I thought something a bit like this when I was in school.
At this point I think we should be paying high school & college students to attend classes.
Everybody says “college isn’t for everybody” but nobody ever says “college isn’t for me.”
To tell the truth, Shop Class as Soulcraft sounds a lot like the same rose-colored-glasses romanticizing that privileged people do when considering the lot of the underclass. Just like when civilian Presidents wax lyrical about the swashbuckling life of the grunt, so too does it seem like there is an element of mythologizing in Crawford’s work. As one reaction to another swooning review of the book put it
From comment by palmcanoe, Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft.
Indeed, you might want to consider what socioeconomic blinders you’re wearing if you can even form the question “Should everyone go to college” when only a third do so anyway.
I’m a college dropout. I did say it wasn’t for me. I may not have been right, but I did say it.
As for underpaid plumbers versus white-collar workers with better benefits, in my estimation plumbers are more necessary than cubicle mushrooms, & should be paid better. Instead of telling youth to go to college to get a “good job,” we should compensate manual laborers better.
I have a BFA in Studio Arts that’s good for very little other than covering up a hole in the sheetrock of my studio. It might have helped me get a foot in the door in a couple of ad agencies and printing companies, but being an Art Department drone pays considerably less than a plumber, or a machinist, or a mechanic, or…
My view is that my degree cost me more than it gained me. We’re putting money away into an account for my son’s education in about 13-odd years, and I won’t be a bit disappointed if he decides to use the money to backpack through India and get a vocational school education instead.
The world needs ditch-diggers as much as it needs doctors.
The economic reality is that the world is becoming more interconnected and more complex. The trend is, like it always has been, to take complex tasks and reduce them to simplifed, repeatable, discrete process steps that can either being performed by automation, an 18 year old high school grad or some guy in a third-world country.
What that means is intellectual skills are becomming more and more valuable while many manual or technical skills are becomming less so. IOW, there is less opportunity for someone to just graduate high school and go to work at the local mill, factory or plant without much additional training and make a decent, sustainable living at it.
That said, does everyone need to go to college?
One thing to understand is that a college degree is both more valuable and less valuable than it was years ago. It is often a prerequisit for even some of the most mundane and mindless corporate jobs, however the college degree as a “magic ticket” to a rich and fullfilling and lucrative career generaly reserved for graduates of the elite institutions. So the question becomes “is it worth my time to graduate from a relative mediocre program with average grades to work the same job I could have gone to a vocational program for?”
To a certain extent, the American post high school education system serves as a sort of socioeconomic class filtering system. It’s kind of a meritocracy, but in many ways it isn’t. Wealth and privilege often provide access to schools that a student would normally be unqualified for based solely on their academic and extraciricular success.
Speaking of blinders.
I know quite a few kids who say exactly this. They didn’t enjoy the class part of high school, and the prospect of college gives them the willies. Some of them don’t have the easiest time learning, but some are just fine. Some come from families where no one went to college, but some come from families where both parents went. Some go anyway, pressured by society and their parents. Some probably are discouraged by parents and friends.
It depends a lot on the environment. In New Jersey I lived nestled in among the research centers, with four or five Ph.Ds on your average block, and everyone went to college. Where I live now is more normal, without that parental pressure, so there is more diversity.
A lot of people theoretically go to college, but it is a few classes at a time at the very inexpensive community college, and half the time they drop the class before it is done. I don’t count that as really attending - no knock on community colleges, only these kids.
No, you are wrong. What people who say “College is not for everybody” mean is “Not everybody can handle college.” You included, and this is why you don’t “knock on community college, only these kids [who for any number of reasons do not complete a–cluck–community college class]”
So, when I say “Everybody says…,” what is being intimated is: Everybody says “Not everybody is capable of handling college” but nobody says “I am incapable of handling college.”
Oh, of course, you’ll find a contrarian or two who will say just that, but it is a peculiar thing that we all agree that college ought to be the province of the very bright but we so seldom find anyone who claims not to be a provincial.
It may be true that unskilled or semiskilled "dependent labor (meaning you go to a centralized location to do your work, like a factory) is become less and less viable as a way to make a living, but I dispute that skilled independent labor is in less demand than it ever was. You can’t offshore your car repairs (and car repairs are becoming more technical, not less so) or your busted toilet or the wiring for your new house.
There’s nothing “less” about skilled trades (I’d argue that in most ways it is considerably “more” than corporate dronery) and it requires plenty of intelligence to do the job well.
What exactly is community college in the US? From what I understand, community college is just like real college, except you work more on individual courses than a whole degree because you are aiming to transfer your credits to a normal college where you will finish you degree.
In Canada we have schools that are quite similar to university programs, except that the Gen Ed requirements are gone (and because of that you get diplomas instead of degrees, but you still get the same amount of training that is relevant to your major). Americans would probably call them vocational schools, but they aren’t just focused on the trades. The one I attended had television/film production, Business Admin, Pilot, Paramedic, Vet Tech…and they are all generally accepted as an equivalent to a degree or close to it (say, have a 4-year degree vs. your diploma and 2 years of experience). Are schools like these looked down upon as much in the States?
I think “Community College” is what used to be called “Junior College”. They offer two-year degrees, either AA or AS, rather than the four-year degrees offered at regular colleges/universities. Think they also offer some program tracks that are more vocational oriented, such as paralegal studies, secretarial, etc.
A community college is roughly equivalent to what we Canadians would call a college.
No, you are wrong.
I have been teaching college for the last 8 years and have encouraged several students to drop out. I’ve encouraged dozens to at least think about it – an essay entitled “college is for suckers” was part of my first week’s reading.
In a few cases where I suggested to individuals that college might not be right for them, it was in part a matter of aptitude; but that was the exception, not the rule. In part because of the “everyone should be go to college” mentality, standards are so low that anybody with an IQ over 90 is going to be able to graduate from somewhere if they really want to. If they’re really stupid and/or lazy, they’ll flunk out.
Far more often, my dropout recommendation had to do with motivation: students who had no idea what they wanted to do with their life, but were unhappily in school because of parental or peer pressure. My advice was to go out and try a couple of jobs until they figured out what they really wanted to do.
And I met at least two students who I thought were possibly too good for college: very smart (if not “book smart”), hard working kids who had or were developing valuable job skills, in fields they enjoyed, that would pay them better than most anything they were likely to major in at college … but who were hlafheartedly pursuing a degree because it was what people told them they were “supposed” to do. I told them that IMO that was a silly reason to invest four years and incur large debts.
In all cases, I gave those students the exact advice I’d give my own child.
When people say “college is not for everybody,” they mean “college is not for everybody.”
The article was not addressing assemply-line jobs, which are indeed going obsolete in the US – it was about the skilled trades: plumber, auto mechanic, cabinetmaker, etc. These are not obsolete and in many cases skilled workers are in high demand.
I’ve seen ads for appliance salesmen and car salesmen that require college degrees. Sales jobs used to require nothing beyond a good personality and sale skill, and I can’t think how a course in astronomy or World Lit is going to ad (or admittedly to detract from) either one.
Same with call center jobs: I worked in a call center where you were given preference if you had a college degree (which I did, in history- didn’t help one bit one time).
I think this is the key problem. Requiring degrees floods the colleges and courses are watered down and undergrad degrees become what high school diplomas were a generation ago. The same people who wouldn’t have gone to college 30 years ago (or needed to) must have a degree to get the same mid-level management jobs they’d have gotten through experience a generation ago.
When I was a lad, Detroit High Schools had College Prep , regular school and special ed. Everybody took some shop courses. There were schools for students who showed a talent in shop. Wilber Wright was a school dedicated to shop classes and those who were not interested in college. Apprenticeships from various trades were affiliated with it. We recognized that not everybody was capable of going to college and that some did not want to.
I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a quote that “Most people go to college because their parents did, the rest because their parents didn’t”, but I think it’s largely true.
I see a really bad future for conventional public universities as positions go unfilled or are eliminated altogether due to budget cuts, but at the same time enrollment is increased to get the tuition checks, thus class size and student : professor ratios swell and more students turn to online education. Because of the institutions being run like huge corporations degrees started trumping education long ago and now the brick and mortar college itself is probably going to become endangered within another generation.
Some great quotes:
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students. (John Ciardi)
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving. (Russell Green)
A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don’t have a J.O.B. (“Fats” Domino)
In Dallas, (good lord, fifty years ago?) this was called Distributive Education and it was the only thing that got me through high school. Without it, I would have dropped out, plain and simple.
You know, I just got back a few hours ago from my college class on the way toward getting my masters in education. Today was particularly interesting, because my fucking idiot Marxist professor screwed up an elementary fact while reading from a newspaper editorial (The error itself was not in the editorial.), and used the bias in the editorial along with his fact to come up with a wrong conclusion and ask us to discuss it. When I pointed out the error and suggested that he consult a more objective source, he got pissed off and cut the discussion short. It’s the third time he’s done this and the second time I’ve corrected him, and I don’t think I’m getting an “A” in this course.
I have run into plenty of mechanics and soldiers who will never see the inside of a college campus who are wayyyy smarter than this guy, not to mention smarter than quite a few of my classmates from over the years. They don’t need a piece of paper saying they’re smart to be validated.
No way should everyone go to college. If I were handy, I would drop this in a second and fix cars for the rest of my life. More fun, less hassle, and I’d find a job a lot more easily.
Higher education has become somewhat of a scam in this country. It’s touted as the ticket to stable employment and prosperity, but college graduates have only made marginal average income gains in the last 30 or so years. It’s the top 1% who have made the bulk of the income gains. So success in the US, for many people, is basically a game of chance. We’ve managed to sucker so many young people into entering this lottery because it’s easier spurring them forward with the faint promise of success than it is to actually try and provide the average person with a social safety net and ensuring meaningful economic opportunities will be available to them. The government gets to act like it’s doing something useful, and lenders and universities make out like bandits.
First of all, the concept of corporate “drones” is a bit misleading. People get hired by companies to perform specific jobs - sales, marketing, finance, accounting, IT, R&D, whatever. Sure, a lot of people have bullshit deadend jobs, but in the vast majority of companies I’ve worked for there is a career track for most positions. You may start off in a drone-like job but that’s because you are new and don’t know anything. The expectation is that as you learn and prove yourself, you take on additional roles and responsibilities and move up the ladder.
You can certainly make a decent living in skilled trades. I don’t know much about them, but it’s my inderstanding that unless you own your own business, you tend to cap out much sooner than you might in many corporate jobs.
Not everyone likes corporate environments. The tend to be very political and intangible compared to skilled trade jobs. A high premium is placed on “fitting in”. That’s why companies tend to like to hire college grads, student athletes, presidents of their fraternity, ex-military officers, and so on.