A common piece of life advice I see is "work in trades" instead of going to college, and while I think there is certainly some value in exploring alternative paths rather than going into debt for a dime-a-dozen degree, I do wonder how the advice of working in trades proliferated. It is career advice that sounds good on paper, but is also not as cut-and-dry as the comments would have you believe.
I'm sure it started from hearing random folks who supposedly work in trades are making great money, but the concept of working in trades becoming pushed more and more by the redpill community seems a bit suspicious to me. When did the sentiment of working in trades start to become more common? Was there a particular person or organization who made it more popular?
I think it is important to understand the origins of "popular" sentiments in order to truly determine whether there is an ulterior motive. For example, the common idea of "there aren't enough people in STEM" isn't really true, it's just a claim made by industries to pressure Congress into allowing them to import more cheap labor.
Could there potentially be a larger interest pushing the idea of working in trades as being a lucrative career path? Perhaps it is far-fetched to assume that there are greater forces at play who have an interest in convincing people to work in trades, but trades play a crucial role in maintaining a functional society, and without these people, the current status quo would fall apart. Glorifying trades would upset the status quo of "intellectualism," but appealing to male pride and honor and appealing to the men who see the futility of modern society is a viable means of ensuring that men remain working for a system that thinks lesser of them.
I'm not saying that working in trades is bad or that going to college is better. Working in trades is very admirable, but it is also important to be mindful that there is no surefire pathway to wealth or a fulfilling life. Neither STEM or trades may be the gateway to success that is pushed on the internet, and it is important to consider the path you take based on the circumstances you have been given.
Speaking as someone who has proliferated this advice, I can say a lot of it is disgruntled college grads who see the cost-benefit of a trade education compared to college. Most of my generation was sold the "just go to college bro! don't worry about a job, your degree will take care of that" horseshit.
Jobs that need a college degree are either highly specialized like Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers, or highly incestuous like Teachers. Everything else (history, philosophy, political science, liberal arts, music, theatre, and even most sciences) should be viewed as a fun thing to study, not a career developing endeavor. Contrast this with trades, where literally everything is a career-developing endeavor.
I know I could buy a house with the money I sank into college, and while I did end up having a career related to my degree (Computer Science), The skills I apply in my job can be taught in half the time I spent in college with a third of the tuition. I don't use any of the stuff I learned in macro economics, psychology, chemistry, or even the 4 levels of calculus I completed. It was all generalized fluff and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted.
Give me the tuition I spent and 10 motivated highschool grads, and I can bring them up to my level in 2 years. That's what trade schools do.
I don't know how much you've interacted with people in other engineering disciplines, but my experience as a fellow CS guy who has is we're among the most "trade-like" engineering disciplines. Especially among the older guys who tend to be a bit biased against advanced degrees or degrees from schools that are very theory-focused.
My buddy who does computational fluid dynamics for spacecraft has a very different view on university education and degrees than I do.
But you're right that university focused on the wrong stuff. I've used Calculus twice in my career and Calc III once. I learned all this math that was 1000x more complex than I nee for a job, but what I would have benefitted from is more experience dealing with systems that are 1000x bigger than the toy projects we worked on in school.
The OS class I took where we had to make a Linux kernel module was among the most practically useful pieces of coursework I did.
My particular area of expertise involves a lot of imaging/image processing and controls/closed loop control systems, but I didn't learn any of that in school.
ding ding ding, this is the Crux of it right here. it has been my experience that you learn almost everything you need on the job, the prior education is just to build a solid foundation. I remember avoiding the graphics classes like the plague because it looked so ridiculously complicated, but I did take classes like machine learning. both of these are advanced classes that definitely help exercise my ability as a programmer and problem solver, but I ended up using neither of them professionally.
we live in a world where we can learn these things on our own given enough motivation and know how, we don't need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for some old fart to draw it on a chalkboard.
Yeah we did most of that, but it was with toy projects. Then for my first job I was appointed sole maintainer of this 25 KLOC application. The scale of that was so much bigger than anything I'd done in school.
“Everybody needs to go to college” is the lie higher education sold the nation to constantly increase college tuition.
here here. the cost of tuition has risen far above the rate of inflation, and most of that is because of the demand for college thanks to their successful brainwashing that college is just the next step in life after high School.
The federal government getting into the student loan business was the final nail in the coffin.
EDIT: they also dumbed down high school to help push everyone to college. Back in the day, you could be a success in life with just a high school diploma; now they’re purposefully worthless.