We need to stop telling kids they must go to college.

TIG welders are in demand . You can make over 100k in a few yrs and have minimal student debt if any at all. Guaranteed job if you pass a drug test .Only down side is places like DuPont make you shave all facial hair off for masks etc.

DuPont is racist against Moslems and Amish and Hasidics too.

Oh, and those Duck Dynasty dudes.

And Hipsters.

Not really, Hipsters suck ass.

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And not even in a good way.

lol.. good 1..
actually they do it because you want a tight seal with the mask so you dont breath in hazardous gasses..my buddy worked for them

Is there a risk of getting sort of claustrophobic for some folks?

And the heat under it, good gosh.

I knew a guy who did underwater welding , Crazy Tom. he made tons of $$ . His dad was a seal so he learned to dive young..tons of hazard pay too
He jumped off a bridge to avoid a DUI one time, made national news. In the New Orleans area.

haha, he sounds like a trip....

Some do I am sure...
The heat is very hot. I used to weld myself. You are in thick gloves and covered head to toe, the UV light will give u bad sunburn in seconds. Tig welding puts off Ozone and can eat the lining of throat, thats why u wear filtered masks..
But as soon as you drop that helmet and start welding its like therapy almost. very fun to do if you are trained right..

Must be like sensory depravation combined with a focus on pyrotechnics, sounds like fun.
I believe men have a natural inclanation towards pyromania.
Kitchen?
Er, um...

BBQ? Fireplace? Setting the wooden playground set on fire as a kid?
Heck yeah!

So true, a lil Caveman in all of us"Quest for fire"

If I did the things I did as a kid today, the ATF would be knocking at the door lol.

This guy I knew when we were in hs really tried setting fire to the wood beams monkey bar etc thingy once.
He stood there crying thinking he was going to jail when it finally started catching while 3 of us put it out for him. Granted, I shared the inclanation, but he was super pyro. Tried lighting everything he saw up. His older brothers smoked, so he always had matches.

When I was younger I'd tried to get the guys on the block to try to whip up something explosive with our chemistry sets. Just mixed up various combos, but no boom. Not even a fizz. Did it outside in case we succeeded and would catch a thrashing from our moms.

Those were the days, when you could have fun doing stupid death defying things outdoors that are probably illegal now.

lol

These damned kids today, what will they have to look back at? Playing World of Warcraft?

LOL..my gf grandson is 9, doesnt want to ride a bike. doesnt know. wtf. Tried to teach him, wants to play video games sad

Everywhere I have ever been to where university is paid for, community colleges and trade schools are ALWAYS included in the package deal.

There is NO reason why a liberal couldn't include that in their platform. And don't mislead people into expecting that they wouldn't.

Please show me a quote where any of the current candidates have even talked about trade schools never mind free trade schools. The only high profile person I have seen push trade schools is Mike Rowe.

Why?! Without widespread support for something it just doesn't happen no matter who the President is, and when there is widespread demand for something it can't really be stopped no matter who the President is.

So why give me the moving goalposts on a bunch of guys who, in all likelihood, can be pressured into throwing in trade schools for free if they aren't already at least passively prepared to support it?

I mean, do you have news articles quoting them as saying that trade schools are out of the question?

No, I have not heard anybody saying trade schools are off the table. My point is that they are saying everybody needs to go to college. That is a fallacy. We have diluted the prestige of a college degree so much that it is becoming worthless.

Try getting an engineering job without a bachelor's degree in engineering and let me know how that works out for you.

I actually did do exactly that for a few years. Highest salaries of my life until the recession hit.

What kind of proof are you expecting from me? I don't know what to tell you - this happened. I designed testing equipment for microchip prototypes and downtrained assembly technicians. If you don't believe me then that's fine but it was a major part of my young adult life.

I almost don't believe you lol

My son-in-law has a mechanical engineering degree from a state school. Starting salary at a major manufacturer was $80,000 per year. Two years later he’s making $115,000 per year.

Depends on what kind of engineering. Software engineers are in high demand and can easily make over $100k

...the discussion is about college, not high school.

I don't want to fly a plane designed by college dropouts either!!!!

Why not?
Bill Gates was a University Dropout.
Just because someone does not go to university or college does not mean they are not super smart.

In so far as the software industry is much more lenient about that sort of thing, yes - mostly what they care about is Can You Do The Thing? without being so fussed about credentials. In broad terms for that field, you are not wrong, but only to an extent.

Structural engineers do not and cannot tolerate that. When buildings fall down people get killed in huge numbers, and during the investigations that follow, the first thing they say is "show me who was in charge of the calculations and show me what his record was". Engineers have gone to jail for oversights that have led to loss of life. The industry has therefore understandably and correctly been incredibly anal about who gets any kind of responsibility to design important structures, and about what kind of education and training they had.

Indeed, going back to software, you'll find the same thing happening when computers are deployed on life-critical systems. Bill Gates may have written Windows, but when contracting to air traffic control systems, Microsoft did not send their college dropouts.

Ultimately, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, and the like were people who very easily COULD have finished college but decided that opportunity was lucrative at the eleventh hour. It is highly misleading to hold them as an example to follow to someone who would drop out of college with no evidence that their capabilities had improved for the time they spent there. And don't get me wrong - that's not to say that their time in college didn't have a positive impact on their skillset, but my point is that some systems are too important to be managed by people who don't have evidence of their capabilities. Aircraft design is definitely one of those systems.

No I completely agree with you on the fact that there are certain fields that pretty much HAVE to have a degree.

I was merely stating that someone is not dumb just because they did not go to college.
Conversely, someone is not smart just because they did go to college.

That is all I was saying.

then why not spread the word

I try but the first thing I get is a hundred conservatives saying education should never be tax funded!!!!!!!!!!!!!####

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Corps

Then they should use their "education" to be more accurate, and say "We want free post-secondary education".

We call that "higher education" and you'll find that's the term that is already banded about in political rhetoric.

But to most people, especially "liberals", trade skills aren't considered higher education.

#learntocode

I've never had trouble making it clear to a layman that higher education includes trade schools.

I went to college and enjoyed it, but I do feel the premise one cannot be successful, innovative or satisfied in life without a degree is a false one created and perpetuated by those that most financially benefit from it. https://i.imgflip.com/2zllgj.jpg

I'm very much against people who shame those without college credentials as that's definitely a form of classism - but! I do tell my students that there are certain things you only really have the time to do when you're young and your time isn't wrapped up in the slog of career and running a family and so on, and one of those things is academic study of a field you care about enough to want to achieve expertise.

The reason they want to make college free is that a college degree is nearly worthless in terms of actual learning. Most of what is taught is either material that previous generations learned in high school, or the history of a particular field. Most of the course material in a bachelor's degree is 100s or 1000s of years old, and could be learned with a syllabus and a library card.

What is true is that our society has placed value on having the college diploma as your ante into the professional wwork environment, but that doesn't guarantee you a job.

A college degree is, if nothing else, proof that someone can set you a piece of work and you'll finish it. How many 21 year olds can you honestly say that about?

The reason we want it to be free is to take the risk out of it. There are so many bright minds who should be engineers or lawyers or doctors or bankers, but they never pursue the qualifications for it because nobody can guarantee that they'd make the money back even if they graduated successfully.

It's proof, is it?

*Looks at Lori Loughlin et al.*

Well, in those cases, it should be clear at the interview stage that your candidate doesn't actually have the skills that a college graduate should have and that something is wrong.

Ah, but that's your personal judgement, and they have the degree that /clearly/ shows they're qualified. Given that fact, /not/ hiring them opens you up to accusations of discrimination, and potentially misogyny.

Doesn't matter if it's true or not, you'd be lucky to keep your job at that point.

Nobody's going to fire me for saying "she didn't seem to know a lot during the interview".

Oh no, no, of /course/ they won't. That kind of thing NEVER happens these days.

*snort*

Don't get me wrong - if HR comes down and says that statistically you're at risk of being accused of discrimination, then you have a problem to fix.

But if your interview notes clearly say "I kept mentioning technical terms that should have been covered in the degree that she says she has, and she didn't know what they were" then I've never known an HR department to make an ultimatum out of it.

There are no guarantees in life (except death and taxes).
If there is no risk, there’s no incentive to pick a major you will finish and/or actually use when you graduate. Employers aren’t guaranteed they’ll get their investment in a new hire back either. Sometimes you just have to take the risk.

The incentive is that you get an accredited degree that certifies you can Do The Thing, and the disincentive at least in theory is that with a poor academic record, you'll lose access to institutions of study - although we do get problems with colleges not enforcing that sometimes.

Aren’t you describing grade school? That’s already “free” (tax-payer funded).

What? No. The incentive of attending grade school is that your parents don't get prosecuted for neglect.

And that’s the problem with “free” education. Too many kids just go through the motion and put in the minimal effort so they can say they graduated. Do you really think they would behave differently if they, or their parents, didn’t have to pay for them to attend college?

There is a process by which colleges review your entry application to ensure that their students give half a shit about studying! That's not going to go just because the finance layout changes.

Like you said, not all colleges do that. And I’ll bet they would do it even less as long as there is a steady stream of money coming in by admitting less devoted students.

Depends on the place. Best thing to do is to pick one and research how they figured out their own system.

The United States will have to decide what works for us. But if we don't, the collective student debt and the legal prohibition on bankruptcy for student debt *will* crush the demand side of the economy and will cause more recessions.

What I said was, not all colleges have been failing students who aren't finishing their studies.

In terms of admissions standards, places where college is paid for aren't particularly experiencing a problem whereby students who got terrible grades in high school are somehow getting into college. That's not happening. Colleges expect those students to prove that they've grown up a bit by taking remedial courses in community colleges - which are also free and accessible. When universities lower their standards for any reason, they can lose their accreditation - which is much much worse than losing money. In fact, it can pretty much shut down the school entirely.

However, banks in the United States ARE being incentivized to issue as many loans as possible without even looking at the applicant's grades - and that IS a conflict of interest.

So, how are colleges funded in these places where it’s paid for?

All of the above comments may be true, but the product is still not worth what it costs. What disturbs me most is, like healthcare, we look for ways to pay the ransom rather than question the cost. If healthcare and education are behaving like businesses, they should be subject to the same conditions.

In healthcare and education, when the government is the customer, they are able to exercise heavy negotiation power on quality control conditions when giving contracts and grants. This is why the USA gets such mediocre outcomes on these services when compared to other countries while we pay through the nose for them.

This does require that government actually takes the time to exercise the quality control with competence and an interest in delivering value of service. In the United Kingdom, there have been periodic government attempts to undermine public services through intentional mismanagement for no other reason than to say ah ha! See? It doesn't work. But a massive popular backlash against that kind of cynicism holds the government in check, and ultimately, they still to this day run these institutions with significant value efficiency as compared to the United States.

There is no reason why the United States couldn't put this together here as well, as long as we want it, and as long as we want it enough to see it work out. If we half ass it and then try to undermine it right away like we did with the ACA, of course we won't see much return for our efforts.

But the rewards for us seeing it through are enormous. In the case of healthcare, for what we're paying now in insurance premiums or less, we could allow more of the population to get preventative care or treatments for things that currently aren't treated until it is much more expensive to do so. In the case of education, we could unleash the social mobility, technical innovation power, and skills networking of the full spectrum of our population to develop America's talent pool, while preserving the purchasing power of young graduates starting off in their fields i.e. we won't have to wait until they're in their 40's before selling them their first house.

I suspect that a free bachelor's degree will only drive up the price and demand of advanced degrees, and make a bachelor's even more worthless.

Find me a Norwegian with a bachelor's degree in engineering who can't get a technical job.

In most countries where undergraduate education is free, graduate education often is also. In those countries, the reason people don't just sign on to PhD programs en masse is a) they need exceptional grades from their undergraduate programs to get in, and b) at this point in their lives, students are usually antsy about the fact that they haven't been earning a salary all this time they've been studying and it's probably about time that they cash in on the degrees that they have.

And finally c) the more specialized the degree, the narrower the scope of employment it will qualify you for. This is why you do not see a lot of engineers with doctorates, even though doctoral students get a stipend so it's not just free but actually brings money into the household; at a certain point, anything more than a Masters doesn't really qualify you for industry and just boxes you in to being a professional academic. Does that make a PhD worthless? Of course not, that would be a silly thing to say. But everyone makes a judgement call for what is best for their own careers.

So your suspicions are irrational and the proof is in the experiences of countries that run education systems that are free at the point of study.

When the feds opened up student financial aid, tuition skyrocketed. Making the government foot the whole bill doesn't inspire confidence that costs will go down. Tuitions are inflated, for no other reason than pure greed. They are at least as bad as any corporation.

You can design apps for iOS and Android, but you cannot merely load an Android app onto an iPhone and expect it to work. The systems are different. In a similar way, just because a particular idea works in Norway doesn't mean it will work in the US.

That's why I'm telling you, universities in paid-for systems who try to jack up fees quickly find that the government just walks away from the negotiating table and suddenly the college is left with a tiny amount of money for a tiny number of students.

Students just want the best education that they can access, and it doesn't make sense to expect them to exercise the collective leverage on universities that are jacking up tuition fees. They're 18 and they worked hard for their high school grades - they deserve the good teachers, and if they don't get them, then that's bad news for all of us because then our doctors and lawyers and businessmen aren't the best ones we could have had.

So the check on the tuition inflation has to come from FAFSA and the government - and since it's all been contracted to private banks, guess what? It doesn't get done. You can't just say oh, we made loans available and now it's a mess - we didn't try. The effort to contain costs was never there. And it could be there if we want it to be there.