All politicians wobble on about how they want as many people as possible to get a uni education, while they never talk about the value of a trade.
Why the blindness to the fact that society needs good mechanics, plumbers, elecricians etc etc?
Does society really need zillions of people graduating from “media studies” etc.
Trades are seen as lower status, and a place for the less intelligent to go. Physical work of any sort is looked down on in modern US society.
This is, I emphasize, a cultural phenomena and not even really that old.
It is part and parcel with keeping up with the Jones’, and wanting every child to be above average. It is tied into measuring a person’s worth by the size of their wealth.
So, politicians try to appeal to parents by somehow or other promising all their children will go to college, get high status jobs, become fabulously wealthy, and support said parents in their old age.
Which, strictly speaking, is my opinion and in fact I expect this thread to wind up in IMHO because I suspect most of the answer you get will fall into that category.
Two reasons:
First is the old correlation vs. causation problem. Politicians see that people with a university education have higher wages and lower unemployment than those without a university education. So they promote university as a way to fix those problems, rather than thinking that maybe the kind of people that go to college are going to have better jobs and lower unemployment anyway. Of course, this means a lot of unqualified people try to go to college, and then rack up a lot of debt while diluting the worth of a degree.
The other is that any given country needs to stay ahead of the technology curve or they’ll be left behind. After sputnik launched, there was a big push for science and math education in the states because the US feared falling behind in the technology gap. Pushing for college education (and usually I hear this as a push for STEM degrees) is a way of keeping your country competitive. And a competitive country is more economically viable than a country where nobody has a degree.
The politician has to push for something, and pushing for good parenting opens up a huge can of worms.
The other point is that the USA best competes on the global economic scale using brains and natural resources. Our cheap labor is pretty much gone, and you can’t even find a tv made in America any more. I often wonder what is going to happen to the low-skilled people. The guy with an 85 IQ can’t make a good living screwing on car bumpers any more, it seems. Even those jobs now require understanding something more than a power screwdriver.
College degrees are and always have been a class indicator in America. You don’t have to have a college degree to be middle/upper-middle class, but if you have one, you’re not working class–no matter what you do and how little you make.
This is why everyone with middle-class pretensions is in favor of education in the trades, but for other people’s kids. Their own kids? If they want to be a plumber, that’s fine, but they better be a plumber with a business degree.
This a million times.
It’s the first cousin of NIMBY.
This is one of the reasons. Correlation vs. causation confusion is a big problem in our society. One interesting one is that studies have shown that moderate drinkers of alcohol, on average, live longer than teetotalers. It hasn’t been proven that cracking open a beer on Friday night causes some specific effect on the body to extend life by X minutes. One thing that has been proposed is that moderate drinkers tend to be more likely to have a balanced life and teetotalers are more likely to be emotionally uptight and have psychological hangups that stress the body and that these psychological or emotional issues make the person uncomfortable with drinking.
There’s also the thing on intelligence and education vs. smoking. It’s known that higher education and higher intelligence are correlated with lower smoking rates, but nobody’s really proven whether or not cigarettes literally make you stupid (e.g. by destroying brain cells) or whether or not people with lower ability or achievement are less likely to see not smoking as important enough to make it part of their life.
There’s a lot to this too. If a guidance counselor tells a kid they can’t hack college, that’s tantamount to saying that kid is a failure and the school system is a failure. But if they go to college then society can point to something about how they succeeded for this kid.
Sadly, that probably also gives them something to point to when the kids that didn’t go to college are unemployed. “Oh, you didn’t go to college? Clearly your poverty is your fault la la la”. Which doesn’t help the poor at all.
Almost all (if not all) politicians in this country are college grads. In their rhetoric they ignore the fact that there is no shortage of people with bachelors degrees, however they are funding a lot of education for lesser degrees and certifications, so they must be aware of this. I’m not aware of a shortage of people entering the trades so it wouldn’t get mentioned much. However, I have heard complaints from master tradesmen about the quality of people apprenticing now. There are a lot regulations that affect the trades now, and much more paperwork involved, it’s not just a matter of ‘being good with your hands’ any more.
I too have wondered this. I can only assume the logic is that if I get you to go to college, and you still become a plumber, then perhaps you’ll have a well rounded enough education to open your own plumbing contractor business, create jobs, lowering unemployment, etc., versus just becoming plumber #539 working at Acme plumbing.
Personally, if my kid didn’t want to go to college, I would try to find out what they did hav an interest in that was trade related as early as possible and get them into a program for that, so that they could become a certified whatever, and have a career. College isn’t for everyone and for some it is a complete waste of time and money.
We have a friend whose family bent over backwards to send her to college because she was going to be the first one in her family to get a degree. So, she went to college, and got a theater degree even though she can’t act and is a reclusive person. Now she does a generic customer service job she could have gotten without a degree, that is only slightly better than being a barista at Starbucks. Meanwhile, we know two other friends who ARE baristas at Starbucks, love the job, and have been doing it for years without degrees. They make enough to live on and one is now a manager, and they have no crippling debt.
Is there really a political frenzy about a university education?
I think of it as a frenzy about a post high school education.
High School is the starting point of an education to be a successful adult. Yes there are exceptions but there is no denying that even trade school graduates are more successful than their high school only (or GED) counterparts.
Going to post high school education isn’t just about the education; it’s about being able to work your way though and finish something.
So more specifically to Yarster’s point above; that’s why it’s easier to get hired in a job that has nothing to do with what your degree is in. Sometimes just proving that you have the drive to go through the steps to get the degree is enough. It may not be fair; but it’s real.
It seems to me, though, that as the traditional trades get overlooked, good-quality tradesmen are in great demand and can make very good money. Plumbers, builders etc who aren’t cowboys are pretty rare in many places, and people will pay a premium.
This is especially true during economic boom times when lots of people are pouring money into property (as epitomised in the UK by Harry Enfield’s “Loadsamoney” character in the 1980s, who was a plasterer).
When I was young, how would I have gone about learning a trade? I wouldn’t have minded being a plumber or an electrician, except I had no idea how to do that. I did know how to learn other occupations. Colleges have tons and tons of programs to learn many different occupations, just not the ones we call ‘the trades.’
I don’t believe that trades are ‘ignored.’ I think those who do those jobs keep it to themselves and pass it on to others as they please. They are not interested in creating a super abundance of tradesmen to compete with. If anything, the trades are closed to most people while college is open to all (who can pay.)
I don’t think the premise is accurate. For example, here are President Obama’s remarks before Congress in 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-President-Barack-Obama-Address-to-Joint-Session-of-Congress:
" I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma."
So Obama, like other politicians, sees a need for a more educated populace, including plumbers, electricians, and skilled craftsmen as well as doctors and lawyers. By implication, I suppose this means fewer janitors and nursing assistants.
The OP seems to assume that being a tradesperson aren’t college graduates but that doesn’t seem right to me. You can study mechanical engineering and go into HVAC or building engineering, or study landscape design and run a landscaping business. If you don’t want to just be a plumber but want to be a plumbing contractor, you’ re going to need some technical skills.
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Moved thread from General Questions to Great Debates.
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I’d also like to see quotes from politicians saying stuff implied in the OP. Two year colleges get lots of support, and I’ve never heard a politician diss a tradesperson, either individually or as a class. In fact cutting back on funding for state universities seems to counter the OP’s assumption.
And college grads do have lower unemployment and higher pay in general, which means more economic activity and more taxes. Plus politicians talk about supporting STEM, not media studies. So I don’t buy the premise.
In Minnesota trade schools were renamed colleges. Some people,not all, are simply encouraging some post secondary education, which might be a four year college, and might be a trade school.
I would rather have my son be a plumber than get a degree in Fine Arts.
Can I ask where you’re from? ‘Uni’ is a term I’ve only ever heard from British.
Conservatives in general in the States deride the Ivory Tower as a liberal conversion bastion.
I use the term uni and I’m from the southern US. I’m not a traditional southerner though.
The ‘liberal conversion bastion’ is really going away as rhetoric. My alma mater had 5x as many people in the College Republicans as in the College Democrats. Conservatives might deride “French Literature” and “Women’s Studies” programs, but probably because the jobs out there aren’t huge in number or high paying. Democrats aren’t really pushing those either - like Voyager said, it’s the STEM degrees getting pushed from both sides of the aisle.