In the part of Canada I’m from, there’s already a shift happening where people are realizing all the money is in trades and it’s becoming a more respected path. I mean, there’s still a lot of people choosing university, but if you choose to study heavy machinery there’s no stigma against it and it’s seen as a perfectly fine career path.
I’m in a field without any real tradition in education, so the options are scattered - there’s some university programs, some trade school programs, some degrees, some certificates, some diplomas, etc. I ended up going the tech school route and I’m doing fine. I did get accepted to a competitive university program though, and had I applied to universities that didn’t have my program, I could have gotten into some prestigious ones.
In my state, there are no “trade schools” - they are technical colleges and belong to the same association as the state colleges and community colleges. Many of the technical colleges are actually moving into a combined “community and technical college”. Part of that is that stigma of being thought as a “trade school”. In most cases to get a “trade” degree at a technical college students are still required to complete the math and speech and college composition classes - because it is a college degree. Using the term “trade school” has become almost derogatory which is why it’s not used here.
My wife and I both have college degrees-- me a BA and her a MLS-- and we’ve both said that if we could do it over again, would go to trade school. Something medical for her, something like pipe fitting or masonry for me. And when our kids are ready to graduate high school, if they, like us, don’t have a specific college-type career in mind (engineer, teacher, doctor, lawyer), we’ll definitely encourage a trade/technical school.
“Trade School” spans a lot of activities, some of which requires pretty smart people. A lot of factory labor today is highly specialized and requires a lot of computer skills. Programming CNC machines, working with various logical languages, understanding complex precision machinery. A good mechanic must have excellent problem-solving and diagnostic skills, in addition to having detailed knowledge of the engineering. There’s a lot of English lit majors who wouldn’t last a day in one of these schools.
A 2-year diploma in Engineering Technology from a trade school or community college can require math all the way through differential equations. The students have two years to learn not just the subjects, but well enough that they can apply it in real life. Some of these programs have 30-35 hours of scheduled class time per week. No 12-15 hour per week semesters here.
Tradespeople build and run the world. They should be celebrated, not disparaged.
Trade schools are fine if you want to learn a specific trade. But that’s pretty much all you can do after you graduate.
Yes, more people get college degrees these days. That doesn’t make a college degree “worthless”. It’s a direct response to the fact that most decently paying jobs are “knowledge worker” jobs. Those jobs require the broad and diverse thinking and communication skills they teach in college.
The only time I’ve ever been required to show transcripts is when I applied for teaching jobs. Seriously, my resume is a piece of paper. I’m going to ‘pad’ it (haha! pad!) with better-known universities, say I got a teaching degree from a great school and then claim I’m leaving for the corporate world.
The thing is, a BA does matter in some places. It doesn’t matter what you studied, but employers still largely want to know you made it through college. Trade schools are great if you’re entering a trade, but not so great if you’re wanting to be as ‘marketable’. I mean, what advertising company hires a guy who went to trade school to be an auto mechanic? Or a pastry chef?
Monj, you should realize that what you know about your high school isn’t representative of most American high schools. I’m not even sure that it’s representative of your own high school. Your high school is clearly better than most American high schools and (as you said) the students on average come from well off families. A high school in which all 300 graduates are going to college (and only 10 of them are going to community college) is well above average in American high schools. Incidentally, where did you get these statistics? Did the high school supply them, or are you going from your own offhand observations? It’s a little hard to believe.
There are a lot of really lousy American high schools out there. There are many where the proportion of students who graduate is a little more than half of those who begin high school, where less than half the graduates go to college, and where most of those go to community college or something equally nonselective. People often talk as if the problem in the U.S. is that too many high school graduates go to college. This may be true if you look at good high schools. There are also lots of really lousy high schools in communities where most parents weren’t well educated (and aren’t well off) in which not nearly enough students are going to college. They usually aren’t going to trade school either. I know that this is hard to believe for people in well off communities where there is a lot of pressure to go to college. There are still communities where education isn’t pushed at all.
The problem is that whether someone goes to college is still too much a matter of how well off the parents are rather than how smart the person is. The problem is that there are both graduates going to college who shouldn’t and graduates who don’t go to college who should. Both of those issues should be addressed. Just discouraging students from going to college isn’t solving the problem at all.
The high school publishes a list of where each graduate is attending college. Granted there were about 3 or 4 who were “undecided” that I did not count.
I want to clarify that in no way do I mean this post to be demeaning towards those who pursue a trad school education. Quite the opposite, I think that more people should be encouraged to do so. And this quote from Antibob I think really sums up the whole issue.
There is still a cultural expectation that everyone should “reach for the stars” yet frequently, these over ambitious ideal lead people into a post grad life of mediocre jobs (that could be obtained without a college degree) and an overwhelming debt burden.
> There is still a cultural expectation that everyone should “reach for the stars”
> yet frequently, these over ambitious ideal lead people into a post grad life of
> mediocre jobs (that could be obtained without a college degree) and an
> overwhelming debt burden.
There is such an expectation in many communities in the U.S. There are other communities where the level of aspiration is too small. Both of these are problems. The fact that many people end up in mediocre jobs isn’t caused by too many people going to college. It’s caused by the fact that our economy currently requires lots of mediocre jobs (in the sense that they are boring and poorly paid). Reducing the number of people going to college wouldn’t change this. Yes, everyone should be realistic about the amount of debt they get into with educational loans (and all other loans). Yes, it might be a good idea if more people go to trade school. Just reducing the number of people going to college isn’t going to fix this.
It’s also based on the expectation that those observations will continue to be true in the future. Unfortunately the recession has hit young people exceptionally hard and it’s easy to discount the long term effects.
I am 28 now and I can’t help but feel the every widening gap between me and my successful peers and the less fortunate people who in most respects are like me in every way. Sure, I know someone with a Masters in Archaeology who is assistant manager of a Panera Bread. But most young people I know who are failing to establish a career have massive student loans from competitive colleges they worked diligently at and earned a useful degree from.
For example, one of my friends earned a economics degree from a very selective private college on the east coast. She had a good job for a major fashion brand for a few years until she was laid off. She was unemployed for a little over a year and finally took a position as an administrative assistant.
Unfortunately I know more people who never got a professional level job, they settled for an administrative position or worse. Definitely no bachelor degree level. After doing that for several years, I don’t see how they get back on track. They’re not likely to hop back into the professional track if the job market ever improves because there’s 5 years of more recent college grads also lacking any professional experience.
And all else being equal they might be better off than a non-college degree holder. Unemployment rates for young people with degrees is certainly much better than for those without. The problem is that does not take into account the massive pile of debt people are under. Lot’s of people my age have student loan payments that are literally the same as my mortgage payment.
I think anyone deciding to go to college needs to think much harder about what they’re borrowing, what they’re studying, how risky it is, etc. than was necessary just a decade ago.
While a business or Liberal Arts degree may offer a wider range of jobs initially, the fact is, there are a wide range of opportunities after trade school within the specific trade that was learned.
An electrician may remain an electrician in the field turning a screwdriver, or in time progress into management (lower to senior), operations, design, sales, ownership and others.
Before starting my own company, I worked as a general manager where I had sales people reporting to me that made well over 100K, and a couple over 200K.
The president of that company (a 2nd generation company with the 3rd generation taking over) I would imagine makes well more than my attorney.
And it’s not as if you need to wait 3 generations to do well. I personally know several HVAC sales people who make 100K+.
I think the same attributes that make someone successful in retail or manufacturing etc apply here also. A hard working, bright ambitious, intelligent person in almost any endeavor----including the trades-----can be very successful and has a wide range of opportunities available to them within that industry.
Well imagine how far short of your expectations you will fall with no education. tarde school isn’t some panacea for lifetime employment. What happens if you can’t find work as a plumber or HVAC technician or whatever? You don’t exactly learn a set of skills that’s all that transferrable.
I would agree with Fuzzy Dunlop that the main issue is college debt. Unless you have someone footing the bill for you, students do themselves a great disservice not thinking about how college fits into their greater career plan. And I mean something a bit more detailed beyond “uh…some sort of professional job.”
There are a few problems with the statistics regarding income comparisons of college grads vs others:
To the extent that college grads tend to be brighter than average, the statistics may just be showing that bright people tend to do better than people who aren’t as bright.
The categories are overly broad. Saying that ‘4-year graduates tend to make X more than high school graduates’ isn’t very useful if 90% of the difference comes from people graduating in engineering, nursing, and other professionally-oriented faculties - if you’re planning to major in ‘gender studies’. I suspect that if you compare the lifetime average income of an English lit major against a person who graduates from electrician school, you might find a very different outcome.
(this is in Canada, but the U.S. has a similar education system)
That’s a critical number: They’re saying that on average, the money spent on a degree in the humanities or social sciences will only return 4 to 6 percent on your money. If you’re borrowing that money, your lifetime financial situation will not be improved at all. And even within the humanities and social sciences the numbers are probably skewed by faculties that have good prospects for employment such as social worker, psychologist, etc. It’s easy to believe that the average grad with a general studies type degree or a degree in a subject like English Lit or history may not earn any return on their investment at all. And then when you factor in the opportunity cost, it may be a huge lifetime loss.
3. Those statistics don’t factor in the cost of tuition and student loans, or the lost wages of spending four years in college. This is actually a BIG number, because it happens so early in life where the opportunity cost is high. For example, if you went to work instead of college, and as a result managed to save $50,000 for retirement when the college student didn’t, by the time you both retire you would have an additional $351,000, even if your savings only earned 5% interest.
Take that last one: If you go to college on the student loan program, you can come out of a four-year degree program with $150,000 in debt. In the meantime, someone who apprenticed as an electrician will be earning a wage that entire time. If that electrician apprentice is a journeyman after four years, he or she could be making as much as $50,000-$75,000 (the average wage in the U.S. for a journeyman electrician is $50,000). Over the four years, that person could easily have earned $100,000, given the lower pay of apprenticeship. If that person was diligent with savings, he could already have some savings in the bank. He may also already have a house mortgage and a start at a family.
If you’re rich, you can afford the expense of going to college to ‘find yourself’, or to ‘broaden your knowledge’. But we make a grave error when we convince poor people to load up on student loans so they can spend four years in college earning a useless degree in a field that has no practical applicability. We’re graduating a generation of people with watered-down degrees in unemployable subjects, paid for with massive debt. These people are having a hard time finding a mate and a job. Who wants to marry into hundreds of thousands of dollars of previous debt? Who wants to hire someone with a degree in ‘racial studies’ from a state college?
Advice for young people who aren’t trust-fund babies or who don’t have rich parents:
Get an education in a field where you have demonstrable talent and passion. If you’re a person who likes working with your hands, a trade school or a 2-year college tech diploma is a smart choice. If you have a passion for history and you get solid A’s in school, then maybe a history degree followed by a graduate degree and a plan to teach history in high school might be a good way to go. But you need to have a plan, and it needs to be realistic. If you’re a ‘B’ student or worse in high school, you’re not going to grad school. You might eake out a degree, but you had best then study a subject in which a bachelor’s degree is a good credential in the job market.
If you don’t know what you want to be yet, college is an incredibly expensive place to ‘find yourself’. You’re better off getting a job for a few years and saving some money. You can ‘find yourself’ in your spare time. In the meantime, the crappy jobs you’ll likely find will give you that much more incentive to study something that gives you the best chance at improving your life.
If you’re poor but you have a burning desire to study art history, do it in your spare time. Take night classes. Take online classes. Learn how to educate yourself. That’s free. Or, if you have a college in your home town and you can live at home, perhaps you can self-finance a degree by working part time.
But since the degree is being taken out of love for the subject and not for financial gain, you need to be realistic about how much you can afford to spend on it, and above all, don’t get yourself into debt while studying it. High debt loads are killer for young people - they limit your options, prevent you from moving where the jobs are, lower your chances of finding a mate, etc. Only go into debt for your education if that education has a very realistic chance of earning more return on that debt than the cost of the debt itself. For many of the programs in the humanities, that’s simply not the case.
And how transferable is a degree in art history? What kind of job is that degree going to get you in the first place? It used to be that such degrees could get you an entry position in a white collar job, simply because a degree of any sort signaled higher-than-average intelligence, work ethic, etc. That’s no longer true. If everyone can get a degree, the degree stops signaling anything special, and then all that matters is what subjects you studied and how they apply to the job required. That’s why there are now so many highly educated baristas and retail clerks in America.
If you choose 100 people with a degree in one of the humanities, and I choose 100 people with a journeyman’s ticket as an electrician or a plumber, which group do you think will have a higher average income? Which group is likely to have the best overall job prospects in a lifetime?
On that we agree. So the critical thing to get across is not that you should ‘go to college’, but that you should educate yourself in a field that has a demonstrable demand in today’s job market. That can be trade school, or it can be a degree, but a poor choice on either path can be disastrous.
If you look at the data on starting and mid-career salaries by major, though, the picture starts to get more complicated: most of those “useless” humanities majors actually gain value over time. Art history majors start off making almost $20,000 a year less than nursing majors; by mid-career the difference is only $2,100. Philosophy majors start off making less than accounting and IT majors, but end up making more. (The big money-makers are still people who majored in fields with “engineering” in the title," but not everyone has the inclination or the aptitude for these subjects.)
That’s not really true. I wasn’t a straight A student and yet somehow I managed to “eek out” an MBA and a six figure income. That said, I worked a lot of shit jobs both in school and right out of school until I could find a professional career.
Other than that, I think your post is mostly spot-on. Quite frankly, I never understood the idea of kids just heading off to college with no clear idea of what they wanted to study or what they wanted to do when they graduated. Much of my college selection process was driven by my high school interest in architecture and science. I didn’t have it all figured out, but at least I had a direction.
Imagine my shock when me and some of my engineering buddies took Theater as a blow-off elective. I’m like “these idiots major in this stuff? AND they can barely do the work?!” Like why would you enroll in one of the most expensive, prestigeous engineering universities to take such a bullshit blowoff major? I mean I can see if it were NYU or something.
Well, I wasn’t either, and I did fine in college. What I meant to say is that if the best you can do is a ‘B’ average in high school (in other words, what I was really saying is if you’re just average in intelligence), you’re probably not going to grad school. Oh, you could maybe get into a grad program somewhere, but you’re not going to go, “Degree in History ->Masters in History -> PhD in History->Tenure Track Professor”.
One of the lesser-known scandals that many colleges are engaged in is that they over-sell the potential to become a professor or leading researcher, to keep those lucrative kids in the schools. Then the professors give them low-paying teaching assistanceships and use them for cheap labor doing their scut-work. Somewhere along the way, the student realizes that he’s wasting his/her time, or he eventually graduates with a Ph.D only to find that the best job he can get is as an assistant professor making $45,000 in a non-tenure track position with no benefits and no job security, sharing a tiny office with one of the other also-rans.
I had a friend who was working for a Ph.D in biochemistry, and a couple of years in realized that the professor guiding him had no interest in his thesis, but plenty of interest in getting him to do all his lab work for him.
A couple of things: First, what msmith537 said: The data is skewed by people who get a degree in the humanities, then go off and get an MBA or some other secondary qualification that, together with the Bachelor’s degree, gives them a decent qualification. I would also wonder if the data includes those people who graduate with a degree, are unable to find work in their field, and change career paths entirely. Did they only survey people with history degrees working in degree-qualified jobs? Or did they survey people with a degree in history who never found work in the field and went back to school to become electricians or work in sales? If so, and they make a good salary in their new career, should they really credit the degree?
You also have to wonder if it includes people who got a degree in the humanities as part of a pre-law program or some other graduate-level professional program.
Also, any survey of people in mid-career necessarily means these are people who graduated 20 years ago, when the job situation was different and the number of people graduating university was smaller, making the degree worth more. It does not necessarily hold for people graduating today - and probably doesn’t.
From that chart, the median wage for electricians is $52,000. Medical lab technologists (2 year diploma required) earn $58,000. A chef makes on average $46,000 (graduate of a cooking school). Technical salespeople (a 2-year diploma, generally) earn $86,000. Postal clerks make $53,000. Carpenters make $44,000, and brick masons make $51,000.
I could go on. The list is full of jobs that do not require degrees but which pay more than many jobs that do. All of the ‘technician’ level jobs, which require either a 1-year diploma, a 2-year diploma, or an apprenticeship/journeyman status will tend you put you in a group with a median salary around $50,000. Skilled factory jobs like CNC programmers and assembly-line maintenance people also earn money in that range.
In contrast, a lot of the jobs you would expect with a humanities degree, such as various counseling jobs, HR jobs, clerking, survey and research assistants and the like pay significantly less. The one big outlier is education: If you love the humanities and want to make a good income, become a teacher. Teachers make WAY more than other people with equivalent qualifications.
Of course, there are high-paying jobs that you can get with a humanities degree if you’re lucky and have the aptitude, just like there are high paying jobs you can get with no degree at all - real estate sales, for example. In the end, it’s generally about you and how hard you work and how smart you are and how willing to take risks to grab opportunities you may be.
But the degree itself doesn’t guarantee you anything, and it’s certainly not guaranteed to give you a financial advantage over someone who chose a trade program or who chose to attend a 2-year college in an in-demand field.