A lot of people here and on reddit like to romanticize the trades while sitting in an air-conditioned office like it's some secret tip to instant wealth without the need to study for years. But the reality is grim for the majority of salaried tradesmen. It's a job that is very hard on your body and the heralded "fresh air" suddenly sounds a lot less nice when you have to do physical labor in intense heat or cold.
Those who go above and beyond will always succeed no matter the field but for the average Joe a solid education is a much better bet and you are doing them a disservice by spreading these second-hand anecdotes.
I agree with everything you said up to the above quote.
I’m not sure how you characterize “the average Joe”, but I assure you that the 50th percentile of college age people by any reasonable measure of aptitude will not be able to finish college with any degree, and they will certainly not be able to get a degree that will likely lead to (relatively) high pay like engineering or nursing.
About 32% of 24 year olds (maybe 25 yo) have an undergraduate degree. If you have a casual conversation with the 20%-32% folks (spitballing this number), you would probably be shocked about how little most of them know about anything, including their “major”. These folks were basically socially promoted through an undergraduate degree. This happens a lot more than many folks would like to believe, and it boils down to ability to pay.
If you need some anecdotal evidence of this, I strongly encourage you to teach or be a TA for a required freshman writing course (esp. at a lower competitive university / junior college). The inability of many of these folks to write a coherent short essay or even a coherent paragraph would make your brain explode.
These are the average Joe’s you are referring to. College, at least in its current form, is not the answer for these folks.
But at the end of the day many of them still get a degree and (somehow) get hired and there are plenty of universities here that are far easier than mine. You don't need to be smart to get a college degree, all you need is discipline to torture yourself through these mostly pointless exercises.
Whether or not they learn anything at college or just waste time is not the point. The fact of the matter is that a college degree helps you to get a job that is usually more comfortable and pays better. I'd argue that those people who can excel as a tradesman and actually rake in the money would also do the same had they gone the college-route instead and for those that don't, an office job with college degree is clearly the better option.
Plus, with a college degree, getting visas for abroad is easier and in these troubled times mobility of this sort is also something I wouldn't like to miss.
It wasn't until I had about 5 years of solid experience before I started being able to significantly increase my income regularly in my field.
There is a ceiling to what local opportunities can provide. More specialized or more senior roles are usually available elsewhere.
This, this, this.
Our education system does a great job of teaching value production. It does an absolutely terrible job of teaching value capture.
It would be really nice if the two were always aligned. But for most people, most of the time, they're not. The best solution for most people, IMO, is to divorce the two: to work at a job, and serve the community in off-hours. And to aim for independence so the two can be joined.
I agree. My father works up in Albertan north in temperatures anywhere from +30 to -50, and their schedule is 14 days work and 5 days off. No doubt it's getting harder on his body ( he is now approaching 60's).
Also, a lot of people romanticize the value of “the college experience.” Is that experience worth $150k of debt? Is a degree in social work ever worth that much? Not at all; the data proves it.
> for the average Joe a solid education is a much better bet and you are doing a disservice by spreading these second hand anecdotes
Did you hear the one about the sociology graduate working at Starbucks with 100k in debt? How about the English graduate working at a call center with $80k in debt? How about the one about the one who worked her way through a marketing degree only to end up working as an assistant manager at a local Williams Sonoma making about $18 per hour.
Let’s not spread anecdotes about how college is a better bet because for many many people, it’s not. I got a completely wasted degree in journalism, but now I work for a FAANG as a software engineer. The degree wasn’t even a consideration. So I have student debt for no good reason.
And belittling the trades, claiming physical labor is hard: that’s just elitist. Most of the trades are more active than your office jobs, but that’s what “work” often is. People have gotten soft, lazy and fat. It isn’t like the trades require 12 hours a day at the bottom of a coal mine. A sedentary lifestyle is more of a risk than being a machinist.
Are you sure about that? I've always thought that a degree was essential to get past HR at large, established companies, but it's not essential that the degree relates directly to the job you're doing.
Not necessarily. Many large companies, including even some of the FAANGs, phrase the requirement as "BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience". That being said, though, applicants who want to make use of the "or equivalent experience clause" should expect to be challenged to demonstrate that they do indeed have equivalent experience.
> What struck Major Anderson most forcibly was the almost universal inability of the prisoners to adjust to a primitive situation. "They lacked the old Yankee resourcefulness," he said. "This was partly—but only partly, I believe—the result of the psychic shock of being captured. It was also, I think, the result of some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men—a new softness."
The Vanishing Adolescent (1959), page 210: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24370505M/The_vanishing_adol...
My dad, meanwhile, started out as a pipefitter but went into the management side of things and was basically doubling up his neighbor in salary for the last 20 years of their careers, and the only medical treatment he's ever had for work was for carpal tunnel, which was non-surgical.
My dad is 70 and gets around way better than you would expect for a man his age just because he's kept in shape with a bit of jogging. His former neighbor is 4 years younger and has to be extremely judicious with how he gets around.
It's not that we didn't want to, but that we never had the opportunity. The Great Recession destroyed basically every trade job out there. Nobody was going to hire a young buck when you could get really smart, experienced guy for the same price.
So us millennials went to college instead. In 2009, people my age with no degree had an unemployment rate of like 20-25% while people with degrees had an unemployment rate of maybe 5-6%.
A lot of my friends growing up that started in trades (myself include) ended up in the military and/or college because you still had to show up for work every day, just to sit around for a few hours to learn you weren't getting paid.
Not that I'm complaining, my life certainty worked is better as a result. But I don't think people with office job realize how bad The Great Recession was for people at the bottom.
Ive been doing a lot of renovation on my condo lately...and found there's a couple distinct categories of people in trades.
- Those who suck at their job - The scammers - Those who are so overbooked they have a 4-8 months waitlist and charge 3 times as much as the rest.
Even the first 2 categories can be hard to come by, too. But for a good, let say, carpenter? I'll happily pay north of $200-300/hour. Because those who are cheap are usually just scamming/screwing me anyway and will cost more in the long run, so may as well get it right the first time.
In fact- I've found that often times, price inversely correlates with quality of work. Perhaps it may reverse again once you reach a certain inflection point where you're paying for a lot of 'white glove' service and someone who is willing to take abuse from very demanding clients.
My painter is an exception... I've been tipping him like 50% because he undercharges like crazy but does absolutely amazing work. Maybe he'll get the hint eventually (I don't like underpaying people who do great work for me).
Some people are amazing at their jobs, some are scammers/incompetent/full of BS, most are in the middle.
With that said, I echo what another poster said. In the trades, it really feels like "the middle" is much, much rarer. Unlike, let say, programming, trades are usually an understood problem, where most of the challenge is in the execution (except for the design phase). That means after doing it for 15 years, people who are legit are actually REALLY good at it.
As a software engineer, Im not sure I've ever done the same thing (or even similar things) twice within a year or even a decade at times...
I have a relative who worked construction after high school. Today he is "owns beautiful houses in exclusive neighborhoods around the globe" style wealthy. Yes he worked in the trades, but so did the hundreds of other guys he was working with when he first started out and I doubt any of them did nearly as well. His success wasn't due to him being in the trades, it was his ability to operate an efficient business that narrowly targeted a large business segment that had previously been under-served by generalist businesses, to consistently exceed customer expectations even under adversity, to build trusted business relationships, and to make all of this scale in practice. Which is a fair description of what a tech startup actually entails.
Most trade career success stories have a strong element of entrepreneurial effort and ambition such that I wonder if we are misattributing whence that success is largely derived.
Moreover, the key word here is "union." That is the common feature of most of these tradesman success stories. People need to embrace unions in many fields if they want better jobs. A union won't protect everyone during a 2009-like economy, but it significantly improves pay, job security, and working conditions otherwise.
We have this romantic notion that a pipe-fitter wants their kid to take over the family trade. The reality is that kid probably grew up through a few recessions, knows free/reduced school lunches a bit better than they would like, and the parents aren't necessarily pushing them to follow in the old man's foot steps.
However, trades are not a silver bullet and there are many down sides. The pay starts out low, and a lot of the time STAYS low. Trades are notorious for stress injuries. Electrician is ACTUALLY a kind-of dangerous job. You can fry yourself by being careless. As are a lot of the trades.
I would rather have my health, a valuable degree, and body fully working than not have student loan debt.
You can pay off debt and make it go away if you are smart. You cannot heal your shot joints.
SO MANY young people abuse their body thinking it's going to be young forever. It is not.
My dad worked in a factory the majority of his life. We were instructed early and often to go to college and not ruin your body doing manual labor.
I'm urging him not to waste his abilities on technician work.
I am not telling him to study Art History, but urging him to study Electrical Engineering instead of Electrician.
An EE can be an Electrician, but the opposite isn't true.
Those few short years of making money pale to the 6 figure income and abilities you gain as an engineer.
I took a partial gap year and took a couple college classes with a good friend who dropped out and went on to become a journeyman in a union trade. I went on to get a bachelor's degree. School wasn't his thing. He continues to makes more than a lot of software/data engineers. And he has a pension that should* start paying out more than a decade before I'll be ready to retire.
*Interestingly though, because fewer people are going into the trades, he has noticed the quality of incoming people has gone done year after year and the aging union leadership has lowered the hiring bar to keep the pension numbers up. He can't count on people to do their job right or even show up on time, and they come in already knowing everything and not wanting to learn. With higher cost than non-union and struggling with quality it makes them less competitive with non-union shops in the contract bidding process.
There are good opportunities for people willing to work hard and learn.
My wife is a doctor of physical therapy who owns her own business. Most of her job is marketing and paperwork.
If you want to throw the title Business Owner in front of a career title, I'd still suggest Electrical Engineer business owner over Electrician business owner.
I wasn't really talking about someone who employs lots of other electricians.
Edit: thanks autocorrect.
If Joe was good at business he could keep 200 electricians busy with jobs that pay about as much as they would earn on their own, and no need for them to do all the book work in the office, and ultimately Joe makes more money.
I don’t think he really considered college an option, but is doing amazing now.
I didn't go into trades but I got jobs doing what I was good at. Now I work with people who mostly went to Cornell and MIT and I have zero student debt. I'm doing extremely well.
But we graduated college between 2007-2010, so it was a rough economy to be looking for a first job.
One friend skipped college and joined the local electrician union. He did his 10 years to get his lifetime card, and started his own business a few years ago.
Not only is he already making a ton of money, he has zero debt, and more importantly charges close to whatever he wants an hour because of how in demand he is.
He jokes that he’s going to be the only electrician in the city in the next ten years because all the old guard is retiring, and way fewer millennials went into trades.
College would have been a bad idea for him and he knew it.