(01-13-2022 12:46 PM)b2b Wrote: Hopefully more high schoolers are becoming interested in trades. 4 year university is a scam in a lot of ways. Much of that depends on the major though.
Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk
Eh - I see this comment pretty much on every single article that I've ever seen about college enrollment, but it's a lot more nuanced.
To be sure, I agree that there's a lot of demand for trades and we need more people to fill those roles.
On the other hand, I think there's an assumption that people that don't go to college can simply go into the trades when that really isn't any more true than assuming that people that don't go to college can instantly make six figures by simply going to a coding bootcamp or, even better, simply start a business and be an entrepreneur (neglecting the fact the failure rate of startups is 90%).
Trade school is a multi-year investment with a lot of classes and training in the same manner as college. Depending on where you live, getting a job may depend on whether you're able to join the applicable local union, which isn't always a straight-forward process. The reasonable length of a trade career isn't going to be the same for the typical white collar profession because physical health and limitations eventually get in the way (e.g. it's absolutely nothing for an accountant or lawyer to work at 65, whereas trades people realistically need to plan to stop doing on-the-ground work in their 50s).
Of course, this is all assuming that you have the aptitude to perform well in the trades in the first place. I was a pretty good student in school... but I would have been *horrible* in the trades. Whenever there's a DIY project that has an expected time for completion, you pretty much have to double that time for me. That's just not how my brain works and I think that goes for a lot of people in the same way that not everyone can turn themselves into a computer scientist no matter how hard they try.
The upshot is that it's not really a one-to-one relationship between people not choosing to go to college being able to realistically switch to go into the trades. It's going to be a much smaller percentage that could realistically do so than what a lot of the Internet seems to want to believe.
At the same time, for all of the horror stories about students going into massive debt for college, you can see it very clearly in every single employment report going back for many years at this point: there is a DIRECT connection between having a college degree with higher earnings, higher employment rates, higher net worth and more choices for careers. It's not even close.
Now, that doesn't mean that EVERY college grad is better off than EVERY non-college grad. All of us can probably find examples of someone that is very successful that never finished college. My wife's wealthiest uncle by a wide margin is someone that never even finished high school. Yet, let's all make sure to not make the mistake of thinking that the anecdotal exception is the rule. When looking across hundreds of millions of people in the United States, it's very clear that college degree holders as a whole have advantages on every single financial and employment metric.
Finally, a lot of these articles always neglect the people that are really screwed: the ones that attended some college but never graduated. That is the group that ends up with a disproportionate amount of college debt while never getting a degree... which means that they never get the financial and employment advantages of degree holders as described above. Essentially, they're getting all of the downside of college debt without any of the upside of a college degree, which is the worst of both worlds. Those are the people that we all should be worried about as opposed to the sensational stories about people taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars for an Ivy League degree (as those people are going to end up just fine as a general matter).