Yeah, I have a sort of inchoate suspicion that careers of the future are going to be less specialized and more generalist somehow. Like you’re going to have to be able to both turn a wrench AND know how to direct the AI to do a bunch of white collar tasks. Or like a few of my architect friends do now, be design-build people who both do the architecture and supervise the actual construction directly or even for some parts, do it themselves. As such, I feel like a mix of the two sorts of education may be the way forward for success, even for otherwise white collar careers like engineering.
I just can’t help but feel that a lot of this discussion is elitist / anti-elite somehow, with the idea that university-educated people are somehow better on the one hand, and the contrary position is that the trades are more rooted in the ‘real world’ and therefore they’re better.
My own opinion is that both are really valuable, and that no human is above real, physical work, but that intellectual work is also labour worth valuing. I’m an academic and while I’ve worked plenty of retail, I never had to do the kind of work that my family did (the ones who experienced real poverty). My ideal is a world where we just value human labour, and pay people a decent wage for whatever kind of work they’re doing: a much higher minimum wage, and a much lower ceiling—no one, and I mean no one, should be paid wages of a million a year or above.
As part of that, I think a more robust educational system, one that includes learning one’s way around tools and hands-on learning, is essential for society. As a wealthy society, I think we can afford to subsidize and would benefit from subsidizing four years of post-secondary education for everyone, whether in trades or university or some combination.
Perhaps Deep Springs College has the right idea:
Deep Springs involves students working on tasks in the on-campus ranch, farm, and boarding house, including “cooking, cleaning, gardening, milking cows, saddling horses, herding cattle, moving hay, butchering chickens, wiring cables, sorting library books, and fixing vehicles” with the academic curriculum dedicated wholly to the liberal arts such as Ancient Greek, philosophy, political science, and literature.
Three quick points. 1) Talking about wages of nurses and tradespeople is misleading unless regional variations, overtime, and cost of living are factored in. That 100K may be untold wealth in some places, barely sufficient in others, and 'way above the average someplace else. Some calculations of wages include working overtime, and that is misleading.
2) More than half the typical cost of college is room and board and associated expenses, such as health care. College is often a time of “finally getting away from the parents,” to everyone’s relief, but whether people are out on their own or living at the college, it is hugely expensive.
3) The high cost of college, including room and board, reflects wage stagnation over the last 50 years. Once upon a time, a good summer job let people earn enough for two terms of college. No more.
I’m a product myself of a Jesuit liberal arts education, so I am in general agreement with what you have written here. But I do want to point out that while such an education can absolutely do wonders in developing the whole person, not everyone will benefit from it, and not everyone needs it to be a well-rounded, clear thinking, rational person.
I definitely agree that it shouldn’t be compulsory, and not everyone needs it or will benefit from it. My general belief is that we tend to specialize past the point of utility in education. I suspect it’s because people prioritize their own expertise: a professor of philosophy thinks their field is the most important and designs their department to prioritize their field, and engineers do the same thing. In general, students benefit from cross-pollination.
I like Kegan’s stages of development, because most adults end up in stages 2/3, and very few engage in the introspection needed to go above that. Which in a lot of ways I can understand, there are endless assumptions built into society that we just accept and mental bandwidth is limited, and if you have too much diversity of thought then that is how you can end up with an unstable society. Israel and Palestine are good examples of what happens when two totally different life philosophies live next to each other.
Kegan describes 5 stages of development, of which the latter 4 are progressively attained in adulthood, although only a small proportion of adults reach the fourth stage and beyond:
Stage 1: Purely impulse or reflex-driven (infancy and early childhood).
Stage 2: The person’s sense of self is ruled by their needs and wishes. The needs and wishes of others are relevant only to the extent that they support those of the person. Effectively the person and others inhabit two “separate worlds” (childhood and adolescence).
Stage 3: The person’s sense of self is socially determined, based on the real or imagined expectations of others (post-adolescence).
Stage 4: The person’s sense of self is determined by a set of values that they have authored for themselves (rarely achieved, only in adulthood).
Stage 5: The person’s sense of self is no longer bound to any particular aspect of themselves or their history, and they are free to allow themselves to focus on the flow of their lives.
But AI will be better than us at everything in a few decades. Even the most self aware, adaptable, introspective, creative humans will serve no real useful function in the economy by mid century the same way the strongest horse serves no real function in the economy.
Not only that, but AI developed manipulation techniques and propaganda will easily run circles around the most self aware, most intelligent, most introspective humans.
I think a lot of it is that for decades, the trades and manufacturing work were squarely lower/middle middle class blue collar jobs. People aspired for white collar jobs, mostly because of the prestige and (not sure) additional pay. I mean, back in 1950 you could be a middle class family on one industrial worker’s salary, but sending your kids to college to be engineers or accountants was considered better.
So even though the income may not be materially different, the social prestige and to some extent the working conditions are better with white collar (i.e. college-requiring) jobs.
Me too. And it’s definitely not what most people get. Probably because most Jesuit schools aren’t required to take any and all students who register. That’s the big problem at the high school and lower levels; schools are required to basically educate everyone, and half or more of the people coming in have marginal interest in education or intellectual pursuits. And those who do, are likely to get it from their parents anyway. So the schools are stuck teaching basic subjects at a basic level, because that’s where their students are, and what their parents will support.
Not to get to far from the OP topic, but I was surprised at how many high schoolers are essentially being baby-sat, as reported by my kids as they went thru high school. They are 3 years apart but reported the same, many kids have no ambition, direction, or interests in terms of a vocation, and are just going thru the motions. What happens to them after graduation is anyone’s guess.
Even in college, my son went to our local state U and when asked about the level of competition he may have felt from the cohort in his major, he said “I look around at these people and I am not worried, at all - half of them are wasting money going to college!” What happens to these college kids who spend time in school and don’t graduate, but have accumulated debt, is not going to be great for them. I guess not everyone should pursue any higher education or training, no matter who is paying for it.
Maybe more a gate keeping? In many cases it isn’t what the person learned in college that mattered, but having been able to get into college X and completed the program, demonstrates a certain level of at least college associated abilities and tenacity. Certainly some premed requirements seemed like that. Not much of what was learned in organic chem had any application to the med school curriculum; but getting a good grade in that class demonstrated you could learn difficult material and that you would apply yourself.
I am frankly dumbstruck by the casual dismissal of effective use of resources. No there is not endless wealth in this country. We collect a finite amount of revenue to run a certain amount of public services at a chronic deficit.
I am also noting a pervasive educationalist elitism here, an acceptance hook line and sinker of the mythos of college. I am not at all convinced that college education overall creates better neighbors. As far as being a good neighbor goes I’ll sign onto having learned all I need to know in Kindergarten. My shtetl grandparents were better neighbors with much education than most college grads.
As stated here:
I don’t think either are better. Both can be good or awful neighbors.
I don’t even buy that college does much for most regarding critical thinking.
A group will memorize what they need to memorize. And FWIW for my kids … I had done the shadowing in High School and we were allowed to sit in classes in college on those visiting days. The level of critical thinking and quality of discussion was much better in their High School classes.
I do. I did not experience philosophy class as teaching that in any meaningful way. Actually high school geometry proofs were more useful to me for that.
Yup.
This argument has been the one I have historically endorsed specifically in the context of supporting liberal arts majors over very career focused majors. Say like a major in marketing, or such. And I am still sympathetic to it. I encourage premeds to think outside the classic bio major track and consider hitting the science requirements while majoring in something different, history, physics, Econ … But I don’t think that is what college accomplishes for most. For most college is the meal ticket to punch.
Not accurate. College costs have gone up astronomically.
Yes, they have, as have rents, etc. Wages have not kept pace with any of this. I think my point stands: costs have risen higher and faster than wages and when once a good summer job let one afford two terms at college, that is no longer the case.
Just anecdotally I retired from a trades job (government) just last year after a 35-yr career in various positions. It was a senior, unionized, autonomous position in an expensive area so well-compensated as these things go. Six out of seven of us in my little specialized unit were unnecessarily college educated in mostly unrelated STEM fields. Why? Well, it was a gray-collar position with not a lot of demanding physical labor, a great deal of independence/responsibility (no or little direct supervision) and between shift differentials and a pretty moderate amount of overtime you could easily out-earn the first three tiers of engineer positions. It was just a very plum gig.
Because of the independence of thought and action required, a bit of higher education was probably a help. Not at all necessary, mind you. But the non-degreed folks I worked with were mostly quite sharp and would have done fine in college.
The flip-side of that of course being that such positions are relatively rare. There aren’t millions of them, maybe thousands or low tens of thousands at best that combined all of that.
Could happen down the road, but I have huge doubts it will happen so soon as you think. It’s not just the technological barrier (though I think your confidence in terms of timing is excessive), it’s the infrastructure cost.
I used to joke that any monkey could do my job (they couldn’t, but roll with it), but they would be far more expensive between training, feeding, vet care, housing and permits 
. We’re not moving to a post-scarcity society any time soon. Purpose-built mostly automated manufacturing plants? Sure. Bipedal robots that come to your apartment and troubleshoot your toilet problem or rewire your ceiling light? Human labor will be cheaper for a good long, long, longggg time.
I’d bet you money on it, except it’s against board rules and we’ll both be dead long before we could collect.
Compared to other costs the inflation of college expenses in a special group. Since 1980 up 1200%, many times more than inflation overall, even more than healthcare inflation.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rising-cost-of-college-in-u-s/
Since 1980, college tuition and fees are up 1,200%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all items has risen by only 236%
That’s on you. If you think the only way to have more 2 million more apprenticeships is to cut funding for liberal arts colleges, that’s your opinion.
According to studies like that, investments in education create more jobs than investments in consumption tax cuts, military, renewable energy or health care.
Yeah, there is. Because a lot of us don’t like Trump or the rise of white nationalism. And among white people, having a college education makes you far less likely to be a Trump supporter. Which to a lot of us, makes you a better neighbor.
There are probably a non-zero number of people, even here, who’d say that all formal education that has nothing to do with feeding yourself in a world of no grocery stores is worthless.
(Though I do wonder if any of them would act on such beliefs in a meaningful way. I only seem to hear stories like this about conservative nut jobs.)
I honestly think it’s more of a “class indicator” No one REALLY cares about skills or what you learned or any of that stuff. Because outside of some specific technical fields, most of it isn’t rocket science and we aren’t really putting rocket scientists into leadership positions anyway, are we?
Like I work with all these executives and I have no idea how they got to where they got to. They don’t have any actual skills or expertise as far as I can tell (unless you count running meetings or talking about slide decks other people put together. In some cases, they can’t even seem to define what they are actually supposed to be running.
And what’s actually interesting is how completely disconnected they often seem from how the actual work gets done.
So to a certain extent, the way you “prepare” a young adult for a future like that is “go to the right prestigious schools” so you get on a track where executives are like “oh he went to / worked at Ivy League / top tier school / Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Google, PE firm, whatever, lets keep hiring / promoting him!”
Well, you didn’t live next to those douchebags in Phi Delta Theta.
Nah. It’s on math. Increase the total slice of the pie for education overall if you want. It is still finite not unlimited. Yes Emanuel wants free tuition and thinks it can happen by allowing more foreign grads. And one can try to sell industry to pay for trades education. Reality remains: the money comes from somewhere and with cost attached.
Non college educated used to go D, they could again.
extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.
Meanwhile I suspect people studying tech manuals and learning trades DO learn some critical thinking skills.
I know I learned more about critical thinking, logic and trouble shooting in my Navy Electronics and Electrical classes and practical experience as an Electrician Mate than from my college and computer classes.
Though helping others get their programs working in school was a huge help in trouble shooting.
The engineering team I led had a really smart guy whose undergrad degree was in physics, from Cornell. I always assigned him to mentor the scary smart summer interns.
One of them had a 3.9 average in physics at Harvard.
When the intern was getting ready to go back to school, the mentor told him that the degree he was finishing up wouldn’t qualify him for many jobs, “but it will show an employer that you’re capable of learning pretty much anything”.
Way back when I was in 7th grade, I remember being at a friend’s house and overheard his father getting on him about his grades. I don’t remember what he did, but it was something physically demanding and outdoors in the Texas heat. He said to his kid, “I push you about your grades because I don’t want you busting your ass outside to make a living like I do.” I think a lot of parents didn’t want their kids busting their asses like they had to.