If you are asking me I was a graphic designer, mostly print work initially. It's a hybrid trade/skill set that gave me a good business grounding.
I grew up in a generation where a lot of my peers in the UK were apprentices at Rolls Royce, Jaguar etc. I have no visibility into apprenticeships and how they are organized today...
It was just a snippy remark hinting at the many people in this thread saying how great trade skills are, yet very few of them actually do a job like that. I mean, commenters here mention 'the social stigma' and how unfair it is - but being a plumber is just a, well, shit job. Construction work isn't fun, when it's your job, and you're not the boss. There's a reason all those middle and lower middle class parents tell their children to get a degree - it's because they want their children to do better than they do. Working a high-skill office job is in pretty much every way 'better' than doing somewhat-skilled things like, I don't know, garden maintenance or HVAC installation or operating a printing press. Yet here are all people commenting (from their cushy office jobs, probably) how great those sort or jobs are.
How many people here would tell their children 'yeah forget about that LSAT and MCAT, do a one-year part time course in swimming pool construction, much better!'? Very few, I'd reckon. What's good for the good is good for the gander, right?
Half the issue is that all these people have done exactly that: we now have a glut of college educated young people, with supply outstripping demand, while the opposite is the case in the trades. The salaries each can command reflects this.
The tradesmen telling their children to go to uni do so based on their experience in a generation where there were far more tradesmen, with poorer salaries, and poorer worker protections. What we actually need in the workforce is _balance_.
A really good example of where this has gone wrong is over here in the UK: now, 50% of young people are expected to go to university and complete a degree. This means that you now need a degree just to be above-average, and most end up underemployed with student debts - it's simply the case that half of jobs do not require a degree, and this is going to shrink. Likewise, we've outsourced lots of our skilled trades to foreign labour coming from the EU. With the sudden change in how we work with the EU, the UK is going to see hard times with a distinct lack of skilled labour, with many being overeducated and in the wrong sectors.
> it's simply the case that half of jobs do not require a degree
The problem I see in the US is that because of the glut of degrees, jobs that should not require a degree do require a degree. The employers are making things worse when they require degrees for menial jobs.
Yes, sorry, when I mean they don't require a degree, I mean that the job tasks do not require a university education. Because of how widespread degrees are now in the UK, the job ad often demands a degree, on account of this being a good signal of simply being "above average".
I sat down with my daughter and very clearly explained why college for her was a bad idea. Her grades and ACT scores weren't good enough to get into lucrative fields, so I suggested she join the military with a specialization that opened skilled trade jobs. We discussed the benefit vs cost of the student loans, and she admitted that this would be a much smarter path and she is looking at very little career opportunity with a psychology degree.
However, you underestimate the machine that is high school and the impact that has on children. Despite all our conversations, her high school "advisor" insisted she go to college and convinced her to ignore the money aspects of it. When every other peer and parent of peer is feeding them the college or nothing lines, you start to look like an asshole being the only objector. How many times can you defend "Why don't you want your kid to go to college??" before you give in. Maybe there's some super-parents out there, and I did my best to show the reasons behind it, but she was 18 and free to make her own choices.
Women in general wash out of the military at much higher rates than men, mostly due to the fact their bodies are less able to deal with the serious physical stress of training. Women also really aren't going to have as many long term openings in the skilled trades for the same reason, mostly because it's hard, breaking-down physical labor.
There's little guarantee she can even do what you intend; she may very well go back to get that psychology degree after washing out of basic (god forbid she gets pregnant to escape duty)
And yet there is almost zero cost to trying out the option at first (well, outside of the harassment I hear about in the military, but that is sadly a universal concern). In the best case, she has an option that lets her join the workforce with zero debt, in the very worst, she drops out and starts CC a year or two late (which is negligible in the large scheme of things). If her scores really aren't making her viable for college admissions, then I see nothing wrong with considering less risky alternatives.
However, not getting a degree prevents you almost entirely you from making more than $100,000/year except in sales or you start your own business and make it successful (which is very hard without a degree), so you'll have to work until old ages and you'll never have the opportunity to get out of the hamster wheel.
Trade schools aren't the alternative to the LSAT and MCAT. They are the alternative to the SAT. Important distinction.
The point is that if you CAN'T get a professional white-collar job, you are better off learning a blue-collar school than getting a degree in nothing-marketable.
