Our company hasn't hired any technicians outside of high school in years now. We are consistently filling our ranks with young people that we train and develop ourselves. We figured out about 8 years ago we couldn't find people that we actually needed to fill the jobs. So we started farming them and cultivating them ourselves from the ground up.
This is the way I set up my company. Previous place I worked had a lot of trouble with people who had degrees not having the knowledge-base of the product they were selling, so they were lost when there were any technical questions about the product. When I started my company I set it up so that you have to install the product for a few years before you can move into sales. It is very rare for me to get any product questions from my sales team and they have a good working relationship with our installation crew, because they know what goes into the installations.
Any company that's smart enough to train new high school grads directly and pay them enough to keep them happy will have the best, most loyal workers in town. That's a recipe for success.
I used to work in Higher Education (Recruiting and Advising) and Peter is right on the money with this analysis. One bit of general advice is that I can give is that if you can, develop both a skill/trade (blue collar jobs) as well as consider doing your Bachelor's later (for white collar jobs) if you have the aptitude for them. The reason being is that most skill based jobs tend to be more physical and you get to a point in your 40s or 50s where your body is physically used up and you will have to stop. You may also work up the company ladder where eventually you will need to have a degree in order to work at the home office or be a regional manager. If you can, join a Union especially if you plan on working in that specific field for a long time (basically like the Boomers did in the 1950s through the 1970s). Keep in mind that past the newest generation, Alpha, that's still in diapers right now, we won't know what the world will be like 25+ years from now. So having flexibility in your life and professional goals will afford you opportunities later.
@@Redmanticore Yup, it's only going to get worse too. Encourage them to find occupational interests outside of that so they can shift gears to something better that does not require such physical demands.😉👍✨
I couldn’t agree more. I work in the hazmat field where having a solid science education and having practical labor skills is a recipe for success. It certainly takes a professional mindset to work in hazmat due to the associated risks and hazards of the job but the more I have learned and mastered on both sides of the job the more money I have made. With professional certification in hazmat you can commonly earn $100 kpy or more.
It's predatory pricing on the part of colleges and universities. If you look at a chart of tuition and fees, they started skyrocketing when guaranteed government loans started being a thing. They have no incentive to offer value because they know they are being paid regardless of the success of the student.
Reminder that Harvard has a 40 billion dollar endowment. It earns $1.3 billion a year in returns annually. Harvard's endowment is larger than the GDP of 120 nations. And they're charging kids $80,000 a year to teach them that genocide is only bullying when it crosses into action.
@@atticusmatlock4305 Yes, this is simple economics. When there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services (in this case education) then the price will go up. Because the government loans were now given to everyone then, as you pointed out, the value of the degree went down because there were more degree holders for the same amount of jobs and at the same time the cost of the degree went up because of the availability of funds to pay for schools (and schools lowered admission requirements at the same time because more people could then pay for it). Now you have MBA holders working for business owners who may not even have a bachelor's degree.
When I went to college you coudl get 3% loans. But of course the private sector is better so we shifted loans there and now the rates are much higher. Other countries value the knowledge and skills of the next generation so much they educate them for free. People here have been programmed so much to see government spending not as an alterantive wau to spend money to get things done that the private sector never do without government incentives, that they will actually abandon the next generation to the four winds and leave the future economy to whatever peril awaits. Because maximation of shareholder profits is the only thing that matters. The alternative is to forgive those loans the way Biden just idid. Either way, the ONLY practical solution is to invest in the generations as they enter adulthood. The results will not be perfect, but they will be better than less education and highere education debt.
When I started as a professor in the early 90’s, the university system was eliminating all 2yr technical programs. Too expensive for the administrators. We had layoffs, pay freezes, etc., and concurrently, administrators raised their salaries by about 30 to 100% and hired, at my school, 28% more administrators, while giving professors small perks to retire early. It all went downhill from there. As me and my fellow professors would say, everyone above secretary (now called administrative assistants because they no longer work for departments or professors) could stay home next month, and no students would notice. Also, never heard one student say they came to our university because of the great administrators. And there’s always some new initiative that needs a new vice president or vice provost, and their accompanying staff and expense accounts…..it’s a crock of feces.
I started teaching at the university level at the same time as you and your observations and mine agree completely. It seemed like most of the professors wanted to get out of the classroom and into a cash, essentially useless administrative position where they got paid more for doing less.
My wife is a surgeon, over 10 years the administrators have grown 10X while actual surgeons has grown 1.5X. It’s amazing that these administrators try to actually tell a surgeon how to do their jobs when some admins have no medical training at all.
Must not have been much of a college or university and undemanding field to be able to perform so incompetently, maintain current knowledge, make any real impact, and obtain any kind of achievement...
Millenial here, Bachelor's in Engineering. We got screwed over by supply and demand. Every kid my age was told we would be poor, homeless, and wasting our potential if we didn't go to college. So a ton of us went to college, driving up the demand for degrees and therefore the cost of education. But then once we graduated, our degree didn't matter because everyone and their dog had a degree, over supply. Paid a ton for education and got so little for it. Planning to guide my daughter to learn to work with her hands, and that there are more ways to make a living than sitting behind a laptop writing emails.
What type of engineering? Most electrical engineers need a degree to get a job. If you did computer science I guess you could have just gone to a bootcamp but you have knowledge that boot camp grads never get unless they go out of their way to study CS.
@@martinlutherkingjr.5582 Mechanical with an emphasis in energy systems. Doing design work for a solar company now. Making $26/hr, but when you factor in the cost of living I would barely scrape by on my own. My coworker does the same job, same pay and can barely afford an apartment, even split with a roommate.
@@MichaelJCaboose013 Yeah mechanical engineers are generally underpaid, if you want to make more learn to code. Having an engineering degree will help you since you know a lot of the advanced math that boot camp grads without an engineering degree don’t understand.
Apprenticeships supplemented by classroom training are the best way to raise up a skilled workforce. The notion that everyone should aspire to a university degree is ridiculous.
100% My only regret about my own apprenticeship (I'm a Journeyman Pipefitter), is that I did not start sooner. No kid should graduate highschool without being aware of apprenticeship opportunities near them.
@@BlueSkyEntertaiment These programs exist in the US (I went through one within the last 8 years), but most kids never learn about them because our public education system has tried to push everyone into college, even if that's not the best option for the individual.
The uni graduate make like way more money on average, than non graduates. A uni degree is the most important factor to have a middle class family. That’s just a fact , that might insult your personal experience but it’s still a fact
@@bradleyheights5905In Germany, work is almost a religion. They take it very seriously, they don’t goof off, no small talk at the office, no surfing the internet, no playing on their smart phones, no showing up late to work, etc.
@@bradleyheights5905This is just not true. Median pay for a welder is 40k € in Germany, which is the same as a nurse and a bit lower than a social worker. A teacher does make more and has more prestige. Work ethic and productivity in Germany is not higher than in France. They have the most unpunctual trains in Europe and are often on strike. Maybe it was true 3 decades ago. The healthcare system is highly subsidized and will partly collapse (as in many other countries, too).
I agree. The kids that came in 10 years ago were a revolving door, now days they give them a torch and let them poor wire until it looks good after a wire wheel. But more than a decade ago we had to learn with rod and stinger first and the instructor wanted to see the color of the slag and soot before we chipped. There is way more every weld and every process than its profile and cleanliness. I can a weld is off by the color of soot or even its presence. These kids come in pass a PTA then fail a UT after 3 weeks of pouring wire and they let them in as a new hire. Constantly fixing their mistakes that are so obvious to anyone who would have just started with the basics and had the time to learn how to stack or get good at walking the cup. I was training this guy on the floor. His first time stick welding.He thought it was a funny kind of Air ark for back gouging. 😂 I showed him one time and told the kid you only put the rod in the stinger when your welding and if your not welding for any reason TAKE IT OUT. I had him set my buzz box and climb into the compartment with me. He put the rod in and tried to climb in the steel. Arc strike city with it cranked up to 230 Amps. After that I showed him how I tap and lift then drag my puddle. I even showed him that I want him to strike it like a match and if it sticks take it out. At those settings it burns way too fast and should never short out. He somehow managed to stick it to the wall 4 inches away from the joint and didn't know what to do😅 I told him to take it out of the stinger and he had no clue what I was talking about. I'm only 13 years older than him I thought every certified welder knew what that was and could spot it a mile off. We need these people to train from the basics up. I don't trust anyone to stack with 3/32 who can't strike an arc with 7018. And I don't trust anyone to back gouge who can't stack with 3/32 all these skills play on each other. Learning the basics and how much of a hassle stick welding can be makes it so much better when you get into pouring wire you learn how to do it right the first time. The technique needed to lay down 3/32 is very similar to the patience and control you need to use Air carbon arc to back gouge. Learning the ins and outs of using a stinger will help with the safety and awareness when you start back gouging. These to me are the basics that we need for entry level welders at my company. Our advanced welders use this as a base to learn about Tig welding and doing it right the first time or ruining those parts is essential. When you mess up with 3/32 its a long and potentially dangerous process to fix. That headache leads our more experienced people to have a high first pass yield. Only the best of them ever get to learn TIG because of that very fact. If we could get a minimum of 6 months in how would you break up something that takes a decade or more to learn for most of our guys? The 6weeks in a lab is arguably spitting in the face of the company's needs.
I work for the largest independent testing laboratory in the world. We have some US lab divisions who are hiring high-school grads with zero work experience, because there aren't enough people with college-level technical skills available to fill the roles. There are three major US universities and multiple community colleges in our immediate vicinity. The skill-deficit is very real, and probably far greater than even Peter realizes.
What people forget is that in the "good old days" companies trained internally. There was no careerbuilder where the HR dept was trying to cherry pick individuals with "exactly" the experience required. (Look at the number of BILLIONAIRES in 1980. Now look at the number of BILLIONAIRES today) All that "BILLIONAIRE" wealth was transferred from the middle class to the ONE PERCENT. Do your own research. (hint: think of the oft used phrase, "other people's money")
Former prof here... I retired this past summer (I taught for over two decades in Canada). Higher education is horribly bloated (both in terms of administrators but also faculty/programs) and financially unsustainable. There is little to no quality control when it comes to teaching (which is the most baffling part of the system) and in my experience most profs try to avoid teaching as much as possible (especially undergraduate courses) as they mostly want to focus on research or graduate teaching. In my experience, there is little sense of social responsibility to society (in fact, most faculty have nothing but contempt for the rest of society) and next to no fiscal responsibility. Now, most campuses have been taken over by DEI ridiculousness which is just the cherry on top. I came from a lower middle class background and even though I completed four degrees (including a PhD) and taught for over twenty years, I never felt a part of such an elitist and out-of-touch system. I won't even donate my to the universities I attended or worked at... and most of the money is just squandered. I am very worried about higher education too... right now it is just a major financial black hole that society could theoretically throw billions into and it would not improve it. Major reforms are necessary.
The problem with university being out of touch with society is it because it is removed from society. I noticed the same thing when I was in the Army. There was "us" and "them" (civilians). We lived apart, we worked apart, we played apart. Same thing in the university.
I hear what you're saying. However, as a professor for 30 years in multiple universities/colleges across the US-- I have had the opposite experience. Yes-- there are assholes in every profession but the vast majority of professors I have worked with are caring, committed teachers and scholars. At the large state universities and private elite colleges you will get the isolated, ivory tower types. But at state colleges and community colleges you will find the diversity of programs, professors focused on teaching and working with students daily and very low costs. As a parent, I prepared. I started a "pre-paid college" fund in my state, my daughter went through gifted programs, the IB program and dual enrollment as a high school student. When she went to the university, she got scholarships through the Honors College, a general state scholarship plus the prepaid account-- she graduated with two complete Bachelor's degrees in four years and no loans. She went to work for a non-profit serving the public and now (5 years later), her salary matches mine as a PhD, tenured college professor for 30 years. So... a lot of you are whining about getting degrees and cannot find a job. Sometimes you have to move or integrate those degrees into where the economy is growing and new "sectors" of the economy (if that makes sense). Network. Internships. Thinking outside the box is necessary. Take responsibility for yourself and you will be able to make a path that fits your life. Good luck all!
When you can learn more from RUclips educators like the math wizard than from university professors it’s obvious the university is just a barrier to entry to hold a piece of paper.
Before I retired from a large, round the clock manufacturing facility....One of the largest problems, getting young folks hired was....The job is night shift and you'll probably be on night shift for a few years. Or second shift. Mandatory overtime seems to be a sticking point. When I started, in 1979, my wage allowed me to buy a new car and purchase a cheap, older home. I paid off and remodeled that home in 7 seven years. Wages ain't what they used to be. P.S. My mortgage was 13.5 %. C.D.'s were paying over 10%.
I spent time in manufacturing early in my career, and I'm now realizing that is far less common in the subsequent generations. Back then we had school-to-work initiatives but eventually most of the work was offshored. Healthcare has always had shift work so there's that as a current example. Nursing school is highly competitive and they know they'll be doing night work when they first get out.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, there is a link between shift work and several health issues. These include an increased risk of metabolic problems, heart disease, gastrointestinal difficulties, obesity, and certain cancers. I have worked nights before and would only do it again for a few months and $100/hr. I can make plenty of money during the day in the trades and sleep nights.
@@elibennett6168 I worked off shift for ten years before I could afford to go daylight. I could hold the great paying jobs on second and third shift. Took ten years to secure one of the better paying jobs on daylight.
That’s the crux of it. In previous decades, the wage benefit of overnight shift work was worth the negative impacts to your health and social life. It simply isn’t anymore and corporations are fighting tooth and nail to not give an inch in profits by increasing wages.
@@natejusko486 it's always money. The truth is 'the trades' jobs are inconsistent, hard on the body and don't pay what they should..you could make let's say 100k as a skilled plumber welder etc. Or you could make 70/80k as an office pleb and have minimum wear and tear on the body in a climate controlled office.
I spent 6 years in construction, it's not worth the money. You destroy your body and have to deal with some of the worst human beings put on this planet. About to graduate with my bachelor's in finance. Money doesn't always = happiness.
@@virgnthermostat5928 they just don't care. Once you destroy your health no money can fix it. Hope you get better. Swimming, might help. Take care, bud.
As mid-Boomer engineer and government accountant, we started our family in a very upscale suburb. The new high school was gifted by a local chip manufacturer with a CAD/CAM training facility. Just after my son graduated (taking full advantage of the lab and AutoCAD classes), the school district shuttered it as not representing jobs that parents wanted for their kids. Even as new design engineers needed CAD skills every day. Secondary education long ago lost interest in preparing its customers for employment.
@@cameronjournal I treat mine as such. Desired and valued customers, I mean. Because I see them as such. Really I try to run the classes as a restaurant and I am the "World's Best Waitress." I listen to what they would like to learn, tie it to what the requirements and is "on the menu," and then make it so. We do not cut corners or standards, and most students rise to the level of mutual respect and make the class(es) even better than I could do alone.
Did a lot of factory work in the 70s - hated almost every minute of it except a couple of concrete product jobs that I kind of liked because I worked inside/outside and got to play with construction equipment. Finally went to community college, much of it while working night shift and got an IT degree. Spent the next 38 years working on IBM mainframes.
Did something similar. Graduated in 1976 with a degree in History. Worked as a Park Ranger with the US National Park Service. Great job and fun but horrible pay and limited upward mobility because of so many young people ahead of me. Then studied computer programming at a local school and spent 38 years as a programmer, programmer analyst, systems analyst, most of which were on IBM mid-range systems (Sys/34, Sys/38, AS/400, iSeries). Finally went onto an all-PC based system the last few years of my career. Retired just before the COVID crisis hit in 2020. All in all, was a pretty good career.
You were born at juuuuust the right time, Grandpa . . . all the fat old geezer IBM-ers that I knew when I worked at AT&T in the 2000s were being kicked out juuuuuuuuuust before retirement (hee hee hee, wink) in favor of Indian immigrants that would work for nothing. And now THEY are being taken out and shot by Artificial Intelligence. Keep it real, Hippie.
As a 76 year old boomer, I agree. My folks instilled in me that I needed to work like an immigrant, be hungry, be responsible, be a liberal capitalist ... that meant you do what you want, I'll do what I want, make money to support myself, honestly, of course. Growing up in Venice, CA, I couldn't have more of a child of the 60s, which probably scared my conservative WW II vet parents. I taught my kids what I knew, which was to work hard, be honest. I grew up in my dad's gas station, in the early 50s, until the late 60s, starting in elementary school, filling Coke and cigarette machines, pumping gas, and cleaning bathrooms, kind of an indentured servant (smile), a block from the Santa Monica Pier. I learned to fix cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, and whatever else came in. That meant welding, mechanics, hydraulics, and most of all, how to deal with people. I went to Vietnam, came home, became a lineman for the power company, and retired when I was 55, home paid for, totally debt free life. My oldest kid is a welder and works at Port of Los Angeles, making about $250k a year. The youngest is a large equipment operator (backhoe, crawler etc) making about $350k annually. Hard, honest work ... they proudly stand on their own two feet and set a very positive example for their families. I'm proud of them. My immediate neighbors all want them children to be computer guru's, teachers, lawyers, doctors ... they feel that's the path. Oh well ...
My friend, I think you got some numbers wrong here. HEOs in California make on average $87,000. The top 1% make 150k... For welders, the average is 82k, top 1% is 142k. Are your kids selling coke on the side?? No one but F500 CEOs and senior surgeons are making 350k a year that's just ridiculous.
@Steadyaim101 seems to depend on who you work for and what your skill level is. I'm not talking about a welder who can put a trailer hitch on a truck, but an underwater naval certified welder, same with equipment ... it's very large specialized cranes, excavators, and trucks & trailers associated all belong to my kid. As an aside, the guy working for the city reading my electric & water meters makes well over $100k. County lifeguards make more. My next-door neighbor just retired as captain. My house overlooks Google, Yahoo & other technology companies ... CEOs each make multi-millions a year and live in $50 - $150 million dollar homes. Sometimes, they buy three side by side simply for privacy.
There are different paths for different people. They're all right for someone. However, the hard, honest work ethic is important no matter the area of society one pursues. Isn't it great when our children find their way! Whew!
I've got 2 degrees; Mech. and Elec. Engg. I worked for a Defense Contractor for 1 year, and switched to become a Pipefitter. I now make more money, benefits paid, and I'm getting Certs for welding, plumbing, and HVAC. Again, I make more money than a dual-degree Engineer at a Defense Contractor, and I'm doing that as a 1st-Year Apprentice Pipefitter/Welder... Dawg... College is a giant lie.
Honestly. People seem to forget how good those jobs are. And it's a lot easier on you mentally than if you spend the whole time doing defense contract work
yeah, too many degrees being pumped out with grade inflation and colleges finding ways to hand out degrees to people that should have washed out that further degrades their value.
Typically 4 year apprenticeships. With all the classes you can get at community College level including classes in high school that might be considered prerequisites. Hopefully this helps, mostly check in the apprenticeship programs with your son's interest to hear what they want to see. Bottom line the door is wide open! @Dave.O
Started Blue, then crossed over to White as health issues took me out of the trades. Advanced knowledge in the trades increases opportunities for teaching or supervisory positions with just a few night classes to gain nessary teaching, management skills.
@@michaelduncan6287 a lot of businesses will pay for your college so you gain the skills to move up to management. We have a neighbor who learned mechatronics (2-year program) while he was in high school, got a job immediately making $50k+ and his company is paying for him to complete a mechanical engineering degree.
The biggest gripe I have when talking "higher education" is everyone talks as if all degrees are equal. That is, a degree in Russian fine art is just as valuable as a degree in engineering. That isn't true, it's never been true. Peter does know the difference, but far too many gloss over that.
At least you're not so ignorant to say ...as worthless as French literature...considering the founding of our democratic concepts in our constitution and founding laws.
Too true and the institutions don't help with that misconception either. I had to pick a 4-year college to get my POLS degree at this last year. I spent dozens of hours speaking with the Political Science departments at every University in WA State. Not a single one of them could tell me what I could do that would specifically require a POLS degree other than Political Scientist (there's about 6,900 jobs available in the U.S. so screw that). At the end of the day despite the fact I'm still going for the degree it was quite the learning experience to see so-called professionals lumping every undesirable degree together into the "jobs you can get with any degree" category. I feel quite bad for kids who go to a career center or its equivalent and are outright lied to about the degree they're seeking to obtain - they shouldn't have to pull teeth to get answers. Something has got to change, I'm seeing a lot of wasted potential.
No one speaks on those terms. However there are those in established classes who get into positions of power with very little more than a degree in art history. Uk issue too. It's not that art history is equal to a engineering degree. Its just thst engineering degrees don't help ppl understand history, art or the politics of it all.
No college degree makes anyone an expert in anything. Its only step one. Businesses aren’t looking for people with a bachelors degree in business. They want the smartest person they can get, who will work well with others. Often, that is your Russian Literature major. A bachelors degree just isn’t anything but a demonstration that you showed up and did the work for four years, and you have a BASIC understanding of the language and principles in a given subject matter. High school is only about literacy. Undergrad is about learning communication. Expertise only just begins at the next level. These people who whine that their Art History degree isn’t helping them get a job, are FOS. They aren’t getting a job because they suck at interviewing. MOST places DGAF what you got your bachelors in. It simply does not matter most of the time. The non-college educated have this delusion that your major just becomes your career. This is ONLY true if you go on to grad school in the same subject matter and stay in academia. This is not the norm for most people.
Another thing to note about zoomers is that people my around my age and younger (I'm 25 so right on the generational cusp) have grown up hearing from millennials about the burdens of student debt, the uselessness of their degrees, people who went to 4 year schools now working for minimum wage at mcdonald's, all the horror stories. While that may not be everyone's experience, these types of stories are scary and demoralizing and give us every reason to think twice before going down the path of a 4 year degree. Combine this with the asociality you mentioned and I think this will have a big chilling effect on admissions and make this problem much worse for colleges esp in the US.
One thing your generation is going to need is adaptability. The economy, and even society itself is changing around you as we speak. So some of the things you might be educated to do, could very well not exist in a few years. Meanwhile there WILL be new fields that open up and jobs in them that no one has the knowledge to do except the people who pioneered that industry. It's that old saying: May you live in interesting times.
The "Give Up Now Because It'll Never Work" is a MASSIVE problem that older gens (esp Millennials) are laying on the kids. No hope = apathy = lesser workforce output. "If it sucks, why try?" is a thing, and while I am trying to teach my kids that Debbie Downer is full of caca, I can see how it's affecting a pandemic-affected-gen is not interested in helping out. That said, this guy's take on Gen Z is overgeneralizing and "old man yells at cloud" BS that doesn't help. (And since I'm his age, I'm VERY disappointed in him.)
I’m a blue-collar worker and I love my independence but as I get older I recognize that working one of these remote white collar jobs would probably be nice as I get toward retirement
If you're not planning on going into medicine, engineering, or the law a traditional four year college just isn't worth the trouble or the expense. There are a lot of baristas in this world with $40k in student loan debt.
i dont know why a poor person would go to elitist hangout place like liberal arts school for the children of the elites. Harvey Mudd College (HMC) a private liberal arts college costs Tuition: $80,036 every year. their whole point isn't to get a job, its for billionaire´s kids to hang out, to make connections with other wealthy families kids. their huge tuition´s whole point is to keep the poor people out.
The push for everyone to get a college degree set back half of the millennial generation and is criminal. I resent that I went to college just to struggle to make ends meet. That was not the agreement. Thankfully my husband is an engineer and gainfully employed but many of my friends didn’t get so lucky.
I didn’t set out thinking I’d resonate as much with this video as I did. But as a person that hires and builds teams, Peter is on point. We’ve been hiring high school interns and giving them the opportunity and tools to do interesting things that other companies wouldn’t. Universities aren’t producing candidates that can hit the ground running; and often they are over entitled (expecting massive salaries) and are very hard to coach. High School kids with aptitude are the opposite. They are quick studies, willing to learn, and don’t have the mental blocks that things shouldn’t be possible. They then grow into great full time employees.
Hard to coach is a problem, but don't blame candidates for salary expectations. I just want the salary / median house price ratio that my parents had, not way below. Pay execs less or have them work more hours if you can't afford more labor.
Your comment is very interesting. I’m a few years from retirement and I’m consulting now, but earlier in my career I managed a large team of mostly engineers and project managers. Some of my friends still manage considerable teams of non-STEM employees and they echo the exact same sentiment as you.
@@SignalCorps1 Wages and prices do not exist in separate universes. Wages have in no way kept up with productivity or cost of living over the past five decades.
Hi Peter. Machinist here. I went through a 4 year trade school to become a machinist. When I graduated I was making a few dollars more than entry level jobs at Sam’s club. Luckily I saw the writing on the wall and was concurrently getting an engineering degree, and I am so glad that I did because I make so much more money as an engineer. I love machining, I truly prefer it over being an engineer but in the US it’s hard to make money as one without moving to somewhere up north. As of right now I would never suggest to anybody in my area to become a blue collar worker. Again, this is region specific to my area, south Florida, because of high cost of living and low wages.
Interesting. There are always exceptions. So important to drill down into the details of the immediate landscape, instead of accepting trends as absolute gospel.
I agree with you for the most part. Would suggest that if someone has blue collar skills AND an entrepreneurial mindset - you can indeed do very well. Just cant do it as easily working for someone else.
I suspect South Florida is about to change with mass reshoring. Granted my goal in life is to be both hands on and technical. My prediction is with AI etc, there's no need for blue or white collar. More a gray collar, as work environments will be changing rapidly from week to week, depending on where they are in the cycle.
Truck driving also doesn't pay squat in FL, but it pays pretty well elsewhere. It's probably because they have a flood of snowbird labor moving from the north and migrant labor coming up from everywhere else
I'm similar to you in that regard. I love machining, as compared to engineering, but the demographic I'm In screws over a machinists pay. Hence, I too, have been studying Mech E. Regarding you suggesting anyone not being a blue collar worker, you may want to think twice. They will be safer for a little longer when the AI technology improves in the next 5, 10, 20 years and beyond. AI will not be automating the trades away yet, (although the H1B's are the other threat. Hence keeping trade pay low "ish"). Certain Stem Fields in the future could become saturated, and lower their pay too. I think this has happened to lawyers. All in all, carful research is needed for career considerations, along with the willingness to live with the rewards/consequences of the chosen profession if one is dead set on it. That is where most colleges and college students fail, because they usually don't foresee into the future of their career choice and quality of living.
I’m a Hungarian gen x and our generation is in high number, because around the time I was born they introduced 3 years maternity leave, which kinda took mothers out from the jobmarket, so that’s how they solved the problem with having too many workers. Also back then we had big factories sponsored entire public (state schools) and individuals with good grade and gave them scholarships + contracts after finishing school. Of course those factories were state owned, but still interested to having both the numbers and the quality of their workforce. We got very good academic education and the practical skills from high school. There we different types of high schools, the basic 3 years for skilled workers (blue colour jobs), then one version of 4 years where we got from both world and had a lot of general subjects (basically al: math, chemistry, biology, physics, literature, grammar, music, art, language) and skills & practice our trade (we can say light blue jobs, like managers in factories where needed strong manufacturing skills). Then were another 4years high school which mainly focused on academics to train admins and those who wanted to go to uni for white collar jobs. Not everything in „socialism“ is a bad thing. 😊
I always enjoy the comments to Peter's talks. Thanks everyone for the voices from experience! Sometimes contradictory but reflective of your experience.
College in the US have been about social status rather than education and you can tell by the curriculum and their cost: status is more valuable than quality. (Or was). Most college degrees are not technical (i.e. useful) but still very expensive. Kids are picking up on this. 1) Technical schools had a low acceptance rate this year. VT was 11% for example! Their toughest year ever. 2) kids are forgoing college increasingly. There are plenty of jobs out there and I think grow your own is a thing already. Also, lesser schools are struggling with their high tuition. Scholarships are being thrown out like confetti at a parade at lower ranked schools. Basically they are on sale! I fear these trends won’t accelerate fast enough however.
That is ridiculous. No doctor, nurse, lawyer, engineer, scientist, curator of a museum, corporate executive, etc., got their degrees for social status... Not all jobs require technical skills to be useful. And there are plenty of careers that cannot be pursued by just going off and getting some entry level job out of high school.
@@izzytoonsThe sad thing is that you’re both right. Universities are pricing employees out of their futures. Who wants to be a schoolteacher if one year of college is equal to their annual salary? I am very concerned for the future of America.
I am working for a "labour office" in Norway and we see this trend already. Employers are more willing to train new employees from scratch, or to cooperate with schools or to give a chance to employees with various disabilities/disadvantages/history. Consider that higher education is free over here (thus more are able to take it), the difference in pay between white and blue collar jobs is minimal (electricians and carpenters are making much more than me with two masters) and weak norwegian currency is making it less attractive for foreign workers to work here and you can see that employers are having really hard time to find skilled labour.
I went to trade school in 1998 for Audio Engineering…. Within a few years I was making more per day then I had ever hoped for…. I retired at 42, and now I live on a sailboat in the Caribbean…. The best part is no student loan debts…
@@erikkovacs3097 since you asked…. We met when she was 19 and I was 38🤣🤣🤣 if she wanted to work as a professional model, she would have plenty of gigs…. could not be happier…
@@JasbirSingh-zj1fg I attended Full Sail University - Back in 1998 they offered A.S. Degrees. I earned mine in 13 months …. In 2024 you are required to earn a 4 year B.S. before graduating from the same school…
I’m 73 and never finished college. I went to a very scholastic high school in suburban Chicago that offered 4 years of Russian and Latin in 1964 just to show how intense that school was, and is. College to me, since I had no specific goal like becoming a doctor or architect, was like more high school, only much easier. I got bored and wanted to experience real life. Both of my parents had college degrees, basic Bachelor style, and never used those in their future careers. My dad was a traveling salesman and was very successful. Mom sang in a small operatic society, sold cosmetics at “parties”, and raised three children while dad was on the road. Her job was the most difficult I believe. My wife never went to college and both of our daughters have done the same. One is an accountant, self-taught, and her younger sister has been flying helicopters for 27 years, most recently Erickson SkyCranes as a copilot. She got a student loan for helicopter school and stuck with it. They both love their lifestyles and have quite a bit of freedom. Their mom, with no college, taught ballet for a few decades, starting at 16, and later became the preeminent caterer in Sedona, Arizona for a dozen years. I tried several worlds of work including a year with a beekeeper. My first permanent job was working for Pink Jeep Tours as an outdoor Jeep guide. When I left after 15 years I was the guide manager with 50 guides under my supervision. It was a lot of physical work, however I would never trade that time for any other employment. It provided many layers of satisfaction and the pay was enough to live in Sedona and buy 1970’s manufactured home that was worth close to 400K when I sold it and moved to the Tucson area in 2004. The health food store in Cottonwood, AZ where I worked for 3 months in 1974 was founded by four school teachers from the Bronx who came West to create and more fulfiiling life. Now, that store is worth millions but stays in the family, able to support the founders and their 8 kids over the years. Starting a business is not for everyone but it doesn’t always require a college education. For my teacher friends their degrees were stepping stones and the money they made teaching paid for their dream and allowed them to leave the Bronx for a wonderful life in a small, friendly town. As said by many of your commenters previously, money is not necessarily the answer to a happy, rewarding life. Find your innate, best talents and take them into the world. Let your satisfaction with your work be sufficient as you move further. One day I think you’ll be surprised at how many things will come to you just naturally if you create your own work path whatever it may be.
Inspiring. Your solid high school education set you up for life. Someone once remarked that the goal of a high school education should be equip every graduate with the skills needed to write an intelligent letter to the editor. If we return to that standard, along with a requirement that high school diploma grads must have passed AP Latin or Calculus, most kids will have the skills (including the ability to further their education through online learning) to thrive in most any job. Those who are intellectually curious or need advanced training in a field such as medicine can still go to university.
@@cropcirclerPrecisely. My sister and her husband put their two boys through GW at a cost of 250K each, just for a bachelors degree. Had they instead gone out into the world and experienced a few jobs and then came home to dad, they could have had a dad as backer for any other schooling or business that they wanted to create.
@@cropcircler Latin is a dead language for good reason and useless as is calculus. Not once have I needed anything above basic math and a calculator in my four decades plus since high school, except to pass college business math and statistics classes. You are living in an alternative universe.
@@JohnSmith-ti2kp Ouch. Latin connects us to our Western heritage. Calculus connects us to deeper truths about the universe. They are worthwhile subjects of study for those reasons alone. They are also subjects that require intelligence and discipline to master, and thus perform a gatekeeping function that weeds out the less able from pursuing higher education.
People in higher ed have been aware of the enrollment cliff for sometime because of the small gen z population. The best strategy for universities is to compete by creating a robust online or flexible educational programs to attract students who need to work and get a degree, usually in something to boost their already established career. We should be importing skilled blue collar labor, but unfortunately immigration is a wedge issue in the USA. But also its usually at the community college level of higher ed thats suppose to help produce the education for skilled blue collar careers. The US military is actually a big educator for these sort of careers as well. In Universities we need to be pushing the STEM degrees, as they produce the hybrid white-blue collar, engineers and architects etc, that drive local infrastructure and manufacturing in the country. The next 10 years in higher education looks murky for projecting work demand, because of the rapid progress in automation, all the way from smart computer agents to humanoid robotics.
All of that is spot on. Immigrants have filled labor and skilled labor jobs for centuries. Our economy has always depended on them to do so. And still does. Unfortunately, there have always been people here right on the shoreline verbally and physically sbusing the immigrants, complainging they were taking jobs (that no one else wanted), and telling them to go home. Same today.
Just having this conversation with my teacher coworkers. These changes have ramifications for the entire education system in the U.S., especially for secondary education.
Its like 6 weeks to get a certification to be an assistant to an electrician or other blue collar jobs . It takes much longer to first go to months/years of school and then apprentice for a couple of years before you become a full electrician
When do you start earning money, though? Remember, people who get law degrees don't make a red cent until at least 6 years of paying money for education.
Retired college administrator here -- spot on Peter! You’ve also captured the whole demographic equations and economic components that factor into the big picture. The wrong types are over built, the degrees are outdated, they aim at he wrong targets, seems our shortsightedness ha set up a crash and burn. Institutions that are too huge to pivot, beware. But, it’s not too late to advise the young people in your life to change course.
I agree with your sentiment but think you miss the reason. Education is like every other industry. It wants more customers. It's far easier to train people in worthless degrees for inflated prices than to actually train people for programs that require competency.
The University of California is a ten-campus public system of higher education that is governed by a 26-member Board of Regents. There are no Republicans on the Board of Regents. Look at any University or Collage Board in America and you won't find one Republican. The left leaning Dems have managed to gain complete control of all public and private higher education. system.
Only 13% of jobs are blue collar. I know it is increasing but, still...careful how many people you encourage to change course. We still need doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, lawyers, and people with degress in marketing, finance, and even hospitality to help run things. Not every company can wait for a high school grad to develop the chops to run the international sales department...
I think the "ruthless" characterization is important about boomers and their children. My parents and the parents of everyone I knew in the 00s were constantly up our asses about grades. We had to have a boatload of extracurricular activities, never dip below As or Bs. and were still expected to develop bespoke "interests" that would appear good on a college application. Attempts to get a job were dismissed as distractions from our school work and even a sign that we weren't working hard enough already. After all, what does some shitty job do for you besides give you money NOW? If you study hard and get a good job, you'll be ahead. Not getting into the best school possible, even if it was a good school was treated as something you needed to apologize for. We worked our asses off in college and then graduated into an economy that was on fucking fire. We were crowded out of starter jobs by people our parents' age who got laid off from their middle manager jobs, forcing us to take the most menial work. And the same people who told us to defer gratification by working hard were now sneering at us for having listened to them. They called us lazy and entitled and inexperienced as if we were supposed to have had careers before having careers. To hear the burnout fucks among us who slouched their way into a construction or welding job between bong rips at 17 claim that they saw the next 20 years of economic history coming a mile away is just a little bit rich. They knew no more than we did how savage and indifferent the working world was going to become.
Some jobs, many jobs, require those things your parents were demanding. 60-80 hours a week for 4, 6, 8 years. And then a whole career of the same. Those are no doubt the careers your parents were hoping for you. Nothing wrong with that at all. Your disinterest is not uncommon. And you're right. Even better jobs are not fully secure. You rarely get anything that's risk-free. That is the economy we have built. That's what you get when "maximizing shareholder value" is the mantra that leaders, politicians produce, and half the nation votes for.
@@izzytoons I really don’t think you listened to what I was saying. You’re characterizing rungs on the ladder they had and I’m describing how the whole thing was pulled up behind them. Even while they were toiling away in obscurity, they could survive, with room for savings and the leisure necessary to justify a work ethic. We stall for years on the first rung, and then have to put up with smug “that’s life” rejoinders. I know why it happened. I know how it happened. I know who is largely responsible. That is why I and every generation after the boomers fucking hate them.
@@izzytoons No, they really don’t. Framing overwork as the bare minimum to even have a career with reasonable prospects of advancement is a new and stupid twist on an old theme. With very few exceptions, we didn’t have to work ourselves to death like this even two decades ago. And the crowning irony is v that it just burns people out. It’s not more productive, dynamic, and it doesn’t produce better results. Everybody loses
My youngest daughter was lucky enough to get about 1 half of the cost of her education at UC Riverside. She is a STEM major(physics), and the other half is coming from her grandmother's house in SF was sold by my Baby Momma in order to fund her education. I like to think that I am intelligent, but both my daughters are utterly brilliant. In math and spoken languages!
I never realised how deep the educational snobbery until I got a higher paid job. Some of my colleagues act like the "blue collar" sector is a different world to them. They're also very entitled and expect promotions and guaranteed progression just for showing up. Personally, it makes me happy that the tradesmen and blue collar types are going to get a massive pay rise with their increased demand, and all these paper degree snobs are going to fade into economic drudgery.
It doesn't help either when the staff of the school is filled with Technocrats that have no industry experience. They look down on us instructors and students without degrees. We are not allowed into their world. And since they never worked in a factory they habitually break OSHA rules because they have no training in regulatory matters. So, ironically we have more OHSA violations present and in plain sight within our campus that most any real manufacturing facility would. I've been in factories for 19 years in Industrial Maintenance (a blur collar sociologists dream) I have watched some much play out from the outside, I have been able to see every part of the operations and observe these trends. Now from the inside of education. Kinda bleak...
@@justinbrown5715 Totally agree. Where I work now, some colleagues think performing 10 ECGs over a morning is "hard work". They have clearly never done twelve hour shifts lugging cement or been out in all weathers doing deliveries.
Couldn't agree more. I taught for over two decades and one of the first things I realized when I became a faculty member is how many other profs looked down upon the support and maintenance staff. A support staff employee once told me he was assigned a task to install a whiteboard in some professor's office and the faculty member would not talk to him directly instructed the department secretary to tell him how she wanted it installed. Not all faculty are like this but I found a large majority have nothing but contempt for working class people and the rest of society. I enjoyed teaching and the students immensely, but I have nothing but disdain for the higher educational system and most of the faculty/administrators who run it (and are running it into the ground).
For what it's worth physical work is easy on the mind. I prefer being too sore to move and in a perfect mood to watch something. Than too mentally tired to a watch a hockey game. Also not all physical jobs are the same. A lot of people do unnecessary things to cause strain, or alternatively aren't big or strong enough for the job their doing or just as common too tall and heavy. At my last machine job, I did all the big parts, couldn't bend over to save my life but long arms with leverage. Meanwhile the little guy could basically sit and do his job. @@goodyeoman4534
@@davidc1878 Scumbags. I know the type well. Funnily enough, the consultants and surgeons where I am are really friendly and approachable. I find it's mostly the people in jobs you wouldn't miss if they disappeared who are usually the most arrogant.
@@Dave.O Yes and no. Union halls still have the programs. Decades ago, companies had their own internal apprenticeship programs. There are very few of those left compared to what you used to see.
I've worked blue collar jobs my whole life, worked professionally in about every trade and the blue collar tradesman is treated as second class citizen, it's always been that way. No one wants to work blue collar jobs unless they absolutely have to. Most people who were around me when I was doing this work were social degenerates, x criminals, farm boys etc. When I migrated into technical blue collar job, commercial HVAC, was still second class citizen but I commanded some respect as I could bring relief when people needed it. only now age 52 do I have any respect but only because I get paid a lot and work in tech industry but until these jobs are not considered bad jobs or second class citizen job low class jobs no one will migrate to them.
@@michaeldowson6988 I now work in critical facilities for the largest data center in the world (currently). It's very interesting and easier on my body, I aged out of commercial HVAC fieldwork. It's a job that's hard on your body.
Being in a trade is kind of a 2nd class person in the eyes of some. My daughter helped me over a couple of summers in my job and she saw that. She does treat service people and tradesmen very different now because she has been in their shoes.
As someone who has their masters I find this very interesting. I’m former military so most of my friends went blue collar with the exception of me who went into finance. I make vastly more than all of them and it’s not even close, even the ones with years of experience and in unions. I’m not sure what people are talking about here when there’s finance jobs that start at a salary that most blue collar jobs take 10+ years of experience to achieve. Saying that high paying jobs like medicine, law, and finance won’t beat blue collar jobs is just not true, they’re just very competitive and you must have a high GPA
I have a bachelors in political science, and added a law degree to that. Worked as a lawyer for ten years. Now I drive a UPS delivery route. Much happier with my life now - though the risk of injury is always the elephant in the room with a blue collar job. My high school age son is looking at the trades - plumbing and HVAC repair. The other day running my business deliveries I saw a guy repairing the elevator and asked if he was unionized too. He said yes. I told him my son was interested in the trades, and he flat out told me once he graduates high school - he could put in a phone call to the local elevator repair union and they would have him a good paying job with full benefits within three months - train him on the job - no need to go to tech school. Personally, I still want him to get a two year GE degree - so he will be good company for himself throughout his life. But I would be very alarmed if he wanted to get a law degree like mine. Mine was mostly a waste of debt repayment money.
I wish I could believe you. I guess I do. But I have never met in my 65 years of life a blue collar worker, who didn't own their firm, who was happy with their job. Never. Business owner... yes. But blue collar employee with no piece of the business, never. Not once. Not ever.
@@ChatBot-r2q try getting outside of your bubble. i love my job and the closest thing "owning" my company is that i get an employee stock discount. i love it because i'm well compensated
@@ChatBot-r2qI ran my own business as a lawyer and it made me a nervous wreck. I couldn't figure out how to generate enough clients, I was constantly worried I'd commit malpractice and harm my existing clients - no support network, no benefits. Now it's someone else's job to think about how to get more business. I just do what I'm told. I prefer it that way. And yes - we bitch and moan about our jobs. I just put in a 12 and a half hour workday and got back to the house 30 minutes ago before typing this, because my suck-up boss keeps cutting routes for his superiors and dumping the excess work on us remaining drivers. I'm BONE TIRED right now. But the bitching and moaning is kind of a badge of honor in this line of work. We do a tough job most people can't even comprehend, and it feels good to flex on people.
@@ChatBot-r2qIn plumbing and HVAC repair, it's kind of understood that you work for someone else at first to learn how to do everything while you acquire your own tools. Then you go independent and run your own show and pocket all the money.
@@ChatBot-r2q Yup, i am the son of a blue collar worker. The problem is that you age out very quickly out of blue collar work and then you are screwed. When you own the firm, at least you are a businessman and can sell it or let others work for you. But blue collar work is in general very dirty, dangerous, body crushing, and you are also with rough people most of the time. You also directly compete with migrants that can barely speak english, because they tend to be good with their hands, too.
Makes me glad I chose an environmental career. It’s often a combination of white collar and blue collar skilled work. I’ve spent a lot of time doing blue collar work on projects in factories, industrial facilities and remediation projects and I’ve spent a lot of time in labs doing analytical and R&D work, QA/QC and project management. I have gotten full use of my STEM degree and I’ve learned a lot of practical skills in using tools, operating process equipment and operating vehicles like forklifts, boom trucks, front loaders, etc,. All while earning more than either the average white collar and blue collar folks as demand for people with skills in managing industrial and hazardous waste is in strong demand for people with life science, chemistry, engineering backgrounds and who have practical field experience. I have not been unemployed in 30+ years and even in 2008 and during COVID when lots of guys my age lost their jobs and could not find work with comparable pay I passed through those periods unscathed and have seen my earnings grow due to increased demand in my field for people with a strong science and practical field experience background.
While I was in high school they shoved “go to college to be successful” down our throats everyday and I foresaw the over saturation of the white collar market. I decided not to go to college and start an apprenticeship at a machining company because I’d be and still am making more money than most college graduates, I’ve been a machinist for 5 years now and I can EASILY find a job anywhere because we’re in such high demand.
Hey I'm looking for a shift since finding a programming job isn't very accessible now, do you have any advice for me looking to get into blue collar? Machining, welding, electrical etc? What programs or companies? Thank you!
Germany same thing. At least, that's how it USED to be. Higher Education had sooooo muuuuuuuuch prestige in Western Europe because it was 1. Very Very Selective and Rare, and 2. Very Very Hard and Rigorous. To quote Chris Rock, college in the USA is "like a disco with books."
@@misterwhipple2870 Very much depends on the college. There are some "party schools" where they major in hangovers. And then there are a lot of small no-name, no-nonsense, no-prestige colleges that are getting the job done. But people coming out of those schools don't generally end up in top jobs because of that lack of prestige. So you end up with the idiot drunkard rich kids from prestigious schools in upper management undoing the work of those below them.
What you've described Peter is precisely what occurred in the 50's thru the 70's in my hometown - Morton, IL . . . a farming & bedroom community of Peoria, then-home to substantial manufacturing ops & HQ of the world's largest heavy equipment manufacturer, Caterpillar. Our school system was HEAVY on math, reading & writing skills with attendant practical application in shop classes, office occupations classes, as well as sciences & physics for the budding engineers along with college prep reading/writing classes and advanced math (trigonometry, calculus, etc). A person graduating from my high school had a SOLID educational foundation for - with a modicum of personal initiative - being a successful blue-collar tradesperson/farmer, mid-level office worker or any of a number of white-collar professions.
I got my MBA - lost my office job in 2011. Eventually settled for a job in construction. Within 6 months i had doubled my previous pay. Being outdoors is soo much better
Wow, your name must be Peter too, did you used to work at Initech?! ahah) I guess you don't miss those TPS reports, aye?) or Milton and his stapler? ))
I agree with Peter on what *should* happen, but I think there's a big disconnect between what kids are deciding and the actual ROI on their education. That's why we have people with large amounts of student debt that are having trouble paying it off. They went to college because that's what everyone told them they should do and it wasn't until they graduated and looking for a job that economic reality hit them. I'm not convinced that those advising current high school graduates are any smarter and not parroting the old advice "go to college!".
For the record I went to university in 2005 everyone knew arts were a total waste of time. People would flunk out of the technical course in first year switch to arts in 2nd year just to keep the party going, they knew full well that there was no actual job in it. That being said if you can get an arts degree while living at home for cheap do so. College degrees are an amazing waste of youth.
Higher Ed is a huge scam. I got an accounting degree and only 18 of my 124 credits necessary to graduate had anything to do with accounting. Marketing only had 3 of 124 related to Marketing. Associates degrees and certificates should be treated like bachelor's degrees from hiring managers, everything should be converted to an accelerated 6-12 month certificate and schools should work with employers to make sure the curriculum matches what they actually need instead of sending kids out into the work force having learned things completely irrelevant to what the job demands.
Really? My University requires around 30 hours minimum of accounting classes(excluding Intro to Financial & Managerial Accounting). That's sounds kinda wild tbh
You should talk about changing high school. The Amish are one of the most successful groups in the US. They go to school through 8th grade and then they start an apprenticeship or some other job training. I think that is the best for everyone. I felt like I wasted so much time in high school and college. It just prolonged my childhood when I Could have been learning an improtant skill for life.
@@izzytoons I mean... lets be honest. Those ones above can't make the world go round. When it comes to basics like food, day to day living (plumbing, HVAC, construction, etc), that makes the world go round, we can live without NASA and Tesla
As a high school teacher I second this. In Australia there is a massive push for all students to finish Year 12. This has been combined with forcing students to study English and Maths in senior to get their school certificate and shoving essays and reports throughout what should be hands-on practical subjects. Instead of meeting the aim of improving literacy and numeracy, it just means that students on the lower or non-academic end of the cohort are unengaged or experience year after year of failure. It is excruciatingly obvious that there are kids that have no business being there and that it would benefit themselves and everyone else if they left for a job or an apprenticeship. I think kids should be able to leave school at 14 or 15. When I went to school in Year 11 and 12 the timetable was arranged so we all had one whole day free a week to either attend optional tutorials or choose to work on a certificate, apprenticeship or get some work experience. Today's kids are rarely so lucky.
@@AMS-m2h I homeschool my kids. Tht's my plan to traditional school through 8th grade then let them do some kind of apprenticeship or local college in high school. My hope is that the education department will realize this educational model worked decades ago but its outdated for what we need today.
@@alishaberrey4479 I don't disagree the peole you say are important. But the people and places that need food and plumbing would not exist without leaders who can organize and run large endeadvors, establish and oversee and run justice systems (however imperfect), doctors who can heal, and so much more. I live in PA near Amish country for two decades. Trust me, they depend on the outside world for commerce and other needs a lot more than you think. There world would be much less successful without the "English." You simply have been around running things, like companies. I have. They would not exist with the people you seem to suggest are entirely self-sufficient. That simply is not so. We need each other. Civilization would crumble if either were to disappear. Lifespans, including Amish lifespans, would collapse.
I read this book a few years back about shale and rivers or something and it got me to switch my major to Economics, now five years later I'm almost done a masters degree and am able to find work as an entry-level bureaucrat surprisingly easily... but I'd definitely be making more if I'd learned to weld or something. Ah well!
Good one, Peter! With two engineering degrees and 20 years in aerospace, in 2005 I left an executive corporate position to become an electrical contractor. Never looked back. And yes, I’ve been training my own apprentices for most of this past 20 years including as an instructor at the local VoTech schools. I find future electricians in many odd places, places where good guys are paid 12/hour and I offer 18. Haven’t thought about junior high, though.
When I was in school a counselor showed me how much money I would make using my major when I graduated. I was already making more than that working construction in the summer. I quit school and started working full-time in construction and never looked back.
Electrician here. I don’t know about southern states but up here in the northeast we’re required 4 years (600 hours) of schooling and 4 years (8000 hours) in the field
I’m a self employed electrician in the UK, takes about four years to be qualified as an apprentice, most find an employer after first year of college full time, then day release each week to college whilst on the tools, you are earning straight away with no debt, compared with university it’s a no brainier.
@@Westlec Here in U.S. the electricians union will put you to work right away. You just have to pass an entrance exam. If you work well you can get in the apprenticeship program were you go to class a couple times a week. Or you can continue working, and you will qualify for your journeymans after about 10,000 hours of work.
My teenage Z gen daughter is not like others. She hated COVID, took drama once in high school, does well academically, chats with people everywhere, and loves the outdoors. She is like a race horse. I have to constantly keep track of her whereabouts with friends in person. I have been telling her to do a dual route with careers / work. Flexibility is key. I am an old X gen who spent decades working in blue and white collar work.
I'm early Gen Z and everybody I went to college with wanted the social perks of living on campus. I think Peter's assertion young ppl hate being around each other and working with each other is blown out of proportion.
Retired college faculty. There was a continuous decline in entering students that started with No Child Left Behind -- specifically. The decline has been continuous over the past 20 years. T\I had a neighbor who was a retired high school teacher, and with the same change and she could not pass down her supplemental materials . If you get a statistical flux with poor test scores for a couple of years, you are gone. And with the DEI insanity, I am ashamed of my former department!
@@TheLucanicLord A continuous decline in entrance standards for those entering class in the Fall. A continuous decline in the entrance scores on the same tests, year after year, so that now many places have dropped all entrance standards. Hint: the home school seemed to do better and be more capable.
As a new faculty member, I really feel that. I am unable to teach course content for my Psych courses because the students literacy is around a grade 5 level. I'm trapped trying to teach them how to form a legible essay (not even good, literally just able to interpret what's on the page). In some classes, I've basically resorted to giving something easy enough for the bottom 80% to squeeze through a pass, then quickly pull out the actually motivated and high potential students to focus on. It doesn't feel great, but I know if I don't come out with ~70% average and 98% pass rate, I could lose my job...
As a manager I struggle convincing my superiors that “blue collar” ain’t what it used to be, and even the bottom of the barrel jobs require far more skill than they did ten years ago.
heh, in Finland, our well-meaning elitist bureaucrats in government, who have never gone to trade schools themselves, or personally don't even know anyone from the blue-collar class, can't realize that. they still think anyone can do those jobs. everyone is let in, they are thought to be "social cases schools" rather than trade schools where you learn a profession and actually have requirements. acceptance rate: 100% our system is that they need to let X percentage of people graduate from these trade schools for teenagers, that is how the schools get funding from the government. result: kids that can barely read and know nothing of jobs get released to the wild, with predicted results. companies have complained for 40 years now, parents complain their kids aren't properly taught in trade schools and nothing is required, from as early as the early 90s, but the government puts money to " yhteiskunnasta syrjäytymisen estämiseksi " " to prevent social exclusion from society " " jokainen lapsi ansaitsee oppimispaikan! " "Every child deserves a place to study! " and the system goes forever on... if you have a failing degree in everything, you will always go to Ammattikoulu, a trade school. trade school people are colloquially called here as "amikset," which also means.. intellectually disabled. - now, publicly funded high schools, where the elitist bureaucrats own kids go, those places can freely adjust their entrance requirements as tight as they want to, and they do. only those with good degrees get into high schools here. acceptance rate: probably 11%. in here, all high schools are for intellectually better folk. a more civilized folk. a bit more elitist folk. so, you could say, we have 2 publicly funded extremes systems existing at the same time here. when people talk good of Finnish schools.. they definitely only mean high schools and universities.
It was always that way. This myth of unskilled jobs has always been nonsense. Not to say there isn't crappy bad jobs. But if you're smart and handson, there's always a skilled job that can save your back etc. Even the soft skill of being able to train coworkers can save your back and increase your income.
@@dixonhill1108 The problem is, the average IQ is 98 (not even 100), That means 50% are actually below that/ So "if you're smart and handson" doesn't apply for a lot of people in this country. That's the what the economy and the country needs to be designed around... but it's not.
I totally agree. I'm at the end of the Baby Boomers (age 59), so I got an advanced degree (Master in Science, hydrogeology). I'm now retired, as are my younger sibling. I can see every day the high-paying blue collar jobs, like electricians and carpet layers, that go begging. Unlike the (useless) degrees that are offered in college now (gender studies, anyone?), these job do NOT go begging. If you go into engineering or the sciences you still have it made because those are useful skills. And don't get me started on the expense, which will bleed a person dry - unlike when I got my masters degree in the mid 1980s.
Very well put! This has been done before (companies training their employees) to great effect. I am thinking about companies like IBM. At the beginning of the computer age there were no computer science degree programs. IBM had to train people to do that. They also did it among their customers. I learned to code while a student studying physics. That was actually a paid job, not the result of classes I was taking. I dropped out (intending to go back) and with those skills got a job making what college grads were making when I would have been in my junior year. I did eventually go back but got a computer science degree instead of a physics degree. By that time, before I got the degree, I was a senior engineer, engineering manager, and had worked on and led advanced R&D projects. I say all this not to toot my own horn, but to show what can be done. By the way, my older son followed a very similar trajectory decades later.
Commercial hvac technician here, 5 year apprenticeship. Total package with retirement and health care is 160k, 125k take home working an average of 42 hours a week. I will have a fully vested union pension at 47 I'm 41 now started the trade at 19. Never had a student loan and my wife has been able to stay at home with my children and we have a nice house and no debt. My trade is so vast and technical I guarantee you that you can't replace me with a cheaper younger technician. IMHO it takes 12 years of being a a technician to become a decent service technician. The trades are a great career but it takes time like anything else. But I'll never be without a job, while the world was shut down from covid I was working as much as I wanted and in 07-08 I still didn't miss a beat. Don't under estimate the power of learning a valuable trade, we're not all built to sit at an office chair everyday.
I've worked in Higher Ed as a staffer for 26 years...in its current form, Higher Ed is unsustainable. It's amazing how long the unsustainable can be sustained when wealthy and powerful entities have a self-interest in doing so.
The issue is still low pay for skilled workers. For welding sure you can make 66K after school, but the engineer is going to make 75K, and software even higher, all without destroying your body or being exposed to hazardous chemicals.
Exactly. And even if the salaries were reversed, it's still much better to get 66k as an engineer working comfortably from home than welding for 75k who knows where and how. Younger generations don't value the economic aspect of a job as much as they used to in big part thanks to unatainable housing prices.
What you just described is what people have been saying for a while now. They call it elite overproduction. Its when people go after these top tier jobs, and it ends up being so oversaturated that the competition is just too fierce, and the entire system implodes in of itself.
In 2005 we were all saying that arts degrees was worthless. It was either engineer/nurse or bust. Everyone said the same thing. By the end of 2nd year 1 3rd were in their desired field, 1 3rd were dropping out and the other 3rd was trying to convince us that somehow it'll work out.
100% agree. Canuck from Ontario here. The same issues exist here. The university tuitions here are putting kids into debt. If I were to do it all over again, the only way I would do university again is engineering with a co-op (job placement DURING uni) program. Otherwise, it would be a technical college. I tell that to every young person I meet. I've even found in my work history, particularly after COVID, I've taken on other roles ALONG with IT to help keep my employer rolling forward. A baby boomer retired, I picked up part of that person's role (property management) and I even do handy man repairs to mitigate the lead time in getting the super busy trades in. The diversity of things I do now is the most it's ever been. Gotta admit though, I enjoy the diversity of work. It gave me the excuse to splurge on tools, and my IT skills are now playing a role in the property management side. That's another thing I tell young people - don't silo yourself. Skill sets gained in one field can be relayed to another. Because I did many years in IT in industrial fields, I was exposed to many devices that sensed/controlled bits of the real world, and dealing with devices like that opens you up to taking on other roles. To any young people reading this...be curious. Tinker. Get your "hands dirty". Keep learning. You'll never be bored, have cool projects on the job, and if ever you have to switch roles or find new work, your cross skill abilities will make you stand out. Don't just code. Code a microcontroller and interface it with a sensor, a relay, a motor controller. Fabricate the case - get a cheap 3D printer, use that, and read the G Code generated from the software - the industrial machines use G Code. That tinkering, that curiosity will give you hands on experience that many education institutions may not give you, as the institutions are constantly playing "catch-up" to the dynamic market of skills demand.
College is a dream business model: 1) Promote college (your business) as a must. 2) Give your 18 yr old customer with zero credit a loan as high as a mortgage (or higher) backed by the government to buy your product. 3) Raise your prices as high as you want as long as the loan covers it. 4) Operate as a "Non-Profit" exempting your business from income tax. 5) Receive additional "donations" under the guise of a non-profit. 6) Create an endowment with enough cash on hand to compete with a Fortune 500 company. 7) Push whatever agenda you choose.
Another one from me.. the issue is that education has been mistaken for something it isnt. In our capitalist system educstion is simply the means by which you become specialised for employment. When its about learning, for the sake of learning. And if what youve learned is something you can put into practise, then you've won something extra.
Learning for the sake of learning is a hobby. Education needs to equip you with the skills needed to keep society healthy and wealthy, then everyone benefits. Doesn’t matter what economic system you have.
@@richardthomas5362 You're talking as if the cost hasn't gone up by a thousand percent. This is an issue with an origin, caused by specific policies, not a freaking natural disaster.
Thing is learning general knowledge is great if you're naturally intelligent. Problem is you gotta legit be a smart guy to be able to make use out of a general education. If you're not already a person who can reason things out naturally a 4 year degree isn't gonna change that.
I hear you. A liberal arts education makes a more well-rounded person who participates and contributes to communities, society, civilization, and humanity in many more ways.
I'm a home builder in Texas. The electricians, hvac techs, and plumbers i know make 40 - 60k and work long hours in the heat. Not great. A job that is coming back... gardener. The cost of crappy store(non ripe) fruits and veggies is going through the roof. Gardening without artificial cancer causing fertilizers and pesticides is extremely difficult.
I'm so close to buying my farm and making this a reality. Currently graduating with an I.S degree and have zero desire to use it. I want to grow food that doesn't suck and feed my community.
Service work is usually a good bit better income. Much less per-job competition, more reputatational. Hvac, plumbing and sparkie work on construction projects are commonly whole-project bid jobs, so much more extensive competition. Price race to the bottom stuff. Nowhere near the same margins, vs on-demand work like fix/repair and small-scale expansion on-site for residental and commercial customers.
Peter, you're right and wrong at the same time. I am not an American but a Canadian, and we have many of the same problems in the traditional university system, less so in community colleges. You're right from the corporate or national perspective, but most millennials and gen Z (and North Americans) are too self absorbed to take that larger view. The key is to give the school grads, the students, the parents and other stakeholders, an understanding that we're in a fluid, shape shifting world, with zero jib security and with shrinking career lifecycles. That means raising and maintaining an individual's general cognitive abilities at any age and career phase, and the willingness and flexibility to learn and to do all kinds or trades, in a perpetual mobilization mindset. I don't see any degree or certificate program, professional or trades, anywhere that prepares for that.
I'm 26 going on 27 next month. He's correct Gen Z are young people who are loners and love being on computers with a lock on the inside of the closet/ room because we set our focus on a specific task and don't like to be distracted or disturbed. For our leisure/ down time we play videogames until we can't stay up and only sleep two or three hours then the cycle repeats.
The issue isn’t not training blue collar workers, it’s a pervasive social and cultural disdain for blue collar workers. When you have presidential candidates sneering at flyover states and telling people to “learn to code” after 30 years on an industrial job how do you convince someone being an electrician isn’t low brow and low class.
The crazy part is the safe best bet is to do both. Get the degree and then work your way up in hands on jobs. When you can do the job and btw you're the only guy in the shop with a degree you're getting that soup job. It's really weird out people think they can be useful by wearing one and only one collar their whole life.
@@DrTTube I agree and that’s not the point. Go ahead and convince a bunch of teenagers that they should aspire to be a tradesman after 50 years of programming looking down its nose at the trades. I’m not arguing they are right I’m arguing they are a bunch of elitist morons whose goal is to wreck the system to the point that the people will hand over even more autocratic power then become a permanent labor class.
One could argue that programming/IT is a blue collar job but that most programmers do not want to get their hands dirty and talk to customers in their daily business to experience what specific problems they are facing that need solving.
Congrats on your graduation! I just retired after 35 years of very gainful post-college professional work. I wouldn't take this all too seriously if I were you...work hard, take your work seriously, try to add value at work, and don't be an a$$hole and you'll do great..... you'd be surprised by how few people can manage to just hit those most basic of basics at work in almost every profession. Good luck and enjoy your career!
@nlabanok the problem is getting the job lol because there are so many competitors and dei incentives. But I appreciate the kind words I'll keep it in mind
On the one hand there will be plenty of university grads with useless degrees to fill blue collared jobs whether they like that or not. Unfortunately on the other hand, most of those will have women’s studies or gender studies degrees and would be the last people anyone would want to employ.
Higher education is not only expensive, but not very valuable. Of my 4 kids and all the interns I have had at work as an engineer, I don’t know what most schools are teaching. All of the schools that I have interfaced with their output, they are not teach engineers how to read drawings or even touching CAD or database and programming. 99% of engineers in all fields will need to read drawings. Why are they not teaching that? The response I get from interns today is that university teaches you how to learn, which is ludicrous. If you got into university, you already know how to learn.
My local university is basically a housing market manipulation scam. They increase attendance by a wider margin every year, without building out new student housing. It's a very small town, with conservative city management that also refuses to allow new housing to be built. The result is that the cheapest studio apartment in town is $1,500 and rising. I know the university leadership and board are local property owners, because many of them are family friends. My landlord is one of them, head of the athletic department and he owns 4 large apartment complexes. They funnel the (mostly foreign and out of state these days) students into their expensive rental properties and extract every cent. Many of these kids end up homeless after a few semesters and live in their car until the police run them out of town. I don't see how this isn't a scam.
My main concern re: higher education.......the most important benefit of college I have observed is a generalized higher proficiency in critical thinking skills. That enhanced capability benefits a person in multiple ways but it also benefits society tremendously by ensuring the greater majority exercises good reasoning at the ballot box. America desperately needs a better-informed electorate to avoid 2016 repeat.
@@yingle6027 Statistically, those who engage in retail theft are non-college, generally-speaking. And discussions around gender identification are too trivial to justify the energy expenditure for those with an education.
I thought the most important benefit was the higher concentration of GIRLS in one spot! That's why I stayed away,,, too much trouble at too high a price! 😅
@@yingle6027No, I think he's talking about undereducated dimwits who easily fall prey to propaganda and get fixated and outraged at outlier and completely non-existent behaviors while completely missing the mark on other, more relevant issues of far greater significance to people's daily quality of life. Oh, by the way, totally random question, do you have a mirror?
So glad my teen grandson got an appointment to a STEM Military Academy that also provides hands on training. He will graduate as an officer in the Navy Reserves, obtain a 6 figure job & have no student debt. He loves his school & the adventures it provides.
the average american reads like a 3rd-grader so i dont think that you need to worry that much about higher education, its not exactly gonna get better.
Doctors have remotely diagnosed #Trump as having an #IQ of 67 (Ave. used to be 100) plus the reading, writing, language skills of a 3rd grade "flunkie". Yet he attracted 70 million voters in 2020? "Birds of a feather ...!" 😮 5:34
I’m a late career machinist about to retire a little early. I worry my employer won’t be able to replace me with anyone near my level. There just aren’t any machinists at the Master / Toolmaker / instrument maker level because for the past 20 years no one was entering the field. A recruiter sent me a gift basket at Christmas this year to get my attention. I get job offer emails and calls all the time.
I will say this. All those STEM and STEAM programs are paying off. The young engineers I meet now can accomplish things a whole team of engineers would have struggled with 20 years ago. They are so good with technology
Candidate quality is huge. I have heard from a lot of teachers that students after COVID aren't learning as they were pre-pandemic though the trends have been in place for a decade.3rd and 4th graders that aren't potty trained. Kids in 6th grade that read at a first-grade level. Kids that aren't naturally curious or interested in learning. Kids that are interested in getting the right answer that don't care how they arrived at it. Some blame technology - I'm rather surprised that textbooks have been replaced by technology but the main motivation is cost-reduction and not efficacy. Parents aren't parenting. Violent and disruptive kids can't be removed from the classroom due to the Every Student Succeeds Act. There is still a considerable need for computer scientists and software and electrical engineers (as opposed to coders - do you know what the difference is?) And only a small percentage of the population can do the former. The manufacturing jobs now require technology skills and the ability to do algebra now and, shockingly, a lot of high-school graduates can't do it or can't remember it. And need review in community college. College prices are nuts. I went to a private school for $3,500 my first year. The state flagship was $800/year. The colleges I received degrees from (Boston College and Boston University) are charging $88K and $87K respectively for the 2024-2025 school year. So probably $400K for an undergraduate degree. The vast majority of parents and students can't afford that, even with debt. So these places are going to be full of wealthy kids with a small number that attend because of need-based aid. When I attended Boston College, there was a lot of grant money for aid but it's mostly loans these days. My employers paid for 3/4s of my undergraduate degree and all of my graduate degree. This is still a benefit offered by many companies but there's usually a $5,000 cap per year. Courses were $400-$600 in the 1980s so you could go full-time if you could handle working and going to school full-time. But you could finish pretty quickly. Courses these days Courses these days are $1,000 - $2,000 so you're limited as to how fast you can complete a degree on your employer's dime.
I'd recommend looking around for local unions and apprenticeship programs. I'm a Pipefitter and during my apprenticeship I only had to pay $200 for books(all of which I actually used and still have), and of course I had a good job through the Union, with yearly raises as long as I passed my classes.
Just about EVERY community college offers a welding class. And the schedule will be flexible enough that you can probably find a class on weekends or evenings. A few hundred dollars total cost should cover it. That's if you are already doing something that pays the bills and you're looking to learn new skills. If you're jumping right in then you might consider calling up the local union hall or guild and checking to see if they have a training program you can sign up to take. Some are even paid provided you make steady progress and commit to a certain amount of service with the union/guild after completing the program...
i can already teach you: hold your arms up for 8 hours and you know how welders´ and electricians´ professional work feel. and then you realize why there will never be rush into these jobs no matter how much they pay. they _really_ should already invent all-day battery lasting exoskeletons for manual labor jobs.
I use to be in a position to have lunch with our State Governor once a month. He told us many times he was working on a plan to allow every kid in our state to attend online university if they had a B average coming out of High School for free. The cost of the online schooling was reasonable for the state. And he explained that any cost would be offset by the improvement in the states workforce. Of course when he left office a University offered him a ton of cash to become the president of the University and STOP TALKING ABOUT FREE EDUCATION..... I always wonder what it would have done for our states kids if they all knew that they could get a degree, at no cost if they kept their grades up in school. How many lives could that have changed?
When I was a kid, I knew one person with a PHD, a friend of my mother’s who was a psychotherapist. Now I can’t count how many people I know with PHDs. The stubborn thing about socio-economic hierarchies is that everyone can’t be “elite.”
Peter talks alot about gen-x. He is one. But the boomers over shadowed us all this time until now. The boomers have almost finished retiring and this is FINALLY our time to shine.
I have some friends that run blue collar businesses they all need good hard working adults and they will train/equip you while you learn, and they can not find enough young men and women who want to work hard...The job they want is influencer, internet model , OFans, instagram, gamer, ect...It is funny to see the men and women working in the oil fields driving 100k cars and IT people walking.
This is something that nobody is talking about. The army recently had to start sending kids to pre basic training in Fort Jackson to teach them how to read and write because they can't get enough recruits that can actually get a high enough GT score on the ASVAB to be cooks and truck drivers. Most of these kids have a high school diploma.
Add on top of that the 50%+ that cannot meet the MINIMUM physical fitness standards in the first weeks of basic training and must be transferred to a "Fitness Company" until they can do the bare minimum, and then they can restart Basic all over again from the beginning. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. @@kevinfelton689
Junior Colleges already do blue collar certificates. Have done so for a long time. They are partnering with high schools offering a CTE (career and tech ed) program and kids are graduating HS with blue collar certs and college hours. JuCos also are more able to start up programs fast because they don't have tenured profs at all. They are the future of ed.
It's all a scam so no, from the books they make you buy, and half the teachers barely use the book but is required! Why would I want to be in debt my whole life paying school?, when I can learn a trait and start my own business. Dad had a tile company 10 yrs of work, which supported 5 kids, at the end he bought a 30 apartment unit building paid off!, and life is great. All dad does is collect rent at the end of the month,and is mostly home. I'm currently in mechanical, have my own shop. People will always need Ac repair(I live in Florida, ac repair is booming), cars fixing, think of traits that will always be needed. Once you know the trait well, start a business instead of throwing it in the toilet, at school.
The first thing organizations need to do is get rid of their human resource department, apart from the legal bureaucracy to administer the increasing burden of get-out-of-actually-working labor laws. This isn't a shot against unions but they have a lot to answer for, as well. As it is, HR hiring has no skill or ability to hire quality candidates because they work a process of "eliminating what they don't want and take what's left." Organizations with low turnover and solid financials have managers who do their own hiring. These managers network so they have short lists of candidates and trusted networks to bolster the short list. These organizations don't wait until a position is open before starting a hiring process. Research is conclusive: HR hiring is a failure on every level. Executives know this but given the authority HR has been granted, mostly due to consensus leadership style (this is not actual leadership, it's authority without responsibility), there is little reason to believe much will get done... until the financials stop providing the returns we've seen over the last 25 years.
Employers have already been doing that for years upon years, if not decades. Apprenticeships and paying for relevant college courses are pretty common in factories. EDIT: If they get desperate enough, they'll partner with schools to start generalized training courses early. They need employees in order to make profits, and just about every business would rather do something about it than just throw in the towel.
@@rafetizer well not in my finland they haven't. they would rather go bankrupt than pay with their own dime for years of education of anyone, that can just take the skills and move to another company. they just moan in media how skilled people dont magically appear, have done that since the 1980s, like a case of learned helplessness.
@@rafetizer blue collar jobs are 13% of the market. Employers aren't going to be training chemical engineers, climatologists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and so forth. The jobs companies train for are fairly limited in the marketplace.
I've been saying this for last 15 years that we need to train more blue collar and less liberal arts!. AI will rip the guts out of office jobs too, those that use their hands will be the millionaires of the future.
My dude... there's Barely any liberal Arts majors in Any part of the education system worth mentioning. It's 90% Doctors, Lawyers, and STEM. There isn't a glut of Liberal Arts Students there's a glut of White Collar OFFICE WORKERS. Liberal Arts students go on to Make art and Study the application of art to other jobs. The world over is Short on Liberal arts and Teaching professionals. You've been Wrong for 15 years. And you're still wrong now. And didn't listen to what was literally said in the video. Yes we will need Blue Collar workers... but stop shitting on the Artists, Translators, and Teachers while you're at it...
@@HimitsuHunter it's honestly concerning ppl are so deluded they think blue collar workers are going to lead us into a glorious future. Yes they are important but the value-add to the economy is no where near as high as knowledge workers. Also we already know what will happen, we already had a blue collar economy in the middle of the 20th century, it was fine but the world has moved on and the blue collar workforce shrunk as productivity in these fields increased, we simply needed less workers for the same if not more output. They are literally making the same ridiculous argument that farm workers made when blue collar workers came about.
heh, very often those who buy their way into private liberal arts universities are already from millionaire, if not billionaire, families, and want to mingle among similar elites. you will _never_ be able to make them into welding or whatever. its not like government pays for those private liberal arts universities, they have quite large expenses, the students are private customers.. like Harvey Mudd College, a private liberal arts college, costs students $77,339 per year. its not about jobs, its about elites mingling with elites. the connections between other elite wealthy families are their livelihoods, not work.. they never have to work a day in their lives, they have massive passive investments, that goes in their families, that churn money to them for their whole lives. _they_ will say "oh we need more blue collar workers i agree " while _never_ doing that themselves, of course. they mean someone to serve them. they mean looking at statistics. but never themselves. they are the conservative billionaires with ph.D in communications that roleplay as everyman on their silly podcasts.
@@paulbo9033 I’ve been an electrician for thirty plus years, at the start a house had four circuits, almost no testing, houses now have three t8mes the circuits, the testing is extensive as is the technology of the devices, and five times the outlets, it takes twice as long now as it did in the 90’s to Rewire a house. How’s Ai going to increase productivity in the short term?
Price has gotten absolutely ridiculous, content has gotten ridiculously political, quality has drastically decreased, and the student graduating are less and less competent. We're struggling
Good stuff. Yeah, I worked in a blue collar job to finance my way through college back in the 90s. Did the white color job for 7 years after earning the degree, now I work again in more of a blue collar role. The price of an education is now so ridiculously expensive that it’s far wiser to go the blue collar route and avoid taking on debt unless you want to be an engineer or doctor or something.
It takes a lot longer to become a fully licensed electrician in Colorado than 6 weeks. You have two paths available to complete your training: Complete 288 hours of classroom and lab training time and work for 8,000 hours as an electrician's apprentice. Earn a two-year degree from a technical school and work for 6,000 hours as an electrician's apprentice.
Peter is critically wrong about #2: colleges aren’t responding to the lack of traditional candidates by competing fiercely over them, they’re responding by lowering the rigor level to increase the pool and further inflating the cost with more administrators and luxury amenities to sell a social experience, not an academic one, while doing everything they can to ensure cheap, inflationary credit keeps flowing to justify massive staff budgets. I guess you could call the construction of luxury amenities competition, but not one that serves any traditional higher educational or societal goal.
When I came to Canada teenty years ago I had two options, pursuing a master's degree or recycling myself in a technical "light blue" color career related to my profession abroad. I took the second option and time demonstrasted it was the right choice. But technical advance education must be permanent to still relevant. The good thing is that most of that continue education was provided by the companies i was working on.
Our company hasn't hired any technicians outside of high school in years now. We are consistently filling our ranks with young people that we train and develop ourselves. We figured out about 8 years ago we couldn't find people that we actually needed to fill the jobs. So we started farming them and cultivating them ourselves from the ground up.
That how America was built companies used to invest in workers and in turn workers were loyal to
Wish I could find a company that does that. Can't even get my foot in the door.
That's the way it was back in the day, when we had programs!
This is the way I set up my company. Previous place I worked had a lot of trouble with people who had degrees not having the knowledge-base of the product they were selling, so they were lost when there were any technical questions about the product. When I started my company I set it up so that you have to install the product for a few years before you can move into sales. It is very rare for me to get any product questions from my sales team and they have a good working relationship with our installation crew, because they know what goes into the installations.
Any company that's smart enough to train new high school grads directly and pay them enough to keep them happy will have the best, most loyal workers in town. That's a recipe for success.
I used to work in Higher Education (Recruiting and Advising) and Peter is right on the money with this analysis. One bit of general advice is that I can give is that if you can, develop both a skill/trade (blue collar jobs) as well as consider doing your Bachelor's later (for white collar jobs) if you have the aptitude for them. The reason being is that most skill based jobs tend to be more physical and you get to a point in your 40s or 50s where your body is physically used up and you will have to stop. You may also work up the company ladder where eventually you will need to have a degree in order to work at the home office or be a regional manager. If you can, join a Union especially if you plan on working in that specific field for a long time (basically like the Boomers did in the 1950s through the 1970s). Keep in mind that past the newest generation, Alpha, that's still in diapers right now, we won't know what the world will be like 25+ years from now. So having flexibility in your life and professional goals will afford you opportunities later.
i have a stone mason friend, who already in his early 30s, complains about his aching knees.
@@Redmanticore
Yup, it's only going to get worse too. Encourage them to find occupational interests outside of that so they can shift gears to something better that does not require such physical demands.😉👍✨
I couldn’t agree more. I work in the hazmat field where having a solid science education and having practical labor skills is a recipe for success. It certainly takes a professional mindset to work in hazmat due to the associated risks and hazards of the job but the more I have learned and mastered on both sides of the job the more money I have made. With professional certification in hazmat you can commonly earn $100 kpy or more.
University should be liable for pushing degrees that don’t lead to jobs. 1/2 the universities should and will likely go bankrupt
The establishment likes its indentured servants.
There is no better example of predatory lending than the financing of a college education.
It's predatory pricing on the part of colleges and universities. If you look at a chart of tuition and fees, they started skyrocketing when guaranteed government loans started being a thing. They have no incentive to offer value because they know they are being paid regardless of the success of the student.
@@atticusmatlock4305 this needs to be said way more
Reminder that Harvard has a 40 billion dollar endowment. It earns $1.3 billion a year in returns annually. Harvard's endowment is larger than the GDP of 120 nations.
And they're charging kids $80,000 a year to teach them that genocide is only bullying when it crosses into action.
@@atticusmatlock4305 Yes, this is simple economics. When there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services (in this case education) then the price will go up. Because the government loans were now given to everyone then, as you pointed out, the value of the degree went down because there were more degree holders for the same amount of jobs and at the same time the cost of the degree went up because of the availability of funds to pay for schools (and schools lowered admission requirements at the same time because more people could then pay for it). Now you have MBA holders working for business owners who may not even have a bachelor's degree.
When I went to college you coudl get 3% loans. But of course the private sector is better so we shifted loans there and now the rates are much higher. Other countries value the knowledge and skills of the next generation so much they educate them for free. People here have been programmed so much to see government spending not as an alterantive wau to spend money to get things done that the private sector never do without government incentives, that they will actually abandon the next generation to the four winds and leave the future economy to whatever peril awaits. Because maximation of shareholder profits is the only thing that matters. The alternative is to forgive those loans the way Biden just idid. Either way, the ONLY practical solution is to invest in the generations as they enter adulthood. The results will not be perfect, but they will be better than less education and highere education debt.
When I started as a professor in the early 90’s, the university system was eliminating all 2yr technical programs. Too expensive for the administrators. We had layoffs, pay freezes, etc., and concurrently, administrators raised their salaries by about 30 to 100% and hired, at my school, 28% more administrators, while giving professors small perks to retire early. It all went downhill from there. As me and my fellow professors would say, everyone above secretary (now called administrative assistants because they no longer work for departments or professors) could stay home next month, and no students would notice. Also, never heard one student say they came to our university because of the great administrators. And there’s always some new initiative that needs a new vice president or vice provost, and their accompanying staff and expense accounts…..it’s a crock of feces.
They are slush with money. All organizations hire useless hands until their expenses matches their budget. A variant of Parkinson’s Law.
I started teaching at the university level at the same time as you and your observations and mine agree completely. It seemed like most of the professors wanted to get out of the classroom and into a cash, essentially useless administrative position where they got paid more for doing less.
My wife is a surgeon, over 10 years the administrators have grown 10X while actual surgeons has grown 1.5X. It’s amazing that these administrators try to actually tell a surgeon how to do their jobs when some admins have no medical training at all.
academics aren't very smart.
Must not have been much of a college or university and undemanding field to be able to perform so incompetently, maintain current knowledge, make any real impact, and obtain any kind of achievement...
Millenial here, Bachelor's in Engineering. We got screwed over by supply and demand. Every kid my age was told we would be poor, homeless, and wasting our potential if we didn't go to college. So a ton of us went to college, driving up the demand for degrees and therefore the cost of education. But then once we graduated, our degree didn't matter because everyone and their dog had a degree, over supply. Paid a ton for education and got so little for it. Planning to guide my daughter to learn to work with her hands, and that there are more ways to make a living than sitting behind a laptop writing emails.
I recognize so much!! so true
What type of engineering? Most electrical engineers need a degree to get a job. If you did computer science I guess you could have just gone to a bootcamp but you have knowledge that boot camp grads never get unless they go out of their way to study CS.
@@martinlutherkingjr.5582 Mechanical with an emphasis in energy systems. Doing design work for a solar company now. Making $26/hr, but when you factor in the cost of living I would barely scrape by on my own. My coworker does the same job, same pay and can barely afford an apartment, even split with a roommate.
@@MichaelJCaboose013 Yeah mechanical engineers are generally underpaid, if you want to make more learn to code. Having an engineering degree will help you since you know a lot of the advanced math that boot camp grads without an engineering degree don’t understand.
@@martinlutherkingjr.5582But isn't a large portion of coding getting replaced by AI? Or is that just ai evangelism hype
Apprenticeships supplemented by classroom training are the best way to raise up a skilled workforce. The notion that everyone should aspire to a university degree is ridiculous.
100% My only regret about my own apprenticeship (I'm a Journeyman Pipefitter), is that I did not start sooner. No kid should graduate highschool without being aware of apprenticeship opportunities near them.
As a german it is a normal concept for us. Weird that nearly nowhere else in the World they have this type of apprenticeship
@@BlueSkyEntertaiment These programs exist in the US (I went through one within the last 8 years), but most kids never learn about them because our public education system has tried to push everyone into college, even if that's not the best option for the individual.
Did a 4 year apprenticeship in Switzerland. No regrets
The uni graduate make like way more money on average, than non graduates.
A uni degree is the most important factor to have a middle class family.
That’s just a fact , that might insult your personal experience but it’s still a fact
I'm a welder and welding instuctor. I need way more than six weeks. Six months will get you to entry-level under a lot of supervision.
Still better than 4 years to learn that you learned zero useful job skills.
@@rathelmmc3194 and all they did learn was how to be combative for no reason, and have everyone else walk on egg shells around them.
@@bradleyheights5905In Germany, work is almost a religion. They take it very seriously, they don’t goof off, no small talk at the office, no surfing the internet, no playing on their smart phones, no showing up late to work, etc.
@@bradleyheights5905This is just not true. Median pay for a welder is 40k € in Germany, which is the same as a nurse and a bit lower than a social worker. A teacher does make more and has more prestige. Work ethic and productivity in Germany is not higher than in France. They have the most unpunctual trains in Europe and are often on strike. Maybe it was true 3 decades ago. The healthcare system is highly subsidized and will partly collapse (as in many other countries, too).
I agree. The kids that came in 10 years ago were a revolving door, now days they give them a torch and let them poor wire until it looks good after a wire wheel. But more than a decade ago we had to learn with rod and stinger first and the instructor wanted to see the color of the slag and soot before we chipped. There is way more every weld and every process than its profile and cleanliness. I can a weld is off by the color of soot or even its presence. These kids come in pass a PTA then fail a UT after 3 weeks of pouring wire and they let them in as a new hire. Constantly fixing their mistakes that are so obvious to anyone who would have just started with the basics and had the time to learn how to stack or get good at walking the cup. I was training this guy on the floor. His first time stick welding.He thought it was a funny kind of Air ark for back gouging. 😂 I showed him one time and told the kid you only put the rod in the stinger when your welding and if your not welding for any reason TAKE IT OUT. I had him set my buzz box and climb into the compartment with me. He put the rod in and tried to climb in the steel. Arc strike city with it cranked up to 230 Amps. After that I showed him how I tap and lift then drag my puddle. I even showed him that I want him to strike it like a match and if it sticks take it out. At those settings it burns way too fast and should never short out. He somehow managed to stick it to the wall 4 inches away from the joint and didn't know what to do😅 I told him to take it out of the stinger and he had no clue what I was talking about. I'm only 13 years older than him I thought every certified welder knew what that was and could spot it a mile off. We need these people to train from the basics up. I don't trust anyone to stack with 3/32 who can't strike an arc with 7018. And I don't trust anyone to back gouge who can't stack with 3/32 all these skills play on each other. Learning the basics and how much of a hassle stick welding can be makes it so much better when you get into pouring wire you learn how to do it right the first time. The technique needed to lay down 3/32 is very similar to the patience and control you need to use Air carbon arc to back gouge. Learning the ins and outs of using a stinger will help with the safety and awareness when you start back gouging. These to me are the basics that we need for entry level welders at my company. Our advanced welders use this as a base to learn about Tig welding and doing it right the first time or ruining those parts is essential. When you mess up with 3/32 its a long and potentially dangerous process to fix. That headache leads our more experienced people to have a high first pass yield. Only the best of them ever get to learn TIG because of that very fact. If we could get a minimum of 6 months in how would you break up something that takes a decade or more to learn for most of our guys? The 6weeks in a lab is arguably spitting in the face of the company's needs.
I work for the largest independent testing laboratory in the world. We have some US lab divisions who are hiring high-school grads with zero work experience, because there aren't enough people with college-level technical skills available to fill the roles. There are three major US universities and multiple community colleges in our immediate vicinity. The skill-deficit is very real, and probably far greater than even Peter realizes.
Sounds ideal for a technical school partnership.
Phoenix? I could hit the main sonora quest lab with a football from my apartment lol
Yep, seeing it in our sector as well.
What people forget is that in the "good old days" companies trained internally. There was no careerbuilder where the HR dept was trying to cherry pick individuals with "exactly" the experience required. (Look at the number of BILLIONAIRES in 1980. Now look at the number of BILLIONAIRES today) All that "BILLIONAIRE" wealth was transferred from the middle class to the ONE PERCENT. Do your own research. (hint: think of the oft used phrase, "other people's money")
@@davidparnell1893 Yes, just the charts from Piketty really make that clear!
Former prof here... I retired this past summer (I taught for over two decades in Canada). Higher education is horribly bloated (both in terms of administrators but also faculty/programs) and financially unsustainable. There is little to no quality control when it comes to teaching (which is the most baffling part of the system) and in my experience most profs try to avoid teaching as much as possible (especially undergraduate courses) as they mostly want to focus on research or graduate teaching. In my experience, there is little sense of social responsibility to society (in fact, most faculty have nothing but contempt for the rest of society) and next to no fiscal responsibility. Now, most campuses have been taken over by DEI ridiculousness which is just the cherry on top. I came from a lower middle class background and even though I completed four degrees (including a PhD) and taught for over twenty years, I never felt a part of such an elitist and out-of-touch system. I won't even donate my to the universities I attended or worked at... and most of the money is just squandered.
I am very worried about higher education too... right now it is just a major financial black hole that society could theoretically throw billions into and it would not improve it. Major reforms are necessary.
The problem with university being out of touch with society is it because it is removed from society. I noticed the same thing when I was in the Army. There was "us" and "them" (civilians). We lived apart, we worked apart, we played apart. Same thing in the university.
Very well said. The higher education system needs to collapse, then be rebuilt.
People who can do...Do people who can't do anything ...teach
I hear what you're saying. However, as a professor for 30 years in multiple universities/colleges across the US-- I have had the opposite experience. Yes-- there are assholes in every profession but the vast majority of professors I have worked with are caring, committed teachers and scholars. At the large state universities and private elite colleges you will get the isolated, ivory tower types. But at state colleges and community colleges you will find the diversity of programs, professors focused on teaching and working with students daily and very low costs. As a parent, I prepared. I started a "pre-paid college" fund in my state, my daughter went through gifted programs, the IB program and dual enrollment as a high school student. When she went to the university, she got scholarships through the Honors College, a general state scholarship plus the prepaid account-- she graduated with two complete Bachelor's degrees in four years and no loans. She went to work for a non-profit serving the public and now (5 years later), her salary matches mine as a PhD, tenured college professor for 30 years.
So... a lot of you are whining about getting degrees and cannot find a job. Sometimes you have to move or integrate those degrees into where the economy is growing and new "sectors" of the economy (if that makes sense). Network. Internships. Thinking outside the box is necessary. Take responsibility for yourself and you will be able to make a path that fits your life. Good luck all!
When you can learn more from RUclips educators like the math wizard than from university professors it’s obvious the university is just a barrier to entry to hold a piece of paper.
Before I retired from a large, round the clock manufacturing facility....One of the largest problems, getting young folks hired was....The job is night shift and you'll probably be on night shift for a few years. Or second shift. Mandatory overtime seems to be a sticking point.
When I started, in 1979, my wage allowed me to buy a new car and purchase a cheap, older home. I paid off and remodeled that home in 7 seven years. Wages ain't what they used to be.
P.S. My mortgage was 13.5 %. C.D.'s were paying over 10%.
I spent time in manufacturing early in my career, and I'm now realizing that is far less common in the subsequent generations. Back then we had school-to-work initiatives but eventually most of the work was offshored. Healthcare has always had shift work so there's that as a current example. Nursing school is highly competitive and they know they'll be doing night work when they first get out.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, there is a link between shift work and several health issues.
These include an increased risk of metabolic problems, heart disease, gastrointestinal difficulties, obesity, and certain cancers.
I have worked nights before and would only do it again for a few months and $100/hr.
I can make plenty of money during the day in the trades and sleep nights.
@@elibennett6168 I worked off shift for ten years before I could afford to go daylight. I could hold the great paying jobs on second and third shift. Took ten years to secure one of the better paying jobs on daylight.
That’s the crux of it. In previous decades, the wage benefit of overnight shift work was worth the negative impacts to your health and social life. It simply isn’t anymore and corporations are fighting tooth and nail to not give an inch in profits by increasing wages.
@@natejusko486 it's always money. The truth is 'the trades' jobs are inconsistent, hard on the body and don't pay what they should..you could make let's say 100k as a skilled plumber welder etc. Or you could make 70/80k as an office pleb and have minimum wear and tear on the body in a climate controlled office.
I spent 6 years in construction, it's not worth the money. You destroy your body and have to deal with some of the worst human beings put on this planet. About to graduate with my bachelor's in finance. Money doesn't always = happiness.
Yep. I had friend who were applying the whole tube of Voltaren on his shoulder, every day, in order to do his drywall gig.
Insanity.
@@Chain987 I suffered a herniated disk 2 years ago and it still effects my leg from time to time. My company didn't even bat an eye at the injury.
@@virgnthermostat5928 they just don't care. Once you destroy your health no money can fix it. Hope you get better. Swimming, might help. Take care, bud.
@@Chain987 thanks, bro.
6 years and 3 visits to the OR for wear and tear. Nobody tells you about the bad side. Good on you for your degree.
As mid-Boomer engineer and government accountant, we started our family in a very upscale suburb. The new high school was gifted by a local chip manufacturer with a CAD/CAM training facility. Just after my son graduated (taking full advantage of the lab and AutoCAD classes), the school district shuttered it as not representing jobs that parents wanted for their kids. Even as new design engineers needed CAD skills every day. Secondary education long ago lost interest in preparing its customers for employment.
Students are not customers.
@@cameronjournal Yes they are. Why do you think higher education costs up to $500,000 now?
@@cameronjournal I treat mine as such. Desired and valued customers, I mean. Because I see them as such. Really I try to run the classes as a restaurant and I am the "World's Best Waitress." I listen to what they would like to learn, tie it to what the requirements and is "on the menu," and then make it so. We do not cut corners or standards, and most students rise to the level of mutual respect and make the class(es) even better than I could do alone.
@@cameronjournal They should be. Customers have more rights than students.
@@cameronjournalIf they pay in exchange for services rendered then yes they are.
Did a lot of factory work in the 70s - hated almost every minute of it except a couple of concrete product jobs that I kind of liked because I worked inside/outside and got to play with construction equipment. Finally went to community college, much of it while working night shift and got an IT degree. Spent the next 38 years working on IBM mainframes.
Did something similar. Graduated in 1976 with a degree in History. Worked as a Park Ranger with the US National Park Service. Great job and fun but horrible pay and limited upward mobility because of so many young people ahead of me. Then studied computer programming at a local school and spent 38 years as a programmer, programmer analyst, systems analyst, most of which were on IBM mid-range systems (Sys/34, Sys/38, AS/400, iSeries). Finally went onto an all-PC based system the last few years of my career. Retired just before the COVID crisis hit in 2020. All in all, was a pretty good career.
You were born at juuuuust the right time, Grandpa . . . all the fat old geezer IBM-ers that I knew when I worked at AT&T in the 2000s were being kicked out juuuuuuuuuust before retirement (hee hee hee, wink) in favor of Indian immigrants that would work for nothing. And now THEY are being taken out and shot by Artificial Intelligence. Keep it real, Hippie.
Smart move.
As a 76 year old boomer, I agree. My folks instilled in me that I needed to work like an immigrant, be hungry, be responsible, be a liberal capitalist ... that meant you do what you want, I'll do what I want,
make money to support myself, honestly, of course.
Growing up in Venice, CA, I couldn't have more of a child of the 60s, which probably scared my conservative WW II vet parents.
I taught my kids what I knew, which was to work hard, be honest.
I grew up in my dad's gas station, in the early 50s, until the late 60s, starting in elementary school, filling Coke and cigarette machines, pumping gas, and cleaning bathrooms, kind of an indentured servant (smile), a block from the Santa Monica Pier.
I learned to fix cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, and whatever else came in. That meant welding, mechanics, hydraulics, and most of all, how to deal with people.
I went to Vietnam, came home, became a lineman for the power company, and retired when I was 55, home paid for, totally debt free life.
My oldest kid is a welder and works at Port of Los Angeles, making about $250k a year. The youngest is a large equipment operator (backhoe, crawler etc) making about $350k annually.
Hard, honest work ... they proudly stand on their own two feet and set a very positive example for their families. I'm proud of them.
My immediate neighbors all want them children to be computer guru's, teachers, lawyers, doctors ... they feel that's the path. Oh well ...
My friend, I think you got some numbers wrong here. HEOs in California make on average $87,000. The top 1% make 150k... For welders, the average is 82k, top 1% is 142k. Are your kids selling coke on the side?? No one but F500 CEOs and senior surgeons are making 350k a year that's just ridiculous.
Thanks for sharing your story. I liked reading it.
@Steadyaim101 seems to depend on who you work for and what your skill level is. I'm not talking about a welder who can put a trailer hitch on a truck, but an underwater naval certified welder, same with equipment ... it's very large specialized cranes, excavators, and trucks & trailers associated all belong to my kid.
As an aside, the guy working for the city reading my electric & water meters makes well over $100k. County lifeguards make more. My next-door neighbor just retired as captain.
My house overlooks Google, Yahoo & other technology companies ... CEOs each make multi-millions a year and live in $50 - $150 million dollar homes. Sometimes, they buy three side by side simply for privacy.
little rich kid from cali, thats what you were.
There are different paths for different people. They're all right for someone. However, the hard, honest work ethic is important no matter the area of society one pursues. Isn't it great when our children find their way! Whew!
I've got 2 degrees; Mech. and Elec. Engg. I worked for a Defense Contractor for 1 year, and switched to become a Pipefitter. I now make more money, benefits paid, and I'm getting Certs for welding, plumbing, and HVAC. Again, I make more money than a dual-degree Engineer at a Defense Contractor, and I'm doing that as a 1st-Year Apprentice Pipefitter/Welder... Dawg... College is a giant lie.
Honestly. People seem to forget how good those jobs are. And it's a lot easier on you mentally than if you spend the whole time doing defense contract work
What sort of training did it take to become a Pipefitter and how long? I'm curious for my son, a formerly very well paid programmer.
yeah, too many degrees being pumped out with grade inflation and colleges finding ways to hand out degrees to people that should have washed out that further degrades their value.
I too, have two degrees. One in lazy abbreviations, and the other in self-deprecation....Dawg. Sack up, man!
Typically 4 year apprenticeships. With all the classes you can get at community College level including classes in high school that might be considered prerequisites. Hopefully this helps, mostly check in the apprenticeship programs with your son's interest to hear what they want to see. Bottom line the door is wide open! @Dave.O
...My collar is blue, my hands are rough, my bills are paid.
Keep on Keeping on Peter.
Started Blue, then crossed over to White as health issues took me out of the trades. Advanced knowledge in the trades increases opportunities for teaching or supervisory positions with just a few night classes to gain nessary teaching, management skills.
And you are probably poor and always stay poor.
@@michaelduncan6287same here. I teach the trades now in a tech college. Body is beat up but brain is still workin!
@@michaelduncan6287 a lot of businesses will pay for your college so you gain the skills to move up to management. We have a neighbor who learned mechatronics (2-year program) while he was in high school, got a job immediately making $50k+ and his company is paying for him to complete a mechanical engineering degree.
Same here. Dirty hands, clean money.
The biggest gripe I have when talking "higher education" is everyone talks as if all degrees are equal. That is, a degree in Russian fine art is just as valuable as a degree in engineering. That isn't true, it's never been true. Peter does know the difference, but far too many gloss over that.
At least you're not so ignorant to say ...as worthless as French literature...considering the founding of our democratic concepts in our constitution and founding laws.
Too true and the institutions don't help with that misconception either. I had to pick a 4-year college to get my POLS degree at this last year. I spent dozens of hours speaking with the Political Science departments at every University in WA State. Not a single one of them could tell me what I could do that would specifically require a POLS degree other than Political Scientist (there's about 6,900 jobs available in the U.S. so screw that). At the end of the day despite the fact I'm still going for the degree it was quite the learning experience to see so-called professionals lumping every undesirable degree together into the "jobs you can get with any degree" category. I feel quite bad for kids who go to a career center or its equivalent and are outright lied to about the degree they're seeking to obtain - they shouldn't have to pull teeth to get answers.
Something has got to change, I'm seeing a lot of wasted potential.
No one speaks on those terms. However there are those in established classes who get into positions of power with very little more than a degree in art history. Uk issue too. It's not that art history is equal to a engineering degree. Its just thst engineering degrees don't help ppl understand history, art or the politics of it all.
a degree became just a show of being able to commit to 4 years of something in my opinion.
No college degree makes anyone an expert in anything. Its only step one. Businesses aren’t looking for people with a bachelors degree in business. They want the smartest person they can get, who will work well with others. Often, that is your Russian Literature major. A bachelors degree just isn’t anything but a demonstration that you showed up and did the work for four years, and you have a BASIC understanding of the language and principles in a given subject matter. High school is only about literacy. Undergrad is about learning communication. Expertise only just begins at the next level.
These people who whine that their Art History degree isn’t helping them get a job, are FOS. They aren’t getting a job because they suck at interviewing. MOST places DGAF what you got your bachelors in. It simply does not matter most of the time.
The non-college educated have this delusion that your major just becomes your career. This is ONLY true if you go on to grad school in the same subject matter and stay in academia. This is not the norm for most people.
Another thing to note about zoomers is that people my around my age and younger (I'm 25 so right on the generational cusp) have grown up hearing from millennials about the burdens of student debt, the uselessness of their degrees, people who went to 4 year schools now working for minimum wage at mcdonald's, all the horror stories. While that may not be everyone's experience, these types of stories are scary and demoralizing and give us every reason to think twice before going down the path of a 4 year degree. Combine this with the asociality you mentioned and I think this will have a big chilling effect on admissions and make this problem much worse for colleges esp in the US.
One thing your generation is going to need is adaptability.
The economy, and even society itself is changing around you as we speak.
So some of the things you might be educated to do, could very well not exist in a few years.
Meanwhile there WILL be new fields that open up and jobs in them that no one has the knowledge to do except the people who pioneered that industry.
It's that old saying: May you live in interesting times.
The "Give Up Now Because It'll Never Work" is a MASSIVE problem that older gens (esp Millennials) are laying on the kids. No hope = apathy = lesser workforce output. "If it sucks, why try?" is a thing, and while I am trying to teach my kids that Debbie Downer is full of caca, I can see how it's affecting a pandemic-affected-gen is not interested in helping out. That said, this guy's take on Gen Z is overgeneralizing and "old man yells at cloud" BS that doesn't help. (And since I'm his age, I'm VERY disappointed in him.)
I’m a blue-collar worker and I love my independence but as I get older I recognize that working one of these remote white collar jobs would probably be nice as I get toward retirement
I work in one of those remote white collar jobs, but the pay sucks more than you realize.
If you're not planning on going into medicine, engineering, or the law a traditional four year college just isn't worth the trouble or the expense.
There are a lot of baristas in this world with $40k in student loan debt.
i dont know why a poor person would go to elitist hangout place like liberal arts school for the children of the elites.
Harvey Mudd College (HMC) a private liberal arts college costs Tuition: $80,036 every year.
their whole point isn't to get a job, its for billionaire´s kids to hang out, to make connections with other wealthy families kids.
their huge tuition´s whole point is to keep the poor people out.
The push for everyone to get a college degree set back half of the millennial generation and is criminal. I resent that I went to college just to struggle to make ends meet. That was not the agreement. Thankfully my husband is an engineer and gainfully employed but many of my friends didn’t get so lucky.
I'm training to be a capitalist pig so that I benefit regardless of what happens
I have an MS in mechanical engineering and I’m doing a job I could’ve done without a degree. I guess it’s a nice status symbol.
@@Reglaizedeveryone is. You need training and education, neither require a college degree. We’ve just pushed it all into our universities.
I didn’t set out thinking I’d resonate as much with this video as I did. But as a person that hires and builds teams, Peter is on point. We’ve been hiring high school interns and giving them the opportunity and tools to do interesting things that other companies wouldn’t. Universities aren’t producing candidates that can hit the ground running; and often they are over entitled (expecting massive salaries) and are very hard to coach. High School kids with aptitude are the opposite. They are quick studies, willing to learn, and don’t have the mental blocks that things shouldn’t be possible. They then grow into great full time employees.
Hard to coach is a problem, but don't blame candidates for salary expectations. I just want the salary / median house price ratio that my parents had, not way below. Pay execs less or have them work more hours if you can't afford more labor.
@@pbkoboldI feel for you, but the affordability is more a function of house prices being too high rather than salaries too low.
Your comment is very interesting. I’m a few years from retirement and I’m consulting now, but earlier in my career I managed a large team of mostly engineers and project managers. Some of my friends still manage considerable teams of non-STEM employees and they echo the exact same sentiment as you.
@@SignalCorps1 Wages and prices do not exist in separate universes. Wages have in no way kept up with productivity or cost of living over the past five decades.
You hire interns, as in, you may them actual money?
Hi Peter. Machinist here. I went through a 4 year trade school to become a machinist. When I graduated I was making a few dollars more than entry level jobs at Sam’s club. Luckily I saw the writing on the wall and was concurrently getting an engineering degree, and I am so glad that I did because I make so much more money as an engineer.
I love machining, I truly prefer it over being an engineer but in the US it’s hard to make money as one without moving to somewhere up north.
As of right now I would never suggest to anybody in my area to become a blue collar worker. Again, this is region specific to my area, south Florida, because of high cost of living and low wages.
Interesting. There are always exceptions. So important to drill down into the details of the immediate landscape, instead of accepting trends as absolute gospel.
I agree with you for the most part. Would suggest that if someone has blue collar skills AND an entrepreneurial mindset - you can indeed do very well. Just cant do it as easily working for someone else.
I suspect South Florida is about to change with mass reshoring. Granted my goal in life is to be both hands on and technical. My prediction is with AI etc, there's no need for blue or white collar. More a gray collar, as work environments will be changing rapidly from week to week, depending on where they are in the cycle.
Truck driving also doesn't pay squat in FL, but it pays pretty well elsewhere. It's probably because they have a flood of snowbird labor moving from the north and migrant labor coming up from everywhere else
I'm similar to you in that regard. I love machining, as compared to engineering, but the demographic I'm In screws over a machinists pay. Hence, I too, have been studying Mech E.
Regarding you suggesting anyone not being a blue collar worker, you may want to think twice. They will be safer for a little longer when the AI technology improves in the next 5, 10, 20 years and beyond. AI will not be automating the trades away yet, (although the H1B's are the other threat. Hence keeping trade pay low "ish").
Certain Stem Fields in the future could become saturated, and lower their pay too. I think this has happened to lawyers.
All in all, carful research is needed for career considerations, along with the willingness to live with the rewards/consequences of the chosen profession if one is dead set on it. That is where most colleges and college students fail, because they usually don't foresee into the future of their career choice and quality of living.
I’m a Hungarian gen x and our generation is in high number, because around the time I was born they introduced 3 years maternity leave, which kinda took mothers out from the jobmarket, so that’s how they solved the problem with having too many workers. Also back then we had big factories sponsored entire public (state schools) and individuals with good grade and gave them scholarships + contracts after finishing school. Of course those factories were state owned, but still interested to having both the numbers and the quality of their workforce. We got very good academic education and the practical skills from high school. There we different types of high schools, the basic 3 years for skilled workers (blue colour jobs), then one version of 4 years where we got from both world and had a lot of general subjects (basically al: math, chemistry, biology, physics, literature, grammar, music, art, language) and skills & practice our trade (we can say light blue jobs, like managers in factories where needed strong manufacturing skills). Then were another 4years high school which mainly focused on academics to train admins and those who wanted to go to uni for white collar jobs. Not everything in „socialism“ is a bad thing. 😊
I always enjoy the comments to Peter's talks. Thanks everyone for the voices from experience! Sometimes contradictory but reflective of your experience.
College in the US have been about social status rather than education and you can tell by the curriculum and their cost: status is more valuable than quality. (Or was). Most college degrees are not technical (i.e. useful) but still very expensive. Kids are picking up on this. 1) Technical schools had a low acceptance rate this year. VT was 11% for example! Their toughest year ever. 2) kids are forgoing college increasingly. There are plenty of jobs out there and I think grow your own is a thing already. Also, lesser schools are struggling with their high tuition. Scholarships are being thrown out like confetti at a parade at lower ranked schools. Basically they are on sale! I fear these trends won’t accelerate fast enough however.
That is ridiculous. No doctor, nurse, lawyer, engineer, scientist, curator of a museum, corporate executive, etc., got their degrees for social status... Not all jobs require technical skills to be useful. And there are plenty of careers that cannot be pursued by just going off and getting some entry level job out of high school.
@@izzytoonsThe sad thing is that you’re both right. Universities are pricing employees out of their futures. Who wants to be a schoolteacher if one year of college is equal to their annual salary? I am very concerned for the future of America.
I am working for a "labour office" in Norway and we see this trend already. Employers are more willing to train new employees from scratch, or to cooperate with schools or to give a chance to employees with various disabilities/disadvantages/history.
Consider that higher education is free over here (thus more are able to take it), the difference in pay between white and blue collar jobs is minimal (electricians and carpenters are making much more than me with two masters) and weak norwegian currency is making it less attractive for foreign workers to work here and you can see that employers are having really hard time to find skilled labour.
I went to trade school in 1998 for Audio Engineering…. Within a few years I was making more per day then I had ever hoped for…. I retired at 42, and now I live on a sailboat in the Caribbean….
The best part is no student loan debts…
Super model girlfriend?
@@erikkovacs3097 since you asked…. We met when she was 19 and I was 38🤣🤣🤣
if she wanted to work as a professional model, she would have plenty of gigs….
could not be happier…
Do you mind telling what trade school you went to for Audio Engineering?
@@JasbirSingh-zj1fg I attended Full Sail University - Back in 1998 they offered A.S. Degrees. I earned mine in 13 months …. In 2024 you are required to earn a 4 year B.S. before graduating from the same school…
@@MrJoelkamins A lot of people call Full Sail a scam. You did well because you are talented and got breaks.
I’m 73 and never finished college. I went to a very scholastic high school in suburban Chicago that offered 4 years of Russian and Latin in 1964 just to show how intense that school was, and is. College to me, since I had no specific goal like becoming a doctor or architect, was like more high school, only much easier. I got bored and wanted to experience real life. Both of my parents had college degrees, basic Bachelor style, and never used those in their future careers. My dad was a traveling salesman and was very successful. Mom sang in a small operatic society, sold cosmetics at “parties”, and raised three children while dad was on the road. Her job was the most difficult I believe.
My wife never went to college and both of our daughters have done the same. One is an accountant, self-taught, and her younger sister has been flying helicopters for 27 years, most recently Erickson SkyCranes as a copilot. She got a student loan for helicopter school and stuck with it. They both love their lifestyles and have quite a bit of freedom. Their mom, with no college, taught ballet for a few decades, starting at 16, and later became the preeminent caterer in Sedona, Arizona for a dozen years.
I tried several worlds of work including a year with a beekeeper. My first permanent job was working for Pink Jeep Tours as an outdoor Jeep guide. When I left after 15 years I was the guide manager with 50 guides under my supervision. It was a lot of physical work, however I would never trade that time for any other employment. It provided many layers of satisfaction and the pay was enough to live in Sedona and buy 1970’s manufactured home that was worth close to 400K when I sold it and moved to the Tucson area in 2004.
The health food store in Cottonwood, AZ where I worked for 3 months in 1974 was founded by four school teachers from the Bronx who came West to create and more fulfiiling life. Now, that store is worth millions but stays in the family, able to support the founders and their 8 kids over the years. Starting a business is not for everyone but it doesn’t always require a college education. For my teacher friends their degrees were stepping stones and the money they made teaching paid for their dream and allowed them to leave the Bronx for a wonderful life in a small, friendly town.
As said by many of your commenters previously, money is not necessarily the answer to a happy, rewarding life. Find your innate, best talents and take them into the world. Let your satisfaction with your work be sufficient as you move further. One day I think you’ll be surprised at how many things will come to you just naturally if you create your own work path whatever it may be.
Inspiring. Your solid high school education set you up for life. Someone once remarked that the goal of a high school education should be equip every graduate with the skills needed to write an intelligent letter to the editor. If we return to that standard, along with a requirement that high school diploma grads must have passed AP Latin or Calculus, most kids will have the skills (including the ability to further their education through online learning) to thrive in most any job. Those who are intellectually curious or need advanced training in a field such as medicine can still go to university.
@@cropcirclerPrecisely. My sister and her husband put their two boys through GW at a cost of 250K each, just for a bachelors degree. Had they instead gone out into the world and experienced a few jobs and then came home to dad, they could have had a dad as backer for any other schooling or business that they wanted to create.
@@cropcircler Latin is a dead language for good reason and useless as is calculus. Not once have I needed anything above basic math and a calculator in my four decades plus since high school, except to pass college business math and statistics classes. You are living in an alternative universe.
@@JohnSmith-ti2kp Ouch. Latin connects us to our Western heritage. Calculus connects us to deeper truths about the universe. They are worthwhile subjects of study for those reasons alone. They are also subjects that require intelligence and discipline to master, and thus perform a gatekeeping function that weeds out the less able from pursuing higher education.
What a full life you have had. Creative, hardworking, life long learner! I wish that for all our youth!
People in higher ed have been aware of the enrollment cliff for sometime because of the small gen z population. The best strategy for universities is to compete by creating a robust online or flexible educational programs to attract students who need to work and get a degree, usually in something to boost their already established career. We should be importing skilled blue collar labor, but unfortunately immigration is a wedge issue in the USA. But also its usually at the community college level of higher ed thats suppose to help produce the education for skilled blue collar careers. The US military is actually a big educator for these sort of careers as well. In Universities we need to be pushing the STEM degrees, as they produce the hybrid white-blue collar, engineers and architects etc, that drive local infrastructure and manufacturing in the country. The next 10 years in higher education looks murky for projecting work demand, because of the rapid progress in automation, all the way from smart computer agents to humanoid robotics.
All of that is spot on. Immigrants have filled labor and skilled labor jobs for centuries. Our economy has always depended on them to do so. And still does. Unfortunately, there have always been people here right on the shoreline verbally and physically sbusing the immigrants, complainging they were taking jobs (that no one else wanted), and telling them to go home. Same today.
Just having this conversation with my teacher coworkers. These changes have ramifications for the entire education system in the U.S., especially for secondary education.
6 week electrical? Try 5 year apprenticeship, 4 rounds of 3 months of school and 3 more yrs to get you masters license.
Its like 6 weeks to get a certification to be an assistant to an electrician or other blue collar jobs . It takes much longer to first go to months/years of school and then apprentice for a couple of years before you become a full electrician
I'm glad you said it
Ikr peter is talking out his ass on this one
When do you start earning money, though? Remember, people who get law degrees don't make a red cent until at least 6 years of paying money for education.
That was when they weren't at demand. Watch that drop
Retired college administrator here -- spot on Peter! You’ve also captured the whole demographic equations and economic components that factor into the big picture. The wrong types are over built, the degrees are outdated, they aim at he wrong targets, seems our shortsightedness ha set up a crash and burn. Institutions that are too huge to pivot, beware. But, it’s not too late to advise the young people in your life to change course.
I agree with your sentiment but think you miss the reason. Education is like every other industry. It wants more customers. It's far easier to train people in worthless degrees for inflated prices than to actually train people for programs that require competency.
The University of California is a ten-campus public system of higher education that is governed by a 26-member Board of Regents. There are no Republicans on the Board of Regents. Look at any University or Collage Board in America and you won't find one Republican. The left leaning Dems have managed to gain complete control of all public and private higher education. system.
Only 13% of jobs are blue collar. I know it is increasing but, still...careful how many people you encourage to change course. We still need doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, lawyers, and people with degress in marketing, finance, and even hospitality to help run things. Not every company can wait for a high school grad to develop the chops to run the international sales department...
I think the "ruthless" characterization is important about boomers and their children. My parents and the parents of everyone I knew in the 00s were constantly up our asses about grades. We had to have a boatload of extracurricular activities, never dip below As or Bs. and were still expected to develop bespoke "interests" that would appear good on a college application. Attempts to get a job were dismissed as distractions from our school work and even a sign that we weren't working hard enough already. After all, what does some shitty job do for you besides give you money NOW? If you study hard and get a good job, you'll be ahead. Not getting into the best school possible, even if it was a good school was treated as something you needed to apologize for. We worked our asses off in college and then graduated into an economy that was on fucking fire.
We were crowded out of starter jobs by people our parents' age who got laid off from their middle manager jobs, forcing us to take the most menial work. And the same people who told us to defer gratification by working hard were now sneering at us for having listened to them. They called us lazy and entitled and inexperienced as if we were supposed to have had careers before having careers. To hear the burnout fucks among us who slouched their way into a construction or welding job between bong rips at 17 claim that they saw the next 20 years of economic history coming a mile away is just a little bit rich. They knew no more than we did how savage and indifferent the working world was going to become.
Some jobs, many jobs, require those things your parents were demanding. 60-80 hours a week for 4, 6, 8 years. And then a whole career of the same. Those are no doubt the careers your parents were hoping for you. Nothing wrong with that at all. Your disinterest is not uncommon. And you're right. Even better jobs are not fully secure. You rarely get anything that's risk-free. That is the economy we have built. That's what you get when "maximizing shareholder value" is the mantra that leaders, politicians produce, and half the nation votes for.
@@izzytoons I really don’t think you listened to what I was saying. You’re characterizing rungs on the ladder they had and I’m describing how the whole thing was pulled up behind them. Even while they were toiling away in obscurity, they could survive, with room for savings and the leisure necessary to justify a work ethic. We stall for years on the first rung, and then have to put up with smug “that’s life” rejoinders.
I know why it happened.
I know how it happened.
I know who is largely responsible.
That is why I and every generation after the boomers fucking hate them.
@@izzytoons No, they really don’t. Framing overwork as the bare minimum to even have a career with reasonable prospects of advancement is a new and stupid twist on an old theme. With very few exceptions, we didn’t have to work ourselves to death like this even two decades ago. And the crowning irony is v that it just burns people out. It’s not more productive, dynamic, and it doesn’t produce better results. Everybody loses
boomer past projecting their failure to their children
Missing the part where politicking was the important part
matthewcaldwell - that is _SO_ true. Been through that, suffered the consequences. Well said, sir.
My youngest daughter was lucky enough to get about 1 half of the cost of her education at UC Riverside. She is a STEM major(physics), and the other half is coming from her grandmother's house in SF was sold by my Baby Momma in order to fund her education. I like to think that I am intelligent, but both my daughters are utterly brilliant. In math and spoken languages!
Good choice of major. Hope she makes a lot of money or marries up 😉
I never realised how deep the educational snobbery until I got a higher paid job. Some of my colleagues act like the "blue collar" sector is a different world to them. They're also very entitled and expect promotions and guaranteed progression just for showing up. Personally, it makes me happy that the tradesmen and blue collar types are going to get a massive pay rise with their increased demand, and all these paper degree snobs are going to fade into economic drudgery.
It doesn't help either when the staff of the school is filled with Technocrats that have no industry experience. They look down on us instructors and students without degrees. We are not allowed into their world. And since they never worked in a factory they habitually break OSHA rules because they have no training in regulatory matters. So, ironically we have more OHSA violations present and in plain sight within our campus that most any real manufacturing facility would. I've been in factories for 19 years in Industrial Maintenance (a blur collar sociologists dream) I have watched some much play out from the outside, I have been able to see every part of the operations and observe these trends. Now from the inside of education. Kinda bleak...
@@justinbrown5715 Totally agree. Where I work now, some colleagues think performing 10 ECGs over a morning is "hard work". They have clearly never done twelve hour shifts lugging cement or been out in all weathers doing deliveries.
Couldn't agree more. I taught for over two decades and one of the first things I realized when I became a faculty member is how many other profs looked down upon the support and maintenance staff. A support staff employee once told me he was assigned a task to install a whiteboard in some professor's office and the faculty member would not talk to him directly instructed the department secretary to tell him how she wanted it installed. Not all faculty are like this but I found a large majority have nothing but contempt for working class people and the rest of society. I enjoyed teaching and the students immensely, but I have nothing but disdain for the higher educational system and most of the faculty/administrators who run it (and are running it into the ground).
For what it's worth physical work is easy on the mind. I prefer being too sore to move and in a perfect mood to watch something. Than too mentally tired to a watch a hockey game. Also not all physical jobs are the same. A lot of people do unnecessary things to cause strain, or alternatively aren't big or strong enough for the job their doing or just as common too tall and heavy. At my last machine job, I did all the big parts, couldn't bend over to save my life but long arms with leverage. Meanwhile the little guy could basically sit and do his job. @@goodyeoman4534
@@davidc1878 Scumbags. I know the type well. Funnily enough, the consultants and surgeons where I am are really friendly and approachable. I find it's mostly the people in jobs you wouldn't miss if they disappeared who are usually the most arrogant.
Your talking about bringing back apprenticeships. 😅. About time😊😊😊😊
I'm the trades they never went away.
Basically, what Mike Rowe is pushing for.
@@Dave.O Yes and no. Union halls still have the programs. Decades ago, companies had their own internal apprenticeship programs. There are very few of those left compared to what you used to see.
I've worked blue collar jobs my whole life, worked professionally in about every trade and the blue collar tradesman is treated as second class citizen, it's always been that way. No one wants to work blue collar jobs unless they absolutely have to. Most people who were around me when I was doing this work were social degenerates, x criminals, farm boys etc. When I migrated into technical blue collar job, commercial HVAC, was still second class citizen but I commanded some respect as I could bring relief when people needed it. only now age 52 do I have any respect but only because I get paid a lot and work in tech industry but until these jobs are not considered bad jobs or second class citizen job low class jobs no one will migrate to them.
I'm old now, but I shudder at the thought of a desk job. What a way to spend your life. One of my careers was math based, but out of doors.
@@michaeldowson6988 I now work in critical facilities for the largest data center in the world (currently). It's very interesting and easier on my body, I aged out of commercial HVAC fieldwork. It's a job that's hard on your body.
Being in a trade is kind of a 2nd class person in the eyes of some. My daughter helped me over a couple of summers in my job and she saw that. She does treat service people and tradesmen very different now because she has been in their shoes.
@@michaeldowson6988 Couldn't agree more. Spent 17 years now in the security field; not as lucrative but much more real than technology.
Office culture strikes me as weird.@@CoolDude-yp9jt
As someone who has their masters I find this very interesting. I’m former military so most of my friends went blue collar with the exception of me who went into finance. I make vastly more than all of them and it’s not even close, even the ones with years of experience and in unions. I’m not sure what people are talking about here when there’s finance jobs that start at a salary that most blue collar jobs take 10+ years of experience to achieve. Saying that high paying jobs like medicine, law, and finance won’t beat blue collar jobs is just not true, they’re just very competitive and you must have a high GPA
I have a bachelors in political science, and added a law degree to that. Worked as a lawyer for ten years.
Now I drive a UPS delivery route. Much happier with my life now - though the risk of injury is always the elephant in the room with a blue collar job.
My high school age son is looking at the trades - plumbing and HVAC repair.
The other day running my business deliveries I saw a guy repairing the elevator and asked if he was unionized too. He said yes. I told him my son was interested in the trades, and he flat out told me once he graduates high school - he could put in a phone call to the local elevator repair union and they would have him a good paying job with full benefits within three months - train him on the job - no need to go to tech school.
Personally, I still want him to get a two year GE degree - so he will be good company for himself throughout his life. But I would be very alarmed if he wanted to get a law degree like mine.
Mine was mostly a waste of debt repayment money.
I wish I could believe you. I guess I do. But I have never met in my 65 years of life a blue collar worker, who didn't own their firm, who was happy with their job. Never. Business owner... yes. But blue collar employee with no piece of the business, never. Not once. Not ever.
@@ChatBot-r2q try getting outside of your bubble. i love my job and the closest thing "owning" my company is that i get an employee stock discount. i love it because i'm well compensated
@@ChatBot-r2qI ran my own business as a lawyer and it made me a nervous wreck. I couldn't figure out how to generate enough clients, I was constantly worried I'd commit malpractice and harm my existing clients - no support network, no benefits. Now it's someone else's job to think about how to get more business. I just do what I'm told.
I prefer it that way.
And yes - we bitch and moan about our jobs. I just put in a 12 and a half hour workday and got back to the house 30 minutes ago before typing this, because my suck-up boss keeps cutting routes for his superiors and dumping the excess work on us remaining drivers. I'm BONE TIRED right now.
But the bitching and moaning is kind of a badge of honor in this line of work. We do a tough job most people can't even comprehend, and it feels good to flex on people.
@@ChatBot-r2qIn plumbing and HVAC repair, it's kind of understood that you work for someone else at first to learn how to do everything while you acquire your own tools. Then you go independent and run your own show and pocket all the money.
@@ChatBot-r2q Yup, i am the son of a blue collar worker. The problem is that you age out very quickly out of blue collar work and then you are screwed. When you own the firm, at least you are a businessman and can sell it or let others work for you. But blue collar work is in general very dirty, dangerous, body crushing, and you are also with rough people most of the time. You also directly compete with migrants that can barely speak english, because they tend to be good with their hands, too.
Makes me glad I chose an environmental career. It’s often a combination of white collar and blue collar skilled work. I’ve spent a lot of time doing blue collar work on projects in factories, industrial facilities and remediation projects and I’ve spent a lot of time in labs doing analytical and R&D work, QA/QC and project management. I have gotten full use of my STEM degree and I’ve learned a lot of practical skills in using tools, operating process equipment and operating vehicles like forklifts, boom trucks, front loaders, etc,. All while earning more than either the average white collar and blue collar folks as demand for people with skills in managing industrial and hazardous waste is in strong demand for people with life science, chemistry, engineering backgrounds and who have practical field experience. I have not been unemployed in 30+ years and even in 2008 and during COVID when lots of guys my age lost their jobs and could not find work with comparable pay I passed through those periods unscathed and have seen my earnings grow due to increased demand in my field for people with a strong science and practical field experience background.
While I was in high school they shoved “go to college to be successful” down our throats everyday and I foresaw the over saturation of the white collar market. I decided not to go to college and start an apprenticeship at a machining company because I’d be and still am making more money than most college graduates, I’ve been a machinist for 5 years now and I can EASILY find a job anywhere because we’re in such high demand.
Methinks a certain president who drove this hard over the past 20yrs or so was doing it to pad his unemployment figures
it's a job. I get that....what about a life? What about being a well-rounded human being. There is more to life than work. Everything in balance.
Hey I'm looking for a shift since finding a programming job isn't very accessible now, do you have any advice for me looking to get into blue collar? Machining, welding, electrical etc? What programs or companies? Thank you!
I wish I did that. I'm unemployed, with a useless degree. I feel like its too late to learn trades.
@@zorandusic7079 ne predaj se! don't give up! don't surrender!
That‘s exactly what we have in Switzerland. Kids starting in the workforce at 15 and going to technical university at 20. Very successful 🙌
Germany same thing. At least, that's how it USED to be. Higher Education had sooooo muuuuuuuuch prestige in Western Europe because it was 1. Very Very Selective and Rare, and 2. Very Very Hard and Rigorous. To quote Chris Rock, college in the USA is "like a disco with books."
Americans hate to hear this. They hate to hear their system needs systematic change
@@misterwhipple2870 Very much depends on the college. There are some "party schools" where they major in hangovers. And then there are a lot of small no-name, no-nonsense, no-prestige colleges that are getting the job done. But people coming out of those schools don't generally end up in top jobs because of that lack of prestige. So you end up with the idiot drunkard rich kids from prestigious schools in upper management undoing the work of those below them.
@@misterwhipple2870 I wouldn't change the American system to be like the German system. It works in Germany but not little countries like Bosnia.
What you've described Peter is precisely what occurred in the 50's thru the 70's in my hometown - Morton, IL . . . a farming & bedroom community of Peoria, then-home to substantial manufacturing ops & HQ of the world's largest heavy equipment manufacturer, Caterpillar. Our school system was HEAVY on math, reading & writing skills with attendant practical application in shop classes, office occupations classes, as well as sciences & physics for the budding engineers along with college prep reading/writing classes and advanced math (trigonometry, calculus, etc). A person graduating from my high school had a SOLID educational foundation for - with a modicum of personal initiative - being a successful blue-collar tradesperson/farmer, mid-level office worker or any of a number of white-collar professions.
I got my MBA - lost my office job in 2011. Eventually settled for a job in construction. Within 6 months i had doubled my previous pay. Being outdoors is soo much better
Wow, your name must be Peter too, did you used to work at Initech?! ahah) I guess you don't miss those TPS reports, aye?) or Milton and his stapler? ))
I agree with Peter on what *should* happen, but I think there's a big disconnect between what kids are deciding and the actual ROI on their education. That's why we have people with large amounts of student debt that are having trouble paying it off. They went to college because that's what everyone told them they should do and it wasn't until they graduated and looking for a job that economic reality hit them. I'm not convinced that those advising current high school graduates are any smarter and not parroting the old advice "go to college!".
For the record I went to university in 2005 everyone knew arts were a total waste of time. People would flunk out of the technical course in first year switch to arts in 2nd year just to keep the party going, they knew full well that there was no actual job in it. That being said if you can get an arts degree while living at home for cheap do so. College degrees are an amazing waste of youth.
Really good to hear you fixed the sound on a windy day, even with the ocean in the background ;)
Higher Ed is a huge scam. I got an accounting degree and only 18 of my 124 credits necessary to graduate had anything to do with accounting. Marketing only had 3 of 124 related to Marketing. Associates degrees and certificates should be treated like bachelor's degrees from hiring managers, everything should be converted to an accelerated 6-12 month certificate and schools should work with employers to make sure the curriculum matches what they actually need instead of sending kids out into the work force having learned things completely irrelevant to what the job demands.
Sounds like you had a "liberal arts" degree. Mine gave me a degree with the cash value of a McDonalds coupon.
Really? My University requires around 30 hours minimum of accounting classes(excluding Intro to Financial & Managerial Accounting). That's sounds kinda wild tbh
Worse people on the planet…Right! And your going into FINANCE! Hahahahahahah
I can only wish this would come true.
So basically you have a semesters worth of accounting experience.
You should talk about changing high school. The Amish are one of the most successful groups in the US. They go to school through 8th grade and then they start an apprenticeship or some other job training. I think that is the best for everyone. I felt like I wasted so much time in high school and college. It just prolonged my childhood when I Could have been learning an improtant skill for life.
Love the Amish can't run hospitals or law firms or Wall St. or NASA or Tela or, or, or...
@@izzytoons I mean... lets be honest. Those ones above can't make the world go round. When it comes to basics like food, day to day living (plumbing, HVAC, construction, etc), that makes the world go round, we can live without NASA and Tesla
As a high school teacher I second this. In Australia there is a massive push for all students to finish Year 12. This has been combined with forcing students to study English and Maths in senior to get their school certificate and shoving essays and reports throughout what should be hands-on practical subjects. Instead of meeting the aim of improving literacy and numeracy, it just means that students on the lower or non-academic end of the cohort are unengaged or experience year after year of failure. It is excruciatingly obvious that there are kids that have no business being there and that it would benefit themselves and everyone else if they left for a job or an apprenticeship.
I think kids should be able to leave school at 14 or 15. When I went to school in Year 11 and 12 the timetable was arranged so we all had one whole day free a week to either attend optional tutorials or choose to work on a certificate, apprenticeship or get some work experience. Today's kids are rarely so lucky.
@@AMS-m2h I homeschool my kids. Tht's my plan to traditional school through 8th grade then let them do some kind of apprenticeship or local college in high school. My hope is that the education department will realize this educational model worked decades ago but its outdated for what we need today.
@@alishaberrey4479 I don't disagree the peole you say are important. But the people and places that need food and plumbing would not exist without leaders who can organize and run large endeadvors, establish and oversee and run justice systems (however imperfect), doctors who can heal, and so much more. I live in PA near Amish country for two decades. Trust me, they depend on the outside world for commerce and other needs a lot more than you think. There world would be much less successful without the "English." You simply have been around running things, like companies. I have. They would not exist with the people you seem to suggest are entirely self-sufficient. That simply is not so. We need each other. Civilization would crumble if either were to disappear. Lifespans, including Amish lifespans, would collapse.
I read this book a few years back about shale and rivers or something and it got me to switch my major to Economics, now five years later I'm almost done a masters degree and am able to find work as an entry-level bureaucrat surprisingly easily... but I'd definitely be making more if I'd learned to weld or something. Ah well!
Good one, Peter! With two engineering degrees and 20 years in aerospace, in 2005 I left an executive corporate position to become an electrical contractor. Never looked back. And yes, I’ve been training my own apprentices for most of this past 20 years including as an instructor at the local VoTech schools.
I find future electricians in many odd places, places where good guys are paid 12/hour and I offer 18. Haven’t thought about junior high, though.
When I was in school a counselor showed me how much money I would make using my major when I graduated. I was already making more than that working construction in the summer. I quit school and started working full-time in construction and never looked back.
Electrician here. I don’t know about southern states but up here in the northeast we’re required 4 years (600 hours) of schooling and 4 years (8000 hours) in the field
It's about the same in VA, has been for over a decade
But how much school is required before you do any field work and earn any money?
@@Dave.O ZERO. That's the upside to apprenticeship
I’m a self employed electrician in the UK, takes about four years to be qualified as an apprentice, most find an employer after first year of college full time, then day release each week to college whilst on the tools, you are earning straight away with no debt, compared with university it’s a no brainier.
@@Westlec Here in U.S. the electricians union will put you to work right away. You just have to pass an entrance exam. If you work well you can get in the apprenticeship program were you go to class a couple times a week.
Or you can continue working, and you will qualify for your journeymans after about 10,000 hours of work.
My teenage Z gen daughter is not like others. She hated COVID, took drama once in high school, does well academically, chats with people everywhere, and loves the outdoors. She is like a race horse. I have to constantly keep track of her whereabouts with friends in person. I have been telling her to do a dual route with careers / work. Flexibility is key. I am an old X gen who spent decades working in blue and white collar work.
I'm early Gen Z and everybody I went to college with wanted the social perks of living on campus. I think Peter's assertion young ppl hate being around each other and working with each other is blown out of proportion.
Retired college faculty. There was a continuous decline in entering students that started with No Child Left Behind -- specifically. The decline has been continuous over the past 20 years. T\I had a neighbor who was a retired high school teacher, and with the same change and she could not pass down her supplemental materials . If you get a statistical flux with poor test scores for a couple of years, you are gone. And with the DEI insanity, I am ashamed of my former department!
Statistical flux, is that something you reverse the polarity of in Star Trek?
@@TheLucanicLord A continuous decline in entrance standards for those entering class in the Fall. A continuous decline in the entrance scores on the same tests, year after year, so that now many places have dropped all entrance standards. Hint: the home school seemed to do better and be more capable.
As a new faculty member, I really feel that. I am unable to teach course content for my Psych courses because the students literacy is around a grade 5 level. I'm trapped trying to teach them how to form a legible essay (not even good, literally just able to interpret what's on the page). In some classes, I've basically resorted to giving something easy enough for the bottom 80% to squeeze through a pass, then quickly pull out the actually motivated and high potential students to focus on. It doesn't feel great, but I know if I don't come out with ~70% average and 98% pass rate, I could lose my job...
As a manager I struggle convincing my superiors that “blue collar” ain’t what it used to be, and even the bottom of the barrel jobs require far more skill than they did ten years ago.
heh, in Finland, our well-meaning elitist bureaucrats in government, who have never gone to trade schools themselves, or personally don't even know anyone from the blue-collar class, can't realize that.
they still think anyone can do those jobs. everyone is let in, they are thought to be "social cases schools" rather than trade schools where you learn a profession and actually have requirements.
acceptance rate: 100%
our system is that they need to let X percentage of people graduate from these trade schools for teenagers, that is how the schools get funding from the government. result: kids that can barely read and know nothing of jobs get released to the wild, with predicted results.
companies have complained for 40 years now, parents complain their kids aren't properly taught in trade schools and nothing is required, from as early as the early 90s, but the government puts money to
" yhteiskunnasta syrjäytymisen estämiseksi " " to prevent social exclusion from society "
" jokainen lapsi ansaitsee oppimispaikan! " "Every child deserves a place to study! "
and the system goes forever on...
if you have a failing degree in everything, you will always go to Ammattikoulu, a trade school.
trade school people are colloquially called here as "amikset," which also means.. intellectually disabled.
-
now, publicly funded high schools, where the elitist bureaucrats own kids go, those places can freely adjust their entrance requirements as tight as they want to, and they do. only those with good degrees get into high schools here.
acceptance rate: probably 11%.
in here, all high schools are for intellectually better folk. a more civilized folk. a bit more elitist folk.
so, you could say, we have 2 publicly funded extremes systems existing at the same time here.
when people talk good of Finnish schools.. they definitely only mean high schools and universities.
It was always that way. This myth of unskilled jobs has always been nonsense. Not to say there isn't crappy bad jobs. But if you're smart and handson, there's always a skilled job that can save your back etc. Even the soft skill of being able to train coworkers can save your back and increase your income.
@@dixonhill1108 The problem is, the average IQ is 98 (not even 100), That means 50% are actually below that/ So "if you're smart and handson" doesn't apply for a lot of people in this country. That's the what the economy and the country needs to be designed around... but it's not.
I totally agree.
I'm at the end of the Baby Boomers (age 59), so I got an advanced degree (Master in Science, hydrogeology). I'm now retired, as are my younger sibling.
I can see every day the high-paying blue collar jobs, like electricians and carpet layers, that go begging. Unlike the (useless) degrees that are offered in college now (gender studies, anyone?), these job do NOT go begging. If you go into engineering or the sciences you still have it made because those are useful skills.
And don't get me started on the expense, which will bleed a person dry - unlike when I got my masters degree in the mid 1980s.
Very well put!
This has been done before (companies training their employees) to great effect. I am thinking about companies like IBM. At the beginning of the computer age there were no computer science degree programs. IBM had to train people to do that. They also did it among their customers.
I learned to code while a student studying physics. That was actually a paid job, not the result of classes I was taking. I dropped out (intending to go back) and with those skills got a job making what college grads were making when I would have been in my junior year. I did eventually go back but got a computer science degree instead of a physics degree. By that time, before I got the degree, I was a senior engineer, engineering manager, and had worked on and led advanced R&D projects. I say all this not to toot my own horn, but to show what can be done. By the way, my older son followed a very similar trajectory decades later.
Commercial hvac technician here, 5 year apprenticeship. Total package with retirement and health care is 160k, 125k take home working an average of 42 hours a week. I will have a fully vested union pension at 47 I'm 41 now started the trade at 19. Never had a student loan and my wife has been able to stay at home with my children and we have a nice house and no debt. My trade is so vast and technical I guarantee you that you can't replace me with a cheaper younger technician. IMHO it takes 12 years of being a a technician to become a decent service technician. The trades are a great career but it takes time like anything else. But I'll never be without a job, while the world was shut down from covid I was working as much as I wanted and in 07-08 I still didn't miss a beat. Don't under estimate the power of learning a valuable trade, we're not all built to sit at an office chair everyday.
I've worked in Higher Ed as a staffer for 26 years...in its current form, Higher Ed is unsustainable. It's amazing how long the unsustainable can be sustained when wealthy and powerful entities have a self-interest in doing so.
Never ceases to amaze me.
The .market can stay frothy longer than you can stay solvent
The issue is still low pay for skilled workers. For welding sure you can make 66K after school, but the engineer is going to make 75K, and software even higher, all without destroying your body or being exposed to hazardous chemicals.
Not once that student debt kicks in
Exactly. And even if the salaries were reversed, it's still much better to get 66k as an engineer working comfortably from home than welding for 75k who knows where and how. Younger generations don't value the economic aspect of a job as much as they used to in big part thanks to unatainable housing prices.
@@matthewcaldwell8100 its really not nearly as bad as you think, you can get it paid off in 3 or 4 years if you control your spending
What you just described is what people have been saying for a while now. They call it elite overproduction. Its when people go after these top tier jobs, and it ends up being so oversaturated that the competition is just too fierce, and the entire system implodes in of itself.
Yes. See the work of Peter Turchin, for those interested.
My mother, God rest her soul, was saying that 60 years ago.
In 2005 we were all saying that arts degrees was worthless. It was either engineer/nurse or bust. Everyone said the same thing. By the end of 2nd year 1 3rd were in their desired field, 1 3rd were dropping out and the other 3rd was trying to convince us that somehow it'll work out.
100% agree. Canuck from Ontario here. The same issues exist here. The university tuitions here are putting kids into debt. If I were to do it all over again, the only way I would do university again is engineering with a co-op (job placement DURING uni) program. Otherwise, it would be a technical college. I tell that to every young person I meet. I've even found in my work history, particularly after COVID, I've taken on other roles ALONG with IT to help keep my employer rolling forward. A baby boomer retired, I picked up part of that person's role (property management) and I even do handy man repairs to mitigate the lead time in getting the super busy trades in. The diversity of things I do now is the most it's ever been. Gotta admit though, I enjoy the diversity of work. It gave me the excuse to splurge on tools, and my IT skills are now playing a role in the property management side. That's another thing I tell young people - don't silo yourself. Skill sets gained in one field can be relayed to another. Because I did many years in IT in industrial fields, I was exposed to many devices that sensed/controlled bits of the real world, and dealing with devices like that opens you up to taking on other roles. To any young people reading this...be curious. Tinker. Get your "hands dirty". Keep learning. You'll never be bored, have cool projects on the job, and if ever you have to switch roles or find new work, your cross skill abilities will make you stand out. Don't just code. Code a microcontroller and interface it with a sensor, a relay, a motor controller. Fabricate the case - get a cheap 3D printer, use that, and read the G Code generated from the software - the industrial machines use G Code. That tinkering, that curiosity will give you hands on experience that many education institutions may not give you, as the institutions are constantly playing "catch-up" to the dynamic market of skills demand.
College is a dream business model:
1) Promote college (your business) as a must.
2) Give your 18 yr old customer with zero credit a loan as high as a mortgage (or higher) backed by the government to buy your product.
3) Raise your prices as high as you want as long as the loan covers it.
4) Operate as a "Non-Profit" exempting your business from income tax.
5) Receive additional "donations" under the guise of a non-profit.
6) Create an endowment with enough cash on hand to compete with a Fortune 500 company.
7) Push whatever agenda you choose.
Interesting point, I am curious as to where robotics and AI fit into the picture over the next twenty years?
@@rodeanabean4019 Right in between Transgender Studies and DEI Studies.
@@rodeanabean4019ChatGPT already turn school busywork useless. Todays Children actually wasting time going to school
It's not a business.
Another one from me.. the issue is that education has been mistaken for something it isnt. In our capitalist system educstion is simply the means by which you become specialised for employment.
When its about learning, for the sake of learning. And if what youve learned is something you can put into practise, then you've won something extra.
Learning for the sake of learning is a hobby. Education needs to equip you with the skills needed to keep society healthy and wealthy, then everyone benefits. Doesn’t matter what economic system you have.
Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but the cost is way too much.
@@richardthomas5362 You're talking as if the cost hasn't gone up by a thousand percent. This is an issue with an origin, caused by specific policies, not a freaking natural disaster.
Thing is learning general knowledge is great if you're naturally intelligent. Problem is you gotta legit be a smart guy to be able to make use out of a general education. If you're not already a person who can reason things out naturally a 4 year degree isn't gonna change that.
I hear you. A liberal arts education makes a more well-rounded person who participates and contributes to communities, society, civilization, and humanity in many more ways.
I'm a home builder in Texas. The electricians, hvac techs, and plumbers i know make 40 - 60k and work long hours in the heat. Not great.
A job that is coming back... gardener. The cost of crappy store(non ripe) fruits and veggies is going through the roof. Gardening without artificial cancer causing fertilizers and pesticides is extremely difficult.
I'm so close to buying my farm and making this a reality. Currently graduating with an I.S degree and have zero desire to use it. I want to grow food that doesn't suck and feed my community.
Mexicans exist
Service work is usually a good bit better income. Much less per-job competition, more reputatational. Hvac, plumbing and sparkie work on construction projects are commonly whole-project bid jobs, so much more extensive competition. Price race to the bottom stuff. Nowhere near the same margins, vs on-demand work like fix/repair and small-scale expansion on-site for residental and commercial customers.
thats why usa imports "illegals" (people)
Peter, you're right and wrong at the same time. I am not an American but a Canadian, and we have many of the same problems in the traditional university system, less so in community colleges.
You're right from the corporate or national perspective, but most millennials and gen Z (and North Americans) are too self absorbed to take that larger view.
The key is to give the school grads, the students, the parents and other stakeholders, an understanding that we're in a fluid, shape shifting world, with zero jib security and with shrinking career lifecycles. That means raising and maintaining an individual's general cognitive abilities at any age and career phase, and the willingness and flexibility to learn and to do all kinds or trades, in a perpetual mobilization mindset. I don't see any degree or certificate program, professional or trades, anywhere that prepares for that.
I'm 26 going on 27 next month. He's correct Gen Z are young people who are loners and love being on computers with a lock on the inside of the closet/ room because we set our focus on a specific task and don't like to be distracted or disturbed. For our leisure/ down time we play videogames until we can't stay up and only sleep two or three hours then the cycle repeats.
The issue isn’t not training blue collar workers, it’s a pervasive social and cultural disdain for blue collar workers. When you have presidential candidates sneering at flyover states and telling people to “learn to code” after 30 years on an industrial job how do you convince someone being an electrician isn’t low brow and low class.
The crazy part is the safe best bet is to do both. Get the degree and then work your way up in hands on jobs. When you can do the job and btw you're the only guy in the shop with a degree you're getting that soup job. It's really weird out people think they can be useful by wearing one and only one collar their whole life.
With money in the bank, you don't have to convince anyone of anything.
@@DrTTube I agree and that’s not the point. Go ahead and convince a bunch of teenagers that they should aspire to be a tradesman after 50 years of programming looking down its nose at the trades. I’m not arguing they are right I’m arguing they are a bunch of elitist morons whose goal is to wreck the system to the point that the people will hand over even more autocratic power then become a permanent labor class.
One could argue that programming/IT is a blue collar job but that most programmers do not want to get their hands dirty and talk to customers in their daily business to experience what specific problems they are facing that need solving.
@@lodepublishing Yes, I was referring to social programming through media, and public schools aka indoctrination camps.
love hearing this right after I spent 6 years graduating lmao
Congrats on your graduation! I just retired after 35 years of very gainful post-college professional work. I wouldn't take this all too seriously if I were you...work hard, take your work seriously, try to add value at work, and don't be an a$$hole and you'll do great..... you'd be surprised by how few people can manage to just hit those most basic of basics at work in almost every profession. Good luck and enjoy your career!
@nlabanok the problem is getting the job lol because there are so many competitors and dei incentives. But I appreciate the kind words I'll keep it in mind
It really depends a lot of where you went to school, what degree you got, and what part of the country you live it.
On the one hand there will be plenty of university grads with useless degrees to fill blue collared jobs whether they like that or not. Unfortunately on the other hand, most of those will have women’s studies or gender studies degrees and would be the last people anyone would want to employ.
Higher education is not only expensive, but not very valuable. Of my 4 kids and all the interns I have had at work as an engineer, I don’t know what most schools are teaching.
All of the schools that I have interfaced with their output, they are not teach engineers how to read drawings or even touching CAD or database and programming.
99% of engineers in all fields will need to read drawings. Why are they not teaching that?
The response I get from interns today is that university teaches you how to learn, which is ludicrous. If you got into university, you already know how to learn.
My local university is basically a housing market manipulation scam. They increase attendance by a wider margin every year, without building out new student housing. It's a very small town, with conservative city management that also refuses to allow new housing to be built. The result is that the cheapest studio apartment in town is $1,500 and rising. I know the university leadership and board are local property owners, because many of them are family friends. My landlord is one of them, head of the athletic department and he owns 4 large apartment complexes. They funnel the (mostly foreign and out of state these days) students into their expensive rental properties and extract every cent. Many of these kids end up homeless after a few semesters and live in their car until the police run them out of town. I don't see how this isn't a scam.
Look at Switzerland. They are amazing at this. They have one of the best systems for preparing blue collar workers.
My main concern re: higher education.......the most important benefit of college I have observed is a generalized higher proficiency in critical thinking skills. That enhanced capability benefits a person in multiple ways but it also benefits society tremendously by ensuring the greater majority exercises good reasoning at the ballot box. America desperately needs a better-informed electorate to avoid 2016 repeat.
Are these the people who can't define what a Woman is and think that it's ok to shoplift up to $900?
@@yingle6027 Statistically, those who engage in retail theft are non-college, generally-speaking. And discussions around gender identification are too trivial to justify the energy expenditure for those with an education.
I thought the most important benefit was the higher concentration of GIRLS in one spot! That's why I stayed away,,, too much trouble at too high a price! 😅
@@yingle6027No, I think he's talking about undereducated dimwits who easily fall prey to propaganda and get fixated and outraged at outlier and completely non-existent behaviors while completely missing the mark on other, more relevant issues of far greater significance to people's daily quality of life. Oh, by the way, totally random question, do you have a mirror?
@@michaelduncan6287 The "high density" you mention was a real challenge, and my GPA suffered as a result.
So glad my teen grandson got an appointment to a STEM Military Academy that also provides hands on training. He will graduate as an officer in the Navy Reserves, obtain a 6 figure job & have no student debt. He loves his school & the adventures it provides.
the average american reads like a 3rd-grader so i dont think that you need to worry that much about higher education, its not exactly gonna get better.
Doctors have remotely diagnosed #Trump as having an #IQ of 67 (Ave. used to be 100) plus the reading, writing, language skills of a 3rd grade "flunkie". Yet he attracted 70 million voters in 2020? "Birds of a feather ...!" 😮 5:34
Yes. The average IQ is 98. That means half the country is BELOW 98. Let that sink in.
I’m a late career machinist about to retire a little early. I worry my employer won’t be able to replace me with anyone near my level. There just aren’t any machinists at the Master / Toolmaker / instrument maker level because for the past 20 years no one was entering the field. A recruiter sent me a gift basket at Christmas this year to get my attention. I get job offer emails and calls all the time.
I will say this. All those STEM and STEAM programs are paying off. The young engineers I meet now can accomplish things a whole team of engineers would have struggled with 20 years ago. They are so good with technology
Candidate quality is huge. I have heard from a lot of teachers that students after COVID aren't learning as they were pre-pandemic though the trends have been in place for a decade.3rd and 4th graders that aren't potty trained. Kids in 6th grade that read at a first-grade level. Kids that aren't naturally curious or interested in learning. Kids that are interested in getting the right answer that don't care how they arrived at it. Some blame technology - I'm rather surprised that textbooks have been replaced by technology but the main motivation is cost-reduction and not efficacy. Parents aren't parenting. Violent and disruptive kids can't be removed from the classroom due to the Every Student Succeeds Act. There is still a considerable need for computer scientists and software and electrical engineers (as opposed to coders - do you know what the difference is?) And only a small percentage of the population can do the former. The manufacturing jobs now require technology skills and the ability to do algebra now and, shockingly, a lot of high-school graduates can't do it or can't remember it. And need review in community college.
College prices are nuts. I went to a private school for $3,500 my first year. The state flagship was $800/year. The colleges I received degrees from (Boston College and Boston University) are charging $88K and $87K respectively for the 2024-2025 school year. So probably $400K for an undergraduate degree. The vast majority of parents and students can't afford that, even with debt. So these places are going to be full of wealthy kids with a small number that attend because of need-based aid. When I attended Boston College, there was a lot of grant money for aid but it's mostly loans these days. My employers paid for 3/4s of my undergraduate degree and all of my graduate degree. This is still a benefit offered by many companies but there's usually a $5,000 cap per year. Courses were $400-$600 in the 1980s so you could go full-time if you could handle working and going to school full-time. But you could finish pretty quickly. Courses these days Courses these days are $1,000 - $2,000 so you're limited as to how fast you can complete a degree on your employer's dime.
yep the leftist choice to breakdown the family unit is working out great (sarcasm).
I wouldn't mind learning to weld. 🤔
I'd recommend looking around for local unions and apprenticeship programs. I'm a Pipefitter and during my apprenticeship I only had to pay $200 for books(all of which I actually used and still have), and of course I had a good job through the Union, with yearly raises as long as I passed my classes.
Im guessing he means for personal purposes @@zachrabun7161
Just about EVERY community college offers a welding class. And the schedule will be flexible enough that you can probably find a class on weekends or evenings. A few hundred dollars total cost should cover it. That's if you are already doing something that pays the bills and you're looking to learn new skills. If you're jumping right in then you might consider calling up the local union hall or guild and checking to see if they have a training program you can sign up to take. Some are even paid provided you make steady progress and commit to a certain amount of service with the union/guild after completing the program...
i can already teach you: hold your arms up for 8 hours and you know how welders´ and electricians´ professional work feel.
and then you realize why there will never be rush into these jobs no matter how much they pay.
they _really_ should already invent all-day battery lasting exoskeletons for manual labor jobs.
I use to be in a position to have lunch with our State Governor once a month. He told us many times he was working on a plan to allow every kid in our state to attend online university if they had a B average coming out of High School for free. The cost of the online schooling was reasonable for the state. And he explained that any cost would be offset by the improvement in the states workforce. Of course when he left office a University offered him a ton of cash to become the president of the University and STOP TALKING ABOUT FREE EDUCATION..... I always wonder what it would have done for our states kids if they all knew that they could get a degree, at no cost if they kept their grades up in school. How many lives could that have changed?
Yup. And when you change all those lives, you change communities. And if you do it widely, you change society.
When I was a kid, I knew one person with a PHD, a friend of my mother’s who was a psychotherapist. Now I can’t count how many people I know with PHDs. The stubborn thing about socio-economic hierarchies is that everyone can’t be “elite.”
So spot on. Thank you
Why no one talks about gen-X?
Yeah. The lost generation. It’s incredible how 20 years just gets skipped over time and again.
Peter talks alot about gen-x. He is one. But the boomers over shadowed us all this time until now. The boomers have almost finished retiring and this is FINALLY our time to shine.
who?
It’s partly our own doing.
We are the generation that just wants to be left alone (generalizing).
All 8 of you?
I have some friends that run blue collar businesses they all need good hard working adults and they will train/equip you while you learn, and they can not find enough young men and women who want to work hard...The job they want is influencer, internet model , OFans, instagram, gamer, ect...It is funny to see the men and women working in the oil fields driving 100k cars and IT people walking.
Yeah. Because y'all pay shit.
Compared to what? @@matthewcaldwell8100
Hey Pete, I'd worry about lower education too. The kids are not alright.
This is something that nobody is talking about. The army recently had to start sending kids to pre basic training in Fort Jackson to teach them how to read and write because they can't get enough recruits that can actually get a high enough GT score on the ASVAB to be cooks and truck drivers.
Most of these kids have a high school diploma.
Add on top of that the 50%+ that cannot meet the MINIMUM physical fitness standards in the first weeks of basic training and must be transferred to a "Fitness Company" until they can do the bare minimum, and then they can restart Basic all over again from the beginning. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. @@kevinfelton689
Junior Colleges already do blue collar certificates. Have done so for a long time. They are partnering with high schools offering a CTE (career and tech ed) program and kids are graduating HS with blue collar certs and college hours. JuCos also are more able to start up programs fast because they don't have tenured profs at all. They are the future of ed.
It's all a scam so no, from the books they make you buy, and half the teachers barely use the book but is required! Why would I want to be in debt my whole life paying school?, when I can learn a trait and start my own business. Dad had a tile company 10 yrs of work, which supported 5 kids, at the end he bought a 30 apartment unit building paid off!, and life is great. All dad does is collect rent at the end of the month,and is mostly home. I'm currently in mechanical, have my own shop. People will always need Ac repair(I live in Florida, ac repair is booming), cars fixing, think of traits that will always be needed. Once you know the trait well, start a business instead of throwing it in the toilet, at school.
Excellent, insightful
The first thing organizations need to do is get rid of their human resource department, apart from the legal bureaucracy to administer the increasing burden of get-out-of-actually-working labor laws. This isn't a shot against unions but they have a lot to answer for, as well.
As it is, HR hiring has no skill or ability to hire quality candidates because they work a process of "eliminating what they don't want and take what's left."
Organizations with low turnover and solid financials have managers who do their own hiring. These managers network so they have short lists of candidates and trusted networks to bolster the short list. These organizations don't wait until a position is open before starting a hiring process.
Research is conclusive: HR hiring is a failure on every level. Executives know this but given the authority HR has been granted, mostly due to consensus leadership style (this is not actual leadership, it's authority without responsibility), there is little reason to believe much will get done... until the financials stop providing the returns we've seen over the last 25 years.
Employers training up employees? Young ones? I am skeptical that will happen
Employers have already been doing that for years upon years, if not decades. Apprenticeships and paying for relevant college courses are pretty common in factories. EDIT: If they get desperate enough, they'll partner with schools to start generalized training courses early. They need employees in order to make profits, and just about every business would rather do something about it than just throw in the towel.
@@rafetizer well not in my finland they haven't. they would rather go bankrupt than pay with their own dime for years of education of anyone, that can just take the skills and move to another company. they just moan in media how skilled people dont magically appear, have done that since the 1980s, like a case of learned helplessness.
@@Redmanticore ah, im in Ohio
@@rafetizer blue collar jobs are 13% of the market. Employers aren't going to be training chemical engineers, climatologists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and so forth. The jobs companies train for are fairly limited in the marketplace.
@@izzytoons well sure. But they are training people for related blue-collar jobs, which is the topic of this video.
I've been saying this for last 15 years that we need to train more blue collar and less liberal arts!. AI will rip the guts out of office jobs too, those that use their hands will be the millionaires of the future.
My dude... there's Barely any liberal Arts majors in Any part of the education system worth mentioning. It's 90% Doctors, Lawyers, and STEM.
There isn't a glut of Liberal Arts Students there's a glut of White Collar OFFICE WORKERS. Liberal Arts students go on to Make art and Study the application of art to other jobs. The world over is Short on Liberal arts and Teaching professionals.
You've been Wrong for 15 years. And you're still wrong now. And didn't listen to what was literally said in the video.
Yes we will need Blue Collar workers... but stop shitting on the Artists, Translators, and Teachers while you're at it...
Wait till you find out about robots.
@@HimitsuHunter it's honestly concerning ppl are so deluded they think blue collar workers are going to lead us into a glorious future. Yes they are important but the value-add to the economy is no where near as high as knowledge workers. Also we already know what will happen, we already had a blue collar economy in the middle of the 20th century, it was fine but the world has moved on and the blue collar workforce shrunk as productivity in these fields increased, we simply needed less workers for the same if not more output. They are literally making the same ridiculous argument that farm workers made when blue collar workers came about.
heh, very often those who buy their way into private liberal arts universities are already from millionaire, if not billionaire, families, and want to mingle among similar elites.
you will _never_ be able to make them into welding or whatever.
its not like government pays for those private liberal arts universities, they have quite large expenses, the students are private customers..
like Harvey Mudd College, a private liberal arts college, costs students $77,339 per year. its not about jobs, its about elites mingling with elites. the connections between other elite wealthy families are their livelihoods, not work..
they never have to work a day in their lives, they have massive passive investments, that goes in their families, that churn money to them for their whole lives.
_they_ will say "oh we need more blue collar workers i agree " while _never_ doing that themselves, of course. they mean someone to serve them. they mean looking at statistics. but never themselves. they are the conservative billionaires with ph.D in communications that roleplay as everyman on their silly podcasts.
@@paulbo9033 I’ve been an electrician for thirty plus years, at the start a house had four circuits, almost no testing, houses now have three t8mes the circuits, the testing is extensive as is the technology of the devices, and five times the outlets, it takes twice as long now as it did in the 90’s to Rewire a house. How’s Ai going to increase productivity in the short term?
Price has gotten absolutely ridiculous, content has gotten ridiculously political, quality has drastically decreased, and the student graduating are less and less competent. We're struggling
Good stuff. Yeah, I worked in a blue collar job to finance my way through college back in the 90s. Did the white color job for 7 years after earning the degree, now I work again in more of a blue collar role. The price of an education is now so ridiculously expensive that it’s far wiser to go the blue collar route and avoid taking on debt unless you want to be an engineer or doctor or something.
It takes a lot longer to become a fully licensed electrician in Colorado than 6 weeks. You have two paths available to complete your training: Complete 288 hours of classroom and lab training time and work for 8,000 hours as an electrician's apprentice. Earn a two-year degree from a technical school and work for 6,000 hours as an electrician's apprentice.
Six weeks training to become a welder or an electrician? Are the standards in the USA really that low?
4 years at a minimum to become an electrician, standards aren’t that low
Not as low as your trolling standards.
yes
It’s 6 weeks to get in as an apprentice
Peter overdoes the hyperbole.. Liberal arts colleges are going to decline. Get a useful education. High paying blue collar jobs are where I'd go now.
Peter is critically wrong about #2: colleges aren’t responding to the lack of traditional candidates by competing fiercely over them, they’re responding by lowering the rigor level to increase the pool and further inflating the cost with more administrators and luxury amenities to sell a social experience, not an academic one, while doing everything they can to ensure cheap, inflationary credit keeps flowing to justify massive staff budgets. I guess you could call the construction of luxury amenities competition, but not one that serves any traditional higher educational or societal goal.
When I came to Canada teenty years ago I had two options, pursuing a master's degree or recycling myself in a technical "light blue" color career related to my profession abroad. I took the second option and time demonstrasted it was the right choice.
But technical advance education must be permanent to still relevant. The good thing is that most of that continue education was provided by the companies i was working on.
I love how you break down an issue. I agree with you!