My youngest starts college in the fall, we'd set aside enough to put three kids through college, the first two blew it off. What are you other people doing wrong that you can't pay for college? Oh yea, getting $40,000 liberal arts degrees and ending up working at McDonalds...
That said, businesses, you know the people who hire for "real" jobs, in most cases (aside from highly specialized fields like medical, education, and the like) say they'd rather see a potential employee with a 2 year from a trade school than 4 years at a university - because the trade school tends to teach actual skills the employer is looking for (vs classes like "Communism 101," "Socialism 101," and the latest craze "How to overthrow the President" which are not very friendly to businesses... or the US, but there is apparently some debate on the latter.)
I love how people who hate education think that the silver bullet to jobs (BTW - we are at full employment and have been since the last month of Obama) is for those to just resign themselves to service jobs. This is just more of the right-wing plan to turn this country into a quasi-serfdom where we all work in service of a wealthy few. We shouldn't be encouraging people to skip college so they can unclog pipes. We should be encouraging people to
go to college so they can innovate. For all the people with Bachelor's who work at McDonald's (and that's not many but rather an exaggeration of a debunked myth much like the fictional "welfare queen"), that is rhetoric used to discourage people from getting an education. So why do so many do that? Simple; they hate the fact that public education does not treat religion as a science, and thus, they hold a grudge against Public Education because they see it as undermining their faith. Which would make them a bunch of *******
snowflake cucks!
How will steering people to become plumbers and landscapers lead to innovation? It won't. These "real" jobs you are describing are not "real jobs". They're just jobs. No more or no less than any other job. The average plumber's wage in this country is $43k. The average
median income in this country is $52k. So by pushing people to low-skill jobs, all you are doing is lowering the median income in the country, and even driving wages down further for those "real jobs" because you've oversupplying them without requisite demand. Which means those folks have to compete with one another for a job, which means lower fees from clients, which means lower wages for workers.
So, if your goal is to set the bar so low that this country is filled with a bunch of service workers, then your rhetoric makes sense. Hard to see how good, high-paying jobs come from a surplus of not-so-good, low-paying, manual labor jobs. Oh also, folks who work in skilled trades generally have to retire
earlier because of the physical limitations for workers as they get older. So in your grand plan to push people to be stupid, are you lowering the retirement age to account for this surge in manual laborers who can't work past age 55 because their bodies just won't? Probably not, right? If anything, you want to
raise the retirement age, forcing 70 year olds to perform taxing manual labor.
Did you ever think of that? No. You only think about yourself.
No my /advice/ is to think about what you are doing and make a decision based on the amount of debt you'll encur vs the availability of the job you want. Paying $40k for an architecture degree in a rural area when you don't have concrete plans to move to some urban area such a degree would be useful (and where such skills are needed as well because not all cities are wanting architects) is a /bad/ investment. Many of these kids are spending tens of thousands of dollars they don't need to spend for the jobs that are available in their area. A 2 year degree from a trade school is typically half as expensive (if not less) and you still get the benefit of having a degree (aka the leg up on other employees) without blowing a shit ton of money to work at a coffee shop. ONLY kids who have a vision of climbing the corporate ladder, and have the real dedication to that purpose (meaning willing to leave friends / bfs / gfs / family behind to go to where said career is needed should even /consider/ paying for a 4+ year degree. If you're not interested or willing to move out of driving distance of rural desert Arizona, then a degree in Igloo building is not a good investment. Etc.
You're the one that's clinging to a myth here; that going to college automatically awards you more pay - it was at some point true, and it "seems" true still because the stats count all the older folks (from when it was true) but it is no longer actually true...
"Reading through the report, you find no evidence of the fact that large numbers of college graduates can only find employment in jobs paying the minimum wage. Currently, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data,
260,000 people with college or even professional degrees are so employed. Moreover, the percentage of college graduates who work in jobs that donāt require any advanced academic preparation (the āmal-employedā) has been rising for years, and now stands at
36 percent. If college degrees are becoming more valuable, why are so many graduates either unemployed or employed at low-paying jobs?" -
College Degrees Aren't Becoming More Valuable -- Their Glut Confines People Without Them To A Shrinking, Low-Pay Sector Of The Market
Itās harder for new graduates to find good jobs. Itās no secret that unemployment among recent grads remains higher than it was before the Great Recession. But in
a recent report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York went deeper and looked at
underemployment among recent grads (defined as people aged 22 to 27 with at least a bachelorās degree). The Fed researchers used data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine whether employed grads were in jobs that typically required a college degree, what those jobs paid, and whether they were working full- or part-time. They found that in 2012, about 44% of grads were working in jobs that didnāt require a college degree ā a rate that, while about what it was in early 1990s, increased after the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions. Only 36% of that group were in what the researchers called āgood non-college jobsā ā those paying around $45,000 a year ā down from around half in the 1990s. The share of underemployed recent grads in low-wage (below $25,000) jobs rose from about 15% in 1990 to more than 20%. About one-in-five (23%) underemployed recent grads were working part-time in 2011, up from 15% in 2000. -
5 facts about todayās college graduates
Hereās what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isnāt a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. Thereās a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market. This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in todayās economy donāt require a college degree. āIndeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills,ā Capelli said in his study. Given all the non-economic benefits to a college education, itās hard to call having too much education a āproblem,ā but in light of Capelliās findings, itās worth noting that women are the ones who are getting educated. Women now earn about 60 percent of the roughly 1 million bachelorās degrees granted each year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And about 30 percent of all women above age 25 have a college degree or more, according to the Census Bureau. (About 80 percent of women age 25 to 29 have a
high school degree.) Those degrees, however, arenāt translating into good jobs. Which means that maybe Sallyās problem isnāt because sheās not qualified for the job, but, instead, is because Sally has skills that employers donāt want. -
Why Sally canāt get a good job with her college degree
"The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the premier government source for information on jobs, shows that only
27 percent of jobs (percentage calculated from table 2) in the U.S. economy currently require a college degree (associate degree or higher). By comparison, the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that 47 percent of workers have an associate degree or higher. The BLS projections to 2022 are even more depressing. They suggest that the number of overqualified and underemployed college graduates will only get worse. According to BLS, the economy will create
50.6 million job openings by 2022 and only 27.1 percent will require college degrees. Thatās a projected increase of only 2.1 percentage points since 1996." -
Can the economy absorb more college-educated workers?
