The trades are not without their issues, however. Many of them are physical jobs. The trades people who have come to work at my house, if they're my age (58) are hobbling and broken. Their hands look like hell. Many are sunburned. Many if not most of them work for tiny businesses that receive virtually no oversight.
Encouraging the trades might make sense in a country with a strong safety net, free health care, better labor laws, stronger unions. The American public figures who are promoting the trades also tend to be doing nothing about those things, or are even opposed to them. I've heard that the trades are a good option in Europe.
This is just my own observation, but the tradesmen I've seen do OK in the US are those that own and run their own business -- even those that have just 1 tradesperson working. Think "Inland Plumbing LLC" run by a guy and his wife out of their house. Yes, many trades are back-breaking work. I have a relative who was a home inspector for years (crawling around in attics, crawl spaces, and roofs all day is exhausting), and he did struggle at times to pay to raise several kids.
Owner-operator electricians and plumbers in particular (and especially those rated for commercial work) can do very well.
You only see the 58yo that comes to unclog your drain. You don't see the 58yo who's name is on the van. You don't see the one who has some comfy job as a building manager for some commercial facility.
Allowing people to learn trades while still having “the college experience” I think would fix this.
Lots of people out here who can actually affect the labor market and affect the way student financing works, and instead of hiring people without college degrees and instead of electing people who can reform financing, they just ask students to take a decidedly stupid bet on not getting a degree. It's a silly way to solve the problem.
And people will always need stuff that snuck into shot rotoscoping out. Don’t worry.
I once had a friend comment when we were talking about job security that the first thing to go when a recession hits is dance lessons and Karate classes. At the time it felt like film making was very boom or bust
This may turn out to be false: electric cars require almost no maintenance.
Just because we’re getting rid of two large issue generators in the engine/transmission system, doesn’t mean the new machines are bulletproof.
People are going to need their cars fixed.
We have like 3 actually good mechanics locally... most of what they do is related to alignment, suspensions, and consumables that owners don't feel comfortable doing themselves. All three of these still apply to a Tesla, even though they don't need their oil changed, they still have tires, antifreeze, air filters, brakes, etc, and that's still bread and butter work for the local shop.
Spoiler: it's booming.
That's nothing special these days, look at the maintenance schedule of a new Toyota Corolla, except 3 oil changes (and that's only in the US where this is done ridiculously often) there's nothing ICE specific on there...
It's also my experience with my Ram truck.
More impressive is getting from 100k to 147k, for instance.
that anecdote is only indicative of short term market conditions. It's sort of like saying that trucking jobs are safe because there are truck driver shortages today, ignoring the impending doom of automation in the next few decades.
If it's still decades out, that means it's still reasonable to suggest to people looking for a career. Changing careers at 38 is something a lot of people do, for instance after 20 years in the military.
They would love it if you could fix a vehicle instead of having to replace the entire thing, which is what the OEMs want.
The auto insurance industry knows how to influence car makers, they run the IIHS crash testing rating system, and they could probably also rate cars on repairability. Although, sometimes the safety features make it hard to repair, so there's some tradeoffs there.
The top of the home page states their aim, "Learn a trade,earn a degree, and graduate without crippling debt. The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor. We teach our students to think, but also to pray, to love, and to build."
By way of example: "electrician" is one of their 5 trades, and they have no listed electrician faculty.
No, it's aimed at solving a perceived problem of the Catholic working class, that they aren't effectively equipped and harnessed as a political arm of the Church to shape civil society.
The people this is aimed to attract is not people who would otherwise go to traditional liberal arts colleges and universities, Catholic or otherwise.
Relevant:
Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.
Third, the demand for degrees — due to the idea that everyone must go to college, and misguided subsidies to make that happen — already far exceeds what colleges are able to supply while still being achievable by the majority of their customer base.
The result has been degree inflation, cost inflation, and a huge number of useless workers with useless degrees unable to pay off their crippling college debt.
And even if equipped (whatever that means exactly) many simply have no interest in doing so. I assume I could have gotten into a PhD program of some sort had I had my heart set on it. (I did get a couple of Masters--and mostly quite enjoyed them.) But had very little interest in getting a PhD--and find the idea retrospectively even less appealing today.
We're rich enough (for now) to import innovation; we don't need an educated populace. We have a robust military that makes us untouchable geopolitcally.
Do you see how dangerous this kind of bullshit is? Do you see what happens when enough of the people in your country don't value things like degrees and institutions of higher learning? The Athenians fell because of their hubris; not because they valued poetry and art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
So long as people have ready access to a trade education if they want it, the wages afforded to various professions should be sufficient to handle the distribution of students into the future - clearly, degrees are still desirable enough to the alternative that trade wages will have to go higher before more people start moving into it.
I’m Swedish and this is the ideology Sweden is based on. But I’ve come to see it as backwards, even immoral.
There’s a dream on the left side of the political spectrum that everyone is borne a blank slate that society can fill with whatever it wants. By this logic a rich country can fill their blank slates with wonderfully productive and innovative PhDs, because all it takes is economic resources invested in education.
But that’s simply not true. Highly challenging, creative, innovative thinking doesn’t work that way. Take Srinivasa Ramanujan as an example. With no formal education at all he wrote himself into the history books of mathematics. He’s an extreme example. But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.
I have one brother that has a mild intellectual handicap and one that has a PhD in medicine. The former makes sandwiches for the kids in a local school and works in a stable. The latter makes equipment for medical research. They are both perfectly happy with their stations in life. But taken to the extreme this ideology means that if they were borne in different countries then their positions may very well be switched. Nobody benefits from this. It would make them both miserable, the sandwiches worse and (probably :P) the medical research equipment less useful.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case I think that means every country on earth is going to have some brilliant innovators, and some skilled craftsmen. They’ll need both to stay rich.
This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.
Skilled craftsmen exist because there are things that require a combination of capital in the form of tools and knowledge in the form of training on a small scale. Think about an electronics repair shop: they will pretty much always exist (and should) because as sophistication increases in electronics, when they break they always result in a unique snowflake of a situation that is basically impossible to automate the repair thereof. Repair also requires spare parts and tools that they buy one time and use many times.
In a dynamic economy both will exist, but it doesn't render the argument that we should want more Nvidias and fewer Subways any less valid.
Another example of such a competition is the global innovation economy. If you’re in the 50th percentile of GPU companies then you’re not nVidia, and economically speaking you can just go home.
I understand it sounds harsh, and it is. But it’s the truth.
Also, not everyone has equal potential, and the people who do have it may not want to use it. Having many trade paths, not just elite ones helps our society to match achievement and desire. We certainly need the full spectrum and should encourage the development of more choice.
So, to begin with, high school graduates who go to these schools were predisposed to go to a Catholic liberal arts college. If the College in the article is successful in its mission, these folks will graduate with the degree they wanted, in the surroundings/environment they wanted, but also with solid career possibilities.
People have been swearing up and down for over a decade that the US graduates far more people with bachelors degrees than we "need", and that more parents[0] should be encouraging their kids to learn a trade. This new college is a response to that.
[0] it's seldom "us"; the problem seems to be isolated, in many peoples' minds, to other peoples' kids, and they don't want their own kids to be the ones who learn a trade.