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Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

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Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#111

Post by watwut »

mseebach wrote: post #104
watwut wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upward mobility is lower in US then in other western countries. The feudalism would have much lower mobility, but none of those countries have feudalism and did not had it for years.

Upward mobility is higher in Denmark, where I'm from, so that's what I'm familiar with. I don't think this metric necessarily measures exactly what people expect: The spread of possible outcomes is simply much tighter. Making $65,000/year puts you in the top 10% of earners, while the bottom 10% ends at $19,600/year. When tripling your salary is enough to travel almost the entire scale, obviously more people will do i…

If I recall right, the mobility was measured by percentage of people who move out of their bracket. E.g. US kid born into 20% bracket is more likely to stay in that bracket. If you move, you make bigger jump (cause differences are bigger), but you are unlikely to move.

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#112

Post by Double_a_92 »

forapurpose wrote: post #94

As is often the case, the answer is built into how the question is framed: If we frame the question as, 'what is the most efficient way to train people with directly salable skills', then college is inefficient and probably not the best solution. But if the question is, 'how do we best prepare people for life, including critical thinking and knowledge about the world, and to improve our society', college blows away a…

The problem is that most people are not actually that smart to profit from that. It just lowers the level if everybody basically HAS to go through college.

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#113

Post by kgwgk »

coredog64 wrote: post #7
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social stigma is not the problem. Employers requiring degrees for jobs that don’t require a degree are the problem. They force the cost on the student, and with demand for college education then bring inelastic, colleges have all of the pricing power to charge whatever they want.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Degree requirements are the last bastion of socially acceptable racism.

Raising the minimum wage is even more socially acceptable.

http://nypost.com/2013/09/17/why-racists-love-the-minimum-wa...

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#114

Post by roel_v »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #79
teslabox wrote: post #58

> "There are too many four-year colleges serving too many students, The Screwing of the Average Man [0] said that college used to be something the upper-class sent their children to so they'd have a leg up on the "uneducated" masses. Then the congress provided the GI Bill to subsidize college for WWII veterans. This kept disgruntled veterans occupied while the economy retooled to peacetime production. Thus began the…

Sudbury and Montessori schools offer a model that seems to encourage students to learn at their own pace Provides a positive feedback loop that seemed to have positive results in the real world as well

My children are in a Montessori school. There is no evidence that children from most 'alternative' teaching systems do better or worse than those in 'regular' schools. My children like the school and it's conveniently located, so we have no intention of changing; but it's not the teaching system that makes or breaks a student (well, the more loony systems like Steiner schools have documented worse outcomes than other systems, so it's not hard to make schooling 'worse'; making them 'better' than mainstream systems is quite hard - despite all the armchair opinions on this topic here every other day when this comes up).

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#115

Post by roel_v »

austenallred wrote: post #50
aphextron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Remove the social stigma of not going to college. Hardly any tv shows that show young non college grads as positive. Or just make college useful and accessible. Give people the option of a European style undergrad where there is no liberal arts breadth, only technical courses. If we had accredited colleges doing 3 year bachelor degrees in STEM, the system would be much more efficient.

Honestly we'd be fine with 1-year degrees for most things.

Like what? Are you saying that most degrees, taught at universities today, could be condensed into 1 year, and the outcome would be that we'd have 19 year olds with the same skills as the 22 year olds graduating today? What degrees do you have in mind?

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#116

Post by indubitable »

analog31 wrote: post #60
indubitable wrote: post #37

Another idea, indirectly related, is to simply stop treating all university degrees equally. The whole reason student loans are so broken right now is because they cannot be dismissed, so lenders are incentivized to lend with reckless abandon. In the worst case scenario the loan converts into a lifetime rent on an individual that automatically adjusts for inflation. On the other hand, the idea behind creating special…

In my view, this idea runs the danger of creating a planned economy, with characteristic boom-bust cycles and scams. The choice of which degrees to fund has to be made on either past data or some sort of current fad. The list of preferred degrees will of course create competition to get into those programs, but it may also encourage colleges to create watered-down or even fake disciplines that can absorb more student…

Measurements could be organic and self adjusting. In other words schools are required to accurately assess the average earnings, including nonearners, of each and every degree. Degrees above some rate, adjusted for location, qualify for funding - others do not. It could be on a scale rather than binary. Too many health care workers, funding for more pursuing it is completely organically reduced.

Another cool feature is that this further aligns the motivation of schools (who greatly benefit from 'reckless lending') and students. Reckless lending is only possible when the degrees being pursued are provably valuable.

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#117

Post by roel_v »

derda wrote: post #66
analog31 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an amusing factoid, Germany is the country where my spouse would be addressed as "Frau Doktor Doktor."

Those days are long over. The behaviour might still remain in some small circles (60yr old trophy wifes in a golf club) but is basically unheard and frowned upon pretty much everywhere else in society.

My last experience was 10+ years ago, so maybe there has been a drastic revolution, but I once worked on an 'account profile' page for a large, national company (in Germany) and one of the meetings went into this topic - should there be a 'doctor doctor' entry in the dropdown with all the titles someone could choose to be addressed as (so Prof, Dr, etc.). I, the barbaric foreigner, then proposed we just get rid of the field all together - more to fill in, more to get wrong, and who cares anyway? Jeebus, I might as well have kicked a puppy in the nuts right there on the table. How was a letter to Prof. dr. Mustermann ever going to end up in the right mailbox, if they couldn't specify whether it was Prof Dr, Prof dr, Prof or just Dr. Mustermann? These people spend hours coming up with the most ridiculous UI ideas of multiple comboboxes, check list boxes, what have you. So after a few hours I said 'then why don't we just put in a free form text field, so that people can just type whatever they want?'. Well that was the one suggestion I could have made that was even more ridiculous than leaving out the field. What if somebody would type in 'poopyhead' (or whatever the German equivalent is), and they would send a letter to Poopyhead Mustermann, and somebody would take a picture of that letter and send it to the newspaper, mocking the company for doing such idiotic things? (in those days they were more concerned about newspapers than websites).

I don't even remember what they choose in the end. I think just a dropdown box. I probably told them I'm make the list of titles to choose from configurable in their backend system and they could make it however they wanted later - which nobody probably ever bothered to do.

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#118

Post by evv555 »

roel_v wrote: post #115
austenallred wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly we'd be fine with 1-year degrees for most things.

Like what? Are you saying that most degrees, taught at universities today, could be condensed into 1 year, and the outcome would be that we'd have 19 year olds with the same skills as the 22 year olds graduating today? What degrees do you have in mind?

Almost half of the courses I took were subjects like English, History, Health, and so on. I don't doubt the value of these courses but they were competing for time and energy with courses like Linear Algebra and Calculus often to my detriment. I think an advanced degree could be condensed to 2-3 years or 4 years of part-time night school.

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#119

Post by walshemj »

olivermarks wrote: post #107

I reacted strongly and positively to the headline of this piece...and even more positively to the article. Apprenticeship was once considered more important than academic degrees in many areas. The balance has gone too far towards academia, and blue collar 'workers' don't get nearly enough respect IMO

Which sort of "Apprenticeship" do you mean a Trade Apprenticeship doesn't let you move that far up the ladder

you would still have to get a degree level qualification if you want to progress assuming you have a permissive system that allows it until recently it was almost impossible to do this in Germany - the EU made them change this.

Re: Trade school, not 4-year college, is a better bet to solve the US income gap

#120

Post by freddie_mercury »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #46
loeg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tangential attack on the source, not the content. Please address the article, not the publisher.

It is not a tangent. The source is unreliable. If I must address the article, it is the same kind of ham-handed shilling I have come to expect from them. "Researchers" say this. "Researchers" say that. Then at the very bottom, regard: " Note: Working papers have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. " Scam the kids into college! Wa…

> It is not a tangent. The source is unreliable.

The source is the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER is not unreliable.

> "Researchers" say this. "Researchers" say that.

Scientists often disagree with each other or with previous scientists as more data and tools become available. I'm not sure why that makes you so angry?

> "Note: Working papers have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications."

This is standard boiler plate for every NBER working paper. If you don't read a lot of NBER papers it is understandable that you think it signifies more than it actually does. This was a conference paper presented at 3 different conferences.

The paper isn't just about Germany. It is uses a variety of data sources to investigate look at the cross-country evidence from 21 countries. They perform a series of regressions on the data.

Germany vs. US is presented as a case study. The research paper acknowledges all of the things that you think they are too dumb to notice.

They also present Thailand vs. Vietnam as a case study.

I generally find that it helps to actually read the underlying research before criticizing it.

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