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I firmly think there is a sea change going on from standard “college” degrees to more practical training that will be a mix of apprenticeship and solid training

• nsnick 6y ago
  No one is deciding to work a trade instead of going to Stanford.
  • fortran77 6y ago
    How many Stanford students are even capable of working a trade?
    • 32notp 6y ago
      What do you mean by that?
      • war1025 6y ago
        Would you be equally confused if it was phrased the other way? "How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?" People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life. The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.
        • fortran77 6y ago
          Thank you.
    • non-entity 6y ago
      I'd wager most of them
      • jacquesm 6y ago
        Whether they'd be willing or not is another matter. I know a few though, people that have very high levels of secondary education working trades or other simple jobs because it keeps their stress levels down.
        • non-entity 6y ago
          Yeah thats probably true. There are a few I'd certainly consider picking up if not only so I could manage to do work myself as opposed to hiring someone else.
        • fortran77 6y ago
          > working trades or other simple jobs because it keeps their stress levels down. Yes! People take "simple jobs" like hauling trash or cleaning sewers or welding pipes because it's stress free! Unlike those high-stress jobs at Facebook where you take the free party bus to the office, get free food, drink, gym, yoga, and massages, and even have internal message boards where you're encouraged to post about how horrible you're being treated. So stressful! I bet all of those 10xers at the FAANGS wish they could be maintenance workers.
          • asldkjaslkdj 6y ago
            You're cherry picking examples to suit your narrative. For every person working at a FAANG you can probably find 1,000 working in a place with the same shitty working conditions most people are subjected to. As a counter example cops can make $200k a year doing detail work (standing around) and retire with a pension after 20 years. There are similar situations (with lesser pay) for a lot of city and state level civil service. There are shit jobs that will wear you down in every field. They're the jobs most people are working.
          • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    • chasd00 6y ago
      it would be interesting to see the ambition and execution discipline of a young person who made in to, and through, Stanford applied to a traditional trade. If i may use a dirty word, "disruptive" comes to mind.
      • dokem 6y ago
        There's plenty of guys that go into the trades (thinking more like welding, machining, diesel repair) that quickly start running their own truck or shop, work for themselves, maybe hire a few employees and make bank. That's what it would likely look like I imagine.
        • 609venezia 6y ago
          I know a guy who dropped out of HS and did this as an HVAC guy. He bought a house on a lake, a second home at the beach, and built a special garage to house his car collection. After an ugly divorce that cost him almost everything he has rebuilt (but not quite to where he was before). It takes a lot of work but it can be done. As others have observed, it's unfortunately regarded as a low-status option on the coasts
  • elliekelly 6y ago
    Do you not see programming as a trade? Do you not see accounting as a trade? Nursing? Medicine? Law? Pharmacology? I would consider all of those “trades.” The non-trade courses of study aren’t particularly popular with college students anymore. I don’t know many people with degrees in english or latin or history or philosophy. And the few that I do always planned to go to trade school (law school) so their undergrad course of study didn’t much matter.
    • ceilingcorner 6y ago
      No one considers these things trades. Trades and trade school have a very specific meaning in contemporary American English.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      > I would consider all of those “trades.” Well good luck communicating with other people because is not how anyone else anywhere uses the word ‘trade’. They’re not ‘trades’ they’re ‘professions’. And I would guess you already know this and you’re trying to be contrary rather than you’re genuinely misunderstanding a basic word.
      • elliekelly 6y ago
        I’m not being contrary at all. Nor do I think I’ve grossly misunderstood the word. Haven’t you ever been to a trade show - a meeting of people from one profession? I don’t think I’ve used the word outside of its definition: > 3. b : the business or work in which one engages regularly : OCCUPATION > 3. c : the persons engaged in an occupation, business, or industry https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trade https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trade
        • chrisseaton 6y ago
          If you take your definition then all jobs are trades, in which case why do you think we have the word trade if it doesn’t add any new meaning, and what do you think a ‘profession‘ is? Have you never heard people make a distinction between tradespeople and professionals? What do you think the words in this article mean? Are they completely new concepts to you? https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-manual/bim14010 https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-man... > A ‘profession’ historically meant the three learned professions of the Church, Medicine and the Law but today the term goes much wider and normally involves some substantial exercise of intellectual skill.
• muh_gradle 6y ago
  While I would like this, I don't see this happening. Universities are stonewalling the complaints for lowered tuition. It's in a private university's best interest to keep their schools away from being "career preparation" institutions.
  • red_admiral 6y ago
    Of course universities will fight against anything that cuts into their income streams. That doesn't mean they'll win though. Market forces can't solve all problems, but they may solve this one.
    • muh_gradle 6y ago
      The top prestigious universities don't have any real competition though. I don't see mid tier colleges suddenly creating a paradigm shift any time soon.
• red_admiral 6y ago
  I really hope so. The problem with "part of the population being disenfranchised" is that it includes the some of the parts/minorities that we officially care about (unlike, say, poor white boys in areas that vote for The Other Party). If a solution can be found where these minorities can instead go and learn something actually useful, I'm all for burning the current university system to the ground.
• netcan 6y ago
  Somewhat different take. The student debt problem is not really related to the college format. The format existed in earlier decades, exists in other countries and exists in K-12 education without runaway costs and student debt. It's mostly a matter of policy. The US' method to expand third level education to most of the population was by government backed and/or subsidized loans, without price controls. This caused an inflation in credit, prices, and cost. This is reversible, but deflation is always painful. Meanwhile, I disagree that “underwater basket weaving” degrees are the problem. At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. The real problem is "Online Marketing" degrees, or most business degrees excepting accounting and finance. These business degrees are fake subjects. The material was invented for the purpose of creating a textbook, course or somesuch. Nothing they teach is useful. Worryingly, these have the greatest intake... because they're easy, and sound relevant to getting a job. I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that. But, I also think we should try to keep the level of investment (time, money, social capital) in education high. Get efficient by doing more, not doing the same for less.
  • tmaly 6y ago
    Governments both state and federal could provide incentives for low cost trade schools if they wanted to. What is to stop them from granting favorable loan interest or even forgiving the loans like they do for the peace corp?
    • netcan 6y ago
      It's hard to run a micro-policy in a contradictory macro-environment. The incentives (mostly via credit, but also social incentive) for regular college is already super-high... as is the incentive of colleges that receive this credit as payment. You would need to overcome that with even bigger incentives... creating the same inflation problem, but now for trade schools. If you don't, trade schools have to compete with colleges funded by the ever increasing student loan complex. Imagine a country that has a suburban housing policy similar to the college education policy. Contractors get subsidies, donations, grants. Buyers have access to easy, no money down, no question mortgages backed by a government. Prices inflate. Houses get bigger. A massive debt pool keeps growing. You say: "this is really inefficient. Don't some of you want downtown apartments instead?" This isn't going to work while competing with the other housing system... no matter how reasonable the plan is. Throw in a stigma about apartment-dwellers... your plan is now doomed. Unless students are paying out of pocket (student loan schemes don't count), then you need price controls.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Trades have been more lucrative than many liberal arts-esque jobs for decades. Awareness isn’t the issue. The issue is social acceptability. Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans, nothing will change. Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades. It is a problem of culture, not economics.
  • totalZero 6y ago
    Any parent who thinks that way is a moron. Educated uselessness is to the detriment of the kid. If you want to be happy and healthy in America, you must have a way to make money. (Or your parents must give you so much money that you're set for life.)
    • ceilingcorner 6y ago
      I don’t disagree with you, but I think it’s an extremely common viewpoint among the Upper Middle Class and potential Ivy Leaguers.
    • neltnerb 6y ago
      Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but having gone to a similar university I suspect that the underwater basketweaving degree from Harvard will come with lucrative enough connections to make up for the lack of actual skills. Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better. That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.
      • netcan 6y ago
        Exactly. People are not extremely attentive to social status & class-adjacent stuff out of foolishness. This stuff has always been extremely important to everything job/money related. Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.
      • 6y ago
• totalZero 6y ago
  I don't know why people use HVAC as a boilerplate example of working-class work. Jobs come from where the booms are. Unless there's an HVAC boom, why would you anticipate a surge in HVAC workers? Not a criticism/denial of your larger point, just an observation about that point specifically.
  • neltnerb 6y ago
    Climate change? ;-)
  • 0xffff2 6y ago
    I've read the GP 3 times now and I can't find any mention of HVAC... Did it get edited or something?
    • SamBam 6y ago
      Parent comment says "training like air/vac."
• non-entity 6y ago
  > since the vast majority of jobs don’t really need a college degree. This is the unfortunate part to me. I see a large amount of "not minimum wage, but not that great either" jobs require bachelors that the average person could probably do with a HS education, or jobs wanting advanced professional degrees that are paying pennies and probably don't require much more skills than from a bachelors or even associates programs. And then there's a number of fields where highly skilled (and proven) individuals can't get the better job because they don't have the right degree.
• pjc50 6y ago
  Certainly in the UK, the system went in the other direction: all the "polytechnic" technical colleges training people in practical skills got uprated to "universities" years ago, and the big Blairite expansion of universities was similarly not focused on "trades". Why? Class. Having a degree and having been to university is such a pre-requisite to being middle class here, far more so than money. It is also a common problem that certain influential jobs preferentially recruit from certain schools; so people apply to Stanford as a prerequisite for Google just as they apply to École Nationale d'Administration if they want to be part of the French government.
• cactus2093 6y ago
  I worry about the effects on economic mobility, and eventually on overall per-capita productivity, in a world where we stop encouraging as many people to pursue higher education. Yes, there are people today that wind up with college debt and don't have a correspondingly higher income to pay it off. But there are other solutions to address this problem, like lowering the costs of college to where they were just a couple of decades ago. Or perhaps changing the framework by which loans are made (e.g. if college loans were simply dismissible in bankruptcy, default rates would skyrocket and lenders would not be able to hand out such large sums of money so easily, and colleges would have to adapt by lowering their costs). And on average, people with degrees still earn more than those without, and enough more to pay off a loan over time. We should be wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In a world where college is no longer normalized as the default option for a moderately ambitious 18-year-old, aren't we just reverting to how things worked for hundreds of years until quite recently? The kids from upper class families will continue to go to Ivy League schools, but kids from middle class and poorer families will be told from a young age that their path is to go to a trade school, or get an apprenticeship. College is too expensive and not worth it for them, so they won't even try. It just seems like a step backwards. Lastly, I will admit I'm somewhat personally invested in this topic, and I take some offense at the idea of useless degrees. My partner grew up lower-middle class, neither of their parents went to college, but they took out a lot of money in loans and got an English Literature degree (which I believe is a commonly-agreed useless degree). If it had not been for the encouragement of teachers, and basically society at large that college is a good idea, they could have very easily not gone and just gotten an entry level job in their home town instead. Now they have a great, high-paying career in tech working in sales and operations. One very successful founder I worked for in the past had a philosophy degree (as did many other famous people in tech, like Reid Hoffman). Every job, but especially a job in sales or management/leadership, requires working with, understanding, and motivating other people. Many liberal arts degrees focus on exactly this. Dismissing any degree outside of science, technology, or medicine as being as useless as "underwater basket weaving" is just absurd.
• heimatau 6y ago
  >In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes. Actually this has been true for many decades, not just the last 10-20 years. The issue is exasperated due to massive unemployment because of the mismanagement of covid19. There will be no 're-examining' because there is so much bloat that votes. Countless administrators that actually vote for their interests, at the expense of the students. It's systemic and just like police reform, it's not going to be an easy and fast change. When renovating the system, there are losers and those losers will fight you tooth and nail to prevent progress. It's partly why I like creative models like Lambda School. There is a massive opportunities for business(es) to help fix this gap but...again, incentives are not static. A business helping you get a high skilled job, might want cheaper labor, so they flood the market with more workers, which reduces the collective in that field. In conclusion, these issues are massive/systemic. It's entrenched to society and protected by stakeholders. Effectively making change happen won't be easy and we may be creating a 'wake-a-mole' type environment where we solve today's problems and gain two problems tomorrow.
  • xiaolingxiao 6y ago
    Could you speak about administrators that vote for their own interests. I always suspected this is the case, have you seen it first hand or is close to it.
    • heimatau 6y ago
      > Could you speak about administrators that vote for their own interests. So, given the rising costs of Health Care and College both situations are good examples of this. The rising 'costs' are more people in administration. This could be blamed on regulation among other issues (greed). As for voting in their self interests, I live in California now. University of California is the #1 employer in this State. This doesn't happen by chance. It happens due to stakeholders. Many people in this States want an 'easy' and 'stable' job. The easiest way to do this is require more red tape (regulation/'initiatives'/etc), in the name of 'progress' and then now you just created a 'stable and easy' job to make sure certain quotas are reach. Professors and students lose out due to admin workers are more aggressive on making the government enrich their interests.
• baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  > so-called useless degrees. Yea no more pesky English majors and philosophy students who bring up all sorts of annoying questions about the power structures that create our society. Can't we just stop thinking about stuff and get back to work! I'm also hoping that CS will be transformed into something more useful, thinking about complexity theory is a waste of time (outside of helping us make good white boarding questions). We really need an army of CRUD engineers to do useful stuff. If you're learning about something that doesn't make someone else money, you're wasting everyone's time. Thank god ML has learned to focus from the start on making things that make money. Only handful of whiny researchers complain about annoying things like "oooh we don't really understand how this works, we should understand foundations, blah blah". But statisticians, oh boy, those academic nerds are the opposite of those ML folks. Always complaining that we aren't running A/B tests correct, and not accounting for confounding variables. All we need to know about stats is how to put results for a marketing experiment into a calculator and then tell the marketing director that the variant they like better is the winner. You can learn that in two weeks. Brave new world with such people in it! (bonus points to anyone who recognizes the work of Shakespeare both this post and parent reference).
  • usui 6y ago
    I just want to do a double check: Is this satire?
    • divbzero 6y ago
      The author keeps us guessing :) but would surely add that reading Shakespeare is low ROI.
  • mxcrossb 6y ago
    I strongly agree with you. I know many people whose whole views on religion, politics, society were changed through their humanities courses at university. Personally I gained a deeper knowledge of history, a love of art, and a real interest in ethics just from my mandatory general education courses (I was a CS major). Now imagine you remove that knowledge from the adults of your country. You remove that knowledge from heads of industry, community leaders, and voters. What kind of society are you left with? College needs to be expanded to all with an emphasis on the liberal arts, a high school education just isn’t good enough to produce a good society.
• 7leafer 6y ago
  Great, more mindless drones without a wide picture of things in their heads, way to go for the modern slave drivers. Preheating for predefined occupations assigned at birth, the digital caste way. Ever noticed how the most agenda-aligned comments are always at the top? HN has become the most disgusting indoctrination platform in the whole IT, and the day will come when it'll burn up in colourful flames. A sea of change, my ass! Better be prepared for the ocean of backlash for all the crap you're being peddling.
• WalterBright 6y ago
  The "underwater basket weaving" degrees will disappear if students have to pay for those degrees themselves. I'm not really understanding students who take on loans they cannot realistically pay back. Finding the salary and job prospects for various majors is a literally trivial google search away. How can one go through 4 years of college and never check this?
• oivey 6y ago
  Can the trades support a sea change in employment/education that leads to a massive new labor supply while maintaining high wages? My guess is probably not based on the scale of change you’re suggesting. America’s labor market is fundamentally broken, and the issues with higher education are only a symptom.
• JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  > we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes. Many? Only ~10% of student loans are in delinquency. 90% of borrowers are making payments. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/topics/student-debt https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/topics/student-deb...
  • heavyset_go 6y ago
    Making payments is not the same thing as being able to pay back loans in a reasonable amount of time.
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Not to mention the opportunity cost of people not being able to start families, buy homes, etc. Go ahead and collect the future economic value of people’s education, but I won’t be surprised when “middle class” America is then too tapped out to support the consumerist economy. Only people I see having kids are those with strong, secure incomes, or those with no prospects at all. The cohort in the middle earning $40k to $120k doesn’t feel secure enough, or at least not until their 30s.
  • machinelabo 6y ago
    People don't grasp how good America has it for jobs. I have a friend in Australia who emigrated recently and struggling to even get an interview. This is a guy with intellect through the roof, ex-Microsoft, ex-Amazon software engineer and has trouble finding someone who can hire him. In my personal contact graph - every engineer I know who has graduated (even with C grades) has obtained a job and is happy with what they're doing. If they have loans, I am sure they're paying them off.
    • mensetmanusman 6y ago
      It’s counter intuitive, many don’t understand that jobs ‘protection’ results in fewer jobs.
• whakim 6y ago
  It's mostly a myth that there are tons of lucrative jobs out there which only require an apprenticeship/vocational school/training: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/welding-doesnt-pay-as-well-as-republicans-think/597733/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/weldin... It's also not the case that a college education and massive debt go hand-in-hand. In most other Western countries college is either free or much less expensive. Finally, I disagree that we should determine how "useful" a degree is based solely on its ability to help someone find a high-paying job. While it's certainly true that it's harder to find a job studying the humanities than STEM, perhaps we should consider why it is that our society places such a low value on these subjects?
• Shebanator 6y ago
  The student debt problem has little to do with the people who go to elite universities. Let me give a slightly biased plug to my nephew's documentary on the problem, Fail State (https://failstatemovie.com/ https://failstatemovie.com/), produced by Dan Rather. He started out making a movie about student debt in general, and found that the problem was so much worse for poorer people attending for-profit colleges that he had to change his focus. See also his latest project, https://www.defendstudents.org/stories https://www.defendstudents.org/stories
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  >Once again I believe net/net the beer virus will be positive for America in the long run - even if only on the educational level. I'm a parent with children that are five, seven and nine. I don't think this at all. Basically what happens is that I'm able to afford to pay tutors and nannies and therapists to help with schooling during the day, but most parents are not. This means my kids have a massive advantage that may never be caught up. Things would be much worse if my children were in their final two years of high school, where college applications are going to be based on "performance" which basically means "did my parents have enough money to continue giving me a decent education when the state failed to do so". At the same time, I'm also aware of what is happening from the other side of things. One of my children has fairly severe autism and is supposed to have a full-time para-educator assigned to them to help him cope with school. I say "supposed" because it's not happened yet (since late February/ early March) and looks very unlikely to happen for the school year coming in September, no matter how many people I harrass. I also want to add that they have an IEP that is legally binding, and failing to provide services is literally illegal, yet nothing has been done to help with this. In my case, I (again, insane privilege levels here) can cause enough problems with lawyers and talking to school board members directly that my own son will hopefully be okay but I really worry about any child that has special needs right now and is being ignored or underserved because no one seems to make them a priority. It's honestly heartbreaking. My son still sets his alarm clock every single day to get up for a school that doesn't exist. He doesn't understand why all of his teachers just stopped teaching him one day and he asks all the time when he will be able to go back. Just imagine a seven year old autistic kid setting his own alarm and trying to make tomorrow be like the days he remembers. He doesn't understand that things have changed. He completely lost not just his teacher and support staff, but his private therapists and everyone else that he relied upon and that spent years convincing him they would be there to help him and that he should trust them. The district expects him to be on a computer watching live instruction for 5.5 hours every day. He is seven. He can't manage twenty minutes. He needs someone full-time every day to help him stay on track and yet nothing has been provided and I strongly doubt anything will. Again, I have backup plans involving hiring someone full-time to teach him. We are insanely, ridiculously lucky to be able to do this. My concern is for all of the other kids who don't have parents that can spend tens of thousands of dollars on teachers and lawyers to fight for their own children. It's so, so wrong that these children, the most vulnerable of all, are being so neglected by the system. Fuck. That was a rant. My inclination is to delete everything I said here but I think it's important. This virus (and more importantly, the utterly inept, almost criminal lack of response and leadership) is causing enormous, potentially-permanent damage to many, many students, and the only kids that are going to improve are those with parents with plenty of money to shield them.
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  Dunno if Americans have this but almost every degree at my university is “co-op” which means every other term is a paid full time job you have to seek out and get. And you have no summers. The result is that I graduated with two years of real work experience. It’s a total game changer. It blows my mind how people can graduate with a degree and have no guarantee of any work experience. No idea how you turn that into a career.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    I've heard of it at some more technical institutions (often not 4 years degrees), but I don't think anyone in the top ~100 in CS has considered the model. It's not like it's hard for CS students to get internships in the summer...
• joubert 6y ago
  > Just think of it! In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes. I think it astounding how we humans are swayed in the information/meme/idea wind.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  You won't change the education issues in the US at the very top of the pyramid. The problems with US education begin at day 1 of kindergarten and the complete balkanization of curriculums both from state to state and often between different school districts in the same state.
  • spbaar 6y ago
    There wasn't even a coherent line throughout elementary and middle school in Orange County. One year, 1/3 of our curriculum was geology, which was 90% of what we covered last year. More flabbergasted than concerned. It was more stressful because I was nervous about which classes were going to be hard and which easy and then that curve ball comes along and i dont know what to think!
    • ineedasername 6y ago
      Yes, my children are in grammar school. First: They focus almost exclusively on Math and Reading. Important subjects to be sure, but history, science, social studies etc are little more than an afterthought. And as you said, a significant part of the begining of the year simply covers what was done the previous year. I'd prefer they simply provided a summer curriculum of 2 or 3 hours a week of such work if review is necessary, which would also eliminate the complete discontinuity from one scho year to the next. I'm fortunate that We can do so on our own, piecing together that sort of thing, but plenty of working parents have neither the time, or ability, or inclination to compose their own mini summer curriculum.7