One thing I liked about my graduate program is that we had a course of academic study alongside 24 hours a week of internship. I was very busy. But it allowed me to discover I liked something I was interested in through my classes, and then actually practice doing it as an intern. This is how I discovered and started grant writing. My internship experience was invaluable in teaching me how to apply what I’d learned in class.
I wouldn’t want to completely remove the studying and critical thinking piece of this equation - but what if the typical undergraduate program had two years of exploratory or core education followed by two years of in-depth study + work study or internship? Would this be feasible?
Many of the Trade Programs are just scammy money making operations. Even the official Job Corps program run by the Department of Labor has been turned over to lowest bid contractors. Who are these contractors? The same companies that have contracts to run for-profit prisons, the very same.
The longer they can keep you, the more money they make. There is no incentive to train you, complete you, get you a job, and open up a new spot for a new student. They can, and will, keep a student for 2 years to train in carpentry or welding, which takes 6-8 months, even if the student is not paying attention. The student is the product, and they will keep them as long as possible, because they get paid for every day the student is there, just like prisons.
In Ohio, at least, trades training programs are part of the public school system, and you graduate from the trades program when you graduate from high school. Everywhere in the state is part of some career technical district, which doesn’t have the same boundaries as the regular school districts (around here, there are four suburbs that each have their own regular school district, but pool together for a career tech district). A student who qualifies for the program will spend their mornings at their normal high school learning normal high school subjects, and then take a bus to the career tech school (if it’s not in their own school) and take trades courses in the afternoon.
At least, that’s one option. There are also community colleges, which do both trades and low-level prerequisites for conventional college majors, and specialized trade schools. I don’t know if either of those deliberately prolong training, but they do at least sometimes advertise and compete on how quickly they can get you into a job.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to advise my kid, with job satisfaction at such low rates and actually good careers seeming hard to come by. I hold out hope he solves some impossible math problem at age 15 and ends up working for NASA - but lately it apparently even sucks to work for NASA!
Figure out what sorts of things he likes, and what he really hates—not so much in terms of jobs, but “likes being around people” / “happy to do a terrible eight hours for a paycheck” / “no children or animals” / “must be good for the planet.”
When he hits 15, start doing serious research into what the processes to get a job look like THEN, because whatever advice you have for him now is wrong.
See whether higher education is something that will enrich his life or else waste his time, and choose accordingly.
I know people often change careers, but these sound like people who don’t want to do any actual real work.
I think that’s a common side effect of higher education. It often produces these ivory tower “intellectual” types who feel any real work is beneath them. Everyone wants to “manage” or “consult” or “advise”. My inbox is flooded with ex-Meta/Google/Mckinsey/Big-4/Goldman/whatever who suddenly decided they want to be “executive coaches”.
As for your kids, I would echo the advise of Scott Galloway. Find something you’re good at, not something you’re passionate about.
I’ve met a lot of people without a college education who claim this is common. I have never met an academic who felt this way. Maybe it’s my class background, but if I encountered this attitude, I’d call it out on the spot as bullshit.
Far more common is the belief that scademic work isn’t work—not so much among manual labourers, but among university administrators.
It sounds like you’re saying being a therapist or a writer isn’t work. As someone who writes fiction, I can tell you that writing a novel is several orders of magnitude harder than any other work I’ve ever done. Grant writing is easy by comparison. Be that as it may, it’s not very conducive to consistent income. I am very passionate about writing, but it’s hard for me to see it as a revenue stream for a very long time, just because I don’t know that I want to do all the things you have to do, like publish and market and engage fans and all the entrepreneurial parts. And of course being good (and I am good, thanks to years of labor) has very little correlation to success.
Not a good bet for me right now, but my lawyer friend has joked that he hopes his wife makes it big as a writer so he can quit his job and write his own stuff. They are both very good, but she has the entrepreneurial and social skills the rest of us are lacking. She started her own podcast and by dint of everyone she was constantly engaging with, ended up landing interviews with major writers and then got a deal to co-write with a pretty successful author, which mainly means writing a book for someone at breakneck pace for almost no money and they get most of the credit. She has her foot in the door, now, though.
That’s what it means to be a writer these days. Constant hustle for little reward.
It just looks exhausting and unappealing. And she told me she pretty much constantly feels like throwing up. (In her day job, she’s a neuropsychologist. I’ll bet she finds that easier.)
One of the engineers left at least in part because she couldn’t stand the sexism, which is the same reason my mother left engineering in the 80s. It sounds to me like things haven’t improved all that much.
The lawyer is a case of moral injury. He’s doing things that feel unethical to him, but he needs the work.
Hmm. I wonder if @msmith537 is also sort of alluding to the idea he stated before of being “passionate” about one’s work, which is something that I feel like a lot of people are searching for without it really being something that works out for most people. Writing is definitely the kind of thing one does because one is passionate about it and not because it’s a job to pay the bills. Is it hard work? Yes, of course. I’ve done short-form writing (novelette length is the most I’ve done) and beta work for a novel, and I know it’s a ton of work! But it’s the kind of hard work people are willing to do for free (just look at all the novel-length fanfic on AO3, some of it really very good) or for almost no hope of monetary return, which is maybe what he means by not being “real work.” (I actually know someone who is chronically ill and can’t hold down an office job, but is marketing and publishing a book this fall. No promises on whether she’ll break even, though.)
I work as an engineer. I guess if I think about it there are incidents that could be characterized as mildly sexist (e.g., the occasional off-color joke) and certainly it’s still extremely male-dominated, but I haven’t seen anything like the sexism that existed in our parents’ generation. I think it may depend a great deal on which engineering subcultures you are in. I hear that startup culture, for instance, can often be a lot more frat-bro-sexist.
The lady who left because of sexism was an aerospace engineer.
She’s a little unhinged though. She made this massive career shift at the same time as she realized she was a lesbian and divorced one of my closest friends. I don’t begrudge her coming to terms with her sexuality, truly, but the way she dropped her ex and immediately started gaslighting him about how he never really felt romantic feelings for her and this divorce was better for him when it effectively left him destitute (he’d been full time child care for their two kids), and the way she just changed everything about her life in one go, was a bit disconcerting.
I agree in part though, that some people expect jobs to be meaningful and if they aren’t, they refuse to work. I have to tread carefully in this area because I’ve left many jobs that I found unacceptable, mostly for mental health reasons. But surely I’ve been working since I was 12, I’ve worked at McDonald’s and all kinds of food service, I’ve worked call center jobs, I kinda did all that in service to what I actually wanted to do, recognizing it as the next step to get closer to my goals. And I got there eventually.
Yeah, I think it’s bullshit work. That’s my point.
My first professional job I was a civil engineer (in training) and when I wasn’t in my air conditioned office playing with AutoCAD or whatever I would be at construction sites directing work crews made of up ex military dudes and Jamaican immigrants and whatnot to hammer nails into the sheer walls of like 50 under construction apartment units in the middle of August.
In fact, I remember meeting one guy who was an ex airline executive who became a carpenter because he got tired of corporate bullshit. I didn’t quite get it at the time, but I get it now.
Unless you are going to college for a specific degree-requiring field (like accountant, engineering, lawyer, doctor, etc) it is my opinion that most people go to college to come out with a degree that they think will provide a magic ticket to not having to do low level, low-paying work that sucks.
The thing is, I don’t think there’s enough “real work” to support all the people going to college. So somehow we’ve created all this office jobs we really don’t need that don’t really produce anything.
I mean don’t get me wrong. In my last job I worked as a “management consultant” which is probably the most bullshity job out there. Douglas Adams actually listed it in the Hitchhikers Guide series as one of the useless professions that some alien civilization tried to offload from their planet. (point of fact I actually have a “Deloitte” branded phone sanitizer I picked up at a conference that had to have been someone’s idea of a joke). But I digress.
The point is, my job is only “hard” because I have to mostly deal with overpaid corporate assholes and morons. But I’m not working in a coal mine or on the roof of an eight story building in August.
I’m skeptical of this. What’s to stop a company from simply rooting out and eliminating all these “useless” positions and thus crushing the competition by having lower operating costs?
I think it could be a sentiment filtered through class as well. In David Graeber’s book ‘Bullshit Jobs’ he relates at how just what constitutes “essential” is viewed less shrewdly at the upper income/class end than at the lower ends of the economic spectrum. From this, their assumption is that more “fat” ( Bullshit? ) is tolerated or thought of the natural order of being at the top, whereas jobs on the lower to bottom have to prove their worth and cost-effectiveness nine ways to Sunday.
I understand. I’ve been a consultant and worked in Strategy, Finance and “Operational Optimization” (consulting + industrial engineering) for 25+ years and have had a front row seat to how sausage is made in org design as well as how front line standards are developed and implemented. Bain, McKinsey, Oliver Wyman, BCG, I’ve worked with them all and a bunch of more boutique firms.
But in ALL the large organizations I have worked for or consulted for there are hundreds or thousands of jobs that Graeber would call bullshit. Every single organization. In the US, Europe, China and Japan. A huge number of “bullshit jobs”.
So all of commercial enterprises seem awash with useless bullshit jobs. That means they are either essential or there is a huge market failure.
Some of what people describe as bullshit jobs is analogous to calling security guards useless because there is so little theft.