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There are three problems that colleges need to fix. 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six

• srcreigh 5y ago
  Your point #3 just looks at two different things. They don't contradict each other at all. Maybe had a job before age 18 implies later went to college for instance.
• rgrieselhuber 5y ago
  One question I’ve had is if tuition paid via student loans can go to a college endowment. That should end immediately, if so.
  • brewdad 5y ago
    Tuition money is fungible. If a school gets 20% of it's funding from loans (no idea what the real number might look like) and uses 30% of tuition money to fund their endowment, then the accounting will show that all of the loan money went to fund operations and only cash payments went to the endowment. We've already seen this in every state where lottery funds "go to education." The new money doesn't increase the budget for education, it only frees up some money to be spent on something else.
    • rgrieselhuber 5y ago
      I’m sure that no moral hazards emerge out of that arrangement.
• Thorentis 5y ago
  > She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr. Hate to say it, but sounds like a diversity promotion to me.
• honksillet 5y ago
  Government needs to get out of the student loan game entirely.
  • mmcconnell1618 5y ago
    Medicare in the US has negotiated rates they will pay for medical services. The "retail" price is very often extremely high but knocked down to what the government agrees to pay for Medicare patients. A similar system for college loans would allow the government to still offer loans but with caps on how much colleges could charge for tuition to students with government loans. The problem is uncapped tuition and loan terms that allow lenders to offer tremendously large sums of money to students in a low risk way because the students can't declare bankruptcy or discharge the loans in any easy way.
    • kube-system 5y ago
      Many of the largest schools in the US are government institutions. There's no need to negotiate prices, state legislatures can just set the price. https://c0arw235.caspio.com/dp/b7f930003542e89a6fb844548260 https://c0arw235.caspio.com/dp/b7f930003542e89a6fb844548260
• jimmyjazz14 5y ago
  I don't think the first two are problems colleges need to fix I think its more of a matter that we need to change our mindset about who should be attending college maybe some people would be better off going the trade school route.
  • zapataband1 5y ago
    Yeah we I read somewhere that in Germany 60% of students go into trades and they have seriously beefed up their programs. But yeah there is a stigma here in the US about trades, I think that's partly due to the social consequences of having insane wealth gaps and worshipping billionaires.
    • deltree7 5y ago
      Huh? From Peter Thiel to Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Zuckerburg, most billionaires don't push the college propaganda and have shown/encouraged path without college education. It's only the pseudo-social scientists who can't do proper data analysis (finding out the real confounding variable) that push the college propaganda
      • zapataband1 5y ago
        That's true I should've said wealth. I think many people don't see many paths towards wealth if they aren't entrepreneurial, college used to be a good way towards upwards mobility. I think we're all realizing it's not really the case now
      • salemh 5y ago
      • justinator 5y ago
        Don't forget Elizabeth Holmes!
    • larkost 5y ago
      Not only that, but depending on which state you are in in Germany (and Austria) you get routed at around 4th grade. If the teachers decide that you are academically fit for it then you go on to the Gymnasium, which prepares you for college, often with some focus for your class (e.g.: mathematics, arts, or science). If those same teachers decide that you are not up to college, but are still smart enough for something skilled, then you go on to Realschule, which still has some focus on academics, but is steering you to something like being a secretary, or a generic office worker. And finally there is the Hauptschule track. Here you are being groomed for something more involved with labor. The academics are not nearly so rigorous, and there is almost always the expectation that you will be steered into an apprenticeship for the final 4 years of what we (in the U.S.) would have as High School. Some of these apprenticeships can be quite prestigious (e.g.: the BMW technician school in Munich), but many of them are pretty pedestrian (e.g.: learning to run agricultural equipment). For most people this routing when they are 10 (or so) decides what routes are open to them later in life. There are exceptions to this (my host sister went to Realschule, and later took the Abiture, the the test that got her into college), but they are pretty rare. I have always been a bit leery of choices made so early in life, but it works pretty well in Germany.
• fnord77 5y ago
  there's been a proliferation of administrators in colleges. the ratio of administrators to professors/instructors has been steadily climbing since the 70s. I see this as a form of corruption.
  • moneywoes 5y ago
    Apparently this is where most of the tuition cost is going
• newfonewhodis 5y ago
  While your (completely valid) points address the economics of college, it misses the connections and friendships you make through college. It's the best way for most people to be thrown around thousands of people to find and build their community. All that to say, if the economics of college were better, even I (mid-career) would consider going back for a couple of degrees to continue expanding my community.
• PopeUrbanX 5y ago
• vmception 5y ago
  There aren't colleges problem. Its coincidence that for the last 60 years people felt like they needed college, while colleges insist that people want to be there for obscure higher education for the sake of pursuing obscure higher education. Turns out this was true for hundreds of years before inclusion was even a concept, and will exist for the next hundreds of years as people find another option.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • rPlayer6554 5y ago
    The colleges were willing to jack up the price to take advantage of the government giving out loans. They are a major part of the problem as well.
    • kube-system 5y ago
      And those that did, used the funds to build new campuses and cutting-edge programs. And students overwhelmingly chose to go to these more expensive and larger schools while smaller and more modest schools struggled to attract students.
      • JPKab 5y ago
        I suggest you look at the ways universities ACTUALLY spend money. Yes, many, including my alma mater, spent lavishly on fancy new buildings. No question about that. But the primary growth of expenses at universities has been the huge growth in administrative positions. Administrators want to get paid more, and what better way to do that than to pretend you need more people working UNDER you. There is zero reason why every other industry in the world has reduced their administrative overhead with technology except higher education. And you will never see a bigger group of useless fucks than university administrators. Not unlike the Wall Street "bro" douchebags, they are just talkers with no real skills, inserting themselves into a corrupt system to collect a chunk of the dollars flowing past them.
• jorblumesea 5y ago
  The purpose of college is partly workforce training but also just general education. To see college as solely providing competitive dollar careers seems to misunderstand a large part of higher educational purpose. In theory at least, the liberal arts are something far more than just "can I work at FB".
  • RealityVoid 5y ago
    Yes, thank you! I find the point of view where college is just job training so myopic.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    Which is why far fewer people should be getting them. The immediate needs of most people far outweighs the desire to learn about liberal arts. Which is why these degrees were sold with the promise of good pay. If you want to blame someone for framing college solely from a wage earning potential perspective, point the finger at the people selling college degrees to kids. There should not be guaranteed student loans for degrees that don't provide competitive dollar careers.
• starwind 5y ago
  There shouldn't be a divide between skilled trades and bachelor's degrees. If I could add a creative writing minor to math degree, why was it impossible for me to add an aircraft maintenance certification through my school?
  • lapsedacademic 5y ago
    > why was it impossible for me to add an aircraft maintenance certification through my school? Because schools can't bullshit maintenance certification curricula and aren't willing to pay qualified faculty. See also: the alarming number of schools where CS and Data Science courses are still taught by mathematics faulty (because they can't find CS faculty who are willing to work for $70K). This model of "pay unqualified people to teach a good enough version of the course and hope our consumers don't notice they're being shafted" only works in unregulated fields. Most trades are not unregulated.
    • xyzzyz 5y ago
      > Because schools can't bullshit maintenance certification curricula and aren't willing to pay qualified faculty. Yeah, the crucial thing that most people miss in these discussion is that most schools don’t actually effectively teach what they claim to be teaching. Teachers and students go through the motions, but the students don’t actually end up learning much of anything, and the teachers who nevertheless give them passing grade face no consequence. If a typical high school started offering aircraft maintenance certification, instead of increasing the graduates value on job market, it would simply make the certification to be held as worthless.
    • yardie 5y ago
      For most schools CS is literally in the Math Department. And traditional CS is a lot more math than the contemporary CS, which should really be called SWE. My alma mater finally merged CS and SWE, then moved the new CS/SWE degree to Engineering because engineering basically prints money.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    Because the AMT course is typically 24 months long by itself (for a combined airframe and powerplant certificate)? It’s 30 months of relevant, supervised maintenance work experience or a qualified AMT school program, which are often 24 months full-time. That’s far more time than a typical creative writing minor.
• jacobolus 5y ago
  > kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime Just as with claims about college, there is a huge selection bias in this observation. (A substantially higher proportion of youngish Americans obtain a bachelors degree than have a job before age 18.) Edit: Let’s be clear: there is obviously a huge selection bias when talking about college as well, which should not be ignored.
  • texasbigdata 5y ago
    That’s the point?
  • tryptophan 5y ago
    Yes, but it is interesting which bias gets ignored and which one gets pointed out. > Collage increases earnings! "Yay lets send everyone to collage and give out >1T$ of loans" > Early work experience increases earnings! "Confounding factors and selection bias!"
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • dionidium 5y ago
    > A substantially higher proportion of Americans obtain a bachelors degree than have a job before age 18. Is this true? I got a job as soon as I was legally allowed to and so did every one of my friends in high school. Where I'm from you were seen as kind of a loser if you didn't work over the summer, at least. I'd guess it was something like 90% of kids at my school worked at some point in high school. Edit: Here's a chart [0]. These numbers are much smaller than I expected (although keep in mind this is a snapshot, not the percentage who at any point in high school will have had a job), but what's really surprising is that the number of high school kids working has collapsed since I was in high school. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/477668/percentage-of-youth-who-are-enrolled-in-school-and-working-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/477668/percentage-of-you...
    • 5y ago
• throw10920 5y ago
  Your first three points are very strong and insightful, but I somewhat object to your fourth. Individuals get loans for things that pay off in the long-term regularly - cars and houses, for the most part. I don't see any reason why college should be different, especially because the alternative is for taxpayers to subsidize it. The real issues are twofold: first, student loans are underregulated and very predatory in a way that car loans and mortgages are not; second, like you said in your third point, college is way overpriced, with the cost of it going up about an order of magnitude over the past few decades with no discernable increase in quality (see the excellent Consideration On Cost Disease for more[1]). If education was 10x cheaper and student loan rates were 3-5% a year, you wouldn't need the public to fund education - and even if you wanted to, it'd be a far easier time selling that idea than trying to convince people to fund undergraduate degrees to the tune of $100k+ per student. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
  • artful-hacker 5y ago
    I think a third real issue is also important, the 'undue hardship' burden necessary to get rid of student loans through bankruptcy needs to be dropped.
    • ksdale 5y ago
      Exactly, people get loans for houses and cars, and the banks make damn sure you're a good credit risk. For college loans, it's literally the opposite. Since the loans are so hard to get rid of, the only incentive is to increase the number and size of the loans. The issue is that if lenders looked at creditworthiness for college loans the way they do for mortgages, either the price of college would have to decline precipitously, or they would trust far fewer people with that amount of money.
      • throw10920 5y ago
        Very good points - I had no idea of this crazy situation for student loans. So, perhaps, "student loans" need to go (in the sense of all of the awful regulation (or lack thereof) around them), but not necessarily "loans to students to earn a four-year degree".
• throwaway75787 5y ago
  Out of interest, could you please point me in the direction of the digital marketing bootcamp that your daughter toook?
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made. 3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive. Link to your study? Did these people not go to college? 4. As you’ve already demonstrated college is hardly required let alone loans. I’m surprised this is the top post. Average College grads make more money over their lifetime, period. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/collegepayoff.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...
  • meatsauce 5y ago
    So why are the babies crying that they can't afford their loans?
  • zebraflask 5y ago
    I think #1 needs to factor in cost of living. In many urban areas, 45K is near or even below the poverty level for a single worker.
    • geodel 5y ago
      Well , one thing to consider is who more likely need to stay in urban area. I think it is required more for college educated compared to tradespeople.
      • zebraflask 5y ago
        To find white collar employment? At least before remote work became prevalent recently, I suppose so. On the other hand, the infrastructure for a large urban area doesn't run itself! Trade work is definitely needed to keep the roads paved and cars functional, the warehouses and stores stocked, the buildings in repair, etc., I would hazard even more so than in less urbanized areas. I think what I'm getting at is that it seems a little too facile to say uncritically that anyone can just go drive a forklift and expect to make a reasonably liveable income.
• ptero 5y ago
  One big issue with making a no-college a viable option is that in the US the school education is absolutely atrocious. In many colleges the first year of science or engineering degree classes focus on providing a decent background that should have been taught at schools. This needs to be fixed for the school-only path to be viable.
  • kube-system 5y ago
    Public schools in the US vary from "absolutely atrocious" to "absolutely great" depending on where you live. The colleges that select students only from the latter do not waste time re-teaching high school material.
    • ptero 5y ago
      I think I did not express myself well. The problem I was referring to with the schools is not that some teachers are better and some are worse, class features, etc. This matters, but there are bigger problems as US lacks a uniform school program. The selection of materials is done more or less at the teacher's discretion. This means that even in the same school the math teacher for kids entering grade 8 does not know what material was covered before. Some kids may have been exposed to a particular topic, some may have never seen it. So teachers have to go over the basic material again and again and again, which makes it very hard to give a solid course. In Europe (at least in some countries), there is a standard program, so the teacher in grade 8 math knows that all prerequisites have been seen by every student. So they give a very brief refresher at the beginning of the year and can turn to the new material. Even better, when a topic is covered in a physics class, the physics teacher knows that the corresponding math tools have already been covered in the math classes.
      • kube-system 5y ago
        Every state I've lived in has official curricula required by state governments, and the AP courses that are typically recommended to college-track students are standardized across the entire country.
• lokar 5y ago
  What do teachers and forklift operators make after 10/20/30 years?
  • carlmcqueen 5y ago
    My wife has a doctorate in occupational therapy and works as a hand therapist, when pay is the only metric looked at you really do miss a lot. The body condition of construction workers, fork lift operators and even welders is worn down and in pain. Not to mention, they have to live with unfair medical standards. When she does hand strength assessments for workers comp the number is based on natural average. So lets say a normal office worker squeezes on the test at a score of 100, a construction worker squeezes at 320. Workers comp says they can return to work if they can squeeze at like 120. Which terrifies the construction workers but they won't get any more time off.
    • oblio 5y ago
      Yeah, the only winning options long term, as a skilled worker is to get out before 40 and either start your own company or become a sort of project manager at a bigger company. Neither options are super easy.
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes." With the forklift you will stay at 45k forever and probably make less every year whereas for the teacher this is a starting salary and will go up. Talk to real blue collar workers and from most you will hear a not very rosy picture. Pay stagnates, management treats them like crap, terrible working conditions, very hard on the body so getting older is difficult. Unless you are a business owner or in a very good union blue collar jobs aren't much fun.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • atlgator 5y ago
    I mean, ok, but let's not base our entire view on one trade, if you can even call forklift operation a skilled trade. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC techs all have upward mobility from apprentice to journeyman to foreman to owning their own businesses. Apprentice level electricians make about $75k in Alaska with zero experience. Foreman electricians managing commercial electrical jobs make about $175k. YMMV per state or metro but that's some decent growth IMO, especially considering no college education requirement. I agree that the jobs are tough in the apprentice years. You are literally doing the grunt work for that trade, but a) you are getting paid to learn, and b) if you start right out of high school you are still young and able-bodied. Apprenticeships only last 2-4 years typically. You could be a licensed electrician at 22 years old.
    • lumost 5y ago
      You are describing good Union work. Anecdotally these jobs appear tough to get into from family who work in various trades, in construction such jobs are tough to get into and tougher to hold onto ( eventually the work dries up as construction dwindles ) Unionized manufacturing does much better, with steady employment that can exceed 200/hr for the right work. These days you can pretty much only get such jobs via connection as they aren’t creating more of these jobs very frequently. Source: The 200/hr figure was based on underwater welding for USN ships.
• rurp 5y ago
  > kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree. I'm surprised by the magnitude but I can see why this would be the case. Working teenagers probably correlate with having parents who value work. Plus it teaches some valuable skills early on. An entry level job can throw all sorts of uncomfortable challenges at you, which you are expected to handle in stride. I'd say there's a societal benefit as well, due to the empathy it promotes. Most people work very different jobs as an adult than they would as a teenager. Having more perspective on what other workers experience makes one more kind and reasonable in general.
  • sjostrom7 5y ago
    You're probably also more able to work if your folks make enough money to have a stay-at-home parent (so you don't have to watch your younger siblings), buy you a car to get back and forth from your job, etc. Without seeing how they actually did this study, I'll go ahead and chalk most of this up to generational privilege.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      My first job as a teen was delivering newspapers (not sure that's really an option anymore, though). I also cut lawns in the summer. All of that was on foot or bicycle. Didn't have a car until I was 18.
    • rurp 5y ago
      Hmmm I'd want to see some data on this before drawing any conclusions, because my anecdotal experience is the opposite. The poor teenagers I knew pretty much all had jobs, in large part because they needed the money. Their only option to be able to buy new clothes or a used car was to earn the money themselves. Well off kids didn't have that same sort of pressure.
  • HNDen21 5y ago
    If you for example do some open source projects between 15 and 18 and then get a job after finishing high school.. by the time the other person graduates college you will already have 4 years of experience and be a mid level/senior developer.. so you have a start of 4 years in terms of money as well as experience We only look at college degrees for people without experience... for people that have experience, we don't care about the college sine it is all outdated stuff anyway... the interview will tell us what we want to know
• criley2 5y ago
  >3) College is way over priced. They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree. Having a job before 18 and getting a bachelors degree are not mutually exclusive, in fact, recent data suggests that about half of all people attending undergraduate school are employed. I personally was employed by 16 and went to college at 18, keeping a job for the entire time to offset some of the costs. I do agree that student loans are a heinous tool though, even moderate loans accrue huge interest during a formative time in your career and prevent you from saving for retirement during the vital years when your investments have the most time to mature.
• varelse 5y ago
  In the short term I agree with you that trades pay very well, $250,000 a year even at the higher end. Even more if you're willing to risk your life on power lines or windmills. But that's a starting wage in tech in Seattle or the Bay area for an engineer that's in demand and it only goes up from there. Those engineers that are in demand all have undergraduate degrees, it's a huge virtue signal for hiring for now. A new college graduate with one year of industry experience got poached for $400k by a competitor. And that doesn't begin to cover what AI superstars make straight out of school. Ironically as someone in the later phases of my tech career, I am increasingly interested in trade skills over tech skills. And doubly ironically there's a lot of intellectual overlap.
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. Is this a problem that needs fixing? We don't have enough plumbers & electricians (for example), many in those fields are retiring and until lately there haven't been enough people entering those trades to replace those retiring. Now we're probably going to start seeing people enter those trades at a higher rate than in the recent past. These are very good paying jobs and often it's hard to find a plumber or electrician when you need one.
• lend000 5y ago
  Re: numbers 3) and 4). It's a hard trade-off. I believe in equality of opportunity in education, which infinite guaranteed government loans do provide to someone willing to take on that burden (which often ends up being a bad decision for most people). However, the very act of guaranteeing unlimited loans to everyone creates a very simple economic effect in which colleges will grow in expense to meet the supply of money. Look at all the ridiculously nice buildings, statues, grounds, and administrator salaries at even C-tier colleges. The alternative, IMO, is to make state run schools tuition free, but there's no guarantee you'll get in. Use some relatively objective metrics like the SAT and relative standing in high school class to determine eligibility. Then get rid of federal lending altogether. Apparently this is more similar to some of the European models. Under this model, any highly gifted but poor person worried about debt can get a higher education. Granted, the gifted person is also generally okay in the current model, because they probably end up making enough to handle their debt. It's the less gifted person who still wants and benefits from a higher education, but can't get into the free state school, who benefits in this model, because the removal of unqualified lending will bring down prices of less competitive colleges. But in the end, college as we know it, as great of an experience as it is for many of us, is likely becoming obsolete (in its current form, that is) with the rise of the internet and the ability to learn just about anything in your garage with an internet connection and a computer.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  > which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes Education degrees and Journalism degrees rank near the bottom of pay. If you want a good starting salary, invest in a STEM major. Above all, google "starting salaries for major XXXXX" before picking one. Sheesh!
  • tinalumfoil 5y ago
    > She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr If OP's daughter got a CS degree after two years she'd have made $0 and be $30k in the hole for state school tuition ($100k+ for private school). By my calculation she's $100k minus boot camp cost out of the hole. According to Google the median income for a bachelor's degree is $100k, which includes experienced people in their working prime. So I think OP has a pretty good counterexample. Also, not everyone wants to maximize their income. Comp sci now is what finance used to be, but not everyone has the moral framework or dedication to money where they can just Google highest paying jobs and choose the top one.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      The point is, don't pick a major, spend 4 years and $$$$$, and then complain that one didn't know what the starting salaries would be.
      • indymike 5y ago
        This is easily the best advice in this thread.
• balls187 5y ago
  > 2) There are better options than college for many. I agree there are better options than college for many. Thought if I were a betting man, on average, College is the better decision. > One of my daughters did a six month digital marketing bootcamp. She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr. I'm curious how old she was when she completed that bootcamp, and if she had a degree in another field, and/or experience. I just cant fathom a 20 year being a marketing director making $100,000. In nearly 20 years professionally, I have worked with MANY people between the ages of 18-22 (many of which themselves attend or attended prestigious schools), and none showed the aptitude, skill and leadership required to be director at that time.
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    Chances are she is working at a very small company, so "Director" doesn't carry much weight. Otherwise I would be similarly baffled.
    • balls187 5y ago
      The title inflation would make sense, but also paying director of marketing at a small company $100,000? Glassdoor has that salary around $75k on average for a small company.
  • baumandm 5y ago
    It's just a combination of being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and making a good impression. There are a lot of people in the world, some of them are going to fall upwards. The real question is whether or not this path is scalable for an entire generation to successfully replicate. I suspect it's not.
• j_autumn 5y ago
  May I ask which Bootcamp that was? I’m interested in learning more about marketing :)
• elihu 5y ago
  > Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. The impression I get from hanging out a bit in the welding subreddit is that a lot of people get into welding thinking it'll be a lucrative profession (because that's what people on the internet say about plumbers and welders and electricians and so forth), and what they eventually discover is that while it's possible to make a lot of money as a welder, that really only works if you own your own business. If you take a job working as someone else's employee, the pay usually isn't all that great. That isn't to say that people shouldn't get into welding, it's just that they should have the right strategy and expectation going in.
  • diob 5y ago
    Exactly on the dot. In the trades you _have_ to move up to management / or above in short order due to the toll it takes on your body. But not everyone can be a manager, I think we need better protections for the doers (unions, etc.). A lot of naive kids go into trades and trash their body only to end up with nothing or a life addicted to painkillers.
    • moonchrome 5y ago
      Just because you own a business doesn't mean you're a manager, I know plenty of people who work independently and work alone or have one or two guys working with them. It's surprisingly similar to software development in that regard, once you get skilled enough you can get better money contracting than being employed and right now there's so much work that the "safety net" doesn't concern you.
      • diob 5y ago
        I'd really like to do the same, although the lack of healthcare in the USA makes me hesitant. I'll probably do it anyways and just roll the dice, but hoping things change here soon.
  • cascom 5y ago
    You don’t need to be an owner management in welding (though that is definitely the better path), but you have to be great welder and you have to be willing to work long and hard (most people I know wouldn’t make it through a shift working on a refinery turnaround in PPE on the gulf coast in September).
• jimbokun 5y ago
  > She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr. That...is one heck of a promotion. Good for her!
• jeremy_wiebe 5y ago
  > 4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop. Young people should not be put in debt-bondage. Imagine America's financial health if we let young people start families and careers debt free. Nobody has forced anyone to take a student loan. In fact, many young adults would probably learn a lot about life, financial management, and restraint if they saved for college and waited till they could afford it instead of going straight to college and going into huge amounts of debt. Generally society doesn’t condone going into debt carelessly in other situations so I don’t understand how we give (or want to give) students a free pass for racking up thousands (or hundreds of thousands) in loans.
  • JPKab 5y ago
    You're right. Nobody forced me to sign on to student loans at the age of 17. I did it voluntarily. I couldn't buy beer, or cigarettes, or lease an apartment, and my brain wasn't fully developed. But yeah, nobody forced me to make a foolish decision and give a bunch of money to an inherently corrupt, predatory industry that employs more and more administrators every year while every other industry has used technology to reduce their admin numbers. I just got tricked. And my degree was fairly good as well. I double majored in Mechanical engineering/applied economics. (I know, it's a dumb combination, but I thought I could get a job in the ME field, and found economics interesting.). I couldn't get a job at all doing mechanical engineering, and instead the degree just demonstrated to potential employers I could do hard stuff and math. Something that could have been evaluated far easier with some form of test or hands-on interview that we use in our industry to screen talent.
    • idrios 5y ago
      Hah, similar story here but biomedical engineer with physics & EE minors instead. I wouldn't say that at 17 our brains were too underdeveloped, but that without real world experience there was too much we didn't understand -- that our universities are training more qualified applicants than there are jobs for our fields, so companies can have their pick of the litter. And I sometimes see people talk about university as a path to scholarship, professorship, tenure, etc.. and that kind of discussion is so foreign to me because even when I was in school 10 years ago it was very obvious that those positions were too competitive, so the school was training us for industry instead. But when you're that age, it's impossible to weigh the economics of how many MRI / CT / medical imaging engineering positions are going to be available when you graduate in 4 years, vs how many other fresh grads will be applying for them. The only thing you know is that if you diverge from the path expected of you too much, the other fresh grads will have a competitive advantage over you so you just have to take the gamble that what you're studying will be employable.
• kube-system 5y ago
  I think this view is indicative of a massive failure of cultural expectations. At what point in the past 50 years did we start expecting academic liberal arts institutions to start churning out people with vocational skills? These are entirely different things. The fact that an average 1970's college graduate was highly employable has nothing to do with those colleges having good vocational training programs, and everything to do with selection bias of those who attended and the economics of the time. If you need vocational skills, you should enroll in a vocational program.
  • eli_gottlieb 5y ago
    >At what point in the past 50 years did we start expecting academic liberal arts institutions to start churning out people with vocational skills? These are entirely different things. The point where they started taking in about half of each rising generation as freshman instead of 5%.
    • kube-system 5y ago
      And whose fault is that? It's the parents and advisors that said "go to college and you'll get a good job" when they weren't cut out for it (or didn't even want to do it). It's the voters who pushed for students loans "to give all of our students a chance". If you give people who aren't cut out to do something, a chance to do that thing, it's expected that more people will fail. We are now living with the predictable result of pushing unmotivated and uninterested kids to "just try it out", and handing them a credit card to do it with.
      • eli_gottlieb 5y ago
        >And whose fault is that? The universities were happy to take the money, from the elite-but-useless private schools to the underfunded but more practical public engineering colleges. Only changing the incentives will change the results.
        • kube-system 5y ago
• stemlord 5y ago
  Director of marketing after one year in the field is wild. Congrats to her.
  • brewdad 5y ago
    She runs her own TikTok. I'm kidding but really the job title doesn't necessarily mean much.
• JPKab 5y ago
  My biggest regret about my 4 years at Virginia Tech is the opportunity cost. I could have been spending the years of my life where I could learn at a vastly accelerated rate compared to present learning useful things. Instead, my double major in mechanical engineering/applied economics was heavily loaded with highly inefficient, archaic classes in subjects I cared about combined with a heavy dose of mandatory humanities type courses that were essentially ultra-leftwing indoctrination courses. For example, my Latin American history course was a non-stop "Latin America is a crappy place because it doesn't have enough Marxism" course. I was assigned various books, and as long as I wrote about the books with identical conclusions to the professor, I got an A, no matter how horribly written. If I wrote eloquently about why I thought the book about Gaitan's socialist movement in Columbia wasn't as angelic as depicted in the book, I got a D. Another book that was assigned reading was "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" which is essentially a handbook telling you how to get otherwise happy people to realize they are oppressed and embrace Marxism. This was the early 2000s, and the predictions about Columbia, for example, couldn't have been more wrong. It's a vastly improved place compared to then, despite the depiction in the class of a sinister, evil, predatory capitalist society. No matter what South American country you discussed, if it was communist/socialist, it was a paradise. If it wasn't, it was a dictatorship. The teacher wouldn't stop talking about how amazing Venezuela was, and how Hugo Chavez was "misunderstood." Another class I took was called "Economics of Poverty". The professor is a person I can't forget, because long before I had ever heard of Elizabeth Warren, she was a fair skinned, blue-eyed white woman who claimed to be half Native American. I never believed that for a second, and it was obvious she made this claim to advance her career. My favorite moment with her was when she told the entire class that "most of you will graduate from this school and be unable to find meaningful employment. Our economic system doesn't value what you've learned, and you need to fix that." It was a soul-crushing, disempowering experience and I'm furious about how much I bought into her and her colleague's bullshit back then. Pessimistic losers who've never left their bubble ruining young minds as they themselves live off of the oppressive debt the students are taking on. I don't have a problem with nutbag activists, but I deeply resent the Federal government subsidizing them and their foolish causes, on the backs of 17 year olds signing away their lives for debt.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes. I'm not sure universities can fix this, or want to fix this. Many of the people opting for university degrees aren't looking to perform work that needs to be done, but seeking a role that makes them feel powerful/smart/elegant/influential etc. In a market-based economy that rewards meeting the needs/wants of others, I'm honestly surprised that many college grads are paid anything at all.
• pyrale 5y ago
  > 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. I fail to see how this is a problem, and whether it should be fixed. The very idea that people that went through college deserve more is insulting for tradespeople as well as the source of bad incentives to go to college. If anything, the society would probably benefit from colleges focusing on transmitting and advancing knowledge, rather than being paid fast-lanes for people who only give a fuck about the payckeck. This idea that some works deserve fair pay and some work deserve abuse (the worst being "burger flipper", "student job", etc.) really need to die. If you don't think it deserves fair pay and respect, you don't deserve the service.
  • someguydave 5y ago
    Fully agree, and the implication is that even fewer people should go to college.
    • pyrale 5y ago
      Well, not necessarily. College currently mostly exists as an early-life service, but alternative paths exist: in the US, people in the military can go to college later in life. In some countries, people can get college education at evening courses. We could envision that some people starting early in life in physically hard jobs may want/have to retire years earlier, and use that time to go through college our of personal interest. This isn't really possible with an onerous college system mostly dedicated to social layering, but an university system with scholarships for everyone and flexibility in the time and way people enroll is not an impossible goal. I for one would really like to return to university after I retire, for instance.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes. For decades clueless counselors pushed kids that were not successful academically or with behavioral issues into "the trades"... Only for the kids to realize they do need good reading and academic abilities to be able to succeed as a skilled tradesman. And that it takes disciplines to work in those fields. We keep hearing about the successful tradespeople (notice how they are all their own bosses and own their shops) who made it but not the auto-repair schools’ dropouts.
• stevespang 5y ago
• HWR_14 5y ago
  In response to your problems: > 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs This is a problem that the colleges cannot fix. It's not the college systems fault teacher pay is being held back so much (unless by that you mean they should dramatically increase professors' salaries, so that the higher rates in academia trickle down.) > 2) There are better options than college for many. This is point 1 again. Digital Marketing is just a different skilled trade. > 3) College is way over priced. Isn't that because tuition has been a larger and larger portion of their income? > They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree. Sure, and? That's not relevant to the discussion, because they just isolated one variable. If both statements are true, you would expect a college educated person who had a job before 18 to make 89% more than someone who did neither. > 4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop. I agree. But it's not the college system's fault that public support (financially) nosedived over the past couple of decades.
• asabjorn 5y ago
  Also, a degree may have a negative contribution. Is the ideological bend of some college degrees potentially harming mental acuity through confusions and bad mental habits? E.g. if you take a math degree that teach "2+2 != 5" this degree is likely to reduce mental acuity. You'll be a great activist, but not a great mathematician or teacher.
  • asabjorn 5y ago
    I meant to say “2+2 != 4” :D
• pwn2d2 5y ago
  > Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My startup is trying to help this in the flooring industry. At https://gocarrera.com https://gocarrera.com we have made a platform for contractors to connect to companies and vice versa. We will roll out a feature shortly for people unfamiliar with the industry to be and to find add join other contractor teams to help them get started in the industry. It's really exciting and pretty shocking how complex the industry is.
• ChrisLomont 5y ago
  BLS lists median forklift driver salary around 37k. This is not starting, it's median. Starting is much lower everywhere I look. And forklifts are being automated by many companies right now. Median starting pay for a 4 year degree is over $54k at the moment. That's a massive difference.
• frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  I encourage you to reexamine your position and perspective on things. It's too much to unpacking one reply, however every one of your points suffers from a kind of perspective shift that skews your perspective on things. Yes, the whole system is utterly convoluted, twisted, and perverted into dysfunction; but I also find it astonishing that you claim it's some kind of debt-bondage, right after clearly making the point that you can just go into a skilled trade or to a marketing bootcamp and that just alone the drive and work ethic of someone who has a job before 18 will set you up for success. The real issue is that the upper class has colluded to corrupt the whole education system, largely for self-enrichment, which has also have an exorbitant impact on America's competitiveness by inefficient allocation of human resources into ever increasingly useless degrees. It is not a coincidence that all these changes have correlated the increase in communistic/socialistic type policies and mentalities.
• pyuser583 5y ago
  Which boot camp? I’m asking for an interested family member.
• Daub 5y ago
  Related to #4 is the insane amount of over staffing in the average uni. The formula is… 1. Create needless procedural requirements, each alluding to serve some sort of qualitative intent 2. Hire people to service these requirements 3. Profit?
• listenallyall 5y ago
  > Young people should not be put in debt-bondage. Imagine America's financial health if we let young people start families and careers debt free. I agree college is far too expensive and the rate of inflation of college tuition is rather absurd. The reasons for such, are best debated in another thread. However, I'm skeptical that eliminating student debt would ultimately result in significantly better financial outcomes for young people. Instead, most of the "savings" would be swallowed up by higher real estate and rent costs. The pandemic should serve as prima facie evidence -- give a huge swath of the population more cash, real estate will eat much/most/all of it. Let's say that instead of student debt, the typical 22-32 year-old professional has approximately $500 more spending power. All that means is that they will compete with each other to purchase housing, pushing rents and housing costs up -- not just for themselves but also for everyone else. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reduce student debt (not via forgiveness, but by reducing education costs to begin with) -- but doing so is not a panacea.
  • afiori 5y ago
    There is another option, make degree status a protected class so that degrees cannot be an in-name-only qualification. This would remove the FOMO of college and significantly increase trades and bootcamps. An idea partially inspired by this blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...
• austincheney 5y ago
  Most people, both in the real world and on HN, cannot differentiate education from certification. That must be super disappointing to come to grips that you overpaid for a 4 year certificate when the self taught guy sitting next to you spent that time building out their career earning money. A bachelors degree is not a license to practice or guarantee of employment. That is not the point of education.
• wayoutthere 5y ago
  The problem with the trades is that they burn out your body. And quickly — you have about 25 years of good work in you, so if you start at 18 your body is done by your mid-40s. From there it’s either moving on to manage / start your own shop, take a job for less money at a hardware store / parts desk, or collect disability checks and barely scrape by in early retirement with a broken body.
• shortlived 5y ago
  > My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes. That's too short sighted. What's the lifetime earning potential of a forklift driver vs a teacher?
• TiredGuy 5y ago
  With interest rates so low these days, are student loans still problematic? Seems like a nice way to defer having to pay while in school, but I'd love to learn more about the issue.
  • pragmatic8 5y ago
    I wouldn’t consider the rates here [1] low at all. Parent PLUS loans are sky high at 6.28%. I suppose you are talking about private loans but they have their own set of downsides. [1] https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-rates https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-r...
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Parent PLUS loans are sky high at 6.28%. PLUS loans are supplemental loans with a higher rate than regular direct undergraduate (3.73%) or graduate/professional (5.28%) student loans.
• oceanplexian 5y ago
  > Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs To me this is just a sign that the market is working correctly. The world needs more forklift drivers, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics than it needs teachers. The idea that teachers deserve to be paid more is elitist, IMHO. The problem is that our culture incorrectly assumes college degrees are the only way to “learn” productive and valuable skills.