The Stigma of Choosing Trade School over College

We need to stop stigmatizing trade schools and start realizing that college IS NOT a necessity for everyone, especially with recent debt loads people are taking on for worthless degrees (e.g. a top university near me recently removed all the math courses from an IT/cyber degree because students "were not enrolling in high enough numbers" - that would NEVER happen 20 or so years ago). "An expansive view of human knowledge" is not needed for someone who just wants to work as an electrician - which many people are perfectly happy doing. If they are happy with a trade, why force them into something they will be miserable in?

Even now, as an employer in a technical field, college degrees are virtually meaningless because most institutions utterly fail to equip their students for the workforce. We hire based on a combination of experience, personality, and certifications. Only if your degree is in a designated engineering field do we give it any weight at all but, even then, experience is still paramount.

That is how I'd justify the fact that 12 years of access to education is not enough.

The way the tertiary education "system" works is built on a premise that is contradictory to that.

Within a generation or two we went from a university system that was intended to educate and socialize (for lack of a better term) wealthy people to a university system that educates regular people.

The premise for this was/is "human capital." That is the idea that wealth isn't just wealth. Your ability to do earn income with your skills is wealth too. In that framework, education is a capital investment.. something that pays for itself.

A lot of efforts went into making these capital investments. Students spend years. Parents save for decades. Charities contribute scholarships. Governments fund universities. ..and of course, (moreso in the US) debt pays for a lot of it.

The human capital theories suggested that education is such a great investment though, that it's worth it.

It turned out though, that colleges aren't really creating the income differences observed between graduates an non graduates. A lot of what they do is just admit people who will be high income earners. The ambitious, talented, studious, academically inclined... and the wealthy.

Anyway.. The problem is that the investment is big. We (society, students, parents) can't afford for it to have a poor return, and retroactivley rebrand it as something else..

Intellectual enrichment is a very worthy pursuit, if you can afford it. That's what universities were originally for. Most people just can't afford it, on balance.

I suffered through a computer science degree. I didn't make much progress figuring things out after the first year (on account of my head injury [0]). My father values my degree more than I do.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17734058

When I was finishing up my first year at teh university, I thought I was wasting my time. Pops said, "just get your degree, then you can do what you want." That piece of paper was rather expensive. Later I came to appreciate that college is mostly about signaling.

Quotes from your link:

> Men by and large compete to be selected by women, but my anecdotal observation is that relatively few women perceive this because they’re in turn focused on a relatively small number of high-status men, with status defined differently in different context.

I had to explain this to a passenger one night [1]. She'd remembered me from the time I'd almost taken her somewhere, maybe two months before...

[1] https://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys...

> Why would a high-status, high-skill man want to marry a random woman with limited skills or prospects?

I have notes for a followup to my blog post, tentatively titled "the predicaments of girls and boys". One of my passengers told of a woman who'd snagged herself a "high-status man". After four years she got kicked to the curb. I suspect she was attempting to upgrade herself from 'trophy girlfriend' to 'trophy wife', but her high-status boyfriend probably thought that was beyond the scope of their arrangement.