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For us we had a big trade school you could go to for the last two years of high school. Normal school academic classes for one half of the day, the program of your choice for the other.
They had IT stuff, welding, auto repair, culinary etc. I went for EMS/Fire.
I still went to college. It's a cool social experience but holy fuck it's a bad financial move for most people. I'm glad I graduated debt free
I made the mistake of having avocado toast once and now I'll never be able to financially recover.
sucks to suck, I've lived in a shoebox eating dirt for 40 years and I'll probably own my shoebox one day.
Wow, that's the dream partner
Don't forget that most highschools also dropped any trades oriented classes too. So now if you want a decently paying career without a college degree then too fucking bad. They're trying to eliminate any alternative to the college debt shackle to make their worker drones more easy to manipulate and abuse.
So now if you want a decently paying career without a college degree then too fucking bad.
Go through college, fuck it up.
Go to job center.
"We want this specific blue collar job"
How do I get it
"Know the union guy or pay for a certification course"
Thanks fuckhead
Yeah, you basically need to luck into being hired at a place that's desperate enough to hire and attempt to train anyone off the street.
As far as the certs go though, at least in the US, most of the 100% legally required certs are pretty easy to get. Our regulators have been so defunded that there is very little effort put into beefing up the requirements. One example is that I'm in HVAC and that means I need my EPA 608 cert to handle refrigerants. I self studied with free online resources for less than a week, paid $80 for an online test, and got my 608 universal cert without issue. It's actually kinda scary how easy it is to get some of the certifications required to do jobs that have pretty major consequences if you screw them up. The only trade that seems to still have fairly strict requirements as far as training goes is electricians and that seems to be largely due to the unions enforcing it.
college debt shackle to make their worker drones more easy to manipulate and abuse.
They have a better one now. H1-Bs. Do what the boss says or you get fucking deported.
If my school system was typical, and I have no reason to believe it wasn't, what happened was that individual high schools dropped their trades oriented classes but the school system opened a dedicated vocational/"tech" high school. That means in order to take any such classes you'd have to completely switch schools, or at least drive there halfway through the school day or something. So, on top of having to arrange your own transportation instead of taking the school bus, you'd probably also have schedule conflicts and be forced to choose between the vocational classes and things like gifted/AP academic classes. And finally, you would also be disincentivized against that (at least in my social circle) by the stigma that only the stupid kids who couldn't hack the normal curriculum, troublemakers, and teen moms would go to an 'alternative' school (which was wrong in retrospect, of course, but the key phrase is "in retrospect").
To add insult to injury, my AP physics class was held in the classroom that used to be for the school's shop class. In addition to a whole bunch of intriguing CNC equipment and other neat science/engineering doodads scattered around the back and sides of the classroom, there was a huge attached storage room that had all the traditional woodworking power tools. And we never had the opportunity to use fucking any of it!
My school never split off trades classes into their own school. They just stopped hiring teachers for those classes.
But also, yeah I feel your second point. My old highschool still has an entire wing of the building filled with a full machining shop, a very well stocked wood shop, a CAD lab, and an automotive shop which all sit there entirely unused. They didn't even sell the machines off or move them. They just shut the lights off and stopped using those rooms.
You’re not wrong about schools, but also it’s not hard to get into the trades. I’m in the trucking industry so easiest example for me, but any of the big trucking companies will (usually) train you with the only cost being to work for them for a set period of time. Others will reimburse your trucking school costs. I make $70k. Could make more, but I like sleeping at home.
My father in law was a Boilermaker and the union offered on the job training. He was making in the $100k+ range before he passed.
May not be able to get a head start in the trades while in high school anymore, but it’s not difficult to join them. All of the trades are short on bodies to do the work, and as a result, are often quite happy to teach you.
Part of the issue though, and the reason trades are currently so desperate for people, is that it's never even presented as an option to kids anymore. With most trades you're going to get far more out of on the job training than you would with formal education anyways. But people need to know that it's an option. The classes aren't so much about giving kids a head start but rather about presenting them with the option and letting them see if it would be something they enjoy and could do.
I was lucky in highschool, we still had shop classes and a couple teachers that were passionate about the trades. It was presented as an option. But even then it was presented as an option for losers and outcasts. It was presented as something for those people who were too dumb or broke to go to college like a "normal" person. My dad was a tradesman so I personally knew that wasn't actually the case but many kids don't have that and go through school seeing trades as being something you do if you fail.
Like you said, you can get into most of trades fairly easily if you just apply at one of the places desperate enough to try training anyone off the street, which is most of them now a days. But people have to actually apply for those jobs. Right now our highschools not only don't present them as a realistic option, but they are actively hostile towards anything that isn't college orriented.
But even then it was presented as an option for losers and outcasts. It was presented as something for those people who were too dumb or broke to go to college like a “normal” person.
At the same time as kids were told "go to college or you won't have a job", back in the 90s/00s, lots of industrial jobs were either being shipped overseas or swamped with visa workers and gray market migrant laborers.
Pay in fields like construction, plumbing, and HVAC took a huge hit. So did a bunch of back office IT and accounting work. Pure race to the bottom as businesses consolidated and cartelized hiring rates.
Of course, the same thing was happening in professional management and technical careers. But it's less obvious you're getting screwed as a Developer earning $60/hr when your parents earned $120, than as a carpenter earning $25/hr when your parents would have earned closer to $80.
Are tech schools still a thing?
The tech schools from my area offered trade focused education paths like plumbing, drafting, auto, hairdressing, and few others.
So you could basically go to them, skip college, and go right into a trade.
I know quite a few people who did that and they seem to be doing okay now.
Not sure, but shop classes, carpentry, electrical/plumbing, mechanic, and those such classes were being cut when I was in highschool back in the mid 2000s. I think classes like that are usually what would open kids up to seeing that they may enjoy those trades.
I remember having all that in elementary school when I lived in New Jersey. Moved down to Texas and people looked at me like I was crazy when I explained we were using power tools and kilns and computers in 3rd grade.
Oh no! You don't get to go anything like that until high school! And this was in one of the wealthier suburbs.
Parents and school boards simply did not want to spend anything close to that kind of money to educate their kids.
The extra kick in the teeth is for those that for whatever reason couldn't/didn't go to college! All that messaging of "go to college or you're going to be worthless" just so happens to have the affect of making you feel completely worthless for not having a degree! All those years on online dating I'd pass on people that were educated and/or had good jobs because "why the hell would they be interested in a worthless uneducated factory worker." It's fun!
I have no debt, nor a house though, but I do have tons and tons of depression and self loathing!
This is how it went down for me:
My senior year, they herded us into the auditorium for a 45 minute presentation on how you would be a total failure and will be scrubbing toilets for all of your days if you didn't sign up for college RIGHT NOW. After that, you were put in line for the recruiter where you'd pick your school and your major. When it came my turn, I told them that I wasn't sure and was thinking of trade school. The recruiter said "oh." and sent me back to class. The school seemed to care a lot less about my academic well being after that exchange. The Military recruiters were VERY interested in how I was doing though. Being a teen during the 00's was wild.
Flipping burgers for us. There were only the two options. That or college. And a few minutes spent on talking to creditors if you can't pay the loan but DON'T WORRY ABOUT THAT YET just go to school the bills will take care of themselves.
20 years and 50k in as of yet unpaid student debt later for a piece of paper I never and will never use, I ended up going to trade school and getting it paid for by my employer entirely.
Now I have a better job, union representation, and almost no petty office bullshit. Had I entered the field after high school I'd be one of the most knowledgeable people in my field. But, it was college or burgers, they spent a lot of money to send that message as often as possible.
Very controlling and didn't care about what we wanted in my experience. Wanted to be an aerospace engineer. Got a great scholarship to the school I wanted to go to, told me they'd disown me and not help if I moved out of state and ever failed. Showed where all income was coming from as it was Kettering University so with the scholarship and their program was set up for co-op, so you'd do school and internships (they help set you up with them too) back and forth through till you finish your degree. Nope.
Instead just wanted to put doubts in my mind and force me to go to a local University with the promise they would help me pay for it instead. Told me if I joined the Marines or such to get school paid for they would be pissed as well, my Uncle told my mother that a lot of people do well working after getting out of the military as they often get first dibs on positions, my mother didn't talk to her brother for months.
They never paid a dime to the school they wanted me to go to, I never liked their programs.. and when I did finally graduate had between $30-40,000 in debt.. no internship experience and just kept trying to work in IT with the experience I had built without a degree. (No one accepted applications in other fields)
Maybe someone has agreed to hire me for having a degree, but really all of them have seemed to hire me because I had years of experience working and suppoting the software/hardware they needed/had. After all, the experience they want isn't taught in any class I took to get the degree.
Calls from a recruiter literally every week and a monthly drop by because apparently that's an ok thing to do.
Not only that, but they neutered secondary education to being basically just be college prep. It's almost impossible to just live comfortably on a HS education from the past ~25 years because of how useless the information is to real life.
I love taking my twice graduated college educated ass to job postings for my field and being offered $60k CAD for highly skilled work that requires both a bachelor's and about 5-10 years of experience to pay for my $40-50k worth of education. It's great!
I've been in the job market for a while and apart from not having a bachelors degree, I have most of the certifications and experience needed. But I did the math, I am unable to afford my bills (excluding things like fuel for my car and food for the table) on anything less than around $65-70k. I don't ask for much for everything else, but I generally need at least $75k a year to survive without starving or going bankrupt.
Life is expensive and it keeps getting more expensive, but the wages I saw posted over 10 years ago when I graduated, are the same wages I see now for the same or similar work. Since the cost of everything has increased significantly over that time, I just move on to other job postings.
Don't mention salary in the post? I'm not interested. Don't have an option for full time remote? No thanks. I don't want to spend hours of my life every week in traffic, spending hundreds of dollars a month on fuel, just so you can look me in the face and say "you look tired".... Yeah, because I'm forced to be here and I'm not able to do this work from home.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home? I don't understand.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home?
Control.
Exactly. It's basically "tell me you don't trust me as an employee, without telling me you don't trust me as an employee".
Americans are the poorest people I know with the most disposable income that seems to buy them nothing.
Come to Europe. You will be poorer and somewhat miserable, instead of regular poor and stressed.
Also:
I had no postsecondary interests, but my parents were the embodiment of this, yep yep.
Turns out taking random subjects you have no interest in doesn't result in success. Crazy. What did I want to do? Nothing. Still don't. Unioned Plant Operator it is.
Luckily that was in 2010 Canada. Wasn't much debt, just a waste of 3 years.
The money I spent on my education could have bought the roof, a ton of bootstraps to pull up, but probably not the electricity. :(
I'm just saying if mortgages were treated like student loans we'd actually be in a better place as a society.
Banks would fucking love this. They would be salivating at the idea that home loans can’t be discharged via bankruptcy.
I graduated into Bush's recession so naturally I doubled down and got a PhD. At least they pay you stipends to do that, even if I'm even less employable than ever! *Cries in millennial
I went to trade school after college. Now I get my hands dirty for work and out-earn all my higher educated friends - except the ones who also work in trades. I also don't need to worry about AI taking my job.
I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this but it isn't all rainbows and sunshine in the trades either, especially for the self employed.
When you're young it's fine but as you get older your body starts to wear out and dragging water heaters out of some crawlspace or running wire in a non air conditioned attic becomes harder.
Still, sitting for 8 hours a day a desk can be bad for you too I guess. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
It's pretty easy to extrapolate this to the whole concept of a full-time job being bad for you. It's not whether you're wearing out your body or your mind more, it's that modern life requires you to wear yourself out just to survive.
Our ancestors fought hard for the 40 hour workday not realizing we were just deciding the dimensions of our cage.
To be clear I am not mad at them or blame them. But it’s still true.
They talked me out of becoming an electrician because they thought that was a poor person's job
If somehow I was able to purchase a house where I live (was never possible), it would have gone up in value more then the money I have been earning working my jobs.
You got so woke since going to college!
Never felt so targeted in my fucking life.
College degrees still have better lifetime earnings on average.
I'm pretty tired of this broad anti-college brush that all the social media tools are spreading around. If someone is cluelessly going to college and can't figure out that a 6-figure degree for a $45k/yr job is a bad idea they should probably try a junior college economics class, first.
Now, before someone gets all bent out of shape: NO, college is not for everyone. Don't go to a $100k college for a job that earns $45k/yr, people don't need to go to UC San Diego, one of the most expensive colleges, to major in being a veterinary assistant. Nobody cares if someone went to a cheap college after their first job experiance. Yes, people should go to a trade school if that is the direction they'd rather go. If people don't have a direction in life that would be improved by a degree or trade, then good luck to them. No, the vast, vast majority are not going to be a rich influencer or youtuber, either, where they get to post how great not going to college was.
Social media wasn’t around back then to show them how college makes people gay, i.e. tolerant and open-minded. It’s hard to lump minorities into a stereotype you hate when you meet individuals, and they’re just people like you.
Plus, the promise of riches from a college education went out the window when it became less valuable than a boomer high school diploma.