Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

Certified Repair/Mechanic/HVAC isn't what it used to be. After my landlord paid $3500 to replace an in wall heater, a 20min operation I easily knew how to do, I honestly considered switching jobs. Do something with my hands be outside, not stuck in an office...

Then I looked it up. The test is intense failing on your first try is pretty common. You have to do 4 years full time of apprenticeship under a licensed contractor who unless they are family (nepotism) will pay you the minimum they can get away with. (This is why you tend to see the kids take over the parents Pumbling/HVAC/Electricians businesses)

Only after all that can you finally go on your own. From then on you owe $3k/yr to the state for insurance in case you screw up and kill someone and the state fund has to pay out. You have to pay this every year along with a $350/yr license renewal and show you are active in the trade, otherwise you can have your license revoked. Take at least 8 credits of continuing education each year as it relates to your license, which you must pass for credit (to keep up with a changing field). Take out your own insurance in case you screw up kill or injure someone and they sue you. Your tax rate is significantly higher as a contractor as will be your health insurance because you no longer have a large collective bargaining power.

Doing the math I'm surprised new people join in the bay area. The only way it makes sense is if you were already here with family or have rent control. Or you do your apprenticeship somewhere cheap like Bakersfield then move to the Bay assuming you can afford rent till you build a solid list of clients.

On a local enough scale, it’s always about the money. If SF offered $1 million a year plus a $1 million relocation bonus to escalator mechanics, they’d fill those jobs by next week. You may say, rightly, that it’s ridiculous to pay that much - but at that point we’ve stopped talking about availability and started talking about price. So start from there and move the price as appropriate.

Now, if every municipality in the US tried to do this, there would be a legitimate shortage. The highest bidders would get their mechanics. The rest would have to wait, possibly hiring from the inevitable influx of new escalator mechanics a few years later.

awrite I couldn't stop thinking about this, have some more ranting:

From a purely business standpoint, if we stop exposing kids to classes that say "hey this creative thing is something you could do" we lose a bunch of people deciding to try and make that their career, which means we lose a significant portion of the entertainment industry - have fun with a significantly reduced selection of books/movies/games/music/etc to entertain you when you're taking a break from creating shareholder value, I guess there's always masturbating to the thought of how much shareholder value you're creating? Some quick searching suggests that Hollywood alone is from 3-6% of America's GDP, plus whatever value you may put on its use as global propaganda for American social values.

Also liberal arts majors end up in advertising, which I'm seeing values of anywhere from 1-19% of the US GDP. Plus whatever amount of value an ad campaign ads by getting people to buy whatever it's selling, how much junk have you bought that you never ended up using, or was way overpriced for what it did, because of ads? Arguably the world might be better off if every single one of those people quit using their skills to help sell cheap disposable junk made halfway across the world by people paid pennies a day but that's another matter.

But nah. Let's all just look for work that's gonna pay us the most cold hard cash, which judging by the top sector of the GDP is real estate and finance. Let's just learn that shit. Nothing else. I'm sure that'll be a fun way to live.

The US education system is fucked up. I can agree with this guy on that. But I don't think eliminating everything but "what will get you a job" is gonna help. Education funding has been cut, and cut, and cut some more, wealth's been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Tax those ultra-rich assholes, spread that money around into education, maybe reverse decades of cuts to stuff like the NEA as well (and give a huge grant to my project to dig up Jesse Helms' rotting corpse and fuck it in the face with a jackhammer in revenge for his role in that), give teachers more power to actually engage their students instead of focusing entirely on being able to regurgitate the answers to the standardized tests that determine which schools get their funding cut the least next year. Oh and also raise the goddamn minimum wage so that someone trying to turn their passion for art into a full-time career has time to do that instead of having to work three shitty part-time jobs just to keep a roof over their head.

In summary, this guy is next in line for my proposal for a performance art project in which I dig up dead jerkwads who think the arts are useless, and fuck them in the face with a jackhammer. He's not dead yet? I'll wait. I got time.

Yeah sure, you can make that after you are in the business for years, own your own truck, have a flawless record, and all that. What they don't mention is you not going home at the end of the day, or the hours you don't get paid waiting for other people to unload your or load your truck, or the social isolation, or the fact that a small misstep could cost you your entire career with your CDL and driving experience becoming useless.

The reason we lack truck drivers is because of pay, it costs a lot of money to get people to forgo a family, or a home, or sleeping in their own bed, waiting around in the middle of nowhere not getting paid just waiting, plus the costs of road food, the cost of maintaining and insuring your own truck, ect.

It's hard work but 'back breaking' would be a misconception. These guys are encouraged to work safely and smart and as a result often have careers that span 20 to 30 years.