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Maybe going off on a tangent but as a German I never understood why in the US people have to study for some very basic jobs. Jobs like nurse, pharmacist, physic

• rayhendricks 6y ago
  We do have that here too, you can apply to be an electrician (IBEW I think) and other trades and be paid on the job to learn. Unfortunately high paying jobs like IT or pharmacy you have to pay first.
• est31 6y ago
  The percentages of university graduates for an age cohort are growing yearly in Germany as well. 25.5% in 2008, 31.5 in 2018. The US is just further ahead in this trend. It has similar effects in Germany. Brace yourself, Akademikerproletariat is coming :). https://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/de/Tabelle-1.9.5.html https://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/de/Tabelle-1.9.5.html
  • ruph123 6y ago
    That is true, but you cannot say that this will lead to the same situation as in the US. The apprenticeship system is well established and it it just not feasible for everyone to take the time and money to study. Apprenticeships are payed. I just cannot see a baker with a M.Sc. :) To add to that: This trend only shows that people do not want to do low-pay hands-on jobs anymore. It does not mean that universities compete with apprenticeships. Although this certainly causes the rise of bullshit study programs.
    • tpetry 6y ago
      It is happening the same in germany too, you have many in germany now too which had been an Ausbildung before: Touristik, Agrarwirtschaft, Osteopathie ...
  • looping__lui 6y ago
    Tricky question - because the entire discussion about social “fairness” and “stepping up in social ladder” in Germany happens around “likelihood to have a university degree”. Now, pragmatically speaking: the apprenticeship and university system in Germany allows people to flexibly qualify themselves for (well) paying jobs at minimal cost. There is another truth to that people rather want “not to be spoke out”: not everybody has the “right” qualifications for completing an apprenticeship or university degree. Having taught at an applied science university it sometimes was beyond my comprehension how Germany tries to “bump up university graduates at all costs”. But to be fair: I don’t think many of those people would have succeeded at an apprenticeship either... I personally know several(!) instances where “the smart and brilliant sibling” went for university, the “quiet one went for an apprenticeship” - and the pay off has been substantially more beneficial for the people taking the apprenticeship road even though the “college siblings” didn’t exactly fail or end up unemployed... I know it’s anecdotical. But in Germany, they seem to push a rather weird political agenda in this direction which doesn’t help anybody.
    • Traubenfuchs 6y ago
      > the “college siblings” didn’t exactly fail or end up unemployed... I know it’s anecdotical. Since there are financially unwise college degrees (social work) and on the other end those with a mostly guaranteed, very decent minimal guaranteed income and incredible potential (medicine), this is an unfair comparison.
      • C1sc0cat 6y ago
        Your not going to get a job in social work without a degree
        • johnminter 6y ago
          That would not surprise me. One might be able to recover the cost of the education at a state university. I suspect the return on investment would significantly lower at a private school with higher tuition. My daughter teaches at a high school with many students from lower income households. One of the exercizes the class did was to have each student pick a career that interested them. They had to find the cost of the degree and the median salary. Next they were to make a budget that for their living expenses based on that median salary, including repayment of the student loans. It was an eye-opening experience for these students. Higher education can be a ticket to a great career. It can be a cost it takes a lifetime to repay, especially if penalties and interest accrues.
  • rjzzleep 6y ago
    There's actually a fundamental difference between the anglosaxon system, US/UK(Canada?) and basically all the others though which I kind of like. In the US and UK you're considered educated once you go through school. So you can go another two years to University and become a lawyer(same with medicine, provided you can afford it). In Germany you're kind of set for life. Engineers are not considered business people, business people can't be considered engineers. But one of my favorite startups back in the days(Basho the makers of Riak) two absolutely fantastic engineering managers I met were an english literature grad and an business school grad. Both just had a lot of interest in Computer Science. Of course the other extreme of the equation is people that found the Fyre Festival or Theranos.
  • watwut 6y ago
    College in Germany is significantly cheaper.
  • fock 6y ago
    though, with a suitable focus on the applied science universities (where you have to work at least 1/7 of your education in a suitable position) and dual study programs, I think, we could avoid the worst (and are I actually think). I think some of the commerce chambers/etc. have brought this onto themselves by pushing the advantage of their paying members who have effectively turned most trades and crafts into guilds, where your only chance at getting a good job (aka being self employed) is inheriting machines and the company rolodex. [And no, you generally can't pull it off on your own, because you have to actually pay for studying to be allowed to open a business, so you are 30 years old, have no money and have to get a 200k loan for your non-hyperscaling business, while you have to pay rent or want to buy a house] Capitalism solves the resulting supply shortage of "qualified" plumbers, carpenters et. al. by providing cheap, eastern european, DIY-style "I can do everything"-craftsmen (actually, my grandfathers both had similar sidegigs (ok, one built his and his friend's homes with them) during the "Wirtschaftswunder" and retired). Nearly everyone who is sufficiently intelligent to pass the necessary exams then moves to university to study in the hope to get a "nice, comfortable" job. Even if they really liked their vocation. But working your ass off in the lower 10%-income bracket, while your boss buys a Porsche a year from profits you earned in a 5-person company he inherited from his father kind of sucks.
    • ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      >Capitalism solves the resulting supply shortage of "qualified" plumbers, carpenters et. al. by providing cheap, eastern european, DIY-style "I can do everything"-craftsmen You can say the same thing about software engineering. The push for easy immigration has solved the fake shortage in Germany and kept the salaries low enough to keep companies very profitable.
      • fock 6y ago
        Given the typical scope (e.g. burning VC money) of the companies going through the effort to hire/immigrate people, there is definitely no real supply shortage for software engineers. While for plumbers, there is, even with the influx of the aforementioned service people.
  • animationwill 6y ago
    There are different levels of nursing in the United States. Not all of them require uni education, but they also do tasks most people would not want to do
• TomVDB 6y ago
  > pharmacist Only 3 years for a pharmacist? I think Germany is the exception here, not the US.
  • kwhitefoot 6y ago
    I think there might be a distinction between those who can hand out the medicine already prescribed (pharmacy technician) and those who can prescribe as well (Bachelors and Masters of Pharmacy). At least that is how it is in Norway
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • ruph123 6y ago
      Oh yes that is correct. Sorry then I compared apples and oranges here. “Pharmacists” in Germany only hand out the medics and produce some. Doctors are the only ones who can prescribe.
      • syspec 6y ago
        Same in US, except pharmacist in the US must go to school for at least 6 years.
        • ulfw 6y ago
          And then they end up at some fluorescent-lid counter at a Walgreens filling pill boxes. Kind of sad when you think about it.
          • caspper69 6y ago
            They are very well compensated for what they do. The work is less strenuous and mentally taxing than being a line cook. They are usually the highest paid employees in a store, unless it's a Walmart where the general store manager can make just over six figures. It's not a terrible gig, with only a 2-year program after your bachelor's.
• unishark 6y ago
  I believe the US requires internships for professional jobs like nurse and pharmacist. Also professional schools are required by licensing and accreditation boards (which are composed of practitioners in the field, not teachers who never leave the ivory tower) to be extremely "hands on". E.g. engineering schools have labs where students make things. Dental schools have clinics where students can serve patients under supervision. Etc. Also bachelor's degrees get all the attention, but there' associates degrees, two-year degrees offered both by colleges and (very cheap) junior colleges. These include a lot of "less theoretical" stuff like dental hygienist or working with other kinds of specialized technology.
• topspin 6y ago
  Training employees use to be common in the US. Companies trained their workforce and marketed the quality of their training programs to both customers and potential employees. US employers didn't do this out of the goodness of their shareholder's hearts or (as in Germany) any regulatory obligation. They did it for competitive advantage; skilled labor was scarce and worth investment. Those days are long past. Contemporary workers are oblivious to this history as it has been more than two generations since this situation prevailed in the US. The reasons for this change can no longer be discussed in a candid manner without triggering people so I won't attempt it.
  • throwawaysea 6y ago
    It might trigger me but I’m still interested in hearing your perspective on why this went away. My simple take is that the economic pressure to train workforces went away as the supply of labor changed, and there wasn’t a competitive advantage to spending on training. Is it something more than that?
    • Consultant32452 6y ago
      Demographics. Compulsory public education became a thing in the US around the same time child labor laws were becoming wide spread. This was coincidentally around the time men were coming back from the world wars and needing to take back the jobs their children/wives had been filling. Well, all those boomers are still alive, and we needed an excuse to keep their kids/grandkids out of the work force a little longer. Hence over-saturation of college degree requirements. That's changing as the boomers die out, so we will see "college degrees" become less of a requirement. The only thing that could keep it going is competition from immigrants, but I doubt that will be the case.
      • rgblambda 6y ago
        I've long suspected this as the real reason but have yet to see any hard evidence.
      • BlueTemplar 6y ago
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Some of that is due to regulatory capture. A big role of government certifications and minimum requirements and private accreditations is to artificially limit supply. For example consider the ADA (a private “professional organization”) fighting the introduction of a lower cost role called “Dental Therapist” to perform the most common mechanical procedures cheaply: https://reason.com/2017/02/22/the-nonsensical-argument-against-dental/ https://reason.com/2017/02/22/the-nonsensical-argument-again... Another part of it is that American college education has low upfront costs typically, due to the high supply of government loans and grants. This lets students access college with low short term financial burden and removes the immediacy of considering the cost benefit tradeoff. This is why we have tens of thousands of students graduating every year with degrees in fields with no economic value. There isn’t a clear incentive and feedback signal to tell students “get a degree in what society values” instead of “get a degree in your area of interest”. And then later when they’re unemployable or paid less than they’d like, they act confused as if the system is broken even though it was their choice to not study something that others value enough to pay for. That shows up in various political struggles 10-20 years later, as large quantities of those very same students now feel left behind. Germany is different not only because of the availability of diverse education paths (like vocational programs), but due to its culture. The trades are respected in Germany. In the US that cultural value on trades has diminished. And now we are seeing many of those trades compensated heavily due to reduced supply.
  • ruph123 6y ago
    Interesting, thanks for that insight! The respect for these “craftsmanship jobs” like baker or carpenter is certainly going down though. Everyone wants to study. Although that might be in parts because of the freedom and great time you have when studying. But on the other hand, I am always very surprised to hear about “college dropouts” who make a living by working e.g. in a clothing store without any formal education. That seems to work.
    • throwawaysea 6y ago
      My hope is that our culture self corrects, but I am not sure how long that will take. My teachers back in school were beating the drum of attending college very early on, and that constant messaging to children has caused them to take college attendance as a foregone conclusion or as a first goal they need to meet in life, even if there are economic signals telling them otherwise. It's hard to deprogram a belief taught to you at a young age. I suspect that for the culture of study and work to change in America, we can't expect the current workers/students to change their views. It may only happen when a new generation no longer receives a constant push to attend college. If that's the case, then we'd see a change in college attendance and employer attitudes and employee attitudes 20 years in the future.
• thordenmark 6y ago
  True. Practical hands on beats book learning by orders of magnitude. Apprenticeships need to become the norm again. It is ridiculous to get deep in college debt that will take a major portion of your wage earning years to pay back.
  • C1sc0cat 6y ago
    But there are only so many jobs that require a 3 / 4 year Apprenticeships. And from my experience you do a fair amount of book learning too - so you can remind the "engineer" how ohms law goes :-)
• jd24 6y ago
  In the US a degree is often used as the first filter. Without a degree your resume could just be rejected by a computer before a human even looks at it.
• vcwanted 6y ago
  Maybe you stop cringing if I tell you that many nurses in the US probably make more than you
  • thecupisblue 6y ago
    The highest average salaries are for Cali and Hawaii, about 100k. Taken in for cost of living, cost of college, benefits - I'm pretty sure a german lives quite nicely compared to a nurse in Cali.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • irrational 6y ago
    I don't know who "you is", but I recently found out that nurses around here make about $100k more than my base salary (and I make a good six figure salary). I went into the wrong field ;-)
    • non-entity 6y ago
      I saw a comment on HN the other day about bay area nurses making like $200k. Idk how true it is, but fuck if so, what the hell am I doing with my life.
      • dr-detroit 6y ago
        Thats Nurse Practitioner. They should be a doctor but they are the devops do-everything of their world but for less money.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        It was for an anesthesiology nurse, a CRNA, a specialized nurse that happens to be in demand right now.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    There are many places in the US where that is true. There are many places in the US where that isn't true. USA is a big country.
• irrational 6y ago
  I think mostly because most high school graduates have no idea what they want to do for a job. I really didn't figure out what I wanted to do for a career until I had 2 bachelor degrees and a masters degree. The career I have been doing for the past 20+ years has nothing to do with any of those degrees (fortunately I was smart enough to get academic scholarships every semester so I was able to graduate with no debt). But if you had asked me when I graduated from high school if I could have seen myself doing what I now do I would have laughed at you for the ridiculousness of even suggesting it.
  • donedealomg 6y ago
    > But if you had asked me when I graduated from high school if I could have seen myself doing what I now do I would have laughed at you for the ridiculousness of even suggesting it Seems to me you weren't that smart after all.
  • thatcat 6y ago
    What field did you end up in?
    • irrational 6y ago
      I’ve been a programmer at a fortune 100 company for nearly 20 years (did a few years at a smaller company before that). In college I studied history, linguistics, and educational psychology.
  • nu_throwaway 6y ago
    totally agree - not to mention attempting to decide on 30+ years of career at 18 years old involves significant uncertainty risk as well. all those hospitality management majors from last year and for the next couple years have lost out on upto 4 years of time plus whatever accompanying student debt. my first job out of college was as a "financial analyst". my undergrad degree (finance) was largely not applicable - excel skills were about the only relevant experience. any 18 year old with a 2 month excel bootcamp and maybe 2 weeks of industry and department specific orientation could have done my job; meanwhile i was desperate and had no other offers so i took it making 50k per year with my shiny new 175k degree.
• C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Does depend some countries treat nursing for example differently and is there a path to a degree at the end. I recall over hearing two specialist nurses discussing what their "first" degree was - this was in a transplant ward. Three years sounds short back when I was doing my higher level apprenticeships in the uk it was 4 years and it was assumed that some if not all would have done a full craft aprticieship first.
• rgblambda 6y ago
  >Jobs like nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc. are 3 year apprenticeships in Germany. Germany is unique among European countries in having apprenticeships for nursing.
  • romanoderoma 6y ago
    It is now, it wasn't before. I'm from Italy, my parents were both nurses, they started in the middle 70s, they did apprenticeships while working directly at the Hospital (couple of major Hospitals in Rome). They received a degree of professional nurse at the end of the three year course that has been made equivalent to the new three year University degree that is required now. My view on the subject is that it was unnecessary. My opinion is that in Italy there was a low number of graduates compared to other European countries, so we created this short term University courses to compensate for it that don't match the MD courses, not even closely, they are just the same old apprenticeships updated and rebranded.
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  We should be glad to have this, especially in these times. One problem is that people often leave the company after completing the apprenticeship and they even get encouraged to switch employers. Every healthy company I worked for didn't like company hoppers and tried to retain employees. Some departments always have some fluctuation, but it is one of the best quality markers for a company in my opinion. But as you said, lateral entrants might have a difficult time since there is a profession for everything. It is a transient education system though. Even if you only got the lowest kind of basic education, you can do an apprenticeship to get access to university or any higher education. Some people need some time to find motivation.
  • prostoalex 6y ago
    Snowden provided an example of this in his book. Receiving specialized clearances is both time-consuming and expensive, but the federal government happily covers the bills. The day after the clearance is issued the employee leaves the government job to return as a security contractor. The government covers all the expenses, the contracting company pockets all the benefits.
• gumby 6y ago
  Two factors: 1 - a high school education in the US no longer results in someone functionally prepared for citizenship (manage a budget, understand how to vote, keep themselves fed and clothed, understand a newspaper etc). It’s also only 12 years. The first year of the 4-year undergrad program at most schools is leveling all the kids to the same base. 2 - despite my criticism above, the US undergraduate design is, by and large, intended to be broad rather than deep; while in most countries you can get an undergrad law or medicine degree and then be a lawyer or physician, in the US undergrads are expected not only to study their subject (“major”) but also some literature, maths, perhaps a foreign language etc. Actual profession comes in many cases from an advanced degree. I think this is a better system though not always well implemented. There is also a Berufsschule- like system called an associates degree for basic accounting, dental assistant, etc. My son attended German Grundschule and Gymnasium track, but did some US high school and US undergrad. I did US high school and US undergrad, but my exposure is to a different system. So while I think the us educational system is in a parlous state, it has some strengths as well.
  • s-lambert 6y ago
    > 1 - a high school education in the US no longer results in someone functionally prepared for citizenship (manage a budget, understand how to vote, keep themselves fed and clothed, understand a newspaper etc). Besides understanding a newspaper, which arguably schools do teach since they teach you to read and do analysis on text in English classes, did high school education ever cover the rest of this?
    • kortilla 6y ago
      Yes, they were called “home economics classes” (or “home ec” for short). They were snobbishly looked down upon by anyone college bound when I went to high school, which is unfortunate. They literally taught sewing, cooking, balancing a checkbook and budgeting, child care, basic auto mechanics, and some welding iirc. These are all super useful life skills and the sad part is that all of us brilliant geniuses that went on to college never got the equivalent covered.
• Gibbon1 6y ago
  > I never understood why in the US people have to study for some very basic jobs. Jobs like nurse. Jobs like nurse Are you shitting me? Seriously?
• krautsourced 6y ago
  Not sure what you mean by pharmacist but a real pharmacist aka 'Apotheker' has to do a full university study of pharmacy. The people selling the medication over the counter don't, but they aren't pharmacists.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > Jobs like nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc. are 3 year apprenticeships in Germany. You're wrong about the pharmacists (it's a study program almost as hard as medicine), and the fact that nurses are not an academic study in Germany is something that is often criticized.
• m0zg 6y ago
  It's purely gatekeeping, just like in a lot of other fields. A lot of people make a lot of money from it, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately. I too don't see why one would need a degree to give me a bottle of pills (dispensed by a robot) and read the label (printed by the same robot). I can read it myself, and I'd prefer if human was optional - this reduces the probability of a screw-up.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  Germany and the US are opposite ends of the spectrum. The US values general education highly. Germany values specialisation highly. Most places are somewhere in between. I often wonder why certain things require specialization in DE.
  • claudeganon 6y ago
    Germany also has strong unions across its blue collar workforce which provides a political and social base for the apprenticeship system. These don’t exist anywhere to the same extent in the US, where many in these jobs are forced into independent contractor status and unions are formed on a shop-vote basis, things which were purposely designed to prevent unionization.
• blablablerg 6y ago
  I don't think a pharmacist in Germany just has to do an apprenticeship for 3 years? More like 4 years college + 1 year internships.
• dr-detroit 6y ago
  Anything skilled is just outsourced and even many unskilled jobs like DBA are very hard to get into if youre a US citizen because the culture her is that the skilled worker factories in China and India and Pakistan are in extremely high regarded. PArity is paramount in professional management these days and you would be a one in a million unicorn if you went with US skilled labor why would a professional manager take such a huge risk to be the only person doing something?
• C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Apprenticeships are Education
• Diederich 6y ago
  > nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc. are 3 year apprenticeships in Germany I wasn't aware of that, thank you. This seems like an amazingly better way of doing things.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Pharmacist is not 3 years of apprenticeship.
• kube-system 6y ago
  We have many similar vocational programs in the US (ours are usually 1 or 2 year), but they have been historically stereotyped as being inferior options that are suited only for people who are incapable of studying at a university. It is typical for grade-school teachers and advisors to discourage everyone but their least-performing students from considering those options.
• programmertote 6y ago
  Do you know how many years do doctors in Germany have to study before they become fully-fledged doctors? In the US, it's 4 years of undergraduate college + 4 years of medical school + 3 years (minimum) of medical residency training. In my native country in SE Asia, it's 5 years of medical school + 2 years of medical residency training + 1 year of remote posting (go to a remote area to work in order to get medical license). And the medical school is publicly funded, so it's pretty much free (you have to buy books yourself, of course, and pay a small amount for lab fees etc. for chemistry, anatomy labs). To me, the system in the US is unnecessarily complicated/long and it not only burdens wanna-be doctors with debt (not to mention that because of the high cost, mostly the affluent/well-off kids--mostly the kids of doctors/lawyers/well-paid professionals--can now afford go to to medical school), but it helps them justify the $250K+/year salaries (part of the reason why the healthcare is expensive in the US) that they earn right after their residency programs.
• ta509258159 6y ago
  Because Americans are sold bullshit narratives about university educations intended to justify the mountains of debt required to finance the lifestyles of the people who run those institutions.
• joncrane 6y ago
  Agreed. I have heard many positive things about Germany's "career funnels," for want of a better term. Something they could definitely improve on in the USA.