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> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. There's this idea that the shift to
by rainsford 2y ago
> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs.
There's this idea that the shift to college and white collar jobs was some artificial push, but it seems more like an incredibly natural and obvious move to me. A lot of blue collar work is just not super great from a working conditions and pay perspective and while not every white collar job is awesome, the pay and conditions are generally better and at their best can be incredibly intellectually stimulating. My Dad started out working in an industrial plant but pretty quickly ended up going to college to get a computer science degree because that job sounded way better than what he was doing...and that was way back when those kind of factory jobs were still a reasonable way to make a living.
I can somewhat agree with the Dirty Jobs philosophy that non-college careers can be valuable and the right choice for some people, and the world after all still needs crab fishermen. But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree.
- xienze 2y ago> But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree. Well they are better in the sense that you can’t really outsource HVAC or plumbing work to India. The downside of course, and the reason that so many Americans fell out of love with the trades, is that we’re extremely eager to import foreign labor, legally or otherwise, to suppress wages.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThe flaw is in putting these things out as alternatives to each other. The future of manufacturing is in automation, but in order to do automation you need machinists and computer science. You need people who can design a machine that makes other machines, which is a physical device that operates under the direction of software. Getting people to learn to code instead of learning how to build machines doesn't get it.
- rainsford 2y agoI agree you need a variety of skills and jobs, but "learning how to build machines" is just as white collar as learning to code. Particularly since the functionality of any modern machine involves just as much code as it does mechanical engineering. Don't get me wrong, mechanical and software engineering are completely different fields and we need both of them. But they're both unarguably college educated white collar jobs.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoYes and no. Writing code is sitting in an office and typing stuff into a computer, all the way into production. Making machines is a physical thing. You can do a lot of the design on a computer, but to do even that you need a handle on the physical reality of the thing that benefits from experience with the physical object. If you want a prototype it's something you build with your hands rather than something you run in a container on your commodity PC. It's not just a matter of whether you call it white collar or blue collar. It's that the physical work is considered dirty and vulgar, even though it's something valuable and important.
- cduzz 2y agoHaas automation started in the early 1980s and was primarily successful because it leveraged the (new at the time) microprocessors to drive machine tools. I was there in the early 1990s, right when this silly article said that machine tool manufacturing was leaving the US. There was lots of "making stuff" but the value of the company was largely the "office work" that happened off the shop floor, in the sales, support, development, etc. I'm not sure but I'd guess that 2/3rds of the employees were "white collar" jobs, even at a company that made machine tools
- achierius 2y agoExactly the point -- the dichotomy of "white collar jobs" and "manufacturing jobs" is a false one.
- no_wizard 2y agoIt was at least partially artificial. The GI Bill post WWII introduced millions of families who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college the ability to go to college. This set off two cycles, one of which is now those folks who went to college on the GI bill wanted to encourage their kids to go to college, which is well and good, but it also showed the economic value to a bigger mass of the country of going to college. Now that made its way into government policy as a result, so the government took steps in the 1970s and 1980s in particular to expand collegiate enrollment, which drove up the price of college which lead to Clinton signing a bill that gave us the student loan system as it exists today, which then fed even more enrollment as a matter of policy, but now universities too were in on the game, as that money is guaranteed which lead to bigger recruitment drives. I'm giving a very high level synopsis here, but the snowball effect wouldn't have happened without the policy interventions by the government, in particular the student loan shenanigans
- watwut 2y agoArtificial here meaning some men were able to afford it. Because only natural state is them wanting it, but being unable to get it.
- protocolture 2y agoIn the UK and Australia there were huge incentives. I recall reading that the peak of the damage to the UK was in the late 90s early 00s when all the older tradesmen began retiring and basic shit like plumbing because scarce. Largely blamed on thatcher.
- mrcsharp 2y agoI'm curious if you have any links you can share on this topic. Thanks.