But I'm not downing the other education either. Plumbing, which is what my father was. Carpentry. Electrician and so on. An apprenticeship is a great start.
Yeah, but the trouble is that so many people have been told they have to go to college for so many years that those other jobs that require skilled workers were being left by the wayside.
Besides............there is ALWAYS going to be a need for plumbers, carpenters and electricians. Those with a degree in business or philosophy? Not so much.
I guess so. No one ever told me to go to college. I worked on an assembly line and one day, I received a notice from the Army that if I didn't use my student benefits, they would no longer be available. I really didn't know what to take. The most respected jobs in the company were engineering, so that's what I signed up for. At the time, the engineering department was still using slide rule, hand calculator, electric eraser and so on. They had bought two 386sx PC's with 17 inch monitors. When they found out I was talking these college courses with CAD, they moved me into engineering.
But until I moved into engineering, everyone told me to quit. I was deluding myself. That I would fail. It was ugly. Then when I moved into engineering, they were telling me that for some reason, the company gave me a gift and I was so undeserving.
But no one can compete with a computer. Rework went from close to 50% on new projects to 2 or 3 pieces. And that completely changed engineering. In one year, except for a couple of people in electrical, the entire department turned over and I became the CAD Manager.
20 years later, I was the senior design engineer, I paid off my 56 grand from loans for University courses, even with the GI Bill. I saved up enough to buy the two flat I live in, in cash and now at 63, I'm retired. Within a week after retirement, I had two job offers.
So no one can tell me education isn't valuable. I know better. And anyone who says it isn't valuable, in my experience, has been a Republican.
