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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.
I guess Mike Rowe was right all along!
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
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.
This isn't helped at the university level where lots of liberal teachers preach that blue collar workers are nothing but a bunch of dumb hicks that are not smart enough to find something better.
Truth be told lots of the blue collar work today requires ether at least one advanced degree or months of apprenticeship.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.
I counsel any young person that is curious to stay out of IT.
Do not get trapped in an office your whole life.
Stay away from IT because it is always understaffed and overworked. Yeah, you make good money but your health goes to shit and your ability to impact is often limited.
I suggest hands-on engineering where you get to go outside and travel to different sites....things like HVAC tech, aircraft engineer, electrician, or something involving industrial controls or construction.
It is very tough to find a good company to work for in IT--have to get lucky. There is no standardized skill verification so you often end up working with a bunch of hacks who poke around in a GUI who have little idea what is going on behind the scenes. Your attempts to fend off disaster go ignored and those who recover from disasters get all the credit--even if they caused it.
If you love tech....make it your own...do your own thing and love it. Stay away from corporations.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I believe Mike Rowe has been trying to get the US to take notice of this for quite a few years.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
There is nothing preventing someone from pursuing plumbing (or electrical work, or HVAC, etc.) after earning a bachelor's degree. A smart college would create just this sort of program - a combination bachelor's degree in a non-work-specific area (say, medieval theology) with something that directly prepares someone for a job, like plumbing.
In any case, earning a bachelor's degree should be about the long-term opportunities rather than that first job. When the robot plumbers enter the workforce, you'd better have something to support your ability to transition to something else.
Yes and no.
Some people do not have the drive to be entrepreneurs. I know for a fact that I don't. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with having the drive and being an entrepreneur, either.
You're falling into the same fallacy as the schools -- one size fits all. That's not the case.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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
soooo, what you're telling us that 70% of public university students and 80% pf private university students successfully complete their degree?
If we get to the point where an AI robot can perform electrical old work in a 50+ year old building, then nobody is going to have a job, and we have bigger economical problems.
I work as an electrician for a year and a half.
Fuck all that noise. Way too fucking hot. The pay was bad. The hours worse.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
His response:
http://mikerowe.com/2018/04/ot...
And interested students have until June 4th to submit an application for a scholarship from his foundation:
http://profoundlydisconnected....
It's also worth mentioning that he's been on This Old House this last season, as they've added apprenticing to the shows (which I really like, as they have someone to ask questions about why they're doing something) :
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/i...
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
$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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
It doesn't matter that a journeyman plumber can charge $70 an hour. The plumber is RARELY going to have 40 hours of work in a week. If they find 20 hours of work they are doing great. Same with contractors. A contractor can have 8 months of work building a house or doing a total renovation followed by 6 months of no work at all. It's wildly unpredictable work. An office drone goes in and does his 40-50 hours and collects his salary like clockwork every week. He doesn't need to worry about any union shop finding him sufficient hours. Now some people are very good at finding business and are the exception to this rule and are always busy but its an endless hustle and why no one in the trades wishes the same job on their kids.
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.
A friend of mine with a view of Cincinnati, the head of a large department, in a brand new building, working for one of the world's most corrupt and stable companies (GE), sees the tug boats floating down the Ohio river and wondered what his life would have been like as a tug boat driver. He hates his job. Very well paid.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
My family (both blood and marriage) has multiple trades people. A good lot of them tend to get put on suspension and have to draw from unemployment for multiple months during the slow seasons. The ones that are gainfully employed year-round make about as much as I make, but when they're 50 or so they're seeing chiropractors, doctors, and are dealing with a variety of health issues.
College also has prepared me by exposing me to more general forms of knowledge. Philosophy, basic finance, mathematics, and how to do research and communicate and validate. It's been my own personal anecdotal experience that these tradesmen are often the easy targets of misinformation. They often believe in crap like Alex Jones, health supplements (delaying their medical care because of "big pharma" by using bullshit like rose hips or whatever), and live in this fear that "ALL gubbermint is bad" and blah blah blah.
They're highly trained and skilled at a very specific specialty. But generally have little to no capacity to learn outside of that specialty, because they generally weren't ever taught how to THINK like an academic.
Remember this crap happened to all the Electronics Techs out there?
BILLIONS spent to flood the market with diploma-mill techs?
Wages bombed and THEN, as the 70's entrants were reaching their 50's, whole business to India.
Now the drones have learned to say "Fuck that" to short term, high work, low pay (eventually) jobs and industrial Capitalists are screaming that wages are too high
What I've seen a lot of in the Northeastern U.S. is that people get that skilled trades have shortages, and people aren't looking down on them as "lesser" jobs. But the younger generation is more likely than ever to have been raised on staying indoors most of the time, in climate controlled settings, doing things like playing video games when not in school itself.
When you propose to them the idea of working in a field like construction, where you might be outdoors all day doing physical labor and dealing with bugs/insects, plus hot, cold or rainy conditions? They say, "Thanks, but no thanks." And plumbing? No matter how much it pays, there will always be a relative shortage of plumbers because it's literally a dirty job. You're going to get called to do a lot of the work that homeowners were too grossed out to attempt to do themselves, like crawling into a mucky, dark crawlspace under a house to fix a broken pipe in close quarters. Even replacing toilets is pretty disgusting, given the conditions a lot of bathrooms are kept in. There are some real health risks involved with all the sewage they come in contact with too.
I've noticed that you're more likely to find available electricians, by contrast. Probably because they get to do a lot more work indoors and electrical wiring is a lot less gross/dirty than sewer lines or rotting wood with a hornet's nest by it.
Some of these skilled labor jobs are honestly just ones I look at myself and say, "That guy earns EVERY PENNY of whatever he charges." The guy who did my roofing repairs recently was one of them. My roof has a steep slope that makes it dangerous to crawl around on it. I know some of the larger firms won't even touch it unless I pay thousands extra for them to put full scaffolding up first. But this guy just took his ladder and skillfully used it to move from level to level, crawling around like a spider monkey, and got everything caulked up, shingles replaced that were missing, etc. This was in the cold, and while it started to rain AND get dark. He just took out a flashlight and kept going.
A report from Washington State on wages is hardly something to apply nationally (disclaimer: I live there). Sure, entry level IT jobs start at$70-$80K, up through $150K for the right gigs - but you can't live within 2 hours of Seattle for less than a $700K house. Housing has increased 12.6% annually over the past 3 years pricing most potential home buyers out of the market. Factor in 43% tax increases during that same period is pushing fixed/low income people out of their homes.
As far as using construction workers as a future job model - next recession, (and we're overdue by 2 years) construction workers will be sitting on their butts again for a couple years. That's a feast or famine job best avoided. Trades related to construction like HVAC and electrical wiring - things that need hands on and certifications - will always be a good bet.
Nationally - there's a problem filling first law enforcement / fire fighter jobs. Kids can't pass background checks and don't have the mental toughness for the gigs. An average cop around here makes (c) $90K per year.
It's also true that high schools are telling kids you have to get a degree to scrub toilets. That's silly, irritating, down right wrong, and demeaning of degree programs. Keep in mind who preaches it (teachers) and what their motivations might be. (I believe they're mostly under paid, but they chose the career)
You might call it fake news, but one man who did a heck of a lot of research into this and turned it into a series of very successful TV shows has actually set up a scholarship program around it.
http://profoundlydisconnected.com/
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
At 41, I have aged out of Information Technology and I am finding my career at a cross-roads. I can go back and train for a new career as an Automotive Technician for about 10,500.00 at the local community college. If I study hard and earn a GPA above 3.5, I can even go to manufacturer-sponsored training which would give me a salary about as high as a senior systems administrator, my previous role. One of the teachers in the program said that the high-end dealerships like people in similar situations as me because we know how to talk to the customer on a professional and educated level. He said that oftentimes that people in my circumstances often start out at higher salaries. Part of me wishes I could remain in IT but I am not getting call backs on resumes that I put out and I am basically ignored for all but the craigslist jobs. The craigslist jobs pay less than average with larger amounts of workload.
This article mentioned "High Paying" jobs...and then said they only get about $50K/yr?
That's not a high paying job.....
Now, if I can make 6 figures a year plumbing, I truly might consider dropping out of IT and doing that....less stress, and more exercise.
You know...last time I had to get a plumber, with what I paid, it could mean a 6 figure income!?!?!
SO, need to look into that, but apparently not Ironworker like the article mentioned, that's not much money annually....
$50,000 to start, being paid for training, paid to get whatever certs/licenses necessary, often in a union with full benefits including a pension, starting 4 years earlier than a typical college grad, starting with assets instead of debt, and actually having options to move upward.
Oh, and most of these jobs will never go away. People are going to need physical buildings, plumbing, wiring, etc. far longer than they'll need any app, phone, service, website, trinket, gadget, etc.
Not sure why you think a trade job doesn't have job security. They tend to be the most secure jobs out there. People will always need their car worked on or their plumbing fixed.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.