This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields.
There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high).
I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0].
> There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training.
We don't disagree
The consistent trait among all of these guys is that they did good work at a fair price, were pleasant and reliable to work with, consistently communicate and were honest. This results in these guys getting lots and lots and lots of word of mouth referrals, not to mention call backs for future work.
When people are putting up a reasonable chunk of their own after tax money for work like that, 99% of the time it's enough for them that their biggest concern is trust and word of mouth recommendations is where trusted referrals come from. Integrity goes a long way in the contractor world.
Keywords being experienced and bay area which is super expensive to live in. Non experienced wanna be workers in bay area have hard time to pay rent.
This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.
My dad made just enough money to get us past the point where Pell grants were denied because of my Dad's income. Unfortunately, my family still couldn't afford it and I was exceptionally weary of taking out 150k in student loans. The most they could afford to offer me was $200/month in rent. After a semester, I just dropped out and got a job at a local ISP as a software engineer.
Would I have went to school? Absolutely, but I couldn't afford it. As a person with Aspergers, it would have also been exceptionally hard for me to work /and/ attend school full-time. I tried that and it didn't work out.
I still have dreams of getting a doctorate. I love school and I love learning. I love being in class and attending lectures. Maybe when I can afford it and do just that, I'll do it.
As a person who graduated three years ago, the education system (even to an upper-lower/lower-middle class kid) is absolutely disheartening and dream crushing. Intellectuals don't speak of social darwinism, but their organizations, fiscally and structurally, still do. I will always feel inadequate for never having achieved a degree that all my friends will soon or now have.
I learned to only rely on myself, though. It's turned me into a very mature and responsible 21 year old. It still feels like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm working on it.
Agreed. It was an emotional response to a subject of personal issue.
But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?
She isn't close to one. And I don't know of many libraries that are cool with you videoconferencing with instructors and pair programming 8 hrs/day.
Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
That "you smell" thing is basically code for "no homeless people." There is no objective smell-o-meter that indicates when someone is actually a threat to public welfare or something. And in settings where people did not know I was homeless, I did not see evidence that I actually smelled bad. They would ask me about my vacation plans while cutting my hair.
There's lots that can be done. How about more computers, for a start? If they're monopolizing 100 computers then how about 1000? Install public showers and laundry facilities, too. Add in a volunteer job training center. Run free programming classes and job interview tutorials. Resumé review classes would be great, too.
Don't do it. Life is all about priorities and keeping your focus. Once you start mixing work and studies, both will suffer.
Go hungry, sell plasma, visit a food bank, do what you have to do. But keep your eye on the prize.
There were certainly periods of time where I didn't see friends much, and my husband had to (gasp) cook dinner once in a while, but it was doable, and I graduated with a 3.7 GPA. I'm not a genius, I certainly did my fair share of procrastination, it was mostly just about making almost every day a "work day" (at least for a few hours), keeping things interesting by alternating between different types of work, and finding creative times/ways to study (commuting, lunch break, doing class busywork watching TV in the evening, etc)
I don't think I would have gotten "more" out of the program by quitting my job and just doing that full time. If anything, the financial stress would have made things more difficult.
How far in the black will a minimum wage job put you month/month? How long will it take to put yourself up on your feet with it?
You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.
Fixed percentage forever? Fixed percentage of only the first job? Fixed percentage until a certain amount has been paid?
I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor.
This IT career track is pretty amazing to me.
You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.
(Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)
How expensive is community in Cali?
It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.
While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.
Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?
I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.
Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job.
In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.
The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.
Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...
A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.
High school already doesn't mean anything, making college free and standardized means that college becomes not just a defacto expectation but something everyone has to do and there's really no point in that when we have the level below that underperforming.
Both are monumental tasks, though.
I think the real genius of making college free is not making it mandatory (of course, easier said than done). It's there if you need it and want to take the next step in your education, but for those who would rather not be there or would do something else that should be a viable option as well, and then you don't have to marginalize the education across the board.
If you look at NYC, they have a model of neighborhood elementary schools and location based high schools, but also a network of merit based advanced and magnet schools.
When I was in high school in a rural upstate NY town, we had tracked programs with "smart" and "not so much" kids and rarely interacted directly with kids more than one track up or down in school. (There was only 90 kids in the graduating class)
It was a real eye opener when taking some mandatory class as a senior (something like civics) when I discovered that my writing partner didn't really know how to read or write. To me that's the tragedy of schools -- that should not happen.
There need to be other changes to go with that, but the people electing to stop school would be happier and I think wouldn't miss out on much learning.
The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive.
I run a computer science academy that's free until you get a job (https://lambdaschool.com), and I can't believe how many people we talk to that just $1,000 of tuition would be a deal-breaker for. I was talking to one of our best students last week and learned that she was living on the floor of a relative and trying to use a touchscreen and some half-working cloud editor to code because she couldn't afford any type of computer, even the cheapest $50 version. It was really slowing her down, but she had no other option, and didn't know what to do. (Don't worry, we shipped her a computer.) I hadn't even thought to ask.
The crazy thing is the value of taking someone from unskilled to skilled is enormous; we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary all the time, and they get that for the rest of their lives. So say they work for 40 years, that's a $2m increase in lifetime salary pre-tax. The cost of us training them to get there is <$10k. But we frequently ask people to either go into an amount of debt or to try to cashflow on minimum wage. It just doesn't work.