I just graduated high school from a pretty affluent town. The norm/expectation is that everyone go to college. Out of a class of 300 only about 10 went to community college. None went to trade school.
Seeing as many of the kids I graduated with were what I’s refer to as “functionally retarded” my question is why dont more kids go to trade school. Why is a college degree such a necessity now even for those who barely got through high school.
I can think of two possible reasons:
1.) No parent wants to tell their child that they should go to trade school.
2.) Colleges are money making machines and want as many applicants as possible.
Any thoughts/ solutions to what I think is going to be a serious problem for the economy in the near future?
It’s a cultural thing - we don’t place the same value on trade school/vocational programs as we do on 4-year college degrees.
That said, I have a friend who is a cardiovascular tech and, because of lots of hard work and extended trainings and so on, makes WAY WAY WAY more money than I do.
You have hit the nail on the head. Many college students are not going to do anything but party for 4 years, and come out of there with a degree that is about as useful as toilet paper. Eventually they will get a job at a fast food chain or take some other low paying job which they essentially could have gotten without a college degree. They could have saved themselves, their parents and the government thousands of dollars just by going to a trade school. But “trade school” does not have the cachet of college or university, and so you have some people with college degrees either being unemployed or taking a job for which they are “overqualified.”
Back in the 40s and 50s, having a college degree was huge, it essentially guaranteed gainful employment for the rest of your life. Sensing that there was a demand for college degrees based on this, more and more colleges popped up, some of which were essentially more interested in making a profit than in educating any students. Nowadays, there are so many colleges and so many people with a “college degree,” that it has become almost meaningless. Perhaps that is why so many people have to go for that post-grad MBA/PhD degree now to separate themselves from everyone else. What a scam.
I think part of it is because college is associated with still growing up and “finding yourself” aka prolonged adolescence. Kids like this because they can still be kids. Parents like this because their kids can still be kids, protected and sheltered from their mistakes until they reach full maturity.
In contrast, vocational school is an acknowledgment that the real world exists and is waiting to gobble you up. That’s scary. There’s also less “open-endedness” to it. If I go to college and major in biology, I can become a doctor, research scientist, zookeeper, veterinarian assistant, high school science teacher, or a lawyer. If I go to vocational school to study how to become an electrician, I can become an electrician. Lots of kids don’t know what they want to do, and our modern society presents life has as having an infinite number of choices…the sky’s the limit. People want to have the freedom to try out different things and wear different identities. They don’t want to “settle” into the rest of their life when they are just 18 years old.
Social stigma definitely plays a part, but I think it’s bigger than that.
I think we also tend to judge the usefulness of a trade education by our image of people in the trades. If you hang with college-educated folks, you tend to think of tradespeople as inarticulate, rednecked, nicotine-reeking white males. While this is, admittedly, an established culture, the stereotype ignores many bright and accomplished professionals who work closely with architects, engineers and builders in the community.
Here’s your answer. Everyone thinks trade school is for retarded kids.
The fact of the matter is that college ain’t that hard and trade school ain’t that easy. The kids who would actually be most successful at trade school and go on to be masters and run their own businesses and make six figures will also do just fine in college, come out and get good jobs and make just as good a money.
The kids that will fuck around in college and drop out with a 1.7 after two years would have fucked up trade school, too.
We think the divide between the two is intellect but we really ought to advise kids based on temperament. But a couple generations of sending the “functionally retarded” kids to trade school has poisoned the well.
Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything wrong with trade school. I graduated a small trade school in my home town as an automotive student. I got a job as a dealer technician immediately after graduation even with no previous experience.
The shop sent me to a brand specific school, which was one week of training out of town every month, for six months. After finishing that, I’m making pretty good money for a guy who is only two years into his trade. I know plenty of people from my highschool with bachelors degrees who are either
Doing an entry level job that requires no degree
Unemployed
or
Going back to a different school to learn something more marketable (cooking, electrical apprenticeship, nursing school etc.)
Also, my entire tuition was paid for by the unemployment office, since the factory I was working at closed down. Even if I had to pay out of pocket the two year course would have cost around 4,000 bucks. Better than a ton of student loans.
The only thing is, at least at my school, the computer type classes didn’t usually do the students much good in finding a job. Not sure if the coursework was outdated or just insufficient. But auto mechanics, welding, machine shop, and nursing has produced a lot of success stories.
It’s based on the observations that college was a gateway to white-collar jobs, higher earnings, professional prestige, etc. You can’t deny that parents would prefer their children to aspire to be doctors and lawyers instead of plumbers and truck drivers.
However, I think the perception around the true value of a college degree will slowly change. The college degree value will decrease and the trade/vocation schools value will increase.
The key driver for the sentiment change is the cost of college tuition racing way past inflation and the recent bankruptcy law change in 2005 that prevents the discharge of school loans. Under that scenario, you’ll end up with a generation of college graduates under lifetime servitude to keep up their loan payments on their 100k student debt. The inflated promises and dreams that college degrees advertise easily lures students in this lifetime trap of debt.
It’s common wisdom to say college degree translates to +X% in lifetime salary above a high school diploma but the equation for ROI changes when you refactor lost earnings during the 4 years plus the debt load upon graduation. It’s not like the old days where kids could get a summer job and work their way through college with zero debt at the end. That’s just not possible anymore. The common wisdom on the value of college degree is based on economics that no longer exist.
You’ll eventually have a generation of embittered parents with worthless college degrees that tell heir children, “college wasn’t worth it.” We then get a new equilibrium in society as to who should/shouldn’t go to college.
As an old fart let me say that I do not understand why the bottom 2/3’s go to college. Learning a useful trade would serve them better than majoring in “theory of underwater basket weaving” dreck that is being taught at the universities.
There is another factor, however–and that is the process of maturation. There is no widespread means in our culture of transitioning and individual from child to adult other than college. So that is what college is used for by this society.
This sentence expresses exactly why they want to go to college.
Does anybody, or their parents, really say, “I’m not as good as the top 1/3”?
Despite the dig at "underwater basket weaving, the underlying attitude behind the sentence is that college should be left to the elites (or at least the top 1/3) and trade schools should be for the masses.
I disagree. College should be for the best and brightest, but it’s now for the average and mediocre. Trades aren’t for everyone, but there are other alternatives these days. There are many certifications available that require less than a bachelor’s degree, and jobs for those certifications are more in demand than many areas of college education. A lot of students going to college for something other than a technical degree are wasting a lot of money, usually their parents or the taxpayers.
Now just so I’m not misunderstood, there is great value in improving your mind through education in any field. But simply as a means of securing gainful employment, college isn’t doing the job very well for many people.
Exactly. Guess what? The schools have already said that yes–they are not as “good” as the top 1/3. Be it intellect or work ethic or work product–they are not. The “soccer trophy” mentality does not work in real life.
Be plumber or be an x-ray tech, you will likely fare better than a Women’s Studies major from State U.
Coming from a small town, college offers the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life and give a broadened view of the world. This is the reason college makes people more successful than people that go to trade schools. Most employers will train a person for what ever position they want you to do unless they want you to be well versed in constitutional law or a brain surgeon. The networking a person accomplishes in 4 years is always substantial and how most people I know have their current jobs. Good jobs at that.
The people who might be plumbers or x-ray techs are business/finance majors or maybe taking a couple engineering classes. It’s a poor argument that these people are taking completely useless majors.
Until a trade school education and career is clearly socially and economically equal to a college degree, why should we expect people to just settle?
The bottom line is that while a trade school can set you up with a reasonable middle class life, a college degree gives a better shot at an upper class life. Of course, the tradeoff is that if you don’t manage that upper class life, the risk is you get saddled with a ton of debt and a poor ROI.
To tell people they’d be “better off” is extremely patronizing. If we really think they (and the rest of society) would be “better off”, we’d pay those careers better and treat them better socially in the first place.
That’s the classic supply/demand paradigm combined with an estimation for what’s best for an individual vs a group. It’s better for society if more people went to trade school. But for any given individual, chances at great material and social success are maximized at college (even if the cost of failure is even larger). Until we, as a society, resolve that paradox, it’s silly to blame individuals for making reasonable individual decisions that are simultaneously unreasonable societal decisions.
College is still the best option for a student who doesn’t have a clue what they want to study. They don’t have to go to the most expensive place in the world, but I think it would a mistake for such a person to be thrust into vocational school and have to pick among a set number of occupational courses that they may be horribly unsuited for. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up…I only knew that I liked sciency stuff. I would have been lost in a vocational program, especially since my education up to that point had been college-prep. High school voc ed. programs would need to be revamped if we’re suddenly going to be directing graduates off to this track.
Seems to me a two-year community college would be the better solution for the majority of students. Voc ed is kind of going too far in the OTHER direction, IMHO.
It’s not the 1950s anymore. The reality is that most of our jobs are in offices, and the work we do in these offices are more and more advanced. In the 1950s, you could get an office job because you know how to type or file or schedule book. Now, everyone knows how to type, files are maintained electronically, and we schedule everything with outlook. Today’s office workers need higher level communication and analysis skills- exactly like those you learn in college. And despite all the griping, college does a relatively good job of imparting these skills.
Yes, it is possible to earn a good living in a trade. You can also make good money bartending, delivering mail or driving a bus. But a lot of people want sit-down jobs with climate control, and college is still a fairly reliable way to get there.
In fact, the bottom 2/3’s do not go to college. The college enrollment rate for 2011 high school graduates is only 68.3%. (And considering that currently about 1 in 12 students doesn’t finish high school at all, that lowers the effective percentage of all young people enrolling in college to about 63%.)
I’m certainly not saying that everybody ought to go to college or that vocational schools don’t provide valuable training, or even that there aren’t too many apathetic students nowadays going to college for no very good reason.
But the hasty assumption among many “old farts” that all the kids are enrolling in college these days, no matter how unqualified or unsuited they may be for it, doesn’t line up with reality.
Sorta related, but who generates those numbers put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics? The ones that say that the USA will be having a teacher shortage, a plumber shortage, etc.? There is a huge surplus of people with education degrees, who cannot find work as teachers. And there seems to be no shortage of plumbers.
Although, being a plumber today is a pretty good job.
My guess is that a lot of trade jobs are due for a big decline, as plumbing, carpentry, electrician type jobs get eliminated , due to technological changes. For example, you can now buy solderless pipe connectors-so a lot of home plumbing can be done without the need to sweat pipe joints. Carpenters will be affected by factory-built housing-a house will go up in a day or two.
So nothing is certain-except that rich people want more and more servants (nannies, house cleaners, cooks, etc.).
There are specific geographical and subject areas where there’s already a shortage of teachers (inner-city districts and bilingual/special ed come to mind as the most pronounced of these). And a large generation of teachers is approaching retirement, so within a few years they’ll start needing replacements. None of that means that absolutely any education major anywhere can get a teaching job right now in the location and specialty of their choice.
As for plumbers, skilled trades workers (plumbers, electricians, carpenters) are actually in short supply worldwide, not just in the US. Just because you see plenty of plumbers still around doesn’t mean that employers don’t want more of them.