrician, you name it, they know them). 3. Work a few years more 4. Buy second house 5. Get a few more houses. This is what my carpenter buddies are doing. And I was the smart kid in my class. I guess they have the last laugh, they are all on their second houses now.
Diederich 7y ago
The other replies are interesting and insightful, so I wanted to add a little anecdata here. > some massive college bills In the late 1980s I started a Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona https://www.cpp.edu/ https://www.cpp.edu/ If memory serves, my tuition for a quarterly full load was less than $300. That's not per credit, that was for as many classes as I wanted. Books added up to a bit less. Working at Jack in the Box and later McDonalds, I was making minimum wage which was I believe $4.25/hour. Assuming I kept 70% of that after taxes it took me about 185 hours to pay my combined tuition and books, which comes out to about 19 hours a week over the 10 week quarter. And I did, in fact, work about 20 hours a week. This doesn't include housing, but it was also fairly affordable. I believe another 10 hours a week could have covered some basic shared rent. I had a place to live for free, fortunately. EDIT: I haven't done any math for how this would look today, but I'm pretty sure it's not quite so friendly.
- vondur 7y ago
  At CSU Long Beach, tuition is about 7k per year. We hire our student assistants at 13/hr, so they can make around 8 or 9k year in salary. Not nearly as cheap when I went, we paid around 2k a year for tuition. So if you are willing to go to a state school, you can come out with relatively small amounts of debt. Now if you go to a really nice private University and live on campus, all bets are off.
  - Diederich 7y ago
    I'm glad to hear that state schools are still reasonably inexpensive.
- bsder 7y ago
  In California, at least, it used to be that(still may be, but my data is a couple years old) you could get about 2 years of your prerequisites done at a community college and then use that to funnel into the Cal-State schools. That was a significantly cheaper option for most students. And the classes tended to be smaller and, often, much better quality.
  - 7y ago
dnautics 7y ago
it goes further up. Luckily I was an only child to a single-worker-family midlevel government employee that rode the interest cliff and was willing to spend gobs of money for my (quite good) college, and I went for a technical grad program that pays you sub-minimum-wage (but no educational debt!) to do 100 hours a week in a lab for seven years, so I had no debt -- but I quit my postdoc to drive for lyft for a year and a half, and I made more money and had less stress driving for lyft (yes, after expenses) than I did in my postdoc. Everyone thought I was crazy. Well, maybe I was, but I wasn't the only postdoc that had quit and was driving for lyft full-time.
darkerside 7y ago
I guess Javon never learned about second order effects in college. > the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway You start in the same situation, but with the room for advancement in a skilled field, you have the opportunity to either pursue growth in your role, or leverage those skills into a related but more lucrative career. Avoiding dead ends is much more important than your velocity, assuming you have enough time to let things play out.
- steve_adams_86 7y ago
  I used to tell my friend this and she was positive she'd never earn more than $50K CAD/year, and always said I was overpaid as a developer making ~$70K/year at the time. These days she has advanced far more than I have, and she'll continue to. Even as a developer with no education or particularly special skills, your ceiling in Canada isn't all that high. I'm the epitome of a 1xer though, so I can't speak for everyone. I can earn around $90k, but she's earning $120k now – that only took about 7 years for a 240% increase. Having an education can be a huge asset to your career, and she couldn't have her career without hers.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
the reason those people can't get jobs isn't because they're not smart. It's because there simply aren't enough jobs that require that, and waaaayyy too many people running around with that education and those degrees.
dschuler 7y ago
You write very well, it flows in a way that reminds me of Bukowski.
aroundtown 7y ago
I thought getting a degree in computer science was my ticket out of poverty and the lower class blue-collar work that has perpetuated my family for generations. Boy was I wrong. Opportunity and pure luck have to be at your back for the kind of generational change I sought. End up on the wrong side of either one of those and you too might not end up where you expect. Nowadays, I wish I had learned a trade. Sure the work is hard, but those skills are always in demand. Houses will always need electrical or plumbing, but not everybody needs someone who can design an emulator or make an interpreter.
gabrielflorit 7y ago
I enjoyed your writing style. Thank you.
wolco 7y ago
It may pay the same but building experience today would net him a better job in the future.
CamperBob2 7y ago
I saw something similar a couple of decades ago when I was living in Austin and working at a well-known game development house. There was a Chinese restaurant close to the office, a really good one. We ate there all the time, enough to get to know a couple of the waiters pretty well. One of them, a guy by the name of Bruce, was especially friendly and professional. He always remembered us, spoke perfect English, never let our drinks run dry. We'd ask to be seated in Bruce's section when we saw he was working. He always got big tips. One day he mentioned that he had an MSEE degree from a university back home in China. Cue record scratch. That was a deeply unsettling revelation, since a couple of us were EE dropouts ourselves. How'd I drop out of school and end up with my dream job, while Bruce finished his master's program and ended up serving Szechuan shrimp? WTF was up with that? What if, in my next life, I'm the one who gets hosed like this? I didn't wake up the next day with a hangover or anxiety -- not with the ego that it took to run in that crowd -- but I certainly had a new perspective on things. If people think that even a STEM degree is going to be an automatic ticket to ride through the good life, there's some massive disillusionment coming. And I don't think it's going to matter whether you're from China or the US or anywhere else. Not in the long run.
analog31 7y ago
In addition to just frightening people away from attending college, we could do some real things to make the skilled trades attractive to more people: 1. Real workplace safety laws with real enforcement 2. Better health care 3. Better safety net, including retirement 4. Stronger unions 5. Free continuous retraining From time to time, I hire tradespeople to work around my house -- roofing, tree service, installing a sliding door, new Internet service, a new furnace, etc. One thing I've noticed is that the guys who are my age -- mid 50's -- are hobbling and broken. Many of them work for smaller businesses, as independent contractors, or in situations where they are conveniently "exempt" from things like health care, unemployment, etc. At the smaller businesses where they work, regulatory enforcement is probably minimal to nonexistent. I would guess that abuse of wage and overtime laws is probably rampant. Much of the work is seasonal. Much of it is at the mercy of the construction cycle. Many of the trades are in businesses that are largely family owned, which puts non family members at a severe disadvantage at finding jobs and advancing beyond the entry level. So, don't just cite some anecdotes, or throw starting wages around, but take a deep look into what the working class deals with in the US, and start making changes.
- the-pigeon 7y ago
  I think this idea that white collar jobs require college is generally wrong. The core of the issue is that colleges produce degrees instead of people capable of doing specific jobs. If you want education for education's sake this is fine and great. But most of us don't have the money for that and need college to give us the specific skills needed for an in demand job. That's what needs to change, colleges need to prepare people for real jobs. Or be replaced by trade schools for white collar jobs or apprenticeships. The main problem with apprenticeships is that you have to pay them and they don't produce enough work for their cost in most industries.
  - analog31 7y ago
    The state that I live in, Wisconsin, has a multi tiered system of higher education. The University of Wisconsin in Madison is a world class research university with all of the trimmings. Then there is a system of public universities around the state that offer fewer programs but similar admission and academic standards -- they are also less expensive and have slightly lower prestige, but produce a lot of trained people such as engineers, nurses, programmers, and so forth. And then there is an even larger network of trade schools (aka "community colleges" in some states) that tend to be smaller but are accessible to students who live at home or commute to school part time while also working. Those schools all offer computer programming and other tech related trades. Many of those schools also offer programs that provide the first 2 years of a conventional bachelors degree, with guaranteed transfer to one of the universities for the rest of the degree. These schools are designed for students who are working, raising families, etc. A lot of people think those programs are a rollicking good deal. All of that stuff is available. The high schools immerse kids in information about these options. In my view, any plan that successfully addresses the college cost situation will do so through the regional colleges and trade schools, which are already excellent. I have colleagues who went to those schools, and you can send me a dozen more. There's huge peer pressure on kids to attend the gilded private colleges, but I'm not sure that I see the value. A problem is that the private schools are funded by private wealth through their endowments, whereas public schools are funded by workers through our taxes.
mirimir 7y ago
I felt pretty much the same, during my last post-doc. I had a friend who rebuilt power plant equipment. He got to work on very cool stuff, and he made very good money. I did a straight chemistry BS and basically a biochemistry PhD, so I remain largely ignorant of the humanities. But I did learn to write clearly (if not artfully) and I learned very well how to learn. In my experience, that's what's most important. Facts get dated quickly, and now they're findable online. But how to learn, that's essential. But then, this was some decades ago. My BS cost about $20K, and the PhD was "free". Indeed, "worked" as a research assistant during grad school. The salary was very low (albeit tax-free) but it was enough for rent and food.
deleted 7y ago
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2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago
I love this anecdote.
Erem 7y ago
Nimbius, the way that you write is remarkably effective. Makes me want to crack open my old Steinbeck novels. Please keep writing.
deleted 7y ago
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DeathArrow 7y ago
The topics people learn in US colleges are about identity politics, affirmative action and safe spaces. Since those skills are hard to monetize outside of politics and academic beaurocracy, the same people have a hard time earning their living.
econcon 7y ago
And it's different for me. I came a poor household in India and guess what? I couldn't even afford a good trade school even if I really wanted to. Most of my education was in government school and later I cleared IIT and studied there for nearly free. After completion education, I got offer from foreign countries and traveled whole world just by bouncing from one company to another. Yea, I'd have loved to stay near my family and become a machinist but my family couldn't even afford a "drill press". Meanwhile, at i had access to do many equipments that I didn't even know about for free at my institute.

nyxtom 7y ago

What is happening with this make for movie story ^ So much here ^ :D

HarryHirsch 7y ago

our bartender Javon had a masters in biology That's de-risking, de-skilling and outsourcing. Back then, in the last century, the US and Europe had a functioning chemical industry. Unfortunately, information technology took off, and investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Also, mergers & acquisitions took off in the same time. Why invest in research when you can buy up someone else's research? Industry research does not exist any longer in the sciences. The sciences are not a good proposition any longer if you want to make a living.

Frost1x 7y ago
You don't have to create and improve in a world you have little to no competition with high barrier to entry established. You can keep repackaging the same things without risk and work on perceptive value of people. Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? We're not quite that bad yet but we're already headed down the path in that direction.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  I know you aren't promoting it, but to answer your question: > Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? Because the entire country is going to implode. 2008: financial crisis 2016: political crisis
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    2008: financial crisis 2016: political crisis 2020: deadly pandemic, inducing a financial crisis, while also collapsing the real economy, on top of four years of political crisis
    - reroute1 7y ago
      Political crisis? Yeah I'll pass
- N1H1L 7y ago
  In economics this is what is called rent-seeking behavior, and I think it probably is an exceptionally interesting area of research to study how financialization of industries modifies rent-seeking behavior in those industries. My own hunch is that it probably increases significantly.
mpweiher 7y ago
The financialization of the economy is more a US/UK thing than the rest of Europe. Lots of chemical industry here, etc.
amiga_500 7y ago
Yep, financialisation black hole. Cratering living standards, partially hidden by printing ever bigger numbers next to people's house prices and ignoring that they have no retirement savings. Many of the "industries" beloved by this site are showing they are only viable on top of a backbone of "real" jobs like industry and manufacturing. No N95 mask manufacturers, but we can write how sad we are about this on facebook. And the media won't tell us the root cause, so nothing is learned.
- kanwisher 7y ago
  3M one of the biggest n95 manufactures in the world, originated and still has factories in America
  - 12elephant 7y ago
    N95 is the US standard, so it makes sense the US makes more of these than other countries. Compare production capacity of N95s in the US with FFP2/3 in the EU, or KN95 in China. Then we'll really see how US production capacity stacks up. To be clear, I have no idea how these production capacities stack up. But if we want to evaluate medical mask production, this is the comparison that needs to be made.
  - amiga_500 7y ago
    Yes and the Greeks invented math, but times move on: https://www.wired.com/story/decades-offshoring-led-mask-shortage-pandemic/ https://www.wired.com/story/decades-offshoring-led-mask-shor...
jldugger 7y ago
> investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Considering how many drugs are basically miracles of statistics rather than science: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/7950612/Five-out-of-six-new-prescription-drugs-dont-work-doctor-claims.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/7950612/Five-out-of-...

mywittyname 7y ago

It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80% of those people live in a handful of rural states. Also, a lot can change in the four to seven years it takes to complete school. A recession can drive a large of people into "safe" majors, like accounting, making it more difficult for new graduates to onboard. And other fields can shrink or disappear almost entirely within that time period. That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar. They could have searched employment in tangentially-related fields or learned some more technical skills. They could have also relocated. Maybe those were not options for whatever reason, but in general, those are things successful people do. Because the job market is going to change wildly during the 40+ years you'll be employed.

twomoretime 7y ago
>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors. It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they hear that psychology or sociology are STEM and therefore a meal ticket, and end up taking out loans for a worthless degree simply because they had it drilled in their heads that they needed to go to college and major in something "useful".
- syedkarim 7y ago
  Why is this being downvoted? Strange. I graduated in 2007 and your observation is the same as mine. Students go to school without really thinking about what is next. I'm guessing that is a result of a middle/upper middle class upbringing. I noticed international students were a lot more driven, on average. I went to a small, liberal arts college that was not highly selective in admissions. Even with the talented and studious, very few had any real idea of what was next. Why do we encourage so much debt just for the supposed sake of edification. I will say, though, that it was a really fun time in my life. So maybe that's worth it?

gwd 7y ago

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery. There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it's a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they're buying a ticket to a better life is far more vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan. All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.

brownbat 7y ago
> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, I thought so too. This always made me so angry. Last time I posted a rant about that here someone urged me to read the REPAYE Act, and it completely changed my mind. Under REPAYE, students get income based repayment, even down to $0 payments if you're anywhere near poverty level. After a certain number of years of repayment, the government just pays off your entire balance. This solves the same problems bankruptcy is designed to solve without ruining people's credit. It also prevents doctors from declaring bankruptcy right after medschool -- I'm honestly unsure whether that was a real or just anecdotal problem, but income based repayment for a fixed term seems like a better way to let people escape debt while still expecting them to pay what they can.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  This program only applies to federal student loans. Anyone with private student loans (before ~2010 IIRC) is SOL.
  - 7y ago

geebee 7y ago

Thanks for your story. I had a similar moment after college myself. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, in San Diego, which had been hit very hard by defense cutbacks. Almost everyone I knew worked service jobs, and even those were hard to get at times. The only people getting decent jobs - by which, I mean jobs that build careers, I'm not talking about pay - were engineers and a few finance/accounting related majors. Humanities majors who moved (to Washington DC, New York, to a lesser extent San Francisco or Los Angeles) fared better. I agree that "STEM" alone won't get you a good job, and some of the bio majors were not doing a whole lot better than the humanities majors. But overall, STEM was a vastly better place to be, especially the more "numeric" fields - by that, I mean the various majors that require the common two year sequence of math from calculus through linear algebra and differential equations as a prerequisite to whatever upper division specialization happens. Even there, some are better than others in terms of jobs, but they all fared vastly better. Humanities majors from very elite schools tend to weather a recession ok, but otherwise, I think that one advantage to being a STEM major (with the caveat I described above) is that you're less likely to be permanently knocked out of the game by a bad stretch, especially in the beginning. There's a real risk to getting sidelined, and I worry about the young people graduating right now. For instance, my employer has done a hiring moratorium for a year, and there may be layoffs. This, especially if it goes on for a few years, is unusually devastating to the long term career prospects of people just starting out. My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom. If you graduate in better times, you lock in a few good career building years. You may stagnate, you may even be unemployed for long enough that it knocks you off the path for a bit, but you have something to build on. If you graduate when nobody is hiring, and you float around for a few years, by the time things pick up, employers are either hiring the people who have some experience, or going back to recent grads for entry level hiring. That definitely happened to a lot of people I know who graduated in the early 90s in SoCal. I suspect that humanities majors from very elite colleges, as well as STEM majors in very in demand fields from a broader range of colleges, are less likely to be locked out in a bad market, and more likely to be recruited back in when things improve. This is a bit of a guess, though I think it is supported by some research.

jcranmer 7y ago

wutbrodo 7y ago

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has been a consistent secret weapon of mine: they're often written off as unproductive, but it's not difficult to turn someone that smart into a solid engineer with a few months of guidance, as long as they're willing to learn. In specific domains, a subset of their actual skills are a good fit (they tend to be great at math), but it just signifies an unfortunate and fairly significant misallocation of resources.

N1H1L 7y ago
PhDs though are never self-funded, so almost entirely the loan is from undergrad.
- skwb 7y ago
  *STEM PhDs are almost always funded.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I didn't mention a loan, and was thinking primarily of opportunity cost (and to a lesser extent, undergrad, though the skills gained in undergrad tend to be the ones directly useful for their current work). I tend to treat opportunity cost like inflation adjustment: in most cases, failing to include it is an error, so I do it by default.
bradstewart 7y ago
"AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?
- burntoutfire 7y ago
  Air conditioning, Ventilation perhaps?

blhack 7y ago

What is the job you do where somebody thinks you make flowers?

xenomatic 7y ago
Botanist

baby 7y ago

your comment reads like bukowski

lanewinfield 7y ago
was just going to say—I'd read your book.

bachmeier 7y ago

For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment. I could write lots of comments about people without a college degree that live crappy lives and have trouble finding good paying jobs, and people with college degrees that live well and make a lot of money. My prediction is that we'll see changes in the US system. The problem you're pointing out is the risk. Universities are the ones that IMO should be taking on the risk. If you graduate 3000 students a year, most will do okay and some won't, and that would be no big deal if college cost $800 a year. I predict that over the next couple decades we'll move to a system where you pay for college out of your earnings. This would clean up another issue (not pointing any fingers with this). Colleges would nudge students into careers with better prospects. If they'd get paid less from students in certain majors, there'd be fewer of those majors. I could even see a system where "you're on your own" if you major in certain limited prospect fields. Universities that align their interests with those of the students will be the ones that thrive. Disclosure: Professor for many years

vsareto 7y ago
No college is going to advocate for taking future income from students over government backed loans or a traditional loan. The former translates to less immediate income. Colleges had little reason to raise tuition since 2000 except for money, I don't see them suddenly moving to forward-thinking strategies.
- fossuser 7y ago
  They may if they face competition form Lambda School style ISAs (not necessarily just ISAs generally, but ones that are actually good for the student). As a bonus this would make universities better at education since the incentives would be aligned with the students. It would be helped though if the easily available government loans were not available, though with the generally bad politics from both sides on this, I find progress there unlikely.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    You're assuming a lot of faith in market forces. In reality, the incentives should already be aligned with student interest: All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge, and you can easily find out if a school has job placement (and their rates) or merely a "career services" area that will help you write a resume and point you at some other resources. The fact is, the majority of students don't make their decisions of where to attend based on tangible metrics. They make their decision based primarily on the perceived "experience" they will have in college, and only after that do they filter their options based on other factors (if at all). The problem is less with the colleges, and more with the fact that attending college has become less about academics and much more about a stage of transition into adulthood (along with a sort of last "hurrah" farewell to the lesser responsibilities of childhood)

Invictus0 7y ago

Thanks for sharing. Out of curiosity, how did you wind up on Hacker News?

IdiocyInAction 7y ago

While I do not want to be rude, statistically speaking, those with tertiary education still do better on average than those without. It's true that there's outliers and that underemployment is a persistent problem (especially in our over-educated society), but getting tertiary education might still be a better choice than a trade school, depending on your situation. Nothing is without risk and you should inform yourself about your job prospects beforehand though. Not every major will pay and some will only pay to a select few. One should put much thought into major choice (or whether they should go to university at all) - it's one of the more impactful choices in people's lives.

WalterBright 7y ago

I don't understand how people can spend 4 years pursuing a major and never spend 5 minutes googling job prospects and salaries for their major.

ashtonkem 7y ago

College, and the push to send everyone to it, makes much more sense when you view College as both an economic proposition, and a part of social class. The economic aspect has been well covered here, but the social class has not. Social classes are a set of shared values, habits, and beliefs that help cluster people together into a sense of shared social membership. It is completely distinct from economic class, with some of the “lower” classes regularly having more income and net worth than the “upper” social classes. In America, a large portion of the push to send everyone to college has been a push for the supremacy of middle class norms and values over working class norms and values via college. College is literally an indoctrination process into the middle social class, it’s where you learn the norms and values of that class and socialize exclusively with other members of said class. As you’ve discovered, social class and economic class are not one and the same, and you yourself as a member of the working class actually make significantly more money than members of the middle class who went to college but did not reap any economic benefits from the process.

eternauta3k 7y ago
Reminds me of this other reference [1] to college being finishing school for the upper classes [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  The first link in that blog, siderea[0] is exactly where I first learned about social class. Definitely worth a read. [0] https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light
deleted 7y ago
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7leafer 7y ago

People aka the New Oil must have skills, not knowledge. This narrative has been coming out of the woodwork recently. Like, lumberjacks over dendrologists all the way. If we translate this motto from the newspeak, it would be this: the New Oil must flow smoothly without asking uncomfortable questions about the piping.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

Actual boilermaker here. Can confirm: earn more than my university educated age group; no education debt; have home and mortgage that I don’t struggle to pay; still have plenty of work during the down turn. Have often thought about living on rice n lentils n going to university to get a degree, but this whole pandemic mess has made me realise: well and truly fuck that for a joke.

moftz 7y ago
It's all a betting game. Go to trade school and get a decent job making good money but have little upwards mobility other than opening your own business. Or go to university and hope you pick a worthwhile major and get a great job out of school where you have a lot of upward mobility. University is risky but if you can pick something like electrical engineering and end up at a top firm, you are probably set for life. I've got friends with university degrees that have done very well for themselves and those that just couldn't find a job in that field so now they work in retail. Some of them did everything right but just couldn't find high-paying work (computer science), others choose majors that fit their passions but don't have any immediate real world use (english). I think some people have huge expectations for what their degree will get them that just aren't reasonable. I picked a engineering major that would pay big but also fit my passion, got the job I wanted, and have constant work lined up for me for the next 5 years. I got very lucky at the university betting game. If I hadn't gotten into college or decided to drop out when I had to take an semester off due to grades, I probably would have decided to try trade school.
- mettamage 7y ago
  Carpenter 1. Work 2. Buy house 2b. Rent house out 2bb. Problem? Fix it with your carpenter skills or trade school buddies (plasterer, electrician, you name it, they know them). 3. Work a few years more 4. Buy second house 5. Get a few more houses. This is what my carpenter buddies are doing. And I was the smart kid in my class. I guess they have the last laugh, they are all on their second houses now.

Diederich 7y ago

The other replies are interesting and insightful, so I wanted to add a little anecdata here. > some massive college bills In the late 1980s I started a Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona https://www.cpp.edu/ https://www.cpp.edu/ If memory serves, my tuition for a quarterly full load was less than $300. That's not per credit, that was for as many classes as I wanted. Books added up to a bit less. Working at Jack in the Box and later McDonalds, I was making minimum wage which was I believe $4.25/hour. Assuming I kept 70% of that after taxes it took me about 185 hours to pay my combined tuition and books, which comes out to about 19 hours a week over the 10 week quarter. And I did, in fact, work about 20 hours a week. This doesn't include housing, but it was also fairly affordable. I believe another 10 hours a week could have covered some basic shared rent. I had a place to live for free, fortunately. EDIT: I haven't done any math for how this would look today, but I'm pretty sure it's not quite so friendly.

vondur 7y ago
At CSU Long Beach, tuition is about 7k per year. We hire our student assistants at 13/hr, so they can make around 8 or 9k year in salary. Not nearly as cheap when I went, we paid around 2k a year for tuition. So if you are willing to go to a state school, you can come out with relatively small amounts of debt. Now if you go to a really nice private University and live on campus, all bets are off.
- Diederich 7y ago
  I'm glad to hear that state schools are still reasonably inexpensive.
bsder 7y ago
In California, at least, it used to be that(still may be, but my data is a couple years old) you could get about 2 years of your prerequisites done at a community college and then use that to funnel into the Cal-State schools. That was a significantly cheaper option for most students. And the classes tended to be smaller and, often, much better quality.
- 7y ago

dnautics 7y ago

it goes further up. Luckily I was an only child to a single-worker-family midlevel government employee that rode the interest cliff and was willing to spend gobs of money for my (quite good) college, and I went for a technical grad program that pays you sub-minimum-wage (but no educational debt!) to do 100 hours a week in a lab for seven years, so I had no debt -- but I quit my postdoc to drive for lyft for a year and a half, and I made more money and had less stress driving for lyft (yes, after expenses) than I did in my postdoc. Everyone thought I was crazy. Well, maybe I was, but I wasn't the only postdoc that had quit and was driving for lyft full-time.

darkerside 7y ago

I guess Javon never learned about second order effects in college. > the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway You start in the same situation, but with the room for advancement in a skilled field, you have the opportunity to either pursue growth in your role, or leverage those skills into a related but more lucrative career. Avoiding dead ends is much more important than your velocity, assuming you have enough time to let things play out.

steve_adams_86 7y ago
I used to tell my friend this and she was positive she'd never earn more than $50K CAD/year, and always said I was overpaid as a developer making ~$70K/year at the time. These days she has advanced far more than I have, and she'll continue to. Even as a developer with no education or particularly special skills, your ceiling in Canada isn't all that high. I'm the epitome of a 1xer though, so I can't speak for everyone. I can earn around $90k, but she's earning $120k now – that only took about 7 years for a 240% increase. Having an education can be a huge asset to your career, and she couldn't have her career without hers.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

the reason those people can't get jobs isn't because they're not smart. It's because there simply aren't enough jobs that require that, and waaaayyy too many people running around with that education and those degrees.

dschuler 7y ago

You write very well, it flows in a way that reminds me of Bukowski.

aroundtown 7y ago

I thought getting a degree in computer science was my ticket out of poverty and the lower class blue-collar work that has perpetuated my family for generations. Boy was I wrong. Opportunity and pure luck have to be at your back for the kind of generational change I sought. End up on the wrong side of either one of those and you too might not end up where you expect. Nowadays, I wish I had learned a trade. Sure the work is hard, but those skills are always in demand. Houses will always need electrical or plumbing, but not everybody needs someone who can design an emulator or make an interpreter.

gabrielflorit 7y ago

I enjoyed your writing style. Thank you.

wolco 7y ago

It may pay the same but building experience today would net him a better job in the future.

CamperBob2 7y ago

I saw something similar a couple of decades ago when I was living in Austin and working at a well-known game development house. There was a Chinese restaurant close to the office, a really good one. We ate there all the time, enough to get to know a couple of the waiters pretty well. One of them, a guy by the name of Bruce, was especially friendly and professional. He always remembered us, spoke perfect English, never let our drinks run dry. We'd ask to be seated in Bruce's section when we saw he was working. He always got big tips. One day he mentioned that he had an MSEE degree from a university back home in China. Cue record scratch. That was a deeply unsettling revelation, since a couple of us were EE dropouts ourselves. How'd I drop out of school and end up with my dream job, while Bruce finished his master's program and ended up serving Szechuan shrimp? WTF was up with that? What if, in my next life, I'm the one who gets hosed like this? I didn't wake up the next day with a hangover or anxiety -- not with the ego that it took to run in that crowd -- but I certainly had a new perspective on things. If people think that even a STEM degree is going to be an automatic ticket to ride through the good life, there's some massive disillusionment coming. And I don't think it's going to matter whether you're from China or the US or anywhere else. Not in the long run.

analog31 7y ago

In addition to just frightening people away from attending college, we could do some real things to make the skilled trades attractive to more people: 1. Real workplace safety laws with real enforcement 2. Better health care 3. Better safety net, including retirement 4. Stronger unions 5. Free continuous retraining From time to time, I hire tradespeople to work around my house -- roofing, tree service, installing a sliding door, new Internet service, a new furnace, etc. One thing I've noticed is that the guys who are my age -- mid 50's -- are hobbling and broken. Many of them work for smaller businesses, as independent contractors, or in situations where they are conveniently "exempt" from things like health care, unemployment, etc. At the smaller businesses where they work, regulatory enforcement is probably minimal to nonexistent. I would guess that abuse of wage and overtime laws is probably rampant. Much of the work is seasonal. Much of it is at the mercy of the construction cycle. Many of the trades are in businesses that are largely family owned, which puts non family members at a severe disadvantage at finding jobs and advancing beyond the entry level. So, don't just cite some anecdotes, or throw starting wages around, but take a deep look into what the working class deals with in the US, and start making changes.

the-pigeon 7y ago
I think this idea that white collar jobs require college is generally wrong. The core of the issue is that colleges produce degrees instead of people capable of doing specific jobs. If you want education for education's sake this is fine and great. But most of us don't have the money for that and need college to give us the specific skills needed for an in demand job. That's what needs to change, colleges need to prepare people for real jobs. Or be replaced by trade schools for white collar jobs or apprenticeships. The main problem with apprenticeships is that you have to pay them and they don't produce enough work for their cost in most industries.
- analog31 7y ago
  The state that I live in, Wisconsin, has a multi tiered system of higher education. The University of Wisconsin in Madison is a world class research university with all of the trimmings. Then there is a system of public universities around the state that offer fewer programs but similar admission and academic standards -- they are also less expensive and have slightly lower prestige, but produce a lot of trained people such as engineers, nurses, programmers, and so forth. And then there is an even larger network of trade schools (aka "community colleges" in some states) that tend to be smaller but are accessible to students who live at home or commute to school part time while also working. Those schools all offer computer programming and other tech related trades. Many of those schools also offer programs that provide the first 2 years of a conventional bachelors degree, with guaranteed transfer to one of the universities for the rest of the degree. These schools are designed for students who are working, raising families, etc. A lot of people think those programs are a rollicking good deal. All of that stuff is available. The high schools immerse kids in information about these options. In my view, any plan that successfully addresses the college cost situation will do so through the regional colleges and trade schools, which are already excellent. I have colleagues who went to those schools, and you can send me a dozen more. There's huge peer pressure on kids to attend the gilded private colleges, but I'm not sure that I see the value. A problem is that the private schools are funded by private wealth through their endowments, whereas public schools are funded by workers through our taxes.

mirimir 7y ago

I felt pretty much the same, during my last post-doc. I had a friend who rebuilt power plant equipment. He got to work on very cool stuff, and he made very good money. I did a straight chemistry BS and basically a biochemistry PhD, so I remain largely ignorant of the humanities. But I did learn to write clearly (if not artfully) and I learned very well how to learn. In my experience, that's what's most important. Facts get dated quickly, and now they're findable online. But how to learn, that's essential. But then, this was some decades ago. My BS cost about $20K, and the PhD was "free". Indeed, "worked" as a research assistant during grad school. The salary was very low (albeit tax-free) but it was enough for rent and food.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago

I love this anecdote.

Erem 7y ago

Nimbius, the way that you write is remarkably effective. Makes me want to crack open my old Steinbeck novels. Please keep writing.

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DeathArrow 7y ago

The topics people learn in US colleges are about identity politics, affirmative action and safe spaces. Since those skills are hard to monetize outside of politics and academic beaurocracy, the same people have a hard time earning their living.

econcon 7y ago

And it's different for me. I came a poor household in India and guess what? I couldn't even afford a good trade school even if I really wanted to. Most of my education was in government school and later I cleared IIT and studied there for nearly free. After completion education, I got offer from foreign countries and traveled whole world just by bouncing from one company to another. Yea, I'd have loved to stay near my family and become a machinist but my family couldn't even afford a "drill press". Meanwhile, at i had access to do many equipments that I didn't even know about for free at my institute.