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I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current

I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as software developers. We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option

loosescrews 5y ago
I think the piece that you are missing is automation. A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated and likely will be automated in the coming decades. If you are college age, you should be planning for a more automated future.
- randomdata 5y ago
  > A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time. There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.
gruez 5y ago
>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. >We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
- tough 5y ago
  Macro-farms and thousands of automation systems can make your need for human labour decrease more rapidly than people can find other jobs... It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed
  - belltaco 5y ago
    In that case, this statement would become false: >We really need farm workers
    - tough 5y ago
      We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways, as we have done by thousands of years. But point maken
      - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
        > We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.
        mac01021 5y ago
        > How so? Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife. The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.
tester756 5y ago
That's real problem Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+ and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years) I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)
- webmaven 5y ago
  Cards?
  - tester756 5y ago
    >have a card up your sleeve >to have an advantage that other people do not know about: (without that last part)
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      Typically I’ve heard the construction “dealt a better hand”
      - webmaven 5y ago
        Same.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      Thanks for explaining. I was thinking along the lines of "report card", as in that document that lists your school grades for a period of time such as a semester.
- com2kid 5y ago
  People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up. Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers. Some of the trades pay very, very, well. Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k. I know a woman running her own cat nail cutting service who is making good money and looking to hire help.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
com2kid 5y ago
America is a country that loves the free market country, yet no one seems to be talking about supply and demand to fix college prices. Double the number of large quality state universities. Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors. Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation. A supply/demand imbalance is in effect, and bloat has taken hold on top of that. Yes building new 20k student universities takes time, but in 20 years these problems will be solved.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis. You could further reduce tuition and fees, but it costs a lot to be housed and fed (and to forgo earning a full-time income for 4 years). Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think. https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
  - WWLink 5y ago
    Speaking from anecdotal experience, the university I went to put a lot of thought and money into things like being sustainable, producing zero waste, having high quality healthy food, etc. This is fantastic if you're looking at things from a long term perspective. On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something. Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    > Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis. As Bronn of the Blackwater said, “it’s all [housing policy] in the end”.
- dantheman 5y ago
agumonkey 5y ago
what about a wise form of agrotech ?
rahimnathwani 5y ago
> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done? Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done? No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.
  - grover35 5y ago
    That's not a rebuttal.
    - phkahler 5y ago
      No it's not. I was going to write one but then decided I'm not qualified to speak for farmers. I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others. IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.
wolverine876 5y ago
> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs. More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
- charrondev 5y ago
  > College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations. As If you have to go to college to become an adult. A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions) are essential skills for taking responsibility, and the lack of these skills is behind virtually every major deficiency in society. College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world. Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.
    - rayiner 5y ago
epicureanideal 5y ago
> I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM. We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better. We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses. There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.
foobarian 5y ago
I don't like how the word STEM gets thrown around because I feel it whitewashes the fact that most of the opportunity is in ad-supported web apps. Anyone trying to work in chemistry or physics finds this out the hard way.
- Fomite 5y ago
  Or Biology.
- BadCookie 5y ago
  Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/research. I didn’t even work at a FAANG, but leaving grad school and getting a programming job immediately cut my workload in half and increased my income by almost 4x … roughly an order-of-magnitude better deal. There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.
  - foolinaround 5y ago
    > There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually. In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced? I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.
    - booleandilemma 5y ago
      This is definitely how it’s interpreted. Especially when a lot of the people in the industry nowadays are clueless PMs who spent college going to frat parties and who can’t do anything in life besides be a PM (or account manager, business analyst, etc), whose first reaction is “oh wow, physics” and the deference begins from there.
paulpauper 5y ago
Have you been to a shopping mall or McDonalds, even in expensive areas like the Bay Area? Poor , low-income families with the latest gadgets, nice clothes. The money is coming from somewhere. Also, tons of subsidized programs like education, housing, and healthcare. Sure, they are not wealthy in the sense of making a lot of money, but enjoy a good standard of living nevertheless.
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  Damn, you must have that special type of clairvoyance that allows you to look at a person and determine both their income and the cost of their phones and clothes. Do you make your money teaching this skill or do you do web apps?
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    i have google. it shows how much iPhones cost.
    - spideymans 5y ago
      Does Google tell you their income?
    - randomdata 5y ago
      According to Google the iPhone 7 I use as my daily driver is worth around $100. Not exactly breaking the bank.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  It's called debt and most households are swimming in it. Looking at what people wear or if they use an iPhone is a really poor proxy for their financial health. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-household/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    Imagine having tons of debt but enjoying a high standard of living as if you were making more money. so what, if the end result is the same anyway, that being a high standard of living, but one one funded by debt and the other funded by earning more money. It's not like your children will inherit your debt. Debtors prisons do not exist either. I think debt is a problem though if you already have a lot of money, because then you're just being wasteful.
antattack 5y ago
Sam's tweet is about college grads being too expensive. Which surprises me that he donated 250k to Joe Biden rather then Bernie Sanders.
01100011 5y ago
It appears we have a demographic crisis in the making. We desperately need to automate as many jobs as we can, get people to take the jobs we can't, and pay UBI to folks without the skills to find a job.
gjvc 5y ago
STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same. If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills. * One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.
- Sparyjerry 5y ago
  Saying we need to pay them more doesn't change the laws of supply and demand. Besides, as of right now none of the careers you mentioned pay poorly, they are in very high demand and most live very comfortable lives. Are they getting Google software engineer type salaries? No, unless they branch off and start their own business. You can't just say "these people deserve more" because it's just not true. If the path to a STEM job was just as easy as becoming a plumber then literally everyone would do it just for the pay. They don't because it is actually harder to become an expert and you don't have a secure base of customers. Plumbers are needed in every single building and for every person to live. Tech is mostly non necessary and you literally have to improve upon those before you to make it. It is actually much much more difficult to succeed to tech.
  - clusterhacks 5y ago
    I am often curious about the actual salary numbers for the trades versus STEM and often see comments around trade positions being high demand and "none . . pay poorly." I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together. The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US. The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1] Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2] HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3] Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4] Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5] Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6] Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7] The same source of data projects the average job growth to be 8%, so "slower than average" and "higher than average" are in relation to that number. It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year. When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education. One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm [4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm [5] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm [6] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/brickmasons-blockmasons-and-stonemasons.htm [7] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
tootie 5y ago
The other side of the coin is for-profit colleges which are providing the highest cost and lowest value educations. Most of the most indebted college students attended for-profit colleges.
quickthrower2 5y ago
If everyone becomes a software dev, then you will end up with the starving software dev who waits tables while trying to make it big in software.
randomdata 5y ago
> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. Do we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie. Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  With respect, OP isn't talking about hobby farms here. Five acres is a great lifestyle and some nice tax benefits, but not a career.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    I work just shy of 500 acres, for what it's worth. While that may still be a hobby, you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude. Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres. If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
Do we really need farm workers? Then why is nobody paying them? I think most stories about poor farmers is about farmers who want to farm in a more traditional way, while actually most stuff is produced in huge enterprises that don't need as many people to run anymore? Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture. In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> We really need farm workers Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.
Callusing 5y ago
Non-STEM viability, in any sustainable sense, is a productivity problem. It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector. Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now. Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity? Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.

loosescrews 5y ago

I think the piece that you are missing is automation. A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated and likely will be automated in the coming decades. If you are college age, you should be planning for a more automated future.

randomdata 5y ago
> A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time. There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.

gruez 5y ago

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. >We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

tough 5y ago
Macro-farms and thousands of automation systems can make your need for human labour decrease more rapidly than people can find other jobs... It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed
- belltaco 5y ago
  In that case, this statement would become false: >We really need farm workers
  - tough 5y ago
    We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways, as we have done by thousands of years. But point maken
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      > We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.
      - mac01021 5y ago
        > How so? Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife. The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

tester756 5y ago

That's real problem Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+ and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years) I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)

webmaven 5y ago
Cards?
- tester756 5y ago
  >have a card up your sleeve >to have an advantage that other people do not know about: (without that last part)
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Typically I’ve heard the construction “dealt a better hand”
    - webmaven 5y ago
      Same.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining. I was thinking along the lines of "report card", as in that document that lists your school grades for a period of time such as a semester.
com2kid 5y ago
People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up. Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers. Some of the trades pay very, very, well. Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k. I know a woman running her own cat nail cutting service who is making good money and looking to hire help.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

com2kid 5y ago

America is a country that loves the free market country, yet no one seems to be talking about supply and demand to fix college prices. Double the number of large quality state universities. Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors. Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation. A supply/demand imbalance is in effect, and bloat has taken hold on top of that. Yes building new 20k student universities takes time, but in 20 years these problems will be solved.

sokoloff 5y ago
Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis. You could further reduce tuition and fees, but it costs a lot to be housed and fed (and to forgo earning a full-time income for 4 years). Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think. https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
- WWLink 5y ago
  Speaking from anecdotal experience, the university I went to put a lot of thought and money into things like being sustainable, producing zero waste, having high quality healthy food, etc. This is fantastic if you're looking at things from a long term perspective. On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something. Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  > Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis. As Bronn of the Blackwater said, “it’s all [housing policy] in the end”.
dantheman 5y ago

agumonkey 5y ago

what about a wise form of agrotech ?

rahimnathwani 5y ago

> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done? Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.

phkahler 5y ago
>> If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done? No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.
- grover35 5y ago
  That's not a rebuttal.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    No it's not. I was going to write one but then decided I'm not qualified to speak for farmers. I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others. IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.

wolverine876 5y ago

> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs. More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

charrondev 5y ago
> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations. As If you have to go to college to become an adult. A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions) are essential skills for taking responsibility, and the lack of these skills is behind virtually every major deficiency in society. College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world. Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.
  - rayiner 5y ago

epicureanideal 5y ago

> I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM. We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better. We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses. There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.

foobarian 5y ago

I don't like how the word STEM gets thrown around because I feel it whitewashes the fact that most of the opportunity is in ad-supported web apps. Anyone trying to work in chemistry or physics finds this out the hard way.

Fomite 5y ago
Or Biology.
BadCookie 5y ago
Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/research. I didn’t even work at a FAANG, but leaving grad school and getting a programming job immediately cut my workload in half and increased my income by almost 4x … roughly an order-of-magnitude better deal. There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.
- foolinaround 5y ago
  > There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually. In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced? I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.
  - booleandilemma 5y ago
    This is definitely how it’s interpreted. Especially when a lot of the people in the industry nowadays are clueless PMs who spent college going to frat parties and who can’t do anything in life besides be a PM (or account manager, business analyst, etc), whose first reaction is “oh wow, physics” and the deference begins from there.

paulpauper 5y ago

Have you been to a shopping mall or McDonalds, even in expensive areas like the Bay Area? Poor , low-income families with the latest gadgets, nice clothes. The money is coming from somewhere. Also, tons of subsidized programs like education, housing, and healthcare. Sure, they are not wealthy in the sense of making a lot of money, but enjoy a good standard of living nevertheless.

cool_dude85 5y ago
Damn, you must have that special type of clairvoyance that allows you to look at a person and determine both their income and the cost of their phones and clothes. Do you make your money teaching this skill or do you do web apps?
- paulpauper 5y ago
  i have google. it shows how much iPhones cost.
  - spideymans 5y ago
    Does Google tell you their income?
  - randomdata 5y ago
    According to Google the iPhone 7 I use as my daily driver is worth around $100. Not exactly breaking the bank.
dougmwne 5y ago
It's called debt and most households are swimming in it. Looking at what people wear or if they use an iPhone is a really poor proxy for their financial health. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-household/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...
- paulpauper 5y ago
  Imagine having tons of debt but enjoying a high standard of living as if you were making more money. so what, if the end result is the same anyway, that being a high standard of living, but one one funded by debt and the other funded by earning more money. It's not like your children will inherit your debt. Debtors prisons do not exist either. I think debt is a problem though if you already have a lot of money, because then you're just being wasteful.

antattack 5y ago

Sam's tweet is about college grads being too expensive. Which surprises me that he donated 250k to Joe Biden rather then Bernie Sanders.

01100011 5y ago

It appears we have a demographic crisis in the making. We desperately need to automate as many jobs as we can, get people to take the jobs we can't, and pay UBI to folks without the skills to find a job.

gjvc 5y ago

STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same. If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills. * One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.

Sparyjerry 5y ago
Saying we need to pay them more doesn't change the laws of supply and demand. Besides, as of right now none of the careers you mentioned pay poorly, they are in very high demand and most live very comfortable lives. Are they getting Google software engineer type salaries? No, unless they branch off and start their own business. You can't just say "these people deserve more" because it's just not true. If the path to a STEM job was just as easy as becoming a plumber then literally everyone would do it just for the pay. They don't because it is actually harder to become an expert and you don't have a secure base of customers. Plumbers are needed in every single building and for every person to live. Tech is mostly non necessary and you literally have to improve upon those before you to make it. It is actually much much more difficult to succeed to tech.
- clusterhacks 5y ago
  I am often curious about the actual salary numbers for the trades versus STEM and often see comments around trade positions being high demand and "none . . pay poorly." I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together. The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US. The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1] Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2] HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3] Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4] Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5] Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6] Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7] The same source of data projects the average job growth to be 8%, so "slower than average" and "higher than average" are in relation to that number. It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year. When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education. One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm [4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm [5] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm [6] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/brickmasons-blockmasons-and-stonemasons.htm [7] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm

tootie 5y ago

The other side of the coin is for-profit colleges which are providing the highest cost and lowest value educations. Most of the most indebted college students attended for-profit colleges.

quickthrower2 5y ago

If everyone becomes a software dev, then you will end up with the starving software dev who waits tables while trying to make it big in software.

randomdata 5y ago

> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. Do we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie. Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?

octoberfranklin 5y ago
With respect, OP isn't talking about hobby farms here. Five acres is a great lifestyle and some nice tax benefits, but not a career.
- randomdata 5y ago
  I work just shy of 500 acres, for what it's worth. While that may still be a hobby, you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude. Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres. If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

Do we really need farm workers? Then why is nobody paying them? I think most stories about poor farmers is about farmers who want to farm in a more traditional way, while actually most stuff is produced in huge enterprises that don't need as many people to run anymore? Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture. In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> We really need farm workers Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.

Callusing 5y ago

Non-STEM viability, in any sustainable sense, is a productivity problem. It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector. Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now. Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity? Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.