Can Americans still go to university free in other countries like Germany? Why don’t more students go to school abroad for cheaper? I’m sure it is not so simple, but I still think it is worth getting the paper just to get past HR.
More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
131–140 of 730 posts
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#132As someone who has worked two of the most intensive blue collar jobs, people should be wary of romanticizing blue collar work. Blue collar workers are expected to really work at their jobs. White collar workers can chill if there is no work to be done, or be sent home early with pay, or take a relaxation day and just browse the internet and listen to podcasts. They have perks, you see white collar workers leaving wor…
Anyone that hasn't done manual labor really has no idea how rough it can be. I worked as an office-furniture-mover in my early 20s (Summers in college), and some days were pretty tough. Granted, that's pretty low on the manual labor skills spectrum, but even for a guy in prime physical shape, it's tiring and has elements of danger.
Now that I'm double that age, the manual labor I've done like rewiring my house, installing all my own HVAC equipment, and all the yard work for a large property is much harder. I stay sore for days, and it's easy to push too hard to get something done and get injured or overwork my body to where my heart rate stays elevated for hours.
There's something to be said for working with your brain. The worst days dealing with idiot product management and never-ending Jira tickets don't compare to unloading a truck in a hot warehouse or kneeling in a crawlspace for hours re-piping a sewer line.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#133Honestly, what a disgrace. It’s almost like capitalism has an agenda to turn every living soul into a productive machine rather than a free-thinking, well-rounded individual. Education is meant to prepare you to think and live, not just prepare you to work. I’m glad I didn’t drop out in my first year to chase the Silicon Valley dream, because I’d be a much more manipulable, less capable individual if I did.
Education doesn't prepare you to live — experience does. Instead, you're in a bubble during those years.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#134> That 7% acceptance rate makes the program as selective as Cornell University and Dartmouth College.
Oof. I wonder if we'll start seeing Applying to Apprenticeships forums/subreddits and 'Apprenticeship Decision Reaction - I got in!!!' YouTube videos.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
4. An amalgamation of sports teams for talented athletes to shop their skills to professional sports scouts.
That's true but an extremely small cohort, <100 per school, at only a few of the top sports schools.
I suspect you're thinking too narrowly on this one. Sure, there's football and basketball (women's as well as men's), plus soccer and baseball, too, in the team sports space. But there are also plenty of golfers and tennis players, including in many schools you've never heard of, that have, or believe they have, a decent chance of going pro.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
4. An amalgamation of sports teams for talented athletes to shop their skills to professional sports scouts.
The sports side of college is bizarre. I think it is descended from British upper class amateur athletics, but it makes no sense in modern times. Athletics has nothing to do with education. Nothing at all. Star athletes are there only so they can get noticed by scouts. Universities keep teams around for the money. They ought to stop pretending there's any connection to education and replace it all with minor leagues…
They have something to do with it in the sense that many people practice them and they need to practice them growing up in order to be able to do it as a job. You also cannot discount the impact of athletics programs on national defense and the programs that were done by multiple presidents to keep people active and healthy. Sports have this quality among cultural activities that they tend to improve your body and reduce healthcare costs in the overall population the more active it is, while at the same time ensuring you have at least some people that could go to war if needed. This explains why there's more legislative support and allowances for sports programs than say music or theater.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#137I think the article ignored a massive datapoint in not talking about gender the one time it might actually be a relevant issue. Simply put: women are going to school more and more, and many men are turned off. Getting to the root of this social change would I think provide an explanation.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of those is not like the other in that it requires extensive college. It also happens to be the one that pays more than the others.
Being a high-end plumber doesn't take much college. I joke, but most lawyers actually don't make a ton of money. Like programming, the profession is very bimodal. By the time you get out of law school, unless that law school is a big name like Harvard or you get a good clerkship or associate job, you will be heading for a career that tops out at $200k/year if you don't burn out in the mean time. Plumbing, electrical…
NYC commercial plumbers make a lot of money and it is also one of the hardest jobs (apprenticeship) to get in the world.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#139As someone who has worked two of the most intensive blue collar jobs, people should be wary of romanticizing blue collar work. Blue collar workers are expected to really work at their jobs. White collar workers can chill if there is no work to be done, or be sent home early with pay, or take a relaxation day and just browse the internet and listen to podcasts. They have perks, you see white collar workers leaving wor…
It shouldn't be unrealistically romanticized, but with University tuitions only reaching ever higher, much faster than inflation what other good solution is there for Young Adults to get a career and secure their financial future? These options being elevated precisely because of out of control student debt and universities which face zero consequences to financially crippling their pupils.
Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your post makes me consider what other avenues to achieve the growth of intellectual souls and exposure to depth of thought could exist other than paid-for highly-structured institutions. I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally noth…
What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students. It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their lear…
> What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from.
Also just touching on "these things exist", converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns. That's the single biggest thing I got from my degree (having already been programming for years before), that nowadays I'm occasionally reminded of in a relevant context and can now dig deeper into.