For most of us, unless it's in a subject requiring high academic qualifications such as medicine or some of the STEM fields, Mike Rowe says it's not. This video clip will be well worth the twelve minutes it'll take to watch it. (I like his comparison to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven".)
If you have kids coming up to college age, or your friends and extended family do, may I suggest they should be encouraged to watch that clip, too?
Peter
18 comments:
Even STEM degrees can be problematic, given offshoring, the H1B programs, or the risk of graduating into a recession when no one is hiring.
I have a B.A. in Graphic Design. 25 year career working in the print-biz in Prepress departments at a handful of shops.
My Class-A CDL license currently offers me a minimum of 5-dollars per hour premium over the jobs I qualify for in the print-biz. I said jobs I qualify for, as a 25-year veteran, not some newbie wet behind the ears kid out of college.
If I can pass the drug test, my CDL gets me a minimum of 5 bucks per hour more.... And I earned that while working a job paving driveways for the summer.
I’ve got two I’ll sell you cheap. I’ve got a BA in English lit, sort of a starter degree and a nifty MBA I can let have for what I paid. Contact me at theresasuckerborneveryminute.com
Me and my wife went to college in the mid 70s. We saw the education system problems with our sons in the 90s and early 2000s. Our sons graduated HS different years after we tutored them to get them properly taught though school.
The choice after HS was college or Trade School and each picked a TS. They went to different Trade Schools, which cost us less then half a year of college. They make well over 6 figures, have houses, cars, and good bank accounts. My oldest son has a family.
Mike Rowe's YouTube channel is the most interesting I watch.
I got a Computer Science degree in the 80's. It was the "high demand" college degree. I was also in the Air Guard in communications. I was able to work in the IT field for 15 years then it all blew apart in 2001. The H1B1 workers had flooded the IT workforce and they got paid about 40% of what citizens got paid. I could not get a job in IT. I did get a job in Satellite communications making more than I did as an IT Project Manager. My college degree gave me an edge over my peers who did not have a degree. Within 3 years I was making more than double my best IT salary.
The problem is two-fold. One, parents are pushing any kid with an IQ over fridge temperature* to go to college, and two, employers (or their recruiters) are requiring college degrees not only for entry level jobs, but for jobs that don't need a degree. I only got my current job because I have a college degree. Now, that degree is in Theater and my current job is providing support for HRIS systems, but that piece of paper was a requirement.
*I'd say room temperature, but I'm in Florida and that can get close to average IQ some days.
The "I just have to send them $90k for a year" bit in this video is actually accurate. Closer to $88k on average but that's close enough.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/lT1tm-jHfIA
Yep. That's pretty high, but the average, including lowest and highest, is over $30k a year. I remember thinking my states public university annual tuition of $5k was a bit high, 14 years ago.
Make college loans impossible to void through bankruptcy, unlike essentially any other kind of loan, they said. It'll be fine, they said. We can just hand out nearly (or actually) half million dollar loans with crippling interest rates to teenagers, and it'll be fine! No school would increase their tuition rates because they know they'll get the money regardless of how insane the tuition is, right? Of course not, that would be silly...
A good friend with a degree in Forestry Managment started with the Indiana Dept of Environmental Mgmt 25 yrs ago, and through her general competence, is now the database compliance admin for pollution site / Superfund tracking / monitoring, because she was always the one who could sort out what the rest of the agency was F*ing up in the multiple databases and programs.
Intelligence and work ethic rises.
John in Indy
I got a degree in computer science 25 years ago. I work in IT, stuff I had to do for the degree is worthless. The industry changes so fast that certifications, good troubleshooting and research skills and experience are far more useful.
"Higher education" is a SCAM. Trouble is, a degree is needed for jobs you wouldn't even think of needing one for. To be a COP, a lot of locales demand a degree in criminology! And to think; the reason there are so many Irish cops and firemen out there is because back in the day, those were "the jobs nobody wanted..."
I have to kinda echo what "Peteforester" said. A lot of jobs, especially in the civil service (local, state, and Federal), require a four-year degree (although a lot of them will accept three years of active-duty military service in lieu). It doesn't matter what the degree is. I worked with people who had degrees in physics, history, English, Spanish, criminal justice, psychology, and I don't remember what else. I think the idea was that the college (or military) experience makes a person less parochial and more tolerant of working with people of different racial and cultural backgrounds. I kinda think it worked. I don't know if a trade-school education turns out the same kind of person. Trade schools tend to be more homogeneous, even though their graduates' customers will be just as diverse as the United States is. (Maybe I'm selling that aspect of trade school short; I graduated from college the day Saigon fell, fifty years ago today, so I'm not hip to the latest jive.)
Daughter has a doctorate in psychology and the student loans to match. One of her friends she made during the internship and post-graduate stage of making sure all the boxes are ticked has said out loud what a lot of them were thinking, "My social work degree is more useful than my doctorate."
I think there is a lot of agreement about which degrees have value and which do not. There are some huge misconceptions, though, about how much money it takes to get one of those degrees that are worth getting. Some say that STEM degrees and some professional degrees (required to be a CPA, OD, MD, DMD, etc.) are the degrees that are worth it. I would argue that the degrees that are most worthwhile are ones that require hard math. I would also argue that it is possible to get an undergraduate STEM degree for not so much money. In 2010 both our kids entered Wake Technical Community College when tuition costs were $56.50/credit. As of 2024, those same credits cost $76/credit. We got both our kids through two years of Community College with the money ($5000 each) my parents had given them when they were born for their college funds. Today, that same education would not cost that much more today for inflation adjusted dollars--maybe a little more. I calculate it would be around $7k or $8k plus living expenses.
After community college they both went on to North Carolina State University, one for an Applied Math degree and one for a Statistics degree. Tuition in 2012 when they started was less than $8000/semester. It is around $12000/semester today.
The kids lived at home while they got their degrees. So the sum total of what we paid to get the kids through school was around $28k each including fees and books. Today, the same degree following the same path would cost around $35k plus living expenses. After that, one of the kids got a funded PhD in Electrical Engineering and the other got a funded MS in Marketing Strategy, so there was zero cost (other than opportunity cost) for their graduate degrees and they were not earning $0 while they studied.
Both of them are researchers now at national research universities (JHU, MIT) with jobs that are much lower paid than if they went to private industry (they might do that someday). I am hard pressed to think of a job where they would be making as much as they are now in even the best of skilled trades (not talking about those who start their own business--that is available to both those with or without college education). That is true even with the opportunity cost of having spent nine (PhD) and six (MS) years in college--that kind of does not apply in their case because they started community college after the eighth grade.
Our kids are NOT uber-brilliant--we believe just about any kid with average or above intelligence could do something like this, but it takes really hard work--just like getting a skilled trade. At least it took a lot of hard work for our kids. Of course, not everyone should do this, but I believe it is absolutely possible to get a great degree that has work at high pay in a math-centric STEM degree without bankrupting one's self and that can lead to VERY high paying work.
Also, I utterly reject the idea that these kinds of degrees are not going to be in high demand for the foreseeable future.
Outside of a STEM degree, probably not. To practice for the public on engineering projects in Texas and many other states, a Professional Engineering License is required with a stamp on all drawings. I got my engineering license in Texas back in 1989.
Don't la, paid internshipsugh. I'm an accountant with a CPA. I take continuing education webinars to keep my license up. In many states there is a severe shortage of new accounting majors, so much so that I have heard there are multiple jobs for each accounting major graduate. The profession did it to themselves by changing the CPA requirement to 150 hrs versus 120. Students are leery of that extra 30 hours (+/- 1 year more college...and tuition). However, there are workarounds....Bachelor/Masters programs, summer semesters, paid internships that give credits. It's a good living. Students should immerse themselves in AI....it's already a part of the job. Word of warning: in my state, the professional body is fielding inquiries from english speaking residents of other countries, Philippines, Ukraine, African countries who want to take the CPA exam and be licensed in my state. Not so much to work here (though I expect that is the ultimate game plan) but to do outsourced work. (Do you really know who is doing your tax returns these days?). We need more American students majoring in accounting. Talk to the kids in your lives!
I graduated with a premed BA back in 1971 was accepted to a med school and decided I would not put my wife and young son thru five years in N.Y. city and decided to go work on a dairy farm instead! The biology helped me fast track to herd management. After a twenty year career I swithched to being a fish culturist in a large salmon hatchery for the next twenty until retirement. Again I used the biology I learned in school. I did have enough scholarship to only have $500 student debt with summer work. Of six kids one has an associate degree and work experience, one went to trade school and ended up with a business, one daughter has a teaching degree and now runs an educational program for Forest Service, one daughter had a mariners license and worked tug boats, dispatched tug boats and now doing other things, one son joined the labors union and has a good job, his son is making $30+ an hour as an apprentice mechanic, and the last one, I won’t talk about. None had degrees solely to stay in school on borrowed money so they could party for four years. Back in the 70’s they kidded about boys taking “basket weaving” to keep from being drafted. The draft didn’t want me with my high blood pressure!
From my own experience in the South, depending on the location (Charleston, SC) trade school is pretty diverse. There is a strong market for culinary arts grads as well Aerospace technicians.
In my Mississippi hometown it is not at all diverse, at 87% non-white. It wasn't always this way, but when Obama federalized the Student Loan Program many white students decided to just get loans for 4 years instead of just 2. To be fair is MS, most good jobs requiring a 4 year degree (especially STEM) are out of state anyway.
Post a Comment