The very point Kelly made in the initial post to this thread was that it is NOT at all clear.

Sixteen years ago, I was assigned to the "exceptional performer" audit of the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PHEAA). As a part of that audit, we reviewed loan files and it was absolutely astounding to see the number of borrowers in default, and the number of people just barely ahead of that status due only to various deferments and forbearances. I couldn't believe the number that carrried six figure debt burdens and weren't equipped with degrees that had clear career paths or high earnings potential. Most "studies" degree recipients don't end up in IT. Of course your success pales in comparison to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Michael Dell-all who quit college.

Quite frankly, your obsession with degrees is misplaced. You come off as an intellectual narcissist and a snob. Get over yourself, you aren't an MIT Phd.

I could just as easily look down on you for having only an undergraduate degree; and not having the motivation and chops to get a graduate degree as you look down on people who pursue technical or craft paths.

I just gathered with some friends last week when they were in town for the Hershey car show. One of them owned a small custom goods shop. His personal net worth is stratospheric. Most importantly, he's happy and can visit the grandkids whenever the hell he wants. That's "agency". When he asked me for some financial planning last year, I had to tell him he really needed a high new worth specialist.

Nowhere am I making value judgements.

I'm pointing out observed trends.

Value Judgements:

noun
an estimate, usually subjective, of the worth, quality, goodness, evil, etc., of something or someone.

"When I hire people, I look at college education not as an indicator of "can this person code", I look at it as a qualifier that "this person can do the varied things that college requires". Those are things like "showing up on time without mom or dad making you", "coherent short and long form writing", "exposure to people outside the town you grew up in", etc... all things that are required to be successful in the professional world."


As for why it's beneficial to wear a white collar instead of a blue one, it comes down to one big thing: people in the white collar world tend to have significant power over those in the blue collar one.

You're right about one thing, your degree was useless. Perhaps if you went to a better school like Penn State....

Looks like you are hitting 40 this year. Ever hear the old adage that a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but one that is a socialist at 40 has no head?

By the way, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Michael Dell proved you don't need any degree to succeed in IT.

You're arguing with a version of me that doesn't exist, man.

The plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence."

The reality is:
We can, if we take some quick trouble for research, produce mountains of "facts" (or at the very least, multitudes upon multitudes of "anecdotes") in support of that hypothesis:

College tuition rates, and other related costs (textbooks, housing, etc.) have increased over decades at an average of twice or more the national rates of inflation, while the endowments of major private universities have swelled to the hundreds of billions tax-free, with returns on investments that would trigger massive taxation were they private industries.
"Silly courses" is in the eyes of the beholders, but there are indisputably courses whose values can be heavily questioned or debated.
The faculties of major universities, in repeated national surveys, skew heavily leftward, with on average (in the studies I've seen) 85-95% Democratic membership and less than the remainder Republican (a few token Greens, Libertarians, etc.), with the few Republicans keeping their heads down (literally fearful of "outing" themselves) in such fields as engineering and science. Meanwhile, the University of Illinois recently paid controversial "anti-racism" author Ibram Kendi $35,000 for a mere 60-minute Q&A session, and also funded up to $10,000 in travel expenses, including a first-class airline ticket, hotel accommodations, and travel to and from the event, while the University of Virginia similarly paid him $32,500 for a different 60-minute Q&A session as part of the university’s "Racial Equity Speaker Series” with other speakers who argued America is “systemically racist.” Concurrently, students at many other universities, led by faculty members, have protested and blocked the speaking appearances of various right-wing/conservative speakers, and greeted the few others that made it to the podiums with loud and near-riotous protests. Or, the universities in question demand exorbitant security expenses be paid to protect such a speaker against the university's own students and faculty and their threats against the speaker--demands not made for favored "leftist" speakers. We could, if we chose, also discuss the multitudes of reports of professors rambling into long dissertations around "social justice," racism, and other "woke" topics having absolutely naught whatsoever to do with the supposed course subjects at hand........

All of this is in harsh contrast to the "free exchange/marketplace of ideas" stereotype that academia and higher education strove to present itself as in the past. The typical response to this by ideologues when presented with the evidence above is the tired canard "Truth has a liberal bias." No, it doesn't. But academia certainly does.

You wrote what you wrote. The funny thing is there's lots of people without degrees that didn't need Mom and Dad to get their card punched promptly every day.

It is tempting to repeat conspiracies and fears about certain forces or attitudes guiding education, especially the emphasis on college admission.

Remember that nearly all US public schools are controlled by an elected board. The retreat from trade school education started in the 1980s, in my school days. The real forces are plain as day. Since that retreat, there have been probably at least ten school board elections, maybe 20, depending on the term. Clearly the schools are doing what the voters want them to do.

What are the key performance statistics for most schools? The key statistics are those that attract new families. For the business community, school performance statistics are what promote the real estate market. Look at any house listing - there are school statistics in the information sheet.

The school goals and statistics are aspirational. New families seeking to buy a house have a vision of their children going off to college to become a doctor or marketing executive. They buy a house in a school district that supports those aspirational statistics. No matter than Sarah or Robert maybe are not really suited to those careers, and would be more successful as nurse or HVAC technician.

So the local Chamber of Commerce has influence and pushes the schools to drive those college admission statistics up. So your local guidance counselor is just doing what they need to do to get a positive employment review and support those goals.

I went to school at a high school in a wealthy midwestern suburb. The school had an enormous metal shop and foundry, but this did not support the key performance goals of selling expensive homes to aspirational families that wanted their children to go to State U or Princeton and become lawyers or bankers. The shop was gone a few years later.

Having said that, I am one of those students who went on to aspirational Big University. So the school served my needs. I loved the shop class, but no university showed any interest in it on my application.

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I must disagree. Those non-relevant courses are a big difference between a university and a vocational school.

Those courses are intended to give people an understanding of the broader world. For example, why the whole pronoun thing exists, or what foreign dictators actually mean when they use words like "Novorossiya" to talk about their foreign policies, and what that means for our own collective defense.

I learned to solder well (to aerospace standards) and design and machine components well at an Ivy League school, and not as part of being in an engineering school. (I still have the cannon to prove it!)

Kelly's issue has little if anything to do with 'liberal bias in academe' or whatever. As I recall he was pointing out that you could make a good living, support a family, and inspire your children without having to have academic credentials, or having to convince anyone of intellectual bona fides or whatever. I would add that you don't have to learn management skills as part of an MBA program to effectively run a shop or shop business -- but you do have to learn and then retain those skills, whether at Hart-Knox or some specialized 'now-free' community college. Included in this is hiring, training, and employee management, none of which in my experience is anything like what I was taught on the subject nearly 40 years ago.

I personally would appreciate it if we could keep this discussion free of vitriol. Especially with respect to "discussions" of supposed left-wing programming or slipping politicized academic standards. What Kelly was proposing is a parallel, respected track to "college" as being high-school-plus-four-years-because-high-school-isn't-getting-their-job-done-enough... which has come to be the real problem with employment requiring a 'college degree'.

Now, would I like to see liberal-arts-style distribution requirements for "trade"-oriented schools? Yes. Do I think they should be mandatory? ...well, perhaps. The key is to provide the resources and framework for what you'd do to 'learn to think' at a typical liberal-arts college, and the encouragement to make use of them outside learning the current state of the art in a blue-collar trade.

There is currently a heavy trade emphasis in the areas of manufacturing I follow to train nominally blue-collar workers in modern methods and technologies, particularly for what we boomers used to call multiaxis CNC machining and 'materials science'. Most of this will be continuing education, if not OJT programs on a regular basis, and these are in fact available and rapidly developing -- in fact, these in themselves are growth opportunities for those with 'the right stuff' in blue-collar career tracks.

The mission of public grade-school education used to be to teach things--math, writing, spelling, history, etc.

The mission of trade schools was, and remains, to teach how to do things and how to think about what to do with those things (how to diagnose a car fault or select metal for a task, for example).

The mission of higher education used to be summed up as teaching "critical thinking," and how to apply those "things" you learned back in grade school. Whatever your degree was in, if you didn't learn "how to think," you were a failure.

Unfortunately today, too much of "higher education" instead focuses on what to think and how to feel to conform to a certain expectation of the majority of academia--and much of that mission appears to be creeping down into lower education as well.

It is very unfortunate that this thread has become a political, educational and social status debate. This topic is very relevant today. Every single employer I know in my area, and even most vendors and customers beyond, can't find enough skilled labor. Hatch your own theories about why, but there are many reasons, most of which don't need to be debated here.

What I experienced in the somewhat wealthy Michigan town I was raised in was that the high schools actually discouraged anything but attending college. Without actually saying the words, they hinted at the fact that you would never succeed and live in a trailer park. The councilors, some teachers, and even parents over sold it like a broker selling a yacht to first time boat owners. Lots of promises of success, with little or no emphasis on the actual "personal effort" required, or financial commitment required. Very few people that I went to school with that pursued, and earned, a college degree work in a field that utilizes it. Timing and the economy did play a big role in that, though.

This was a bit of an extreme situation, but I don't believe it was isolated to our area. Over the years I have talked to many people across the country that experienced similar situations.

For various reasons Jr High and High Schools have become college prep machines and eliminated most of the industrial training that used to be available, although some of that is changing. Even some music and arts programs have been cut or scaled back. Real estate, school funding, image and tax base all play a big part in this, combined with an attitude of parents wanting their kids to do better than they, with less physical work. Good, bad, right or wrong, here we are. Like my dad has always said, everything in life is a swinging pendulum. We reached an extreme opposite from the peak of America's industrial revolution workforce and it will begin to swing back the other way.

I just hope we can learn something from it moving forward.

Full disclosure: I started going to college, mostly because i was talked into it. When the field that I was going into took a dark turn I re-evaluated the value of a degree and decided to exit that route. I then continued in the job I had been working since I was 12 and eventually grew it into my own business. I enjoy what I do and do what I enjoy. I am glad I spent some time in college and, to this day, find extreme value in the psychology classes I took. I wish the K-12 schools would put as much effort into the kids that choose not to go to college as they do for those who choose to.

E

Only if you are stupid enough to let it, or choose accordingly.

The function of a well-rounded academic program is to expose the student to other things that, indirectly, affect the rest of his or her thinking and education. Colleges used to mandate, as examples, elective exposure to writing and literature and history to engineering students, or exposure to sciences and math to humanities students. Because otherwise, you're just going to a more expensive "trade school" to learn a different craft by rote. My electives included psychology, sociology, music appreciation, meteorology, photography, and the philosophy of logic--none of which really lent themselves to Trivial Pursuit (nor does the cliche of "Basket Weaving" supposedly given to professional athletes posing as "students"--whereas "Marvel/DC Comics As 20th-Century Mythology" might help).

We are paying the price nationally for collective ignorance in matters such as history and critical thinking when we see young people rallying to fight what they claim is "Fascism" by, ironically ADOPTING tactics actually used by the self-proclaimed "Fascists" of the early 20th Century..........

Damn, three pages now and nobody stopped to think what any of this has anything to do with.. ya know..... actual PRESERVATION? I applaud the OP for laying down the best bait on this boomer message board.



Thanks for coming in today!

Because as organizations and museums loose what skilled older volunteers/employees they have to time, not enough new, younger people are filling their places with even basic skills. This same problem is happening in certain manufacturing sectors and because companies are short staffed, certain products are being cut back or discontinued that may support certain preservation areas in favor of recent or current production parts.