A job that studies show causes people to develop a form of PTSD. Employers refuse to acknowledge it, so employees get no treatment or recognition for the brutality of the job.
It’s not just any manual labor. It’s an industry that pays little for very tough jobs, and the government imports refugees to work there, so people have little feeling of security.
Just curious (and don’t take this the wrong way, unless you must): what are you currently doing for work, and do you see a path to retirement without significant reliance on social security?
I’m a supervisor in a medical records department. I do, but this is also a career path I just fell into, and not one I’m particularly thrilled about. Retirement will definitely be challenging if I don’t either climb the ladder in my current career or figure out something I would rather do that could turn out better. There are several paths I could take in my industry, some of which will require going back to school. At that point I think it would be worth going back for the specific classes I would need.
Einstien’s Third Law of Relativity:
“The more parents spend to send their kids to Princeton University, the more impressed the relatives will be, in general”
We’ll never see a backlash to this kind of popularity …
And in fact there is a massive shortage of people working in the skilled trades to the point that as a nation we’re critically understaffed to support any kind of infrastructure improvement, rollout of wide scale nuclear power, or even maintain our current systems indefinitely without turning to immigrant labor. We’ve cultivated a system in which being any kind of success outside of the creative arts means having to obtain some kind of four year degree even though very few people use anything from their four (or more) years spent in post-secondary education unless they are in a STEM field. And the beneficiaries aren’t the students, who are often mired in student debt or default for years and sometimes decades, but the schools and loan financiers who are selling an ‘investment’ that isn’t necessary for most occupations except that it has become a de facto threshold of entry.
As a nation we are in desperate need of skilled welders, pipefitters, electricians, carpenters, millwrights, and of course all of the medical ‘trades’, and with a few years of experience and the willingness to go where the work is one can easily make a six figure income without putting in an excess of overtime. Many of these jobs pay per diem for travel as well which offsets the costs of having to travel to a worksite. These aren’t coal mining type jobs with long hours, low pay, and high incidence of mortality and morbidity, either; while trade work does offer more opportunities for injury by dint of doing something other than sitting in a chair, the modern trade workplace offers and widely uses protective equipment and mechanical aids not just because of government regulation but also because it is far cheaper to rent a manlift for a few weeks than to pay out on a personal injury claim and lost time at work.
Coming back from WWII and the ‘baby boom’, people (both men and women, for different reasons) had new access to post-secondary education, and even those who didn’t go to college saw the benefits of it in terms of wealth and social status, and thus worked and scrimped and saved to send their children to college for a better life. But somewhere in that calculus we equated college with betterment and labor with a lack of will, and grew a quiet contempt for those who chose to work in skilled trades. As a society, we need to rethink education in terms of vocational aptitude, interest, and need on one hand, and education as a public and social benefit (i.e. creating an informed electorate) on the other, instead of trying to fuse them together in some hybrid version of the liberally educated white collar worker who only uses his or her hands to do ‘work’ around the house.
Short of a universal offering of free college tuition (which I don’t think is workable regardless of how loudly Bernie Sanders yells it) I think college is going to be priced out of the ability of many students unless they have avenues of alternative funding, and as intellectual labor becomes automated as many forms of industrial and agricultural labor have previously they will be competing for fewer and fewer jobs. Even in the STEM fields, often promoted as being good opportunities for students with math and science skills, there are overall fewer jobs than applicants (and often few enough qualified applicants for the jobs, creating a disconnect on both sides).
Education in terms of knowledge should be open and available to all at minimal expense; vocational training and direction should be provided based upon what aptitude a candidate has and where their interests lie, along with what skill sets are needed in the economy. You cannot force or plan for people to fill a specific role (at least, not with enthusiasm and success) but you can offer guidance and incentives, and I believe there are plenty of people who would be happy to perform a ‘blue collar’ job doing valuable skilled labor if it were not seen as beneath them. What we do not need (and I think will be rapidly disappearing) are more McJobs in soulless cubefarms or masses of Uber drivers roaming around looking for underserved areas and chasing surge pricing. What we could use are skilled trades and craft people building and supporting a modern infrastructure and contributing to both the practical and aesthetic value of the world we live in.
Stranger
It’s pretty telling that if I was starting college today, I would not be able to afford to go to the school I got my degree from. I started in 1994, and just going by a regular CPI inflation calculator I was paying about $380 per credit hour for undergrad tuition (in 2018 dollars.) However, undergrad tuition at the school today is $1,100 per credit hour. Almost three times higher. and I think a big part of that is the notion that “everyone has to go to university” combined with “.gov-backed loans anyone can get” means schools can ratchet up tuition. Plus, where I went (an engineering- and sciences-focused univ.) they’ve had an influx of international students (mostly from China) whose well-heeled families will pay pretty much any price. So the place has jacked up its tuition and spent it like drunken sailors on newer and bigger buildings and a bunch of other shit. Occasionally I get a mailing from them asking to pledge an “alumni donation,” those go straight into the trash. and if they ever call me they’re getting an earful.
Fewer and fewer of them. My daughter’s tech theatre director was just bemoaning that he is getting students who never had the option to take shop - they have never used a saw or a drill, they don’t know what a pilot hole is.
And the shop in my kids’ school was not great - they’ve moved resources out of trades into 4 year college prep - so that when my son started trade school they started with the basics because you can’t get them in school.
I’m more surprised that there isn’t an upper middle class backlash against college: middle class families and students take on some loans but they also receive assistance; the lower reaches of the rich might grouse against six figure tuition but can still easily afford it; while the upper middle class must pay it without subsidies (except maybe at the most expensive schools.)
For the past few months I myself have been kicking around the idea of starting a thread that the price of schooling might be a hidden tax on the upper middle class.
Upper middle-class parents are more likely to see their college graduates getting “good” jobs than middle class parents. Not because the upper-middle class kids are smarter or harder working, but because they have the kind of network that is enjoyed by the upper class. When you can’t find a job on your own and you come from an upper middle-class family, you can expect someone in your network to come through with a position that’s just perfect for you. And there’s always someone who will put in a good word for you. The typical middle-class college graduate isn’t that lucky.
Also, it’s not true that weathier students don’t get scholarship money thrown at them.
There was an article in the NYTimes a day to two ago about a bricklayers’ competition (how high a wall can you build in an hour, points off for any irregularity) that mentioned that there is a dire shortage of bricklayers. Apprenticeships take 4 years and people are just not interested. So the industry is starting to use robots, although robots capable of doing the job are extremely expensive and still require human assistance. I wonder how many other such jobs are around.
As for going out of the country, about 25 years I had a conversation with a student from NY state. I asked him why he had come to McGill. His answer was that it was much cheaper even than SUNY. It cost him about CAD12,000 a year. And that amount of $12,000 was the amount that we got from every student between tuition and provincial subsidies. Foreign students weren’t subsidized at all. Non-Quebec Canadians paid about $4000 and locals about $2500. So yes edu-tourism is a real possibility.
The most disheartening thing I read recently on the subject is that over 50% of Republicans think colleges are, on the whole, negative and should be abolished. (Okay, that last clause is my take on what they said, but I don’t see any other way to take it.)
Actually it seems like many Republicans (at least those on the vocal neocon side) feel that education in general should be restricted and public education abolished in favor of parochial charter schools paid for, of course, by taxpayer money. This is, of course, a strategy that has worked very well for flourishing egalitarian democracies like Iran and Pakistan, and is a model we should certainly embrace to Make American Great Again, because nothing says greatness like double digit illiteracy rates and basic ignorance of history and science.
Stranger
That seems unlikely, since attending a selective college is so central to upper-middle-class identity. People don’t have backlashes against their own class’s preferred status markers. (Collectively, I mean – it’s obviously possible for individual upper-middle-class kids to choose to revolt against the system by becoming a truck driver instead, but they usually do that because, consciously or not, they don’t want to identify any more with their class of origin and its values.)
Also nothing says steadfast Republican voter than that. Those guys may be evil, but they’re not stupid.
Up until 2016education didn’t make much of a difference in party ID (among white people), but once Trump came onto the scene he pushed the college educated whites away and drew the high school educated whites to him. Education has very little role in which party to support among non-whites though.
As far as people earning great incomes in the skilled trades I suppose it is possible. But a lot of people I know who work in the trades work jobs that are pretty hard on their bodies and while thy earn a good income (about 40-50k which goes pretty far in the midwest) they aren’t earning amazing salaries. As of 2010, only 6% of individuals over 18 earn 6 figures a year (that figure may be higher now since 2010 was not a good year for employees). Many of them are probably highly skilled white collar jobs.
There are people in the skilled trades earning 6 figures. But I’d assume a lot of them are either extremely lucky (they got a great union job) or they work long hours in dangerous jobs that take them away from family and are in the middle of nowhere.
I went to college in the early 00’s and was probably in that first generation where everybody got 4 year degrees in absolute crap and when the market tanked in 2007 pretty much all my college friends wound up either taking entry level jobs or going back to college and getting a new degree. Had a friend who got a 4 year degree as a “Musical Historian” just because it sounded cool and was absolutely surprised to find out he couldn’t do anything with it besides go back to college and be a low-level intern in the music department.
Or are self-employed (and work long hours.)
I’m only one data point, but…
We’re upper class according to Investopedia. We actively discouraged college for one of our kids. It just didn’t seem right for him, and there was no possibility of scholarship assistance for us. I didn’t want to spend the money, nor him to waste the 4 years out of the workforce. I explained to him I had easily passed six figures working oil rigs and there were as many, and perhaps more high earning opportunities in blue collar work. I encouraged a few of the trades and actively steered him toward transportation or plumbing/hvac. He held jobs in both and did extremely well, and in a few years was a shift supervisor at a UPS hub. Then one day he rode jump seat in one of their 767s, and from that point was determined to become a commercial pilot. He recently finished a degree (online), but only because it’s required to move beyond regional airlines.
I think the trades are a better choice in today’s world than most college track careers and I actively* discourage them when asked. A lot of my friends’ kids are competing for diminishing white collar jobs, while my son has a six figure income, and is fending off recruiters with a stick.
*A few months ago, the millennial barkeep at the marina was grousing about college costs, baby boomers screwing us over, etc. We had a short conversation about it and she asked what I would do in her situation. I suggested she pursue Mortuary Science at the local community college. It pays really well, and she could spend each week burying us old baby boomers. (I got free drinks for that one :))
It’s likely that people choosing not to undergo a 4-year bricklayer apprenticeship are making the rational choice.
Sure, the robots to do the job are expensive and require handholding today but where are they going to be at the end of your four years? or in 10 or 15 years when you’re entering middle age. Does anyone think that there are going to be human bricklayers in 25 years?
Now, I don’t know a thing about bricklaying, so I could be greatly underestimating the amount of intellectual work that goes into it. But you really don’t want to be in an industry where your main competitive advantage over the robots is that they’re slow and expensive right now. Because robots only get faster and cheaper.
I think the backlash against (most) traditional college is going to come, but it’s going to come because alternative educational models (read: online schools) can deliver just as good an education at a fraction of the cost, with better measurement of abilities. Elite universities will survive (Harvard could live-stream and open source every single class and it wouldn’t matter, because people don’t go to Harvard to learn the things that Harvard teaches, they go to Harvard to be around other people who go to Harvard), but the bottom, say, 60% are in serious trouble.
We saved for our kid’s education and since my son chose tech school, over saved for it. So I filled out a FAFSA - more so the package was complete - and my daughter applied to a bunch of small private liberal arts colleges that were around $50-$70k a year tuition/room and board. Its a lot of money, but its why I spent their childhood’s working and wasn’t a stay at home mom - its there.
She got accepted to four schools (including her ED school - at which point she pulled out of the other schools - we still got several acceptances, but never heard from several more). And they all came with merit money. Almost all with a package that put them all within $5k of each other (remember, they started about $20k apart).
Now, the amount we will pay is still coming down to “pretty much unaffordable if you weren’t a two professional income household saving like anything for college or actually wealthy.” But it did drive home that the sticker price for college is not what people pay.
(Notable, she applied for schools that were in her sweet spot for GPA and test scores - she wasn’t applying for reach schools or schools where her record was exceptional. I would think that she wouldn’t have gotten as much aid at the first, and she would have gotten more at the second.)
Well, I can’t speak for the whole country, but all of Ohio is split up into career technical districts (separate from and usually larger than the standard school districts), each of which contains a school that offers trade training, and all students are eligible to go to such a school (though not all eligible students get in-- there’s some competitions for spots).
Now, not all districts offer all trade programs: My district, for instance, which covers four western suburbs of Cleveland, offers the three I mentioned (automobile maintenance, construction, and electronics) plus a few others, but does not have a metal shop. But there are definitely at least some options available.