Basically the title. Do you believe that the heavy emphasis of going to a 4-year college over going to trade school(s), was way overdone, and has hurt us more than helped at this point?
Basically the title. Do you believe that the heavy emphasis of going to a 4-year college over going to trade school(s), was way overdone, and has hurt us more than helped at this point?
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Basically the title. Do you believe that the heavy emphasis of going to a 4-year college over going to trade school(s), was way overdone, and has hurt us more than helped at this point?
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still is, often.
To a degree yes, not everyone should go to college, but I still would say a large majority of people benefit from the structure (instead you go off for 4 years trying to find a job or working on projects etc) that university gives you even if they don’t end up using their exact major. Imo the issue isn’t college vs trades, it’s that we framed college as the only respectable route, and I think that’s the bigger issue.
Yes I do, when I was in high school you were more orbless told “if you don’t go to college you will be a broke fast food worker for life” no one told us about trades (I can’t say this for kids who took auto or ag courses as electives) I don’t know if I would have done a trade had I been told trade schools were legitimate as college, but Insure wouldn’t have floundered in college like indie either.
No. If anything, I’d say the opposite. I was constantly told growing up that college is a waste of money and only for sissies who don’t have real skills. I still have to defend my education regularly.
Yes. The people who are doing their best in their 30’s that I know from high school didn’t get a six-figure liberal arts degree. They went to trade school.
Definitely though it’s also complicated
The whole “college isn’t the only acceptable route, various alternatives like trades and such are also good” has been around for many years. Just turns out that even many parents who will post something like that on Facebook tend to still push their kids towards college. Also in schools, most teachers, even the ones sympathetic to those ideas, come from the college path, and so just have more experience preparing students for college vs other alternatives, and have more contacts with college programs and college-k-12 partnerships and such, so they can very effectively provide guidance to help students on the college path, while when it comes to helping students who lean more towards the alternative paths, these teachers will genuinely sincerely and honestly offer platitudes of “it’s absolutely ok to do alternatives to college and go for trades instead!” and then have very little to actually say about that other than those platitudes
yes, 100%
Yes. College education is now an arbitrary barrier to many jobs that would not require one in any practical sense. The government also enabled this by flooding the higher education sector with government money (backing unsecured student loans), which led to inflated tuition and a student debt crisis
Absolutely not. I believe an education is the single most important gift a person can receive, no matter your final occupation. Being educated is almost always better. There was a study that came out last year which showed a positive correlation between years in education and additional years of being alive.
I know I’m an idealist but I think everyone would benefit from having a more educated society, blue collar workers would benefit from business degrees or science degrees as much as white collar ones.
Of course the huge issue is like everything else in this country someone decided it would be a good idea to squeeze every penny out of potential college students and a whole political party spent twenty years trying to sow doubt against expertise and now we’re here.
The universities are not without blame, they shoulder a large part of it.
College has become mostly a right of passage for most people. Most people end up doing a job they did not go to school for but many of these jobs still require a degree of some sort. Any degree opens up a lot more doors but don’t expect it to be your golden ticket to your dream job.
I would like to put more emphasis of community college. It allows students to figure out exactly what they want to do before going to a 4 year college and getting by a specific degree. Most community college students I know are the ones who actually give a shit about what they are learning and have put it to good use. And it’s less money.
So yes. Specifically I think it was too encouraged without tempering it with reality such as educating that intended history major that the most common job available to them will be teaching. Or that intended psychology grad that she will need a masters or even doctorate to do what she’s wanting to do. And also degree mills and even unaccredited programs masquerading as legitimate colleges were super commonduring this era to the point that I remember my high school, one of the best in the state, allowed two unaccredited schools to pitch to us the students. This only devalued education even more.
That said, I feel like we have gone too far in the other direction now. Every high school kid asking for advice these days gets at least 3 commenters telling them to just go to trade school and I’m honestly suspicious that a good portion of those commenters are jaded college grads who have never worked a trade in their life because they never temper that advice with the reality of working a trade. It’s like the trades have become the new one size fits all option.
No, I think “get a college education for a better paying job” was pushed too hard.
I use the knowledge I acquired while pursuing my degree every single day. I have skills now that help me better manage my personal finances, I have the knowledge needed to broadly assess financial markets and make informed decisions with risk, computer skills to help every single “not a computer person” in my family- and all that just from general education requirements at my university. It has improved my life. Knowledge is power everyone should have.
Yes and no. I don’t think there is anything wrong with encouraging Americans to go to college, but I do think it shouldn’t push us into debt.
If the words were interpreted as college for everyone no matter what, yes. It’s not for everyone and people ended up in debt with no degree. If the words were interpreted as you have the skills for college and it’s your best bet out of poverty, no. College degrees do translate to better lifetime earnings outcomes in most cases. So, I still think college is useful and necessary for many kids and for our society as a whole. Even if college isn’t for some, some type of post-secondary education (technical school, apprenticeship, etc.) is necessary. As an aside, technical schools also preyed on kids and left them hanging eith debt and no skillset. We can’t tell kids college and student loans are the end of the world and leave them with no post-secondary skillsets at all. Everyone needs to do something even if it’s not the thing you do for the rest of your life.
Absolutely. But even more important is to persuade businesses that a college degree isn’t the most important thing when considering a candidate for hire.
As a country we need to heavily invest in trades including AI, coding, robotics, HVAC, plumbing, electrical engineering, and STEM. Some of it would traditionally be called “trades” and some “college,” but the defining characteristic should be preparing young people for the careers of the future.
I dont think the issue is that we recommended college for everyone. It’s that we made it expensive and inaccessible.
I dunno. I remember the military was also a possibility and I think there were recruiters that went to my school. I don’t remember ever seeing any recruiters from trade schools ever.
And there’s a kind of middle path (one that I did take) between trade and four-year with community college, which has both trade programs and also allows transfer to four year university.
This question is asked outside of a generational/age context.
I’m 44. I came along basically at the crossroads when things were changing away from college really opening doors and more so towards saddling people with debt and rejection letters for not having enough “work experience.” Any time you push people towards one thing, it gets oversaturated. So, you would have had that problem pushing people to trade schools, you have it to some degree with just having a college degree in general, and you now have that problem with having pushed people towards law school, IT/computer science, programming, nursing, business/MBAs.
My older sisters don’t have the problem with college having done them more harm than good like I do, and neither do my parents. And when I say college did me more harm, it’s truly a domino effect. Like, trouble finding jobs, going to law school in part because of that, tons of debt, more trouble finding jobs, moving back in with parents, not being able to afford a house and car or to live in a better city/state, not being able to attract women because of pretty much all of the aforementioned, people being judgmental about pretty much all of the aforementioned severing relationships with friends who did well after college/law school, etc. Stuck alone and poor, essentially.
I think so, yes.
In my opinion, I think that this upcoming generation has had fuck-all when it comes to career guidance prior to college. All they’re being told is to “Go to college, get a degree, get a job, win at life” and that’s about it. They’re not being told that you can waste a fuckton of time and money going to college if you aren’t focused on a particular field and/or a field that isn’t lucrative.
Now this isn’t me saying that college is a scam, far from it. If you’re going in to be a doctor, accountant, lawyer, etc, college is the way in. It provides a great network for people to start their careers in those kinds of fields.
But to the average joe american that isn’t doing any of that, well…. college isn’t gonna help you much, at least not attending a high dollar university that will get you a degree that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
And this is me ignoring the elephant in the room:
College is way too fucking expensive for what it is.
In a perfect world where college is affordable (Like it used to be) I’d recommend everyone to enroll. Unfortunately we’re not in that world right now. At most I’d recommend a significantly cheaper community college where you can start getting credits while you figure out what you want to do.
I think the problem is employers leaning too hard on it rather than people getting it. Especially with the way a university education has become basically a commodity it’s not a good indicator for a lot of jobs anymore.
Some degrees are worth more than others in terms of job prospects and potential earnings. If you have a degree and make the same as someone without a degree, then I’d say it isn’t worth it.
That whole notion of “do what you love and everything will work out fine” is a crock of shite. Find a line of work where there is demand for your skills. Then you can afford to do what you love in your free time.
mixed feelings. I think there’s fundamental value in an education and in an educated populace, period, but there’s also something like credential obsession / inflation happening over time. more and more jobs require degrees (sometimes masters or even PhD) for roles you could learn on the job. it just seems stupid to me. plus I’m a bit older, so of the generation where we didn’t NEED this when we entered the work force, and honestly working with younger people whose entire self-worth has been contorted around their ability to get straight As is kind of depressing. they are so smart and competent, drowning in insane amounts of debt, and doing jobs they don’t even really like. for what? the privilege of renting for the rest of their life?
anyway I know that’s a tired line to put forth, I just feel bad for them. I think people are often also too wistful about trades, but I understand it — there’s a bit of… well, not to be too Marxist, but… people feel alienated from the products of their labor. there are plenty of people who have degrees they put to good use that were completely necessary for what they do, but there are plenty who have one they don’t use. if you’re overeducated and in a cushy email job, where you’re primarily “generating shareholder value” or whatever, it’s such an empty existence, why wouldn’t you eventually dream of actually fixing a real problem? that’s why ambitious rich people are always fucking things up, they get bored.
mostly I would prefer if it were 1) cheaper (free ;)) to get an education and 2) easier to retrain or go back to school once you’re older / mid-career / looking to change. at a minimum there needs to be more flexibility in the system and a wider variety of desirable potential outcomes presented.
The biggest loss in society with the college education push is the lack of companies providing a career path to entry level candidates who are phenomenal in a workplace environment, but do horrible in formal education for one reason or another.
Most definitely.
Lots of good jobs don’t require a college degree, but they do because it’s so easy to find people with degrees. Often times it doesn’t matter what the degree is and so a degree is not needed.
Colleges have become diploma mills, rather than institutions for learning and discovery. Many students don’t care about learning and colleges are treated like a business.
For the record, I love academia and it’s what formed my view on this matter. I’m in favor of free tuition and everyone having an opportunity to go to college. I just don’t want colleges to lose sight of their purpose and I don’t think a college degree should be needed for jobs that don’t require one. I know too many idiots with a four year degree who are undeserving and who are better fits for jobs that don’t require much thinking. Most of them voted for Trump.
Short answer? Yes. American society oversold the benefits and necessity of a college degree.
During my K-12 years of 1983-95, the four-year college degree was sold by pretty much every educator I had and most of the adults I knew in those years as the ticket from the factory floor to the offices upstairs all of the rest of the trappings that made up the American dream.
I don’t think that this was any sort of evil conspiracy to saddle us Gen X kids up with debt. Simply, it was the advice my parents and teachers knew to be true. It’s important to remember that few people outside of select board rooms or think tanks could foresee how drastically the workforce would evolve by the time we were entering the workforce. And it was good business for the colleges who were offering all kinds of degrees.
My parents, to their credit, knew how I liked learning and was intellectually-curious but chafed at the formal drudgery that was school. I didn’t have to go to college, they told me time and again, but I had to finish high school. My dad had a four-year degree, and then art school before getting a job in advertising.
My mom didn’t finish her degree, but would go on to start her own interior design business. She worked with all sorts of skilled tradespeople who for the most part did not go to college. And a lot of them seemed to have nice houses and fat wallets, particularly if they owned their own businesses.
I ended up getting a four-year degree. I’m glad I stuck it out instead of quiting and going to work for a dot-com, as some people were doing in the late 90s, because when the economy went south a few years later, I could at least point to something and show people that I finished it.
No, there is still a very large wage premium for going to college and it would still make sense to go to college in the long term if you can manage it. Trade school should also be pushed but that’s another story.
I think the part where people feel like the rug was pulled from under them was thinking they would make so much money that they could live comfortably in the most in-demand cities with a single family house, two cars and kids, along with every other college educated household wanting to do the same thing. Check out r/salary for multi-six figure individuals calling themselves poor because of this situation.
Of course, there is still the housing crisis because we aren’t building which is causing housing prices to skyrocket , but it’s not getting solved when every millennial wants to live in a dual car single family house.
I think there was (/is?) too much pressure to go to college, but I also think my generation (in my thirties, to give you some context) was also sold this vision of college that wasn’t really realistic or worthwhile. Specifically, that you go to college for X degree, then work in X for your career. A lot of the benefits of college have very little to do with whatever degree you end up with. It’s far more important to network, learn critical thinking skills, research methods, and gain opportunities to explore a variety of interests. We tended to get ourselves pigeonholed into a certain ‘track’ and ignored opportunities to actually gain valuable skills, all under the impression that you were learning the hard technical skills that your first job will want to retrain you on first thing anyway.
Not really, no. It’s just that employers are pushing back harder right now. They want to depress wages for non-executives.
No. I grew up hearing about trade schools side by side with 4-year college degrees. I’d say the problem was that while college education was pushed, there was perhaps less effort trying to funnel people into certain career paths.
And maybe if we did a better job of getting people college educations, like through better public funding for higher education to increase supply and access, problems like our manufacturing worker shortage and these dumbass tariffs to make the shortage even worse wouldn’t be such a big problem. Maybe we wouldn’t have so many people who only want to do specific car manufacturing work or mine coal or whatever to the point of getting on board with making all this Republican bullshit happen. But no, instead of beating China, Republicans want to create an army of Americans to screw together iPhones and leave everyone with less disposable income to buy them.
No. From what I’ve read the benefits of having a degree vs not having a degree have just been growing. People can do okay with a trade school certificate because so few people are doing it, but I don’t know if those jobs would be worthwhile if we were pushing lots of people into them, especially considering the additional toll they tend to take on people’s bodies.
No.
This narrative that it’s a problem only came about when black and brown people started entering college at record numbers…now all of a sudden a college degree or even ivy league education has no more cultural value. When it was all WASPY it was the Key to the City.
No, although the job market did begin to set 4 year degree standards for what was previously high school graduate standards.
Education beyond high school should be very desired for trade schools or colleges or whatever, but the entire job market and school system are overdue for major reform. Paid training should be optional for certain areas like medicine and education beginning in high school. Colleges should include a system that allows more paid apprenticeships while not requiring classes that are not needed.
I don’t think it was pushed too hard, but it’s not for everyone, and never was. What is fair to say is that the college-educated and those who are involved with higher education clearly underestimated the angst and anger of those who are not college-educated.
I don’t think it was pushed enough. Getting a college education is one of the best things you can do for your life. The data bears this out, as college grads on average live longer and earn more than non-college grads.
I think this conversation needs more nuance to it, and I’m also not bashing the trades. I have friends who are tradesman and live nice middle class lives.
College is not a job training program. If you’re doing undergrad with the idea that you’re preparing for a specific career, you’re wasting your time and money. What you do with your education after you graduate, and the connections you make along the way matter more.
Also you don’t need to break the bank going to fancy private schools if you can’t afford to. There are plenty of solid state and local schools you can attend, which won’t put you in crushing debt for the rest of your life.
The trades are fine, however as most tradesman have told me it’s not for everyone and is very risky. First off you don’t make real money for at least 10 years in many cases. Secondly much of the work wears down your body, so IF you last long enough to reap the rewards you will likely be dealing with a host of injuries. Finally, do you really want to be climbing into tight spaces and lifting heavy objects in your 60’s?
Don’t get me wrong, my grandfather was a tradesman who built several houses. It’s incredible to have those skills, at the same time I’ve seen to toll it takes. I fear this new narrative of “you don’t need college, just join the trades” may be a bit overblown. Funny enough, when I talk to tradesemen who’ve worked on my home, most of them are putting their kids through college. So take that for what it’s worth.
I think it depends on your community/upbringing. Like, in the town where I grew up (very affluent and overwhelmingly white), I felt that options besides “go straight to a 4-year college” were presented as inherently lesser. That’s a problem because it’s a classist attitude and I think it’s morally wrong, even though I ultimately am glad I went to college because I like learning.