5 ms·

> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in th

by danans 11mo ago

> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore. That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.

jswelker 11mo ago
Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing. Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
bombcar 11mo ago
Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
- danans 11mo ago
  I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
  - K0balt 11mo ago
    It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.
  - stefs 11mo ago
    While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
    - fpoling 11mo ago
      A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
        There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though. I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
    - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
      >While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate,_1959_to_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
seec 11mo ago
Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.
- danans 11mo ago
  > Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn. If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire? Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Of course there are. Many drop out due to poverty and family/community strife, or mental health challenges. But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
  - seec 11mo ago
    > It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn. You are confusing obedience and willingness to jump through hoops with the motivation to learn. People largely don't need school to learn most things. I would argue that most good learners actually hate school. It would be challenging to self-teach your way to advanced math/physics but that does not concern the vast majority of education. Being motivated to learned is deeply linked to having a reason for learning. I actually wouldn't trust people who were too industrious at school for careerist reasons because it mostly means they are able to tolerate bullshit and rote learn without much pushback on nonsense. STEM is somewhat immune to this because you need at least some form of understanding to solve actual problems but plenty of field have a legitimacy issue resulting from this effect. Notably the medical field is full of hard working idiots and most of the social sciences are infested with ideological parrots. Allegedly it is supposed to select for conscientiousness but since I have faced specialised doctors who schedule 2 interventions when it could be done in one for billing purpose, I would argue it's mostly self-interest or a very perverted form of conscientiousness. > If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire? Someone having a specific diploma doesn't mean he is actually competent in practice. It is just more likely that he isn't absolutely terrible, but that's mostly risk edging. It's funny you take that example because a while ago there was a news in France where an architect had sentenced because he practiced without the required diploma. The guy was 60 and he had designed some big building, even for the public market (his mistake); he had learnt on the job with a mentor and never got around finishing the school curriculum. Le Corbusier famously didn't have any formal architectural training yet seventeen of his projects are on UNESCO list. So I dunno, personally I would hire Le Corbusier regardless of his training if I ever could afford it but the point is that everyone should be free to choose for themselves, not the powers that be of the education establishment. > Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Yes, it doesn't mean anything, just that they got bored with education system or had some other problem. Two of the most valuable companies were founded by drop outs, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (not high-school, but first year of college is basically the same). If it was just a problem of competence, you could have some sort of certifications for most things, where one could take an exam to prove that he knows what he is doing. But this doesn't happen because it is about enriching a specific class, restricting access to high level jobs to people who will submit to the dominant ideology. Most certifications/exams have a specific education level/diploma as requirement for entry. This is just supply control in favor of the most fortunate. You just cannot reduce ability and motivation to the willingness/capacity to submit to the education system. > But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation? That's the whole point of a business. Assume risks to merit the potential payoff. Why do you think the cost of job training should be assumed by the public when they will not get any of the private benefits generated. On top of that, the issue is clearly a disconnect between what is needed in the market and what type of curriculum has been sold in universities so it's clearly not working. In any case it seems insane to me that you are arguing for the isolation of training risks for the benefits of business. What is need is relaxed employment regulations, so that if it doesn't work out, it is not too expensive for business to let go of poor prospect. In an healthy labor market, people would find jobs and the required training much easier. Schools are just a way to offload the cost to the private individual at best or to the public at worst. That's just bad, business have no reasons to exist if they are just to leach of public benefits, might as well go full on communism at this point.
terminalshort 11mo ago
People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.
torginus 11mo ago
That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc. In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.
BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
> Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.

by danans 11mo ago

jswelker 11mo ago

Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing. Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.

bombcar 11mo ago

Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.

danans 11mo ago
I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
- K0balt 11mo ago
  It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.
- stefs 11mo ago
  While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
  - fpoling 11mo ago
    A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
      There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though. I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
  - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
    >While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate,_1959_to_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...

seec 11mo ago

Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.

danans 11mo ago
> Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn. If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire? Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Of course there are. Many drop out due to poverty and family/community strife, or mental health challenges. But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
- seec 11mo ago
  > It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn. You are confusing obedience and willingness to jump through hoops with the motivation to learn. People largely don't need school to learn most things. I would argue that most good learners actually hate school. It would be challenging to self-teach your way to advanced math/physics but that does not concern the vast majority of education. Being motivated to learned is deeply linked to having a reason for learning. I actually wouldn't trust people who were too industrious at school for careerist reasons because it mostly means they are able to tolerate bullshit and rote learn without much pushback on nonsense. STEM is somewhat immune to this because you need at least some form of understanding to solve actual problems but plenty of field have a legitimacy issue resulting from this effect. Notably the medical field is full of hard working idiots and most of the social sciences are infested with ideological parrots. Allegedly it is supposed to select for conscientiousness but since I have faced specialised doctors who schedule 2 interventions when it could be done in one for billing purpose, I would argue it's mostly self-interest or a very perverted form of conscientiousness. > If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire? Someone having a specific diploma doesn't mean he is actually competent in practice. It is just more likely that he isn't absolutely terrible, but that's mostly risk edging. It's funny you take that example because a while ago there was a news in France where an architect had sentenced because he practiced without the required diploma. The guy was 60 and he had designed some big building, even for the public market (his mistake); he had learnt on the job with a mentor and never got around finishing the school curriculum. Le Corbusier famously didn't have any formal architectural training yet seventeen of his projects are on UNESCO list. So I dunno, personally I would hire Le Corbusier regardless of his training if I ever could afford it but the point is that everyone should be free to choose for themselves, not the powers that be of the education establishment. > Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Yes, it doesn't mean anything, just that they got bored with education system or had some other problem. Two of the most valuable companies were founded by drop outs, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (not high-school, but first year of college is basically the same). If it was just a problem of competence, you could have some sort of certifications for most things, where one could take an exam to prove that he knows what he is doing. But this doesn't happen because it is about enriching a specific class, restricting access to high level jobs to people who will submit to the dominant ideology. Most certifications/exams have a specific education level/diploma as requirement for entry. This is just supply control in favor of the most fortunate. You just cannot reduce ability and motivation to the willingness/capacity to submit to the education system. > But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation? That's the whole point of a business. Assume risks to merit the potential payoff. Why do you think the cost of job training should be assumed by the public when they will not get any of the private benefits generated. On top of that, the issue is clearly a disconnect between what is needed in the market and what type of curriculum has been sold in universities so it's clearly not working. In any case it seems insane to me that you are arguing for the isolation of training risks for the benefits of business. What is need is relaxed employment regulations, so that if it doesn't work out, it is not too expensive for business to let go of poor prospect. In an healthy labor market, people would find jobs and the required training much easier. Schools are just a way to offload the cost to the private individual at best or to the public at worst. That's just bad, business have no reasons to exist if they are just to leach of public benefits, might as well go full on communism at this point.

terminalshort 11mo ago

People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.

torginus 11mo ago

That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc. In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.

BeFlatXIII 11mo ago

> Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.