College is great for the right people but we should be emphasizing vocational education and apprenticeships for many more people. Someone who doesn't want to do the reading or do abstract symbol manipulation is a poor fit for universities: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos.... I know because I've taught many students who don't want to be in school and aren't getting much out of it.
Effectively what we're telling people is: you can make decent money with these jobs but you'll have to endure pain which all those kids goofing off in college will never have to go through. Making one class of people go through pain, and the other not, seems like dual-class citizenship. De-stigmatizing blue collar jobs is important but we have to try to make them more equal to white-collar jobs first.
Spot on. When I make that argument its from the perspective of me at 18 with the options to do either. I think you're making an important counter point that many don't have the option to begin with, due to money, citizenship, parental/child care, relationships, illness, education level, etc. - although scholarships heavily target most of those demographics.
They were very happy that I decided to get a desk job because they didn't want me to be in perpetual pain and disabled like they are.
Especially people who do physical work themselves try to make sure their kids won't have to. E.g. my grandparents, who were simple village folks working in the fields, made sure to support their kids in getting educated. (Despite all its nastyness, one of the few good things about socialist Hungary was that this kind of upward mobility was possible and encouraged).
My uncle was an electrician (he's retired now), and so is one of his sons, and they both seem pretty happy with their lives. Happier than a lot of tech workers I know.
I don't fault anyone for not sacrificing themselves for the greater good of society at large.
And yes, for sure, there can be shitty, stressful and low-paid office jobs and fulfilling, well-paid physical work. If someone finds an example of the latter, I see no reason why they wouldn't recommend it to their kids.
Call center is also entry level, so I don't know why an entry level electrician should get paid much more than what someone at a call center makers.
I ask for a particular reason: I think you're easily one of the smartest guys in this forum, and your children are likely to be similarly smart.
So, there are two games out there for us to play -- 1) as you say, the HVAC technicians and roofers who actually make a pretty comfortable salary and 2) the uber smarts, the googlers and the founders. Even a liberal arts degree from a big name A-tier school is worth it for them, for the connections they'll make and the prestige they'll be set with for all of their life. So 2 is actually a pretty good bet. And it's why I encourage my nieces (who seem very smart) to do the whole college acceptance dance (learn to play piano, do some sports, and everything else to secure a ticket to Harvard) and the rest is easy. Don't you do the same with your kids?
I don't agree with folks who say everyone should just go to trade school. There are lots of good, high-demand jobs that require a college degree. That is also part of the reality that kids need to understand. My kids will start SAT prep in middle school and depending on demonstrated potential, we might encourage trying for a top-tier college. We don't intend to pay for school, because we think debt creates motivation. If either of them demonstrate an interest in law or medicine, I suspect we'll encourage them to go to a state school for undergrad like my wife and I did, because people care more about the terminal degree. Either way, we think it's important to take a gap year to mature after high school. (My wife did; I wish I had done the same.) At the end of the day, a lot depends on the kids. At the same time, my wife and I are not ashamed to be Asian parents. There is a lot you can do to guide, mold, guilt, manipulate, wheedle, and prod your children into making good decisions, and we intend to do it.
I mean it obviously depends on what happens a decade from now. I’m imagining some mix of taking some amount in loans with us covering living expenses. My wife worked through Iowa, and I feel like I would’ve done better had my parents made me spend my summer earnings from programming on tuition. But my older kid is so self motivated it may not matter.
Maybe, but you have to be careful with this kind of thinking. I know a couple of really gifted guys with degrees from Berklee College of Music who still have student loans to pay off. The truth is, world class musicians working good jobs still take considerable time to pay off loans that big. It's not a high-paying profession.
There's a category of artist, the superstars, who don't have these sorts of problems but its population is vanishingly small.
On the other hand, the guys I'm talking about don't really question the value of their excellent education. It's not all about money for some people, which is good. It's just wise to know what you're getting into.
An objective criteria might be to pursue art if you don't have to pay tuition. I knew someone who decided as a teenager that he wouldn't pursue music unless he didn't have to pay for it. This worked out mostly - his undergrad and graduate programs were full ride scholarships, he really was extraordinary. Except when he was auditioning for orchestras at the end, he spent almost a year unemployed and flying back and forth across the country on his own dime. He had to buy a separate seat for his instrument because he couldn't trust it being checked as baggage. He was incredibly good, but he told me that 80% of the people who auditioned were just as good, and past a certain level of ability, it was basically random who got picked. So this guy was perhaps "world class," but even at the end it was a dicey period where he was not sure he could be employed.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/david-datuna-banana-art-ba...
Pixar, Riot Games, Marvel, and XKCD would not exist without full time artists (even those with above-average-but-not-world-class talent).
Art school can actually be a great investment if you want to do creative work for hire.
If you are a creative director, you have people working under you.
How do you all get to be creative directors?
You'd be surprised how many high-level creative positions are available, especially in games. It's kinda political to get a position of course. But being an artist is pretty sustainable if you're willing to put out work for a studio of that sort.
IME, the people that wanted to go to art school, weren't interested in what is taught design school, and vice versa.
Dear lord, that's insane. UT Austin estimates $26,000/year (in state), including room and board.
How does that compare to what you paid?
Like I said, it was easier in those days. Dad paid my tuition, I paid everything else with a minimum wage job (and later internships, upgrading my apartment to a nicer university provided $425/month).
Doing the math, it was way less than $10k.
I'm looking at the SUNY website and it looks like tuition, fees, room and board is about $27K a year now. It's about double what it cost me, roughly $108K for four years.
God I wish there had been someone to do this for me, and for all kinds of things, not just finances and career planning. (My parents tried some, but they didn't know much of this themselves.) Now that I'm "old", I'm just starting to get the hang of some of this stuff.
That said, in my youth I suppose I would have been too "smart" to accept advice like this most of the time.
(Want some free education about the business world? Read every Dilbert strip--free online--and think about what they're alluding to.)
> A couple months ago, my 17-year-old daughter’s guidance counselor called her into his office to ask pretty much the only question that adults ask high school seniors: “What colleges are you applying to?” When Ella tossed off a handful of universities, he said, “Have you thought about going to art school?”
This is goddamn malpractice.
> Like most parents, who save on average $18,000 for their kids’ education, we’d failed to sock away anything close to the $75,000 annual sticker price it would take for Ella to go to, say, Pratt in New York City.
A friend of ours matriculated at a similar school, but dropped out and went into physical therapy instead. She and her husband managed to buy a house in their late 20s, have kids, etc.[1]
Your job as a parent is to socialize your children. And that means telling them how the world works. The society that they see around them exists because people with valuable skills work hard to produce things. That doesn’t just mean doctors or engineers—the world needs accountants and roofers and HVAC technicians. The common thread is that these are skills that people and companies need every day to make the world around us keep humming. People are compensated based on the value and rarity of their skills. And money is necessary for security and supporting yourself. Kids need to learn these lessons from the earliest age. You abdicate that duty if you don’t teach them that, and instead allow a bunch of government workers fill your kids’ heads with nonsense.
College, for most people, is a joke. Take a bunch of classes that don’t teach you anything useful, and then get a job that doesn’t require you to use anything you learned. It’s an elaborate shell game we have to play because we’ve bought into the nonsense peddled by teachers and guidance counselors. As parents, it’s your job to be smart and help your kids navigate this game. (We’re going through this with my wife’s younger brother right now.) Manage your courses to keep up your GPA, take prerequisites at community college for a fraction of the price, etc. The Kafkaesque administration of most colleges makes this hard enough. But teachers and administrators will fight you the whole way. They’ll talk about making sure kids get the “college experience” and telling kids to “pursue their bliss.” Its your job as a parent to do everything you can to fight back.
[1] I don’t want to come across to much like judging people’s lifestyle. I know some people who are happy with the bohemian art world lifestyle. That makes them happy. But when you see people complain about student debt and the plight of millennials, that’s what keeps coming up: they can’t afford to buy a house or have kids.
[2] That doesn’t mean I think doctors or aerospace engineers don’t need to go to college. But in 1960, less than 40% of the population graduated from high school and less than 10% had a bachelors degree. It’s incredible what a sophisticated economy we had with so little formal education.