Well since I basically quoted your posts nearly verbatim their incoherence is outside of my control. If you said
to mean something other than that
then I don’t know what to say other than I won’t waste any more time trying to parse out your attempts at communication.
In any case as to “the myth” …
Most of us care less about what we will make in the first year after graduation so much as our long term paths. Comparing early career between university degrees (almost all of which include various amounts of liberal arts education) which that article did not do, is less important than the longer term path as industries change. Interestingly and surpringly enough over the longer term Liberal Arts grads win compared to those who who in professional and pre-professional fields.
Also that article oddly compares majors with career choices. It notes the best paying jobs right out are in advertising. So let’s look at some famous and top people in advertising and marketing. Leo Burnett was a journalism major at University of Michigan. Marissa Mayer CEO of Yahoo - majored in “symbolic systems,[29] a major which combined philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science.” Also danced. Kevin Wertz Campbell Ewald president Arizona State, marketing, which is part of the liberal arts college. Steve Riggio, VP of Barnes and Noble, Brooklyn College Anthropology. So on. Amazingly many of the top dogs in advertising and marketing, that leading industry, had liberal arts educations. huh. Please find me all the people getting those advertising executive jobs with a technical education alone. Don’t get me wrong … the ability to quickly master various sorts of technical skills is important today as well and learning how to do that should not be excluded from anyone’s liberal arts education. But longer term analytic skills, creativity, and communication ability, will be more predictive of career success in a fluid job market.
The next two top jobs in that article - also not open to those with exclusively a technical education.
How does that compare to previous years? That is, is this a problem with millennials, or is it an issue with the fact that young people in our country have historically taken a long time to get their shit together?
In NC, incidentally, folks at college were pretty heavily hit by the change in voter laws. Some campuses were split straight down the middle between voting districts, and there were dire warnings that if you voted in the wrong place (either your parent’s district, or your temporary college district, I forget which was considered wrong) you’d be committing voter fraud. Campus polling places were eliminated. It was a thing back in 2012; Rachel Maddow did a segment specifically on college students in NC trying to vote.
President Obama is a deep thinker and a terrific orator. He says things that challenge his audience as opposed to solely pander to it (great orators do both).
So it’s a shame that the OP poisoned the well with the thread title.
Over the past 4 presidential cycles (2000 on) lower income voter participation has increased from 55 to 62%. 18 to 29 year old participation from 40 to 45% with a peak in '08 of 51%
For midterms here’s another link that includes 2014. 2014’s 18 to 29 year olds came out at 21%. Pretty consistent with how poorly the group has participated in midterms since 1995 (22%) In 2010 it had been 20%.
It’s not a problem specific to today’s younger voters but to younger voters through the years. As they age maybe they’ll vote more.
(Read the text in the census numbers you cited, those are not eligible voters but total voting age population. “Overall, America’s youngest voters have moved towards less engagement over time … it is important to account for citizenship status when estimating voting rates”)
‘Paraphrasing’ is not verbatim. Since I wrote: “Why do you americans focus on the university so much versus the technical training? I can imagine that for the black americans or the other non white minority or immmigrants this bias among the sanders and the understanding focused on the pure economics is not attractive at all…” seems to have the economical meaning only to you. I suppose it escapes that the ethnic minority can have different concerns than only the economic, like in biases.
It is true my understanding of technical is different than the typical american one as Dangerosa has noted.
There is a myth certainly as it contains the arrogant prejudice of this type of education that it only teaches thinking. I have both types of these degrees, I do not agree with this.
Pre professional is not a synonyme, but rather than cherry picking the best outcomes for this profile, that come from the advanced, post bachelors results, it is better to look at the more common profile (60% in the article), those who are not able to go on, and a result of more impact for the disadvantaged profile lacking the support and the asset backing.
From your article
Emphases added.
The lower earnings for only the bachelors are of significant impact to any community with a sensation of the structural disadvantage to itself (discrimination, bias, whatever).
For the disadvantaged coming into a work force, the present value calculation is different, particularly if coming from the less asset rich background (as is a typical case of the ethnic minority) which in their early years of the family formation that is valued, the current value is an important calculation. The larger and easier to read graphic in this article highlightsthat the more technically inclined degrees are mostly significantly lower economic risk (unemployment = the foregone earnings) for any level of the degree attainment, reflecting of course the economic demand and the employability, but the recent graduate with the BA risk of non employment is a significant calculation point for any person coming from the discriminated against visible minority background. It is doubtless difficult for the white middle class to understand this as a point, but I can see it easily in my own experience having a large impact on the policy interests and political concerns of the visible minorities in the USA.
In any case, overall that is not a very economically literate article and does not show any good sense of the cost-benefit analysis of the economic payoff for the studies. It reads as the special pleading for the myth of the unique result.
I think this is why you are both talking past one another. We think of vocational technical education - votech - as something that trains you to be a car mechanic or an electronics technician or a plumber or a hair stylist - or maybe a childcare worker or low skilled nurse.
When we think of what I believe you are calling a technical education - i.e. becoming a computer programmer or an engineer - those jobs are trained for in four year colleges and universities. Occasionally you can train for a programming job at a votech - but you’ll be limited in opportunities with that degree.
So for us, the path to becoming a chemical engineer or getting a PhD in English Literature happens at the same kind of school.
So we value “college” for three reasons - 1) it is the typical path to jobs in engineering, business, medicine, etc with advancement potential 2) it is not a terminal degree - you can get a Masters or PhD or MD or JD with a four year college degree and 3) its a "well rounded ‘classical’ education - and that is still valued as a mark of social class.
We devalue “trade school” for a few reasons - workers in the trades are seen as individuals with a lower social status (although a plumber is likely to make more money than a social worker), people who attend trade schools are often the students who don’t do well in school (if you have an A or B average, you will be pushed towards a four year college, even if your stated preference is to be an electrician - you will feel a lot of pressure to become an electrical engineer), and people in the trades tend to do “dirty” and “hard” work - rather than sitting at a desk. I have two uncles in the trades - both now in their 60s - and its hard on you.
To make things even more confusing - in Minnesota there is a law (not kidding) that calls all vocational technical schools and two year schools “colleges.” The are the same “vo-tech” schools they used to be, we’ve just renamed them. But we wanted to remove the stigma so “everyone goes to college!” Different states use different terms. Its quite possible that different regions within states use different terms. And then there is the college and university terminology - usually (but not always) universities offer graduate degrees in addition to undergraduate degrees, where colleges only offer undergraduate degrees.
So for someone who doesn’t speak American English(as opposed to English - cause it is different) as a first language, and is more familiar with a British educational system than an American one, and then trying to put a Continental type of pathing on top of that, while trying to track cause to some sort of stereotypical American mythos…its going to be hard to communicate effectively.
Just speaking for myself, I do not a priori devalue “trade school.” My intent in the GD thread I created and linked to is to hear from others and maybe develop some insights into the balance between various issues.
The current circumstance of middle class “kids” getting liberal arts educations with commensurate debt and emptying out of any of their parents’ accumulated wealth to get to the place economically that a High School education was formerly sufficient for, if that, seems untenable moving forward. Narrow technical training also seems like a poor model.
That’s what I’m saying. There are some specific reasons why people vote less as youngsters than they do as fogeys. When folks attribute low voting to “millennials,” it’s blaming the specific generation rather than talking about social factors that lead to this dynamic, and that’s inaccurate and unwise.
There are things we can do as a society to increase the electoral participation of youth. These things have nothing to do with millennials specifically and everything to do with finding ways to get citizens involved in elections earlier in their lives.
Issues? Why is is everyone talking about stances on the issues?? If you care about issues let it affect your choice for Congressman and Senator. A Democratic President can be expected to sign the legislation a Democratic Congress passes.
For President we need someone who has the temperament and experience to deal effectively with foreign-policy crises. That is why the choice of Hillary is clear-cut compared with Trump or Sanders.
I don’t either - my son wants to be a pipefitter. But I can tell you when people ask what he is planning on doing for college and I say he is going to go to school to be a pipefitter - well, people are polite - but I get a completely different reaction when I talk about my daughter’s four year liberal arts plans.
And I agree that the current situation is untenable - but I also think that the kids and their parents need to shoulder some of the blame - rather than two years at community college and two years at a reasonable state school, I’m on a personal finance board where middle class parents all the time who think their kid should be entitled to go to NYU at $70k a year if they want - which is great, if you’ve saved for it - but they haven’t. And then the aid is tiny and mostly loans, but they don’t want to disappoint their kids. People themselves are unreasonable.
From my read just as there is no take down there is no blaming going on.
The worst is a bit of eye-rolling. The perception that some of us have of the position of some of the younger Sander supporters: “We don’t vote much now, we especially don’t vote in elections that are not for president, but we have loud rallies. Maybe we’ll vote later. Do things our way, now!” And the simple reality is that you gain power when you are a reliable voter, not before. And that unless you yourself are the majority, or a dictator, you need to build coalitions and to compromise with others who have different perspectives and priorities in service of getting items on your agenda accomplished.
And my simple point was a correction of fact: Eonwe claimed that lower income demographics are the biggest non-voters and the fact is that under 30 is much more predictive of non-participation. Relatively “the poor” - hell even “non-college educated Whites” - vote more. Don’t vote, including in midterms, then don’t be surprised that you don’t matter.
No. I think it may have had to do with the fact that I’ve been legally disabled since childhood. My parents’ names are still on everything along with mine, and they do have IDs. The only ID I’ve ever had to show in connection with any of this was my Medicaid card.
I did get a bank account using my college ID once. I’m not sure how they verified my identity at the college itself, though. I just remember submitting a bunch of forms and such.
What I do know is that I’ve never actually had an official government issued ID, since I never got my drivers license (only my permit). My sister got one, and I remember how weird I thought it was to even need an ID if she wasn’t driving. I considered getting one, but never got around to it before 2009.
I definitely don’t need it now to get my money. It’s on a card. Before that, it was on a check that also had my parents’ names on it, so they could deposit it as well as I could.
“Just as soon as we figure out what it is! We have the power, the primary results notwithstanding, and we demand that you and your corrupt Establishment whore of a candidate grovel and beg us!”
The other thing LOHD is that the non-voting habit seems to only partly improve. In your census link as each non-voter 18 to 24 yo cohort moved into the 25 to 44 yo cohort the 25 to 44 yo group dropped their rates. the You have to get up to 45 yo and over to see relatively stable voting rates. The 25 to 44 yo cohort went from 69% participation in 1964 per that graph to under 50% in 2012.
This is a totally small peeve, but my username ain’t Left Of Hand Dorkness :).
Part of my gripe before was with identifying non-voters specifically as “millennials.” As long as we’re identifying them as youth in general, not a specific generation, I’m happier; it smacks less of “get off my lawn, kids these days ain’t like they were when I was a kid.”
You know how there are more virgins ages 18-25 than there are ages 25-44? Vaguely related reasons account for the more nonvoters at younger ages. As I understand it, most folks, once they start voting, they continue voting. But if in a group of ten people, one person starts voting at 18, one at 22, one at 26, and so on, the cohort isn’t all voting until they’re all age 54. It’s a cumulative effect. Of course it’s not a perfect pattern–some people stop voting as they age–but my understanding is that overwhelmingly the pattern goes in the other direction, which can account for a huge share of the disparity.
Other factors apply, of course. Feeling less connected to a community; feeling like politicians don’t give a shit what you say; feeling that only homeowners and parents get voices in political discussions; feeling like a ball of raging hormones who wants to tear down the state; being rootless and traveling and not entirely understanding your local community; being poor; not knowing much about politics; doing too many drugs–all of these can contribute to lack of voting. Some of these factors are things we can do something about. Others we can’t. The question for me is whether we ought to try to mitigate the factors we can. One big factor is the sense among youth that political parties don’t care about them, and I think it’s fairly important that older folks like us encourage the participation of youth into politics rather than discouraging it.
What you are describing here is a legitimate problem and an outrage. You mentioned other possible explanations in other comments. But none of what you have said explains why young voters come out so much less in midterm elections. And that is where they have to take a great deal of the blame, in my opinion. The only explanation I can think for that dropoff is that the midterms just don’t seem as exciting or interesting to them. And that’s not a very good reason, and it undermines their claim to want to affect change.
If you care about issues let it affect your choice for Congressman and Senator. A Democratic President can be expected to sign the legislation a Democratic Congress passes.