I wonder whether it's self-correcting in some way - management-class hopefuls end up poorer than their hands-on counterparts, and these wealthier families end up having more political clout over time which balances the snobbery that got everyone to push their children into management streams in the first place...

Since there are financially unwise college degrees (social work) and on the other end those with a mostly guaranteed, very decent minimal guaranteed income and incredible potential (medicine), this is an unfair comparison.

I think it's fairly easy to see this type of outcome if the major was a humanity and the trade was something like plumber, electrician, or climate control, even in the US.

The problem is, no family ever considers both to be valid options.

There are families where it's just assumed you'll go to college and no one even questions it. (They don't even stop think, wait, this gal would be a great plumber and easily make six figures as her own boss!)

There are families where college is something "extra" that's not required.

I know of no families (though I'm sure they exist) where plumber is considered an equally honorable profession as accountant or teacher.

There's a kind of social stigma attached to the trades, for want of a better word.

You can say the same thing about software engineering. The push for easy immigration has solved the fake shortage in Germany and kept the salaries low enough to keep companies very profitable.

They literally taught sewing, cooking, balancing a checkbook and budgeting, child care, basic auto mechanics, and some welding iirc. These are all super useful life skills and the sad part is that all of us brilliant geniuses that went on to college never got the equivalent covered.

No. But the upper middle class from which most of HN's inhabitants come could more easily be ignorant of it back then.

You had the token home ec and wood shop classes but eeryone who wasn't super interested did whatever and got a B and didn't really pick up any lasting knowledge in the process (art and music have similar probably the best point of comparison today).

[In the Ontario public school system, specifically] we were required a Civics-classified course in our upper years which resulted in me taking Canadian History rather than general civics—but understanding how to vote has never been a burden here.

Budgets, etc, were covered by a maths course called "Math for Everyday Life" which was, unfortunately, in the "enter the workforce" rather than the College or University stream so most avoided it because it appeared as if it was next to remedial. I took it. It was alright. I don't remember specifics, but it's likely responsible for a lot of my intuitive understanding of things like budgets, credit systems, mortgages, etc. While it wasn't in the higher streams, it did fulfill the requisite for math in order to graduate.

As far as English courses, we were required to take one of College or University streams throughout high school for reading a mix of literature critically, dramatically, and to engage in debate. You could also optionally take a Creative Writing course beside that which had more reading, more debate, more in-depth grammar and creative exercises (which if you ask me only improves reading comprehension) as well as a final project of developing a small body of related work, presenting it and defending it in a proposal.

And I attended rural schools, one of which was being progressively closed as I attended (thanks Mike Harris), so it wasn't just a matter of being in a city rich with resources, or of a certain class.

That said, it's unfortunate that I hear a lot of people claim those kinds of courses are not offered here (and worse, use that as reason for complete reform or selling our public system to private interests), and many subjects are not covered—but they are, and I've just noticed not many people take them. Canadian History, and our amazingly jaded teacher, covered in detail the dark side of the country's history and some of the complex network of politics of the First Nations, and the Math for Everyday Life course (while I wish I had dug into more complex topics with as much fervour) made the basic stuff a little more natural in my understanding.

Any of the wood shop/home economics (joint course, you had to take both) courses mentioned we had taken in the 7th/8th grade rather than high school. There was an auto shop, but I can't comment because I didn't take it. Car ownership seemed well out of reach so I didn't care as much at the time!

For example, a CS student at Stanford would meet these requirements [1] by choosing from a wide range of courses such as "Jazz History", "Conservation Photography", "Contemporary Moral Problems" and "To Die For: Antigone and Political Dissent"

People who like this system would say it produces a well-rounded education - surely nobody would want students of politics to be ignorant of statistics, or students of engineering to be ignorant of ethics!

There are a variety of much more cynical interpretations available, of course...

[1] https://undergrad.stanford.edu/academic-planning/degree-requ...

At the factory attached to my place of employment, I'm not sure what jobs are actually left that are related to any of the skilled trades. Most of our workers are assemblers. We do hire people with 2 year trade school degrees, or equivalent military service training. When our welder retires, we will probably outsource the welding.

Now we get pieces from shops that have skilled trades such as machinists, but I don't think those shops require a 4 year degree. I don't think carpenters, roofers, or plumbers have bachelors degrees. Many of the businesses that hire those people are family owned, and hard to break into if you're not connected.

As for health care trades, well, employers might be willing to bear the cost of the training, if there was only one employer: The government.

Companies that invested a lot in their employees paid less than companies that had no such expenses, so it became common to have a new hire, spend 3 years on trainings and leave for a better salary. This competition pressure made us adjust and move the training budget into salaries.

It makes more economic sense to train your workers if people tend to stay with one company for a long time.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/re.html

Tech employers usually offer reimbursement for online training, conferences, books, etc. That seems commonplace and enables business models of PluralSight and alike.

Some also bring outside consultants and training firms for in-house seminars, some pay for conference expenses, and some even reimburse tuition for a professional development course.

but when govt started handing out loans like candy, then of course the employer would rather the university train the person for them.

it moves the cost of training from the employer to the employee paying for their own training with debt

Much of the university requirement is a bit of an anachronism because a lot of the underlying reasoning is nominally based on the scenario of pharmacists manufacturing their own drugs in the backroom, but fortunately there seems to be a lot of political agreement that opening up requirements for theoretical efficiency gains would only enrich aggressive investors without making health noticeably cheaper.

I suspect that for the culture of study and work to change in America, we can't expect the current workers/students to change their views. It may only happen when a new generation no longer receives a constant push to attend college. If that's the case, then we'd see a change in college attendance and employer attitudes and employee attitudes 20 years in the future.

Engineering has a few extra math classes that weed out most of these types..

Long ago I worked at a startup in Los Angeles. We had software engineers from all over, but because of the location many from UCLA or Cal Tech. We used to have a joke about hiring a "CS major from Brown". I am sure Brown is a great school. But some of the Ivy League educated people that we would interview would have a ton of confidence and polish but not necessarily better technical skills. So they felt they deserved a better job, but it wasn't clear they were equipped to do a better job.

I know UC-Davis provides as good or better an education than Stanford (not at all sarcastic and meant in an earnest way), but it seems willfully blind to not see that they serve different social and economic roles in the American class system.

Are you denying there's a networking benefit to attending an Ivy League school? I don't have the article I was thinking of handy, but this source (0) seems to say the main advantages are networking and status.

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0811/the-value-o...

In earlier times, we were sending a few people to college to be leaders, and thus all were expected and required to learn to persuade. The hoi polloi were not in college, and were to be convinced by said rhetorically trained leaders. There were many more hoi polloi, and democracy provided the check and balance between the educated and manipulative (in good and bad ways), and the unarmed masses.

Now we have many more topics to cover and many more students, thus the term Universe-ity. Few students learn rhetoric formally. Which is good in the sense that when there is an expectation of needing to argue, it descends into sophistry. Arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, etc.

What all non-rhetoric students should learn is how not to be convinced, not to be persuaded. Something that has been called critical thinking. There have been a lot of writings in the past on how to train students in critical thinking. It was a hot topic in post-WWII education. When 60 million people die, arguably because of a lack of critical thinking, and those that survive go to college on the GI Bill, they start asking good questions. When hundreds of thousands of older students who lived through the horrors of modern war entered campus, they made it clear to the Academy that critical thinking was a priority. That sort of moral authority, gained at the end of a rifle barrel or in a cockpit facing life and death, is lacking now.

Expand that to persuaders in the visual arts, and it becomes media studies. Media studies as the transliterate counterpart of critical thinking and classical rhetoric in text. Logic falls under rhetoric. And, when you think about it, there is a broad overlap between statistics and media studies. I recommend the book, How To Lie With Statistics, published in 1954. Tufte wrote some good stuff too.

Not everybody needs to learn to be a persuader in college. That can be picked up later as needs arise or not. But everyone coming out of college needs to learn to be a critical thinker, an anti rhetorician. There are standard techniques, philosophies, ways of thinking, psychologies that could be bundled together in a Freshman course. I’m still a fan of General Semantics and cognitive bias research myself. Mixing humanities and STEM in a common cause. Fifty years ago as a high school senior, I developed a unit plan to do something similar for high school students.

If anything I’d say more college-educated citizens is a shield against tyranny, as it trains you to be more intellectually critical, and therefore (one would hope)c , inoculated somewhat against anti-factual biases.

Manipulating public opinion may seem petty or roundabout for a government but having legitimized policy creates a lot of stability for decision makers so it seems worthwhile. The gambit even pays off when the majority of the public isn't persuaded by education too, since the people who agree with you are by definition the "well educated" you can give their opinion more weight without seeming like a tyrant.

That's the idea being alluded to by the parent here at least I think.

3/4 of the university students in the US are currently enrolled in a state-subsidized public institution. This has been the status-quo for many decades.

To the contrary, US state universities are known for their solid educational foundations and research output -- and the reputation of various private-universities in the US is rather spotty.

I understand that it is how many americans view the world, but claiming that the society that I live in can't possible exist is... disheartening.

Corporations (who pay lower taxes than citizens) in charge of education is a specific form of dystopian hell.

>I had to learn about all these things from my history classes.

So the education provided you with multiple, different viewpoints, then. If you evaluate specific, individual classes, yes, you'll find a bias depending on the specific, individual faculty. I had faculty ranging from those who extolled the virtues of a strong-man in the white house, to those who wanted a complete anarchy.

I'm willing to bet most university/college educations contain a little bit of everything.

Or, put more simply, wide ranging viewpoints. . . .

To you, what is a "Marxist idea" about the 20th century?

And if your teacher really did gloss over the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin / the USSR, Mao / the PRRC, then, well, that person was a poor teacher.

I don't know what college you went to, but at mine, reading was the homework, and the discussion on the books (even with the professor's inherent biases) in the class with my peers is what developed the profound thoughts and ideas that I still carry with me. Humanities might not contribute to jobs, (I'm STEM) but I don't for a second regret the philosophy classes I took.

If you can read through Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and get everything out of it without help good on you, but I certainly couldn't.

The pragmatic part of humanities is argumentation and writing. You can't get that from just reading.

What you're saying is like "the value of a computer science degree over just reading programming books is marginal." It's ignoring that the most important part of the learning happens in application.

Or, you know ... history?

Or even Shakespeare, for that matter. For some, a course makes reading such material hugely more enlightening.

To you, apparently, one book is as good as another?

Can you elaborate further?

Why would I use a spade vs a single point vs a Forstner drill bit? When would I use a backer board? When would I use conventional cutting vs climb cutting? If I want to achieve tolerance X on face F, what should be my sequence of operations? How can I fixture this work to give me the best results? When is a circular saw vs a table saw vs a jig saw vs a mitre saw appropriate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#Early_life

People who want to end democracy rarely say so, it is always just "a little less than it is now".

Same for education, where would you draw the line?

On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate. This one million dollars will be taxed at at least twelve percent federally. Twelve percent is a very conservative estimation on the federal tax rate of that money. This means the federal tax revenue of a college grad is at least one hundred and twenty thousand dollars more than a high school graduate. The average net price of a public college education with room, board, fees, and tuition is fifteen thousand four hundred dollars a year, or just under sixty two thousand dollars for four years.

In four years the federal government spends $62,000 to send someone to college.

Over their lifetime the federal government receives $120,000 back.

Today we create jobs for staff, professors, admins, etc at university. Tomorrow we have a more educated and skilled workforce.

Of course, what I really want is for my fellow citizens to be more well read, better critical thinkers, and better informed citizens. Sometimes the best way to sell someone on something isn’t to focus on what you want out of the deal.

Maybe 25% of the students in the program were there to learn how to make video games. They weren’t there to get a job in making video games. They weren’t there because there is money in making video games. They were there because they wanted to know enough about computer programming to make video games, and everyone had ideas about what type of game they wanted to make.

I don't mean this in a superficial sense, I mean: there's no way for a PhD to be certified for investigating the kind of knowledge that's difficult to verify in that context. They can investigate it, but the system is only allowed to give them a qualification for academically verifiable results. It cannot verify esoteric knowledge (unless it can use consensus as a proxy).

Sure, they'll pick that stuff up with experience. We might be talking past each other. I read it as: they're hiring graduates. That might not be what OP meant.

I don't know any three year examples. I'm sure there are PhD degree mill spots that'll give you the degree in a couple of years if you pay enough.

Prominently a lack of the factory production kind of work, I'd say.

So you keep people in school system(s) as long as possible. For people who would previously have gone to a factory after leaving school at age 16 or 18, you now keep them and give them a high-school+2y or +3y degree (it is free), and you release them only at 21-22 years old, they will be some random clerk performing some random procedure in some random client service or administration.

1. While they're in schools, they don't grow the unemployed figures.

2. Degrees guarantee a better chance for employment, they say. It is a stupid fallacy because it is only a comparative advantage, and when everyone gets one, even the advantage is gone.

So now, in France, by widening and easying them, we reached 95% of "success" for high-school degrees (which also grant access for universities). Also, high-school has become the almost unique way, so overall 80% of all kids get one of the high-school degrees every year. So, technically speaking, it means we're giving the high-school degree to a few light morons (or whatever it is called these days).

Cherry on the cake, they now finish high-school without having repeated any year (now, you can sleep your way through your whole primary/middle/high school career without repeating, no matter how little you do and you know, as long as you are not an exceptional PITA), so they are even less mature, which is another problem for practical and technical paths.

One big issue is that all those people at different levels think that they are valuable because they got a degree of some level. Except the degrees are valueless, and they are plenty of these people being given licences or master degrees. So there is a huge gap between what they think they will get (status and salary-wise)and what they will actually get.

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There is however a big difference between France and a lot of other countries: in France, good pupils do not go to University ; after high-school the top 5% (perhaps up to 10% now) goes on a path to Engineering schools (and similar paths for humanities) through competitive exams. One major consequence is that, opposite to most countries, the PhD does not represent the "elite" here. Of course there are gateways going one way or the other between the two systems, but still, the paths are pretty separated (and the gateways are mostly used to allow a few good ones from University that were missed earlier, to join Engineering schools after 2 and 4 years of University) and University/PhD is not considered the royal path. Actually, 40 % of PhDs are delivered to foreigners.

Everyone tries. That's why you see entry level positions with 2-3 years experience requirements and entry level pay. Of course, these stay empty for years since nobody bites!

To get someone with experience in a reasonable amount of time takes money. Also, keep in mind that the engineers with 2 years of experience might be looking for an other job because of performance issues at their current one. Those who are learning fast and getting promoted aren't looking around.

>the bigger issue is the credential is not preparing graduates properly

The most important skill is really how fast someone can learn. I've always said it's harder to learn CS fundamentals than the tools and practical aspect of software. Someone who is comfortable with graphs and trees should be able to figure out git pretty fast. Someone who rote learned git commands and knows one workflow might not be able to figure out graphs that easily.

>This is interesting. I hadn't thought about it in these terms.

It's actually worse than that. With internships some engineers are off the market a few years before they even graduate. And then accept a full time offer with a 4 years vesting schedule that makes it incredibly hard to poach them.