well, we long taught the masses that ANY degree is the key to riches.
We are lacking good trades people, too. Probably making as much money as an engineer.....
If the brown engineer people were to stay we'd still have a problem....
ah, it's a no win, unless we go socialistic and force people into carriers we need for the benefit of the economic growth.
(now I am brewing some good tea and waiting for billi...
)
I agree with you. We still tend to preach this
'everybody should go to college' thing or at the very least
'everybody should have the right to go to college'. It's about the dumbest thing I ever heard of.
Does the guy who paints houses need a college degree? How about the guy who installs cables for the phone company or the cable television company? The guy who sells cars? How about the guy who puts fenders on Chrysler's? The guy who runs a CNC mill or a lathe? The guy who frames windows? Puts the roofs on houses or pours tar on new roadways? Any of them require college degrees?
We like to talk about the 'nobility' of labor, but then we make it clear we don't really value that, nor do we value the real-life skills required to fix a car or to repair a washing machine or to apply a welding rod to two pieces of metal. We look down on and cut funding to community colleges that teach vocational skills; we want people to aspire to nobler goals!
Here are some basic truths. Not everyone wants to go to college. Not everyone is equipped, mentally, emotionally, or physically, to succeed in college. And frankly, cluttering up the classrooms with people who do not want to be there or who are not equipped to compete and succeed in such an environment is about the most hand-wringing claptrap I've ever heard in my life.
I don't understand where these moronic shiny happy people think everyone is going to work once they graduate college. When everyone has a college degree, all you've done is devalue a college degree. And who drives a taxi when everyone is a college graduate and has been told to expect more from their lives? MORONS!
The world needs people who know how to fix things; how to build things that engineers have designed, now to grow crops, how to cut and fold and sew and paint and hammer and dig and so on. We need these people, and what's more, we want them to be happy doing what they want to do; not miserable because they feel they were denied the right to go to college, to better themselves, to be 'elite' and 'better', as if a college degree actually conferred that (which it does not).
People who have the desire to go to college and who have the ability to succeed should have the opportunity to do so. And they do now; but it requires them to want it enough to take some risks and work hard to get it. When I got out of the military, it was during the period between Vietnam-era GI Bill school money and the Gulf War GI Bill school money programs. For veterans like me, there was no money for school, no GI Bill.
But I wanted to complete college, so I took out student loans, I worked in the college computer lab part-time, I held down a full time job in addition to that, and I got my degree. I just paid off the last of my student loans at age 50. Was life unfair to me? No! I got everything I bargained for and then some. The opportunities were there and I took advantage of them. They still exist. That the opportunities are not laid at the feet of some lazy-butts is not my problem and not society's problem.
In conclusion, I get so tired of the whining about higher education. If you want to go, go. You can if you want to and if you're equipped for it. Choose your path of study wisely if you intend to be gainfully employed afterwards; it's not that hard to understand that a degree in Poetry does not lead to a seat at a corporate boardroom. If you want to study Poetry, by all means do so, but understand what that means for your future employment chances; the world owes you NOTHING in return for your degree. I also get tired of the whiners and hand-wringers who think everybody ought to go to college. Take a look around you, morons. The world was built and is maintained by people without degrees, people who use their hands and their backs as well as their minds, people whose educations are in their vocations; how to weld properly as opposed to how to find the square root of pi. And we need them, now more than ever if jobs are going to move back to the USA. Let them be; they are vital parts of our economy; stop filling their heads with crap and stop pretending that what they do for a living is 'less than' those who are educated and work in other professions. There is no better or worse; just different. I need my mechanic to be able to fix my car. He needs me to help engineers continue to build cars. We need to do what we do and stop trying to mess with things hoping everyone can be rich, educated, and not have to lift a shovel or a hammer in their life. It doesn't work that way.
End of rant.
