College-Educated Workers Are Taking Over the American Factory Floor (wsj.com) 159
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations could get by without higher education, an analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal found. Within the next three years, American manufacturers are, for the first time, on track to employ more college graduates than workers with a high-school education or less, part of a shift toward automation that has increased factory output, opened the door to more women and reduced prospects for lower-skilled workers.
U.S. manufacturers have added more than a million jobs since the recession, with the growth going to men and women with degrees, the Journal analysis found. Over the same time, manufacturers employed fewer people with at most a high-school diploma. Employment in manufacturing jobs that require the most complex problem-solving skills, such as industrial engineers, grew 10% between 2012 and 2018; jobs requiring the least declined 3%, the Journal analysis found. [...] Specialized job requirements have narrowed the path to the middle class that factory work once afforded. The new, more advanced manufacturing jobs pay more but don't help workers who stopped schooling early. More than 40% of manufacturing workers have a college degree, up from 22% in 1991. Looking ahead, investments in automation will continue to expand factory production with relatively fewer employees. Jobs that remain are expected to be increasingly filled by workers from colleges and technical schools, leaving high-school graduates and dropouts with fewer opportunities. Manufacturing workers laid-off in years past also will see fewer suitable openings. "At Pioneer Service, a machine shop in the Chicago suburb of Addison, Ill., employees in polo shirts and jeans, some with advanced degrees, code commands for robots making complex aerospace components on a hushed factory floor," reports The Wall Street Journal. "That is a far cry from work at Pioneer in the 1990s, when employees had to wear company uniforms to shield their clothes from the grease flying off the 1960s-era manual machines used to make parts for heating-and-cooling systems."
U.S. manufacturers have added more than a million jobs since the recession, with the growth going to men and women with degrees, the Journal analysis found. Over the same time, manufacturers employed fewer people with at most a high-school diploma. Employment in manufacturing jobs that require the most complex problem-solving skills, such as industrial engineers, grew 10% between 2012 and 2018; jobs requiring the least declined 3%, the Journal analysis found. [...] Specialized job requirements have narrowed the path to the middle class that factory work once afforded. The new, more advanced manufacturing jobs pay more but don't help workers who stopped schooling early. More than 40% of manufacturing workers have a college degree, up from 22% in 1991. Looking ahead, investments in automation will continue to expand factory production with relatively fewer employees. Jobs that remain are expected to be increasingly filled by workers from colleges and technical schools, leaving high-school graduates and dropouts with fewer opportunities. Manufacturing workers laid-off in years past also will see fewer suitable openings. "At Pioneer Service, a machine shop in the Chicago suburb of Addison, Ill., employees in polo shirts and jeans, some with advanced degrees, code commands for robots making complex aerospace components on a hushed factory floor," reports The Wall Street Journal. "That is a far cry from work at Pioneer in the 1990s, when employees had to wear company uniforms to shield their clothes from the grease flying off the 1960s-era manual machines used to make parts for heating-and-cooling systems."
supply and demand (Score:2)
Re:supply and demand (Score:4, Funny)
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But what level will they descend to?
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But what level will they descend to?
You'll have to consult Dante's Inferno.
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Even if the receptionist might be dude?
Re: Well if my receptionist is going down ... (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re making several assumptions here.
college educated with big loans may also steal stu (Score:2)
college educated with big loans may also steal stuff to help pay it off.
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Dissent. Why can't college graduates spell these days?
Yeah, I know - "You kids get off my lawn."
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Your guess is better than mine. Even then, dissent doesn't quite work, as it implies disagreement with a specific issue. Maybe he was going for "discontent", a general unhappiness about the situation. I was trying to parse that (while thinking about a cool 20+ year old video game) and failing. I thought it was perhaps "decent" with a word left out afterwards.
Anyways, it's one thing to misspell something where the meaning can still be salvaged from context. It's quite another to completely leave the re
Re: supply and demand (Score:2)
A different verb would help: engender dissent. Hence a diffuse but pernicious impact. But YES the focus on spelling, grammar, and punctuation is just class marker or snide stuff. Just because you know what a semicolon is and use it doesnâ(TM)t make you smarter. ;;;;;;;;;;; See? :)
Re: supply and demand (Score:2)
From context I immediately took OP to mean dissent, which clearly gave me a picture how a more formally educated employee may be a worse option than a minimally educated employee.
At no time did I think OP meant decent _missed word_.
I was thinking of Descent and Descent 2, and of descending...
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The economy is so bad (Score:2)
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H1-B workers are paid in excess of $60K/yr, by law.
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And they do the work of locals who otherwise would have made 100k+ a year so the original point stands.
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The prior comment I responded to was about H1-B secretaries, that's a very expensive way to fill a secretary job.
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Because the person without the degree is more likely be grateful versus the college educated candidate who is more likely to be bitter and bring descent.
The word you wanted to use is *dissent.
If you had a college degree, you might know the difference.
Re: supply and demand (Score:2)
...and bring descent
Never do that; you'll make everyone puke. Played real smooth on an S3 Virge, though.
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What a complete garbage argument.
Might not the college graduate, burdened with student debt, be more motivated than someone without that debt hanging over their heads?
Besides, factory job doesn't equate to bad job, and it certainly beats no job.
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Not necessarily.
Your argument is based on Stereotypes, where I can counteract your argument with an other Stereotypes.
The person who didn't get a college degree is too lazy and unfocused because they didn't want to go threw the rigors of college. Thus will probably be lazy and undisciplined at that job too.
No I do not believe my argument as well. Because it just just based on a Stereotypes not actual people.
However there is an influx of College Grad students who are unable to get into entry level work beca
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Re:supply and demand (Score:5, Interesting)
I can think of a lot of shit for a receptionist to do in their downtime which would be really valuable, but which your average high school C student couldn't likely do. Reception tends to be boom and bust, and the real value comes in filling that downtime with something that make the company better, rather than facebook and candy crush.
The problem lies in that person doing those other things for a year or two, and realizing that they can get paid a lot more to do them full time rather than part time in between reception jobs. They decide that there's more to life, and move on. Then you're back hiring another receptionist, and trying to find another desperate person with a college degree who wants any sort of job.
We've gone through I think 5 administrative assistants in 7 years at this point. The problem with most of them is that they are actually too qualified. They get bored and move on. Our current one is a lovely woman who isn't super sharp, but she's very nice, likes to do quantities of repetitive, mundane tasks, and plays around on facebook a bunch of the day. She's also a surprisingly good proof-reader.
And you know what? That's great! She's one I think will stick around. And I hope to hell that she does, because every time we go a month or two between them, it's a shitshow.
You need to hire the person with the right skills but also the right motivation and aptitude for the job. One of our previous administrative assistants did a time series analysis of customer contacts for us. They no longer work here. Our current one won't do that, but I bet in another 2 years if I ask her to book me a hotel room for 2 nights and charge it to the travel account, she'll still be here, and she'll get it done in 20 minutes with a smile on her face.
I have way better shit to do with my time than work with the finance department to get the company credit card and then call the hotel and book my hotel room and charge it to the card. And then call them back when they took my personal card for incidentals and instead charged the room to it despite it being pre-paid to the company card. "Hey Sam, the hotel put the entire room on my personal card. Here's the folio. Can you fix that?"
That sort of shit is worth soooo much to a company. Let the people with special skills do their thing, and let the people who are steady, solid, mundane workers take care of the low-skill, boring shit. If you're hiring people who are overskilled to do that, you're going to be replacing them every 6-12 months.
I'm a firm believer that more education is better, but there are definitely a lot of jobs where that's not true for the organization. Turnover costs money, and makes an organization less efficient. Some is always needed, but getting the right people with the right skills into the right job minimizes the disruption, because they're more likely to stick around for longer.
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Yup, my experience exactly. College educated receptionists require coddling and effort to be put into creating mental challenges for them. Administrative assistants are a mixed bag there though; sometimes one college educated person can be more effective than two non-college educated people, picking up things like design, marketing, and all the one-off things that can’t really be documented in a procedure document.
But for coordinating and negotiating with vendors, I will take a charming high school dr
Re: supply and demand (Score:2)
*Of course, you're referring to current college grads; no well-run business would even dream of letting most of them anywhere near the phone...
Re: supply and demand (Score:2)
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How many Starbucks baristas and Barnes and noble sales clerks are still paying off their grad school loans?
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It wasn't that long ago when a Mc Donald's franchisee admitted to preferring college graduates to candidates with only a high school diploma, and the press and pundits couldn't understand his simple point - if college grads cost the same as anyone else, why not?
They press/pundits claimed he refused to hire folks without college degrees (not true) and went on and on about how such jobs were vital for non-college graduates.
The glut of unemployed college graduates rests squarely on the backs of every parent, t
That's some amazing reach around logic (Score:5, Insightful)
It couldn't possibly mean that those college graduates who have degrees, have useless degrees and they've suddenly decided to suck it up and work in a factory(oh noes blue collar work) to pay off their debts because there's massive demand for workers that outstrips supply or anything. And it pays far better then the minimum wage jobs that they were working before. The quote at the bottom of the article is even funnier, hate to break it to them but CNC setup ops were doing that shit ~25 years ago too and were paid well for it. Now you only need to be able to make minor adjustments on the fly after someone has setup the machine for you, it's still not rocket surgery.
Maybe it rocket surgery (Score:5, Funny)
> it's still not rocket surgery
They're cutting aerospace parts, so ... maybe it is rocket surgery.
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Silk sheath wrapping of aviation wires is rocket surgery, also an art form. Not even kidding on that, the people who do it by hand are amazingly skilled.
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Why not train the silkworms to do it?
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Silkworms can't read regulations.
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I was going to say, the difference now is that the computer control is mainly done in software with adjustments made on the fly. It actually requires significantly less job specific knowledge than older systems that used jigs/cams etc as they required intimate knowledge of the production process (e.g workers for life) and there might have been specific quirks even to that machine. Modern computerised systems allow for workers to be brought in on contract, who have little knowledge of that sites specific p
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They need to be adaptable so the educational requirements shoot right up.
The stuff that they're requiring was taught in shop level classes back when I was in high school in the 90's. Everything from CNC and lathe operations, to 3D CAD/CAM setup and designs and modifications on the spot. Ask yourself why so many schools cut and gut their shop and math-in-action classes while pushing arts instead.
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It couldn't possibly mean that those college graduates who have degrees, have useless degrees and they've suddenly decided to suck it up and work in a factory(oh noes blue collar work)
Was it really a useless degree if it gave them the edge to score a well-paying job? Remind me which ones are the useless degrees again.
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Was it really a useless degree if it gave them the edge to score a well-paying job? Remind me which ones are the useless degrees again.
No, it was likely the case that there's an increasing amount of open jobs paying more money as companies increase wages in an attempt to draw more people in. Do you really need a list, or should I just start with the social justice and communications courses that you can get a 4 year degree in that contribute nothing to your actual ability to become employed.
If you really need help, why not go look at the soft courses from the University of Michigan and University of Toronto then compare them to say Univer
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Borrowing money to get a degree so you qualify for a job that used to only require a high school diploma is a waste, no matter what the degree is in.
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It couldn't possibly mean that those college graduates who have degrees, have useless degrees and they've suddenly decided to suck it up and work in a factory(oh noes blue collar work) to pay off their debts because there's massive demand for workers that outstrips supply or anything.
Could also be that while their degrees are "useless", the fact that they're college grads also means that they're more intelligent than the average bear, and learned IT skills on their own so they could get a job. Doesn't hurt at all to have a non-tech degree if you've acquired tech skills. That Bachelors on your resume could only be a plus at most companies, in this scenario. And tech is FILLED with liberal arts/business grads that go bit by the tech bug at some point and picked up those skills outside of
Programming vs Operation (Score:5, Informative)
I've done some work for an aerospace company programming systems that control their robots for making advanced carbon fibre composite aircraft parts for commercial airliners. Yeah it was fun gig (although the in-house C# based app was horrendously ugly), but I can assure you that the people who were operating the machines laying down the raw materials and then pulled the finished parts off the machines definitely did not have college degrees. They were regular low wage workers from the surrounding area.
And it's the same at every industrial job I've worked at. There is a large amount of high level programming design, but that is partly done in order to minimize the complexity of the operations jobs of the people that actually use the stuff.
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infrastructure is going down hill. Infrastructure builds are high employers of the low skilled, so why not more effectively spend money, rather than on the employed and those to be imprisoned, employ them as infrastructure workers and get that infrastructure to A+ just because, well for a start it saves costs in the entire rest of the economy, makes it all far more efficient and this of course includes maintaining infrastructure.
The problem is that infrastructure builds have to be approved by permitting agencies that tend to have a high population of those junk degree holders, the kind of people who will give in at the first sign of protest.
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That is not true. Most of the permitting agencies have high populations of engineers and holders of other STEM degrees. And if you know anything about permitting, you will know the permitting agencies don't give up easily if you protest their decision.
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I'm not so sure that's true. Yes, construction projects employ low-skilled laborers, but a lot of the work is highly skilled, and, though those skills do not require a college degree, they do require experience.
We need to make AA / AS free / part of like HS sys (Score:3)
We need to make AA / AS free / part of like HS system.
Yes people do need more school but not the full 4 year things.
So we should really make Community college an extension of HS but give people the choice to go to an 4 year school as well.
Don't know the best way to fit 4 year STATE colleges into that system. Other then ALL credits must transfer
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They already exist, that's what trade and technical colleges are for.
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Don't know the best way to fit 4 year STATE colleges into that system. Other then ALL credits must transfer
How do you propose to transfer vocational class credits to state colleges?
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Community college (part of the state / local school system) Must move to Sate college. Non state schools are free to make there own rules.
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American kids don’t really become adults until they are ~25 for men and ~20 for women. Much of what post-secondary education does is keeping people busy until they hit that point.
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We already have this its called H1B (Score:2)
Indian companies take in kids from shady colleges which havn't taught anything. All these colleges do is give them an engineering degree so that the clerks working for USCIS cant reject them saying does not have 4 year degree
The companies then invest in these kids for
a) 6 months of in house training
b) Then another 6 months as unbilled buffer resources on client project
c) 2 years as billed offshore resources
d) spend 10000 dollars on filing their H1
e) send them to US
f) At this point the kids are getting marke
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We could do what the Germans do, and help set up apprentice programs for HS kids that aren't necessarily college-bound.
That's racist! No, really, that's the reason why we have "everyone goes to college" instead of something that would actually give young adults a good job: too many Asian and white kids on the college track. So instead of doing any number of rational things about that situation, we just banned "tracks" to sweep the problems under the rug.
The corporations would be up for it, or at least enough of them would. There are something like 1 million skilled manufacturing jobs sitting empty in the US. Corporation
History repeats (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree or disagree with Bernie Sanders in general, but he is almost spot-on in the comparison to roughly a century ago when high school became mandatory and tuition-free across the nation.
There was fear the USA was falling behind Europe in technology and that it could result in economic and military losses. Most realized the importance of keeping up and agreed to socialize high school education. We needed smarter factory workers.
We are faced with a similar situation now. High school is not enough to have a competitive national work-force.
I'm not saying we should make post-high-school education tuition-free, but at least find ways to subsidize it, such as friendlier loans.
It's not about "free stuff" in a hippy communal sense, it's about USA's economic future.
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People come out of universities with degrees dumber and older and more in debt than people came out of high schools a century ago.
The answer is NOT more schooling. If you guarantee more taxpayer dollars for shit, you just get more shit.
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People come out of universities with degrees dumber and older and more in debt than people came out of high schools a century ago.
Debt yes, but that's irrelevant. College educated people are not "dumber" than people who came out of high school a century ago. That's absurd.
Gender studies. End of discussion
Re:History repeats (Score:4, Interesting)
I seriously don't get the rageboner folks like you have for gender studies. It's so fucking stupid.
"Jenkins, what did the survey reveal about our poor sales?"
"Well boss, it turns out that women really, really don't like our product."
"Well damn. What should we do?"
"Lets ask geek. He doesn't need to study shit to understand it. He just knows everything and shits on people who try to learn about something he's not interested in."
Here, let me try to be like you:
Debt yes, but that's irrelevant. College educated people are not "dumber" than people who came out of high school a century ago. That's absurd.
Software engineering. End of discussion.
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>I seriously don't get the rageboner folks like you have for gender studies. It's so fucking stupid.
Gender Studies is the field that literally published a copy of Mein Kampf in a professional journal, except "aryan" was replaced with "woman", and "jew" with "man".
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Debt yes, but that's irrelevant. College educated people are not "dumber" than people who came out of high school a century ago. That's absurd.
~20 years ago, grade 13(5th year of high school) was eliminated from the course options here in Ontario, Canada. One of the reasons was that the general and advanced classes which many took as a prerequisite before heading to university already had them at a freshman level if not higher. Today, because no child can be left behind. There are people who enter university and can't pass muster on a grade 8 education. They're educated in the same country as those people ~20 years ago.
While I'm on that, we're
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Teacher's unions in the US are threatening to strike over testing teachers or standardized testing as a requirement for students advancing to the next grade level. Of course they want to be paid more with absolutely zero accountability for their work product. The result? Lowered standards across the board. A lot of teachers couldn't even pass the tests they are grading.
College professors in tax-payer funded state schools are making 3-4x more the pay that any student who graduates in their field will make
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What school? State university salaries are public information and most are available online. I was shocked when I looked up the state schools in a deep southern state, especially for a few professors who wrote editorials decrying the failure of a tax increase aimed at giving them another raise. They were making between $200-300k.
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Here's the 2015 database for LSU: https://www.lsureveille.com/in... [lsureveille.com]
Plenty above $200k and this data is outdated..
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"Full-time instructional faculty" does not mean Professor. You'll be hard-pressed to find anyone with a title of "Professor" making less than 6-figures. Many make much, much more. An $85k average for instructors and assistants is even pretty high considering the state's median salary is $46k. Elementary, Junior and High school teachers in LA have a median salary of $55k and they consistently demand more from the tax-payers while the students they produce can barely read or write.
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Teacher's unions in the US are threatening to strike over testing teachers or standardized testing as a requirement for students advancing to the next grade level. Of course they want to be paid more with absolutely zero accountability for their work product. The result? Lowered standards across the board. A lot of teachers couldn't even pass the tests they are grading.
Standardized testing doesn't always work either, neither do standardized lesson plans. One of the big reasons we've seen such a drop in the quality of graduates is because of standardized lessons and lesson plans that focus on teaching in only one way. Boys have seen the most significant drop in their pass/fail rate over the last 20 years. What most people don't know is that the average teacher here in Ontario now makes between $85k to $93k/year plus benefits. The median income in Ontario is $78k/year s
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Teacher's unions in the US are threatening to strike over testing teachers or standardized testing as a requirement for students advancing to the next grade level. Of course they want to be paid more with absolutely zero accountability for their work product. The result? Lowered standards across the board.
Two years ago 13 Baltimore high schools had ZERO students that were proficient in math. Zero. Proficient means 'at grade level' - nothing more.
Zero.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/... [foxbaltimore.com]
Think any math teacher at any of those schools missed a pay raise? Was threatened to lose their job? Had a poor evaluation put in their HR files?
Of course not - that's what the teachers union is for - protect wages, jobs and protect teachers from "activist" administrators.
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Teacher's unions in the US are threatening to strike over testing teachers or standardized testing as a requirement for students advancing to the next grade level. Of course they want to be paid more with absolutely zero accountability for their work product
80% of the score on a standardized test comes from the student's parents and home life. The teacher can only influence the score by about 20%.
Holding a teacher "accountable" for a student's shitty home life is pretty dumb.
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Can we compromise just require annual testing for the teachers?
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College educated people are not "dumber" than people who came out of high school a century ago. That's absurd.
No, it isn't - how many "college graduates" can't complete this (famous) 8th grade test from 1895?
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
That was 8th grade, not high school.
Re:History repeats (Score:5, Interesting)
Those exams are not harder they just cover different material that is no longer considered relevant. Many questions about the original colonies, unit conversions etc. It is mostly a lot of memorization required which we have been moving away from. Facts you can look up, how to use them you can't
The engineering exams I have taken are FAR harder. The focus is on setting up the system, verifying all the knowns and unknowns, stating all assumptions, checking the sanity of the system etc. Once you get it to a point where a computer can solve it you are done. If you just want to take an equation and drop numbers into it we have computers to do that, what we can't get computers to do is actually understand and design a system.
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How has basic math changed? Reading comprehension? Grammar? Critical thinking?
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As far as the 8th grade test linked above, the basic math on the test would not be harder than that on modern 8th grade tests. Same for reading comprehension. The grammar may be "harder", but as pointed out above, that's because what's taught may be different now (or maybe it's just me, I never paid much attention to formal grammar lessons). Also, I didn't see any great critical thinking skills required for that test.
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"As far as the 8th grade test linked above, the basic math on the test would not be harder than that on modern 8th grade tests."
What percentage of current college freshman could pass that 100-year-old 8th-grade math section versus 100 years ago? That's the entire point of this thread.
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People are graduating as high school valedictorians today who can't pass remedial math in their first year of college
Two years ago 13 Baltimore high schools had ZERO students that tested as proficient in math - that means NO graduating senior, not even the valedictorian, was proficient in math.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/... [foxbaltimore.com]
Zero. That includes entering freshmen thru graduating seniors, zero - not a single student.
But I bet every math teacher at those 13 high schools got raises and kept their tenured jobs.
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Such studies are easily gamed and more than likely outdated with poor methodologies. I promise you a skilled tradesman will earn far more in their lifetime than the average sociology graduate.
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I actually did the math on this for myself some time back. I've got 3 degrees and I spent way too much time in school earning nothing while racking up debt.
I researched the path to master electrician starting at apprentice at 18. What I found was fascinating. I'd likely have made more as an electrician up until about age 50, taking into account non-earning years and college debt. But between 50 and about 70, my earning potential with the degrees starts to really skyrocket. At that point professional contact
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I can't say assurances that "in a mere 30 years this degree thing will really start to be worth it" is a compelling selling point, assuming it is even true.
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I've never seen a study that takes into account the (wildly-varying) tuition expense in wage earnings over a lifetime. I'd like to see it.
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I am not going to dispute this line of thinking. And I'll add to it. In the 70's and 80's, the only USSR invested a lot of money into teaching students math and engineering, the results I have found is that, the old USSR countries have as good or better coders or engineers than most american firms.
Russians understand science real well, and they are now with the opportunity to exploit every step of it.
I think your idea of trade schools or community college before college and post high school required educati
Re: History repeats (Score:2)
High school is not enough to have a competitive national work-force.
It sure could be but a bit of fucking change would be in order
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High school is not enough to have a competitive national work-force
It would be if we hadn't watered it down so much with an "everyone gets a trophy" mentality. High School used to be much vigorous and involved much more work. High School shop classes used to teach real skills that could get you in the door as an apprentice at skilled shops (carpenters, welders, etc). Now you have to go to a post-high school vocational school to pick up the same basic skills you used to get in high school. Modern high school shops classes are usually little more than glorified craft program
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I'm not saying we should make post-high-school education tuition-free, but at least find ways to subsidize it, such as friendlier loans.
We had friendlier loans, but people used to ignore their student loans, then file bankruptcy, then avoided paying for their education.
The current system of non-dischargeable education loans is the response to the decades of abuse that preceded it.
Ideals of Industrial Revolution alive and well (Score:3)
I watched a TV show once where a management consultant went in to help a company sort themselves out. He told the upper management they had to do one they they weren't doing right now, "Talk to your staff and find out what they do outside work. When you've done that, ask these people if they coudl use those skills inside work.". The management laughed but tried it.
The management team found that out of 50 sampled people, they have 7 youth group leaders, 3 part time authors, 3 bedroom coders ( who weren't paid to be coders ) who were working on writing games online, 2 photographers running photo learning workshops and 1 person who ran a local scheme to help the homeless by collecting unwanted clothes and giving them away at the weekends to people on the streets. There is a ton of talent lurking under the surface of every company, education is needed of course we need a skilled workforce more now than ever but even the college drop-out who runs his own one man part time company has skills he can help draw on to help make his full time employment better.
The problem is that 80% of companies aren't really interested in their employees, this stems from the middle-management right across the First World. The middle-management in most companies are interested in one thing, simply effing-over their counterparts to get the coveted head of division job and all its perks! They don't want encourage anyone under them, if they did then that person becomes a threat. So as an employee you simply get told to turn up, do your job and shut your mouth if you want to stay employed and get paid.
Numbers? (Score:2)
I spent 15 years working for a CNC company (Score:3)
I was the in-house IT person for a CNC machine shop that made aerospace parts.
We had some amazingly skilled CNC people who made amazing parts.
They even taught me to run a machine occasionally when they were short handed. I also was one of the better Solidworks people, and I would make solid models of parts from prints, so we could use the model in our CAM software to write programs.
One thing I found, I was very good at figuring out how in integrate new technology, like a live 4th axis on mill, to make more complicated parts with fewer setup steps. The high school only people, would want to keep making every part exactly like they always had. Set up a vise, cut one side, flip the part into another vise, cut another face.
I would teach them how I was looking at the part, and they would learn and adapt it to other parts. They learned that complicated parts, in a 4 axis setup, were almost impossible to program by hand. They had to learn the CAM software better.
This company had 50 employees in an area that only has 18% college graduates. Most of their employees started there after high school and worked their way up. Even the company president started after high school as a material handler, worked his way into machining and eventually into management. There are no college graduates to hire, so they will keep training high school kids.
Education in the US (Score:2)
I'm a hard core little-government conservative, but it's been a fact since Fredrick the Great invented compulsory public education that a country's well-being derives DIRECTLY from its educational system.
Ours has a lot of problems: fad-following in lower grades, lack of funding for critical programs, wasting funds/time/teachers on fluffy feel-good crap, agenda-following and entrenched unionism, tenure, etc but EVEN WITH ALL THOSE ISSUES, I think it's inevitable that we as a society have to recognize that pu
Re:$100K in hole with an master just to work min w (Score:4, Funny)
You borrowed $100k for a Masters degree and can't even write a coherent sentence without misspelling half of the words?
Re: (Score:2)
Most degrees are not bogus (Score:4, Informative)
There was a small spike of useless degrees in the late 60s/early 70s as people went to college to avoid the draft. I had several really crummy teachers who spent 6 years in college and then cobbled together an education degree.
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Most business degrees are useless. Psychology/Sociology are considered STEM, yet still useless. Law fields are saturated with few job prosepects, so again useless.
Standards for attaining most of those degrees have been lowered so much that only the top 5% of graduates have any hope of paying back their loans by finding meaningful employment.
I disagree (Score:4, Informative)
And nobody's paying off their loans. That's not because of lower standards, that's because Wages are 20% less [cnbc.com] than they used to be. That's because income inequality is at levels not seen since the Great Depression [fortune.com]. Which I'm sure is fine. [duckduckgo.com]
Re: (Score:2)
How many accountants and business law graduates do you think a modern economy can support? One doesn't need a degree to open a small business. How much have standards been lowered in the past 20 years to produce how many more graduates?
A LOT more people are being sent to college who have no business there than 20-30 years ago, amassing crippling debt in the process. Because they were mostly sold the lie that "blue collar" means lower class.
And to answer your later post the economy is better today than it
Re: (Score:2)
I learned most of what I needed to start a business in Junior Achievement in high school, but the exceptions are important. Understanding contracts and legal documents has real value as an example— and that needs someone that can break down the legal framework. It might only matter 2-10% of the time, but having someone with that skill on your team is important when starting out.
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One doesn't need a degree to open a small business
No, but a business degree makes it a lot easier to keep that small business open. There are a lot of lessons the owner will not have to learn "on the job".
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You shouldn't be allowed to borrow money to pay for remedial classes.
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most business degrees are accounting with a few classes in business law.
Gonna have to see a cite on that. Most of the business grads I knew either majored in "General Business" or "Management". Accounting was seen as something that would limit your career, and like, had too much math, man. Everyone had dreams of an office and their own secretary at MegaCorp.
Re: (Score:2)
"And nobody's paying off their loans."
Actually, that data's totally available and you are mistaken.
https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OS... [ed.gov]
For reputable 4-year brick-and-mortar colleges and universities, the loan default rate is around 2%-10%. The better the university, generally, the less likely to default. That said, there are a LOT of bullshit colleges out there and their default rates are much higher. Everything from bible colleges to cosmetology schools, and the profit-driven University of Phoenix (and clones
Re: (Score:3)
There are entire departments in universities that should be no more than a single elective offering, and by your link they make up a good percentage of the 30% of the non STEM, business, and law degrees issued each year.
I once saw a job applicant that borrowed a quarter-million dollars to get a degree in theater management. He's looking down the barrel of $2K/month loan payments for the first 10 years out of college - what job will he find that gives him $2K/month plus living expenses after taxes with that
Re: (Score:2)
mechanical aptitude cannot be taught or learned. Your either born with it or your not,
This is another way of saying, "I don't know how to teach it," except your way of saying it is less accurate.