> 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it.
I'm not sure what you mean by limited window unless we are talking about professional athletes and some categories of manual laborers.
> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades
This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e.g. cosmetologist, many medical roles).
> do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education?
When we factor out jobs that require 8-12 years of education, in general, yes the trades aren't a bad deal.
> 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made.
I'm not turning this into an ad for the school my daughter went to. Cost was literally 1/2 of he first year salary over $40,000. It was capped at a maximum amount. She ended up paying about $6k, but it was contingent on her getting a job that payed better than $40k.
3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive.
I have five kids. My first was straight As, great test scores, and we still ended up with $6-8k of expense per semester after the full ride scholarships paid for tuition at a small private college.
Ok, here is the biggest community college in the US: Ivy Tech. $2,400 per semester for 12 hours, plus fees. It's not that expensive, but they also have less than 20% of students complete their degrees...
> Link to your study? Did these people not go to college?
It didn't matter what education level they attained, across the population the outcome was consistent. Having a job while young made a huge difference - almost as much as having a degree.
4. As you’ve already demonstrated college is hardly required let alone loans.
A lot of the trades are hard on your body. By the time you are 45-50 your knees could be wrecked and that makes it hard to do service work like electric/HVAC.
There are an argument that desk work isnt healthy either but that is a different discussion.
As a 46 year old I agree, but I'll say that most tradesmen I knew have either moved on to owning/managing or have switched careers. Overall they've done very well.
Also, IME, tradesmen always have the nicest houses regardless of income because they or someone they can trade with will do top quality work for barely any compensation.
> As a 46 year old I agree, but I'll say that most tradesmen I knew have either moved on to owning/managing or have switched careers. Overall they've done very well.
Suvivorship bias?
I imagine that those that are still in the trades are managers/owners. Those that have blown out knees, but don't have the skills to manage/own/washed out a decade ago... Are not.
There's not enough room in the trades for every person who did work in their 20s to manage/own in the 40s, unless you have a lot of attrition.
Isn’t that covered by “switched careers?” Anyway, just to add to the anecdata here, my wife was a hair stylist in a nice part of town. Women/men would trade a weekend at their beach house (concert tickets, private jet access, etc) for hair cuts and color. She’s now “just a kickass mom.”
Point is, for a time, we had access to some 0.1er% shit that’d I’d never get to utilize in my “office job” while my wife would trade for some truly spectacular experiences with the spouses of CEOs and CTOs. Heck, she’s half the reason I got the network I have these days. There’s something to be said about someone saying nice things about you to a captive audience :)
Definitely. There are a lot of young guys in the trades who no one should hire under any circumstances. They do drugs, drink, and even start fights on the job site. They get fired frequently and just move to the next job. There are so many of them that it makes for a toxic workplace for anyone getting into the trades.
Not unless they're dogmatic about the language they're developing in, they aren't. I ran into people ALL THE EFFING TIME as a recruiter who refused to train in another language or environment because they were going to make less money if they moved on, even as the market for their current skillset dwindled to nothing.
That's a completely different issue from having injured your back or shoulder or knee so often that you need surgical corrections just so you can remain functional at a resting state.
My neural network was ground down to a nub for a variety of reasons. I could not leave the cozy confines of this react and typescript stack until winter had ended
If you're unable to work "in the field" as a trades(wo)man, you can always switch over to supervisory or inspection works or go the fully office job route (=planning, architectural offices).
You definitely can (and you should if you have the ability!) but there are by their nature fewer supervisory roles available and the skill sets, at least my experience, don't overlap that much.
> This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e.g. cosmetologist, many medical roles).
As a woman who likes trades like manual work as hobby - a lot of those do actually depends on physical strength. At hobby level it does not matter that much, but to achieve actual commercial productivity is simply much harder without all those muscles.
When I did longshoreman for the summer there were but 2 women in the bull pen.
One was a heavier older lady, imagine a burly dinner lady and you’ve probably got her.
The other woman was maybe in her 30s and looked trim, but she had arms gnarled like branches and you could see a six pack through her tshirt.
Mad respect for women who choose a profession like that, but it needs to be a lifestyle and it will consume you. As an untrained man with a normal (assumed) amount of testosterone, my body adapted over two shifts of swinging 70lb metal bars around.
> I'm not turning this into an ad for the school my daughter went to. Cost was literally 1/2 of he first year salary over $40,000. It was capped at a maximum amount. She ended up paying about $6k, but it was contingent on her getting a job that payed better than $40k.
You already have. I want to see the graduation stats.
> It didn't matter what education level they attained, across the population the outcome was consistent. Having a job while young made a huge difference - almost as much as having a degree.
Where’s the link?
Sorry but your point is way too centered on your anecdotes. Fact remains that college graduates make more money.
I can provide hard data on this if the original commenter doesn't want to. I went to a bootcamp called Hack Reactor.
My salary immediately doubled and has since quadrupled in the 5 years since I attended. It isn't be a great option for everyone, and not every attendee has had a great outcome. But it can work for those with an affinity for analytical work and willingness to work 70-hour weeks for 12 straight weeks.
I'm pretty sure not, I'm pretty sure this person is going to argue until someone helps them justify their education expenses to themselves, or their teaching profession. They're fishing for a "you're right, college is the only thing that's worth it."
As opposed to the other person, who laid out their anecdotes to make themselves feel better by not providing sufficient information to refute it?
Come on. The stats support colleges. You need to provide more than anecdotes to be taken seriously. I could just as easily blurt out that I make more than all of his 5 kids combined because I went to college and boom, anecdote refuted. This isn’t how it’s done in conversations worth having.
If the stats supported colleges you wouldn't have this huge nationwide movement of people looking to make college free because they're burdened until retirement by debt they can't pay off. That's not anecdotal, that is a major political platform point.
Which is the problem with your presented stat. "People with degrees make 40% more over their lifetimes on average" is useless because it tells us nothing about whether it's worth the capital expenditure. Just making more money isn't the point, having a better life is the point.
So it is very relevant, and your statement here is basically an admission that your 40% stat I keep seeing in these threads is equally irrelevant. "You can make more money and still be burdened" equates to "making more money won't necessarily make your life better." If that's true, what the hell is the point of going to college? To make 40% more?
We are talking about salaries, not some philosophical discussion. If your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings college is worth it as shown by college vs non-college graduate earnings - including the cost.
We are talking about whether college is worth the investment in unearned capital and time, we are focusing on the capital expenditure. "Paperclip optimizers are great if you want to optimize for paperclips" is not a strong selling point for paperclip optimizers in the real world. Is college worth the investment? It's not purely philosophical at all, it is very practically relevant. Will my life be better for doing it?
The typical horror story of insurmountable college debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars comes from people who go to grad school, where the loans are uncapped, so that they can reach as high as fifty grand a year or more, as opposed to undergrad, where loans are capped to around ten grand a year. Colleges for that reason have to be more generous with financial aid to undergrads.
Unfunded grad school is pretty much never worth it for that reason, especially for non-STEM fields (but even for STEM, it's still pricey enough that it probably isn't worth paying full price). Med school is also pricey, but high salaries make up for that, and what I've heard of law school is that it isn't worth the cost if you aren't going to a top 20 school.
But as for specifically undergraduate education, I do think the financials make it worth it in many cases, but it's misleading to generalise across all majors. 30k of debt for a computer science degree is likely worth it, sure. Is it worth it for an English degree? Debatable, but 30k of debt at least isn't going to financially hobble someone for the rest of their life. Is it worth paying full sticker price (if e.g. the student doesn't qualify for financial aid) for a sociology degree? I think that would be dubious.
The degree obviously makes a difference but, regardless of the degree what’s more important is what you’re trying to do.
Many college grads complete degrees without a strong reason for it nor have they explored the potential opportunities.
Even an English degree is fine if you have an understanding of what you’re trying to do and set yourself up properly, e.g journalist, technical writing, marketing track vs the degree and no clue
> Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs.
Well, it's hard to tell whether this is true for 'most' bachelor's degree track jobs (this depends on what one means by 'skilled trades' which I don't believe there's an objective definition for), but I would say it's probably true for at least some of them. It seems that electricians, for instance, have higher starting pay than English degree holders, as well as higher median mid-career income. So in that respect it's misleading to say that everyone should go to college because going to college raises their income by 40%.
It's beyond a taxi medallion. Before uber you had to have one. With college that's never been true. The thing that propped up the whole industry was high school counselors scaring kids into thinking they'll be burger flippers and ditch diggers for the rest of their lives without it, and that's never ever been true. The number of young people I've known who had existential dread at the thought of not going, beyond reason, peoples lives were destroyed by all this.
There are a lot of companies out there that mandate a degree for roles that don't require one. That creates artificial demand for an expensive credential, and of course a loan industry happy to issue debt for said required credentials (it's a racket). I put forth that if you exposed companies to the cost of that credentialing in some way (a tax of some sort on roles that mandate higher education), those roles would suddenly not require a degree, or on the job training would replace it.
The taxing of credentials is an interesting concept I haven't heard before. What do you think some potentially unintended consequences be?
It made me think of the way some professional licenses work. The payment to keep the credential is essentially a tax. Some employers won't list the credential on a job description because then they'd be required to pay for it. But they only hire people with said credential, essentially shifting the tax on the individual and creating a kind of shadow job hiring process where the people being turned away may not be sure that getting the credential would open the door for them.
That's true, but it's largely the result of a glut of degrees in the job market, as well as high unemployment. As people start figuring this out, and as demand for work outpaces supply (both are starting to happen) you're going to see the smart employers drop these shenanigans and the dumb ones go out of business or start paying degrees what they're worth if they insist on it.
Nah, but I don’t like claims without evidence. That’s how misinformation spreads. I’ve already laid out my source for believing college grads make more money than non college grads.
I'm not sure what you mean by limited window unless we are talking about professional athletes and some categories of manual laborers.
> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades
This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e.g. cosmetologist, many medical roles).
> do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education?
When we factor out jobs that require 8-12 years of education, in general, yes the trades aren't a bad deal.
> 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made.
I'm not turning this into an ad for the school my daughter went to. Cost was literally 1/2 of he first year salary over $40,000. It was capped at a maximum amount. She ended up paying about $6k, but it was contingent on her getting a job that payed better than $40k.
3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive.
I have five kids. My first was straight As, great test scores, and we still ended up with $6-8k of expense per semester after the full ride scholarships paid for tuition at a small private college.
Ok, here is the biggest community college in the US: Ivy Tech. $2,400 per semester for 12 hours, plus fees. It's not that expensive, but they also have less than 20% of students complete their degrees...
> Link to your study? Did these people not go to college?
It didn't matter what education level they attained, across the population the outcome was consistent. Having a job while young made a huge difference - almost as much as having a degree.
4. As you’ve already demonstrated college is hardly required let alone loans.
Yep.