A gap year?
Maybe a more focused gap year. But yea, I think that would help. I just think instead of tooling around and having fun the gap year should be as enforced by tradition about fishing around different jobs and different careers, rather than hopping on a plane and tooling around hostels.
There’s also the problem - a huge, imo, unspoken problem - about degree inflation. Just like high schools are constantly lowering the bar to graduate enough students - because graduating is more important than learning - lower tier schools are inflating their attendance and graduation rates by professors making curriculum easier to get students in and then out the door. So what happens is that the average degree from an average school is just that much less valuable, and everyone knows it, so to get to the “real” next level students are forced to get a masters and beyond, and therefore graduating from State State University with a mediocre degree with mediocre grades doesn’t carry the student further than their region. It becomes the 13th grade, rather than a “University” experience, a minimum rather than an achievement, and employers know this. Degree inflation is a huge problem in the US, imo.
I think I disagree. I agree maybe going through a good engineering degree might indeed be harder than going through a good liberal arts degree (and I’m unsure about this, based on my own experience with Computer Science -European 3 years major-, Fine Arts -European 3 years major- and Film -American 4 years Masters-, but I am willing to concede the point to you), actually doing the work (being a good engineer versus being a good educator, at least in secondary and higher education, where I have experience) is at least equally challenging. It’s just different facets of intelligence.
But the amount of emotional intelligence, fast self-learning, hours spent on the job, people’s skills, management skills, etc… are higher on an standard education job than on an standard engineering job. At least in my experience having done both.
Working at NASA is probably extremely challenging. So is probably teaching at MIT. Working at a run-of-the-mill tech company can be pretty tame, as is teaching at a regular university or professional education joint. There are many, many crappy, mediocre engineers out there.
I don’t think that’s really true you need a degree. The employment rates for people with high school diploma is 4,9% some college 3.9% and Bachelors 2.3%. Now the participation rates have declined especially for HS grads, 58%, 67%, and 74% respectively By any standard those are low unemployment rates. Only 33% have bachelor degrees, so that means the vast majority of America have a job without a college degree.
What I would agree with is that in many parts of the country your chances of getting a good paying job with just a high school diploma and no skills are low Part of the problem is Americans are less mobile society than we have been in decades, throughout most of this century there were good paying jobs in the Dakota working in the oil fields or the mines in Idaho that didn’t need a college degree or even a lot of experience. For the most part those in the rust belt were unable/unwilling to move there.
Still other than WWII, it was never easy for somebody to graduate from high school go to directly high paying factory job like an autoworker. You needed to know somebody in the union or the company to get a shot, and most folks started out as a janitor, go fer, or similarly low payed job. While it is true that factory job of today requires more training today than did 50 years ago, it is not clear they require more skill. But it is a different type of skill more mental dexterity than physical dexterity and more brains than brawn. Undercover boss isn’t a great TV show, but I think it accurately reflect that all jobs need training.
For the most part school doesn’t really teach you how to do a job. You need training and most importantly experience.
Employers typical rely on educational attainment as a form of an IQ test (and it’s a reasonably good for that) and perhaps more importantly as a measure of work ethic. Sticking with something for 4+ years is an achievement,
We have seen a form of degree inflation. 50 year ago ~10% had college degrees, 60% had high school degrees and a bit under 30% didn’t even have a high school diploma. So in 1960, a high school diploma meant you weren’t a total dummy. A college degree meant you were either smart or you had rich parents so it wasn’t all that valuable of a screening tool for employers.
This has changed dramatically 1/3 with college degrees and 90% with high school and only 10% without a diploma. So a HS diploma is of no use in screening for stupid slackers. Now days the chance of kids getting a degree from Penn or Harvard just because his parents are wealthy alumni are pretty slim. So the college degree basically means odds are you aren’t a dummy. A STEM degree is valuable for two reasons to employers. Both the fundamental of science and math are generally useful for problem-solving, and some of the specific courses, programming, and electrical engineering in my case, were directly applicable in the workplace. Secondly, it helps as an IQ screener.
That article you linked is interesting. It makes a fairly strong argument that when given the same test, different majors really score very differently, with STEM at the top and farming and education at the bottom. As a closing thought it asks if we should try and get the smarter kids to study education instead of engineering in order to improve education. But in the end it concedes this is probably impossible. The bright kids who want to study the hard stuff would be bored to tears as elementary education majors. They literally have classes where they make scrapbooks and learn how to work AV equipment and stuff. No super bright kid is going to study that.
By the way, this is what I was trying to mention upthread. Once you get your job and start on your career it can be wildly varied from challenging to boring, from inspiring to dull. That’s true of every career. But the things you study in college as an engineer are just objectively far harder than anything an education major studies. This is supported by testing and observation.
I am in construction. About 200 miles from the SF Bay Area. I have known many carpenters who have commuted to SF for work, earning $40+ an hour plus benefits. There are not enough carpenters in the SF area to handle the work available there.
The trades are begging for qualified people. I don’t know if part of the problem might be that high pay union work doesn’t usually have “undocumented” workers in it, while you probably can’t walk on a residential site without finding someone “undocumented” there. Residential pay is much less, is non-union but used to be a stepping stone, a way to learn how to do things.
Honestly it’s because - I’m not real sure which is chicken and egg here to be completely clear - I think the tech world sees the post industrial world as being divided between the creatives and the baristas. And hey, they love their blue haired punk barista, they want her to have insurance and live decently enough in her drop-out lifestyle.
But construction? Uh. You mean, get dirty? Isn’t that why we need immigration? Truck drivers? Ew. Can’t we automate that job away somehow?
Yes, there is kind of a hidden secret that no one talks about, and that is you can make
super good money as a tradesman. Plumbers, carpenters and electricians I know in Ohio make between $60-$80 a year (this can vary up and down depending on demand, the health of the housing market, etc). If you can get a couple of apprentices under you and take part of their billing you can make a nice six figures as a small business owner. In fact the thing limiting most of them from becoming very rich is just a kind of “lone wolf” sense a lot of them have. This is not backed up by any studies or good evidence, just a pet theory. Tradesmen out on their own tend to be fiercely independent and and proud of their self-reliance. If they ever organized together really well we’d all be screwed. I grew up being taught all that stuff by my Dad and thought seriously in my teen years before college about becoming a plumber specializing in gas pipes. People never want to do something as simple as move a gas pipe or run a new circuit to their breaker box themselves. There is a ton of money there. It’s also pretty engaging because while there are codes to follow, each house is designed and built individually and you have to reach into your bag of tricks. It’s pretty engaging.
Buuuut of course there is not much room to innovate and create something brand new and push your field as a whole through research or experimentation. I mean maybe there is, but that all seems to come from the engineers. I can’t speak for anyone else but that ultimately was the reason I didn’t choose plumbing. I grew up reading high adventure, fantasy and sci fi books. There is always a theme of exploration and the unknown and discovery in those genres. Ultimately I decided that the exploration and discovery that was happening were in other fields, fields that required a college degree to join. And so it goes.
It’s kinda hard to start being a tradesman when you’ve lost your career job at 40-45 though.
Yeah, that’s true. This is a recurring problem we’ve been having for a long time, most prominently featured when factories close and a bunch of middle aged people who had been there for their whole working life are left asking “What’s next?”.
Alternatively, the people who test well and are very “book smart” tend towards the more introverted and less empathetic i.e, part of the reason they’re so good at those things is because they prefer it to interacting with people, and visa-versa. One of the reasons my field even exists is because the engineers and other hard science people are stereotypically bad at communicating with business.
Eh, according to that list you just posted, Mathematics is number 42 on the list… way higher than most of those liberal arts degrees you listed. (Psychology, for instance, was 294)
http://i.imgur.com/OffEJTR.gif
I think tradesmen unions are some of the most powerful and long lasting of the unions.
The IBEW, plumber’s unions, UAW,
They are unionized. There are a lot of organized unions.
And somehow we aren’t screwed.
I am not the one that decided the arbitrary cut-off was anything liberal arts. If you don’t like anything beneath any liberal arts degree being cut-off, you should talk to one of them.
I am a huge fan of pushing the trades more though. College is not the only long-term answer even though many high schools push it like it is, especially to first generation potential grads.
I’m just pointing out that, technically, there aren’t ANY liberal arts majors that are higher on that list than Mathematics. So it doesn’t really fall into that category.
Economics is liberal arts. It’s a Social Science.
Hmm… I guess? Seems like it’s more math based than what I’d normally consider a liberal arts degree, but fair enough, I’ll concede your point.
If ol’ Tom Smykowski there is a better option than talking to the engineers you know it’s bad. :)
My main point is that sure, the degrees being derided might not be as hard from a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean if you make the pay equal that engineering types are suddenly going to make excellent educators and social workers. Look at how horrified we are because Trump has no empathy or social skills (I mean, that’s not the biggest reason but at the very least he could be tactfully abhorrent).
Heh, well the kind of tact that Trump lacks isn’t something you need a DEGREE for. It’s just basic human decency, that he seemingly never got from his parents.