I have a graduate degree. The CS portions of that have indeed been useful in my career as a programmer. However, the rest of my liberal arts education have been helpful in... well... conversing with other liberal arts grads. I sound fairly well-spoken, I suppose, when writing up documentation that no one usually reads. I can reasonably frame a critical argument, except that I live in a world now where most discussion takes place in social echo chambers anyway.
I am pleased with my life outcome, and do not envy the person being quoted, primarily because I lucked into a hot market at the ideal time. But if I were starting out today, I'm not so sure of how smug I would be in comparing my career prospects, core values, and likelihood of happiness and self-actualization to this person's.
Frankly, I think that "blue collar" work would have to pay twice as much as "white collar" work before society would start to re-align itself accordingly. Because quite frankly, we're going on 3 or 4 generations now of the mindset that white collar work is something to aspire to, while blue collar work is a sign of failure and low social status.
Our entrenched cultural bias lags behind the cold economic reality for most young people coming up today.
And of course there is nothing bad in choosing to study and get a degree (or however some higher education) or in choosing to start working and make a different career, but being proud of one's own ignorance?
Knowing how to frame a house does not automatically exclude some knowledge about Roman Theology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_pyramid#Graham.27s_...
You're a sophomore. That makes you, what... 21? It's a bit early to be coming to conclusions about relative success. At that age, they could be managing a gas station and would appear to be "economically further ahead."
The tortoise and the hare spring to mind. Wait ten years and then see how you're all doing.
The quote is a strawman fallacy and it's comparing apples-to-oranges. It's pretty clear that the kid was trying to compare a 4-year liberal arts degree to a 3-day course (or a series of courses) in management that only applies to lumber/construction.
It's probably not a bad deal to get paid $40k a year to learn to be a manager in construction, but your job prospects are far narrower than with a 4-year liberal arts degree and I can't imagine 84 Lumber got to be a $2billion without attacking conditions to their training programs (eg. you are liable to pay back some formula of your training expenses if you don't complete training and work for the company for some set amount of time).
Who cares about learning history? It's not like those who don't understand it are doomed to repeat it or anything. I'll leave that to the politicians - I have houses to frame. All knowledge should be directly translatable to $$$ or it's a waste of time. /s
This is so incredibly vapid and such a poor argument to make in favor of what is otherwise a valid case being made by the author. I can't believe Bloomberg used that quote.