Why did college have to become the new high school?

Why can’t it be like the good ol’ days when many could get reasonable paying jobs enough to lead a middle-class life, only with a high school education, and only those pursuing extraordinary specialization would need a college education?

Now college is the new high school. Graduate school is the new college.

Note: though the tone of this post may imply that I don’t want to go to college, that is not the case. I am actually very excited and want to go. But I am just curious as to what factors lead to the status quo wtih respect to education in the United States.

  1. Most jobs now are more complex and technical than they used to be (require using a computer). 2) You used to be able to get a good manufacturing job with only a high school degree, but those jobs are mostly gone…
  1. As more and more people have college degrees, more and more employers think “why would I take someone who is qualified as a lab technician, when for a little more I can have someone who is qualified as a lab technician, laboratory manager, researcher and statiscian?”

Some of it is just credential creep that Nava highlihts. If you have lots of applicants for a job that may not require the degree itself why not hire one of them. They might have more upside for other jobs. If nothing else the degree highlights a difference.

There’s also pressure on the old middle class unskilled jobs. It comes from multiple sources:

  • Post WWII most of the major economic powers had a heavily damaged industrial base. The US, by virtue of an intact base, was in a position of advantage. That created a middle class of unskilled labor that didn’t really exist pre-WWII. By the 1970s that was no longer true and those jobs were coming under significant strain because of increased competition.
  • Industrialization has spread. That’s added even more competition. As each new country with lower wages for unskilled labor expands their industrial base it keeps the wage pressure on. There’s big chunks of the world that haven’t reached the US/Western Europe level of industrialization yet. That pressure isn’t gong away.
  • Automation creates pressure on some unskilled labor positions that used to exist as well.

Pre-WWII the American middle class generally didn’t include unskilled labor. We had a great run for a couple decades. That’s largely ended. There are still positions in the economy that can lead to middle class pay but don’t require a bachelor’s degree. They are generally called the skilled trades and have other routes to certification (some through Associates degrees.) It’s the unskilled positions where the middle class is taking the biggest hit. That’s all that the HS eduction prepares you for.

I don’t think we should ignore the role that policy has played in job flight. Lesser-skilled jobs have been sent abroad through free trade agreements. Some people have benefitted, but not the ones with trade/industrial skills. “Free trade” is lauded as a cost-free benefit, but that’s wrong.

When I was in school in the 50’s the saying was you will need a college degree to dig ditches. And that was in the 50’s.

Some employers will not hire a college graduate. And a college degree with no experience won’t get a lot of jobs. Two things that I heard when I graduated from college was we would love to hire you kid, but you have no experience. Or I heard we would to hire you kid but with your training you will not stay with us, you will leave for a better paying job.

From the comments my nieces and nephews made after graduating they ran into the same statements.

Now I do believe everyone should get some post high school training to get a better job.

No. They have gone overseas because the evil, job stealing foreigners were willing to work longer for lower pay and produce greater and better quality products.

If you tried to keep jobs at home through tariffs, legislative fiat or labour restrictions, you would simply end up like the Eastern Block circa 1980’s.

Edit: In reply to TSBG

For industrial, AK84 already answered, but how does free trade cost plumber jobs in Nebraska? It may bring brown people to do them, but the pipes aren’t being laid down in Mexico and teleported to North Platte.

Pipes-layer with someone sitting on your shoulder may be something for which a HS graduate is qualified. Master plumber is one of those skilled trades which, as DinoR mentions, need more training than HS even if it’s not college track.

“Better quality” products for cheaper prices but declining middle/lower class wages is a benefit to the rich and no one else.

I’m not a complete fanatic about this. Japanese car makes showed the U.S. a way to make better more reliable cars, cheaper. Then again, Japanese workers benefit from a more comprehensive social welfare system than Democratic politicians dare dream of.

Or let’s take clothes. Is it an absolute good that Americans have access to the cheapest possible T-shirts, even if American textile workers go jobless? My cheap clothing comes at the expense of someone else’s job, and makes the economy worse for all of us.

Also gave a job to some poor bastard in Bangladesh. Who could go and buy wheat from the market, which was imported from Nebraska. Giving a job to some farm worker there. And he used machinery made in the US, bought from California. And they used cotton grown in Texas.

How exactly is the US and workers losers there?

My rough understanding is based on industrial relations frameworks.

In the past many jobs would require a period of on the job training before being considered fully skilled. These could be journalist, Nurse etc.

Professional associations determine base skill sets required, training curriculum’s are developed and before you know it there’s a uni course to teach you to be a journalist or nurse.

Employers would rather hire someone “ready” to go rather than rely on training someone up, so the new base requirement becomes a degree qualification.

That’s a massive over simplification but in essence is my understanding of how it goes.

I work on Human resources in a reasonably senior position and my formal qualifications are high school.

“Better quality products for cheaper prices” is a very obvious benefit for everyone who buys and consumes such products. I.e., pretty much everyone.

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This seems to be more of an opinion and speculation type of question than factual.

Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.

When I was a youth, just thinking about having a career and going to college, I could never figure out why people thought this was some paradox of the universe. I thought “Why on earth wouldn’t those people be applying to entry level jobs that don’t require experience?”

Now that my own career is well established, and I’ve hired people and even owned my own business… I still feel pretty much the same way.

I’m much more sympathetic now. I realize people can work for years to get a degree and fail to find an entry level position. After a few years that 27 year old guy with a BS and 0 years of relevant experience seems a lot less appealing than the 21 year old who just finished her degree. That would be a really shitty frustrating situation for sure.

That doesn’t mean there’s some catch-22 where you need experience to get experience though. While you’re in school you work your way into an internship, where nobody expects you to have relevant professional experience. That helps you find a job at a big company that recruits at your college, or you network your way into a smaller company that needs an entry level person.

It’s not necessarily easy, but people with no experience need to be applying for entry level jobs. Not getting hired for jobs that require experience when you have none just means you’re applying to the wrong jobs.

Skilled labor still pays well and does not require college, whereas some college degrees lead only to the starvation wages of a lowly adjunct. College is not vocational school or a sure-fire path to a high salary, yet high school students are being told it is the only way they will ever be able to support themselves, get degrees in subjects that seldom lead to jobs, then work retail jobs and bitterly complain.

College is the new high school in that students are graduating from high school barely capable of composing a coherent sentence, perform basic arithmetic, or locate major countries on a map. The high school diploma means very little as a measure of academic skill, so if any academic skill is required for a job, seeking a college graduate makes sense.

FuzzyDunlop, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen, “This is an entry level position” and, “1-3 years experience required” (or even “2-5 years experience required”) in the same job listing. Entry level no longer means what it should in the job world. I’d say over 50% of so-called “entry level jobs” have an experience requirement listed.

I think internships are at the root, exploitative. But putting that aside, you basically only have 4 years to land an internship and be able to pay your way while you work without earning cash (and not counting the fact that there are usually far less internships than college students). That is not a hurdle surmountable by everyone and I don’t think it should be expected of everyone looking to go into a specific field.

I’ll be happier when “Entry Level Position” really means entry level again and companies are willing to do a little basic training rather than foist it off on experience requirements.

This is an idea that goes around every single time in every single thread about education. It’s tiresome in my opinion; nobody ever has any decent cites ever to point to getting an education in a nontechnical major as leading to poverty. Sure, some college graduates with with what people consider to be fluff majors do not end up with decent jobs and some plumbers make six figures. By that logic though, some high school drop outs make millions of dollars (Quentin Tarantino, the guy who started 1-800-got-junk). Those are called outliers. To focus on outliers and anomalies as a way to analyze a broad situation is ridiculous.

Every statistic I have seen shows that on the whole over time getting a college degree no matter what the major is a good investment, and the increased earning potential as well as the likelihood of achieving that potential is greater with a college education no matter what the major. Also, for graduate school your undergraduate major can be a wide variety of things - this is true for law school, medical school, business school etc. Trade/Vocational school does not help one bit for going into these professions but majoring in underwater basket weaving would.

I’m also tired of hearing this dribble because of the fact that I have work for many years in blue collar jobs, and none of my coworkers with children encouraged their kids to go the vocational route as long as their was the remote possibility of them having college aptitude. This was true for union guys, non-union guys, self employed tradesmen etc.

In the 50’s and 60’s, the percentage of high school graduates age 25 and over was roughly 50%. Now it’s nearly 90%, and the percentage of people age 25 and over with at least an associates or bachelors degree is over 40%.

Hear, hear, Macca26.

People who express opinions like those of **FuzzyDunlop **assume that this [del]“just get a job, you bum!”[/del] “apply to entry level jobs that don’t require experience” attitude is acceptable simply because they haven’t HAD to apply for entry-level jobs in the current environment, and have no idea that their neat, pat little solution doesn’t exist in the real world anymore.

With free trade, major automobile manufacturer builds assembly plant in Mexico, while idling one in U.S. Plumbers no longer needed to maintain restrooms, parts washers and other facilities in plant.