
The State of American Trade Schools - wallflower
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a26789417/trade-schools/
======
nimbius
I am an engine mechanic for a chain of diesel shops in the Midwest. I hit
trade school after age 17 and slid into a nice apprentice program for aspiring
automotive mechanics. I can confirm my trade school, a state school, was one
of the best decisions I'd ever made.

I can also confirm that some of the heaviest weight on my heart is the friends
I have that struggle to maintain basic health insurance and employment despite
having a biology or chemistry degree. I don't know what the solution is, but I
feel bitter about the kids sold down university avenue with nothing to show.

So if I could say anything to the kids its this. We are hiring. We are hiring
for work you'll be paid well for and a job you can be proud of. Welder,
plumber, mechanic, these cannot continue to be four letter words. Talk to your
vocational tech schools or your guidance counselor.

~~~
joe_the_user
One question I'd have is how easy is it to get into an apprenticeship program?
I have a friend who's working at a dealership driving and shining cars with
the _hope_ that after some period he'll become an actual mechanic apprentice,
so the situation seems like it's less than a sure thing (my friend had a scare
when someone tried to pull scam claiming my friend had dented his car and
police report would be filed, which can be bad for a commercial driver).

~~~
xemdetia
I'm no expert but if you are at a dealership trying to become a mechanic by
detailing cars that seems like a weird/longshot unless there is a specific
program to take people without certification and apply them to their
specialized program from being a porter. I imagine that most people that start
off at dealerships probably start off certified or with experience. If I was
this person I would ask an independent shop and also a chain shop (Midas,
Jiffy Lube) what the best way into the industry was if they don't want to go
through trade school and get a basic automotive certification. I feel like
dealerships for better or worse generally aren't in the business of training
people from scratch (or have stringent requirements from corporate on who they
can have service cars for warranty work) unless they have a damn good reason.

Then there's also the usual questions you should give your friend: are you
sure that this dealership knows you want to become a mechanic? Are they just
wanting you to be porter? Are you friendly with the head mechanic and the
mechanic staff or are you more friendly with the sales part of the dealership?
Does the head mechanic know you want to become an apprentice? Have other
porters become apprentice mechanics at this dealership?

It also is worth asking if the mechanic's shop is an hourly or flat rate shop.
A flat rate shop maybe not be the easiest place to get an apprentice compared
to an hourly shop where taking an extra five minutes to explain something is
not going to cut another mechanic's pay.

------
jalgos_eminator
I remember in middle school and high school we were told in no uncertain terms
that we should all get 4 year college degrees because they gave the highest
lifetime earnings. My high school was lucky enough to have an auto shop in it
with a teacher that had been a mechanic/shop owner for years. He told us some
good stories and also told us about how much money he made in the industry.

I didn't think about it much then because I was dead set on getting an
engineering degree, but I've had this feeling about 4 year colleges for a
while now. I saw so many people at my state college (~30,000 enrollment) that
had absolutely no idea what they wanted to do, lacked the skills to be
effective in college, or were in a degree program that had no job
opportunities. I saw many of them drop out after 1-2 years, but also saw ones
that remained and got their degree. Now they are tens of thousands of dollars
in debt with nothing to show for it, and the people who did graduate are in
more debt with no good job prospects. It feels like we were lied to about
college by all the adults in our lives.

~~~
SantalBlush
We weren't lied to about college being the pathway to a good job; industries
just took advantage of that fact and found ways to profit from it.

There is a reason why so many people don't want to learn a trade: because they
know it sucks. For every anecdote I hear about some tradesman living the good
life, I can give them three about miserable workers who can't get out. Work is
inconsistent, you lack much of the security and benefits that other jobs
offer, it tears up your body, and working conditions are often poor. My dad
had to do carpentry for months with a broken hip, because he couldn't afford
to take the time off after surgery. My uncle--another carpenter--lost his job,
found work in a factory to pay the bills, and lost three fingers in a machine.
I briefly worked in a sheet metal shop, and many of the workers had carpel
tunnel in both wrists, arthritis, and bad eyesight from all of the welders in
the shop. I saw a flare from a TIG welder as I walked by someone's stall with
the curtain halfway closed, and my eyes burned and watered halfway through the
night. In another job, I cut off the tip of my thumb on a circular saw while
building a deck. I'm a statistician now.

Learning a trade, along with the almighty STEM fields, are not the solution to
the college problem; they are a red herring. The real issue is that a college
degree is used to screen applicants for almost every good paying, secure job
in the US, regardless of whether or not a degree is really necessary to do the
job. College became more available, and any entry level worker with a degree
had an edge in the job market, which forced everyone else to go to college to
stay competitive.

In my mind, telling people to skip college and learn a trade because someone
they know makes good money at it is like telling people to skip college and
start acting because they know an actor that makes good money.

~~~
jalgos_eminator
Let me clarify: There are people out there that just __should not __go to
college. It would be a waste of time and money for them. These are the people
that need to take a look at alternate career paths, but those same people were
in the room with me when the teacher was telling us about how poor you will be
if you don 't go do college.

I agree that the prestige of a college degree has been watered down, but that
is simply a supply and demand thing. If there aren't enough workers with a
college degree, then the employer will hire people who don't have one,
especially if the job doesn't actually require a degree.

~~~
rchaud
> There are people out there that just should not go to college. It would be a
> waste of time and money for them.

Wouldn't you say this is a bit 20/20 hindsight-y? You can be an A/B+ average
student in HS and be completely out of your depth in college, depending on
your course choices and rigor of the institution.

I didn't realize until maybe sophomore year that I perform better in applied
scenarios rather than theoretical. I'd fail my stats midterms because I didn't
understand hetero/homoskedasticity, but I would ace the final project because
it gave you a dataset that you were supposed to analyze in STATA to answer
specific questions. Got a B- overall though, due to the bad midterm grade.

Now, I'm not the kind of person who would fall into the typical "college isn't
for you" category, but I did still graduate in 2009 with a 5-figure debt load,
an average GPA and a recession economy. I'm sure there were tens of thousands
of students like me. We likely have paid off the debt by now and are gainfully
employed, but we still question the value of the degree in terms of both
financial and time-based opportunity cost.

~~~
jalgos_eminator
Yes, there are some people that by all measures should do well in college, but
just don't. That is going to happen in any population of people. What I was
talking about was students that I met early on (i.e. in the dorms or 2nd year)
that were just there for posterity. They were there to get a degree just to
say "I got a degree", and not the knowledge they gained there. I also knew
quite a few of the athletes, but that is a separate discussion.

Yes, your situation is pretty rough as far as college grads go. My brother
graduated a few years after that, but luckily got a job somewhat quickly as
the economy was slowly rebounding. Maybe it is 20/20 to talk about this
because not many people saw that recession coming. Kids entering college in
2004 were seeing a good economy, and that affected the cost/benefit for them.

------
chroem-
Here are the wage rates for trades in Washington State. [1] Some highlights
from the Seattle area:

\- Carpenters: $60/hr

\- Electricians: $75/hr

\- HVAC Mechanics: $82.50/hr

Almost every item on the list pays better than a typical STEM degree.

[1]
[https://fortress.wa.gov/lni/wagelookup/prvWagelookup.aspx](https://fortress.wa.gov/lni/wagelookup/prvWagelookup.aspx)

~~~
Retric
The major limit on that is it assumes you’re working billable hours. The
trades are much less stable than an office job.

~~~
chroem-
It was only a couple years ago when Boeing was slashing their engineering
workforce in Seattle, in a good economy no less, to boost dividends.

~~~
Retric
That only sounds bad because of how used we are to a steady paycheck.

Working a paid 40 hour week, 48 weeks a year, for 60$ an hour for even 10
years in a row is extremely unusual for a carpenter. Owning your own company
can result in more stability at the cost of non billable hours. Working for
someone else means being at the whims of the economy and or weather etc.
Injuries or heath issues present longer term issues.

PS: Granted you need some flexibility as highly specialized work is always
less stable over the long term.

------
chiph
> The one big pattern you see is the abandonment of the liberal arts in favor
> of vocational majors

Why not have both? The American College of the Building Arts awards a 4 year
liberal arts degree with concentrations in masonry, timber framing, forged
architectural ironwork, and other programs.

And with the fire at Notre Dame, there is assured work for graduates for
generations helping rebuild.

[https://acba.edu/](https://acba.edu/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_stn9qSLOs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_stn9qSLOs)

~~~
sverige
A friend of mine who is 75 years old was a mason his entire adult life. His
father was as well. He told me how sad it is that so much knowledge and skill
has been lost. He attributes a lot of that to the change in the management of
the way buildings are built. It was not that long ago that master builders
oversaw everything, design and construction. That has been fragmented of
course. For some kinds of buildings it makes sense (e.g., skyscrapers), but
for most it does not.

As for masonry itself, it's in decline. When he sees new brick buildings, for
example, none of them have bricks that stick out a bit over openings (doors
and windows mainly) to ensure that rain water and snow melt drips away from
the bricks below. As a result, the structure ages much faster than it would if
it were built right.

Since then, I've spent a lot of time looking at brick buildings. It's easy to
spot old versus new now.

I wonder how much skill and knowledge has been lost to the idea that college
is the best way to learn things. I also wonder how that could be regained.
Most of the people who know such things are dead, or nearly so.

------
duxup
I changed careers via a coding boot camp. I have highly mixed feelings about
how coding boot camps are sold, and run, but I think for some people such
short term training could be a sort of new future for trade schools.

This could be particularly useful if we're entering an age of sudden
disruption as far as jobs and career paths goes where a career that once was
might be gone (or greatly diminished) tomorrow. Provided business are willing
to recognize and hire those people.

~~~
exelius
The change I see happening now is that many of the jobs people are hoping to
“skill up” to are themselves being automated out of existence.

A combination of targeted AI and good old-fashioned process automation are
going to put a _lot_ of white collar workers out of work; including software
developers at the lower end of the skill curve.

~~~
walshemj
They where saying that in the 1970's how do you automate even basic front end
development of a web site today ?

~~~
opportune
Make a tool that automatically converts a designer's spec/mockup into a
performant webpage with high fidelity? Sounds very hard but certainly possible

To be fair there are already a lot of services that do this. They are just so
commonplace we don't think of them as automation. And they don't allow super
complicated setups so they're definitely not quite there yet in the general
case. I'm thinking of Wix, Squarespace, basic wordpress.

~~~
walshemj
Have you seen the average spec for a website?

------
ccwilson10
Biased because I work there, but App Academy (coding bootcamp) has been
running ISAs (Income Share Agreements) and deferred tuition models for the 6
years we've been around. I'd be shocked if this sort of model doesn't catch on
soon and becomes a more de-facto way of monetizing. Pretty similar to trade
schools in both form and timing.

Purdue started implementing ISAs[1] but they're crazy expensive. Hopefully the
university system can get closer to the value of the education instead of a
multiplier on the students' results. Minimum payback threshold is also only
20k[2] which is absurdly low. a/A has a higher minimum threshold that seems
more humane to me (50k salary for in-person cohorts and 60k for online
cohorts).

[1]
[https://www.purdue.edu/backaboiler/FAQ/index.html](https://www.purdue.edu/backaboiler/FAQ/index.html)
[2] [https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q4/purdue-
rese...](https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q4/purdue-research-
foundation-raises-10.2-million-for-back-a-boiler-income-share-agreement-fund-
ii.html)

------
PorterDuff
It seems to me that it's more expensive to go to an Ivy League school than to
simply hire faculty as personal tutors.

Looking back, I can see where working with your hands would have been a lot of
fun. No doubt you hit the ennui inherent in any profession. Maybe the right
answer is to start over every ten years.

