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High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads Line Up For University (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: While a shortage of workers is pushing wages higher in the skilled trades, the financial return from a bachelor's degree is softening, even as the price -- and the average debt into which it plunges students -- keeps going up. But high school graduates have been so effectively encouraged to get a bachelor's that high-paid jobs requiring shorter and less expensive training are going unfilled. This affects those students and also poses a real threat to the economy. "Parents want success for their kids," said Mike Clifton, who teaches machining at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, about 20 miles from Seattle. "They get stuck on [four-year bachelor's degrees], and they're not seeing the shortage there is in tradespeople until they hire a plumber and have to write a check."
In a new report, the Washington State Auditor found that good jobs in the skilled trades are going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor's degrees. Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance -- including choices that require less than four years in college -- start as early as the seventh grade. "There is an emphasis on the four-year university track" in high schools, said Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report. Yet, nationwide, three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven't earned degrees within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. At four-year private colleges, that number is more than 1 in 5.
In a new report, the Washington State Auditor found that good jobs in the skilled trades are going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor's degrees. Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance -- including choices that require less than four years in college -- start as early as the seventh grade. "There is an emphasis on the four-year university track" in high schools, said Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report. Yet, nationwide, three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven't earned degrees within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. At four-year private colleges, that number is more than 1 in 5.
In my 20 years of working in software development, a bachelor's degree and any further is a waste of time. The best coders I've worked with are musicians as well as coders. I work in an investment bank in the risk department, I've worked on a number of systems where the Quants (all with PhDs in maths or physics) developed a prototype in C++ and mocked when we said we'd build the real system in Java. However our systems in all of the projects were at least a magnitude faster than the Quant systems, not because Java is faster than C++, but because the development team knew how to code for performance. Coding is incredibly complicated, to be good, only experience pays.
Dum spiro spero
Get an electrical, civil, or mechanical engineering degree. Best of all worlds... In some states, this cuts years off the apprenticeship time needed to become a tradesman like an electrician, plumber, or general contractor. You can also go for a PE certification and eventually manage building/renovation sites.
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$50k/yr in Seattle in 2018 is not high paying. This is a young guy with no real bills yet. No kid's college fund, parents still alive to help out with the occasional emergency like a totaled car. Not trying to buy a house in a neighborhood with good schools. Etc, etc.
I've read the median needed for a stable middle class life is around $100k. I'm making close to that after 40 years of struggling and I can tell you it's about right. You don't realize how hard it is when you haven't spent the first 20 working years building wealth.
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The reason for this is the current generation looks down on blue collar work thinking that its beneath them. This myth is propagated by many high schools with the elimination of shop and auto mechanics classes.
No.
The reason for this is protectionist unions. Trades are protected by unions that have trade walls up to prevent people from entering the profession. You should be able to take a practical test and become a plumber or electrician. Instead you have to spend years working with someone who belongs to a group with more power in the union (i.e. someone already in the field which is self-regulating). It's a ridiculous barrier to entry that costs the public a fortune.
Unions have a place. Deliberately hurting consumers and stifling competition in order to raise prices is and should be investigated as an act in restraint of trade under the anti-trust laws.
8 years of undergrad (long story) and I heard that on several occasions at my west-coast state university. Moreso after going back in the 2008-2011 time frame than in the late 90s time frame.
I was in a lot of humanities classes and the comments invariably came from the more left-wing professors. Ironically, it wasn't the pure thought ones (I ended up with a Philosophy BA), but the Political Science/Sociology ones that were usually the worst.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Blue collar jobs like that are really hard friggin' work. Really hard work. There is a reason your grandfather encouraged your father to go to college instead of following in his footsteps. It's because the work really sucks. And if you are injured on the job, disability pays 50% what you were making and you don't have an education or skills to fall back on anything else. And you will lose your health care. And retirement plan.
These jobs suck. Go to college.
A lot of people like to dismiss a college education as too abstract, overly intellectual, etc. and it can be. But, skilled trades have a tendency to have a pay cap and less room for upward mobility once you hit it. In fact, unless you're in a strong-union state and are working for union employers, there's bound to be downward pressure on wages from people who are willing to work for less. Unionized trade jobs are the only ones where you have a chance at a full career's worth of compensation progression.
Both a college degree and a trip through trade school/apprenticeship are lottery tickets for life. You can only buy one, hoping it will pay off, and it doesn't for everyone. Some plumbers/electricians make more than I do and own a business that allows them way more financial freedom than I have. Some are stuck in the equivalent of gig-economy world doing handyman-type jobs. And, some people graduate from college and end up doing very well...while others either drop out or don't pick up any marketable skills along the way. (If you really win the education lottery and get into an Ivy League school, there are opportunities that just aren't available to anyone else such as investment banking and management consulting...and once you're in that club you can't really fail too badly.)
Given the choice, I'd still choose to do a bachelors' degree. Unless you're going into academics, anything more is too much. I barely use any of my formal education in my job (BS in chemistry, and i do systems engineering work.) But it did get me in the door, and it's essentially the minimum standard now for all non-trade jobs. One thing I do think post-secondary education helps with is maturing kids to a certain degree. A stint in the military would do this too, and maybe a good apprenticeship program would. But, having a bridge from childhood to adulthood where you're allowed to make a few stupid mistakes that aren't life-altering can be a good thing.
Except that was my experience also. I worked my way through college working as a roofer and carpenter. I had more than one professors turned their nose up at it saying that I wouldn't "learn" anything by working as a carpenter. They said working in a book store would be better (it was a fraction of my take home pay).
It took me 8 years to finish college but I didn't have a cent of student debt.
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Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I'm normally bullish on AI, but this is one of the hardest types of work to automate.
Consider that a plumber has to go to a site, which could very well have a completely non-standard layout and plumbing design, then troubleshoot the problem and fix whatever is wrong with it at the lowest cost, which generally means figuring out some sort of hack. Replacing parts (or worse yet, whole systems) is a last resort due to their expense, and even when this happens getting the new parts put in may be complicated. It's completely non-routine work.
If you want to see where AI is on this, look at the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... While it's amazing that these high end robots can do some of these simple tasks in the field, they're not even close to humans right now, and the complexity of these courses is nothing compared to real work.
Where AI will completely displace human labor in the near future is in areas where the labor is either already quite routine and in a reasonably well-controlled or standardized environment or where we can use clever tricks to simplify the work to make it more amenable to automation (ex. replacing bridge tollkeepers with license plate reading cameras). This is why, for instance, you see intense interest in delivery drones compared to delivery ground robots, because they can simply fly over the complexity of someone's yard to deliver a package and it's easier to ask a homeowner to provide a dropoff pad than a dropoff path. Similarly, self-driving cars seem smarter than they really are because they rely on a standardized environment and they simply need to drive more safely than the humans that have relatively terrible reaction times, limited sensors, constantly break the rules of safe driving, and can easily get distracted or inebriated. People don't care about the otherwise lowered quality of driving service if they're able to goof off while in the vehicle.
The reason AI is important is because a lot of our current jobs fit this description (many of the top job categories in the US are highly automatable), and not because AI is ready to take on all work anytime soon. When it is, we'll have a much bigger socioeconomic revolution on our hands than that caused by a mere lack of jobs. If that happens within 20 years time, you'll not have to worry about a job, whether that's because your livelihood has been separated from your labor or because you're more worried about the robot soldiers hunting you down.
You can't outsource a plumber. Or an auto mechanic. Maybe they can find someone a little bit cheaper, but you're not competing with people on the other side of the world.
But in IT, we have American universities outsourcing to India , even though they could get cheap student labor (it's how I got started; my undergrad is CivE).
But unless you have a specialist niche, you are easily replaced. Or at least, management thinks so. (I've been fired/"let go" twice, and both times it took three people to replace me as I have a strange combination of skills; and both tried getting me to come back afterwards)
My older brother is a college dropout who made more money than me (master's degree) as an auto mechanic. He changed jobs last year (to advising car dealerships) because he didn't want to work every other Saturday now that he has three young kids ... and he still makes more than me.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
A lot of academics would benefit hugely from working as a roofer or carpenter for a year or so. It provides a connection to _reality_. For engineers it is so invaluable that some really good universities require something like it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
True facts:
Of all the engineers I've worked with my entire life, the best ones are almost always the ones who were technicians while they were working through college.
One of the best engineers I've ever worked with didn't even have a college degree, but a body of work (read as: real-life experience) that exceeded a college degree.
Having a college degree doesn't mean you actually know anything -- or that you know how to do anything. Experience is still King.
On the Internet, I've had conversations with (?) kids playing around with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis who thought that all 'analog electronics' was 'old-fashioned' and 'obsolete' and that 'nobody uses that stuff for anything anymore, everything is digital'. Imagine the denial and arguments that ensued when I started educating them that without so-called 'obsolete, old-fashioned' analog electronics, none of their microcontrollers would even exist.
Without intelligent, hard-working people willing to get their hands dirty, we wouldn't have houses to live in, roads to drive on, cars to drive on those roads, food to eat, clean water coming out of the tap, or pretty much anything else you care to name -- and without all the infrastructure, there wouldn't be any 'high tech' or much of anything else. We'd all be scratching in the dirt trying just to survive. I've met some pretty damned intelligent and creative people who aren't working in high tech fields, because they enjoy working with their hands. Looking down on someone who is 'blue collar' is ridiculous.