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More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

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Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#651

Post by chaostheory »

bluGill wrote: post #644
chaostheory wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imo a "skilled trade" involves a hard to learn skill that is in high demand. Consequently, the demand yields a higher salary than a commodity "non-high skilled" trade that is not high in demand. > I fail to see how you can be an electrician longer than a software engineer Because electrical components and systems do not evolve and change as fast as software constructs, neither does plumbing. > but even if that was tr…

Many skilled trades are not that hard to learn, those who know it just pretend they are hard to keep people out. Of course with an engineering background I know how to read all the different tables and understand where the numbers came from. That might give me an advantage, but I can learn to do most of them pretty quickly if I want. (they are faster than me because they tend to have the tables memorized)

> Many skilled trades are not that hard to learn

If they're not hard to learn, then imo it's not a "skilled trade".

> those who know it just pretend they are hard to keep people out.

> Of course with an engineering background I know how to read all the different tables and understand where the numbers came from.

If you're an EE and you're referring to electricians, I would argue that electrical work is not an easy concept for most of the population which is one reason for its market demand.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#652

Post by pb7 »

devwastaken wrote: post #557
endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

1. Trades are overwhelmingly what people do when they don't go for a BA, and often have houses and children far before college graduates. Many more mechanics, plumber, hvac, electrical, welders, pipfitters, etc than we give credit for. 3. Scholarships are not based on intelligence. They are based on access to resources. Many good scholarships require references, achievements, good writing, and lower income. Hard to d…

>Trades are overwhelmingly what people do when they don't go for a BA, and often have houses and children far before college graduates.

Having a house and children as soon as possible isn't a win. It's what happens when you lack imagination. There's so much more to life than pumping out kids at 21 in your 3/2 in fly over country.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#653

Post by endisneigh »

fuzzer37 wrote: post #604
endisneigh wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not turning this into an ad for the school my daughter went to. Cost was literally 1/2 of he first year salary over $40,000. It was capped at a maximum amount. She ended up paying about $6k, but it was contingent on her getting a job that payed better than $40k. You already have. I want to see the graduation stats. > It didn't matter what education level they attained, across the population the outcome was cons…

Do you like to argue just to argue?

Nah, but I don’t like claims without evidence. That’s how misinformation spreads. I’ve already laid out my source for believing college grads make more money than non college grads.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#654

Post by lapsedacademic »

hooande wrote: post #648
endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

> Average College grads make more money over their lifetime, period. Stop this. The most accurate predictor of a person's lifetime income is the income of their parents. Children of wealthy parents are more likely to go to college. It's like saying "People who drive expensive cars in high school make more money over their lifetime, period". I question the statistical literacy of people who make the argument that goin…

> Stop this.... I question the statistical literacy...

Ugh. Why?

You asked for a statistically grounded conversation, so let's do that.

Let's start, for example, with pdf page 25 (and surrounding context) of https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/causal_educ_earnings.p...

The analysis done in that paper is a good starting point for a productive conversation. We could discuss the bounds on various coefficients and decide whether the conditional statements about those coefficients made in the paper have clear answers in either direction. Or we could critique the various modeling assumptions. Etc.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#655

Post by welshwelsh »

silisili wrote: post #471
endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

Re 1, at least in the US, it's very dependent on market and path. I have two family members who have been pipefitters for 20 years. Both make more than I do as a software engineer. Another is a doctor, and makes more than they do. But another does boat repair, and makes more than the doctor. If the last decade is any indication, skilled labor - especially those not afraid to own their own business, are set to make a…

I'm sure there are some pipefitters who make a lot of money, but we should go by averages, not outliers.

The average for "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters" is $56,330 per year, according to the BLS. For "Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers" it's $110,140 per year. For "Physicians and Surgeons," it's $208,000 per year.

We also need to consider that running your own business is a lot of work, and doing physical labor can be hard on the body. One of the benefits of office jobs is that you get high pay, stable hours, relatively low stress and get to work in an air-conditioned room. So I would still prefer that over skilled trades even if the pay was the same.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#656

Post by bumby »

Miraste wrote: post #575
silisili wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1, at least in the US, it's very dependent on market and path. I have two family members who have been pipefitters for 20 years. Both make more than I do as a software engineer. Another is a doctor, and makes more than they do. But another does boat repair, and makes more than the doctor. If the last decade is any indication, skilled labor - especially those not afraid to own their own business, are set to make a…

This is why the GP linked a source with the national average for college graduates and non-grads. Certainly there are tradespeople who make a ton of money, but usually they make less than degree holders.

>Certainly there are tradespeople who make a ton of money, but usually they make less than degree holders.

I wonder how much of this isn't also driven by the reduction in private union membership. I've worked white collar jobs in organizations with strong unions and I'm willing to bet the blue collar workers were probably almost surely, on average, more than the average white collar workers elsewhere. And when I worked in areas with weak union membership, the converse was true.

The difficulty in the former was that it was hard to get into the union, but once you did, you were probably making many multiples of the average household income for the locale.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#657

Post by Graffur »

ars wrote: post #109
Graffur wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first point makes no sense. The logic follows that we should have let the original and more deadly variants rip through society? Young people are part of society so they are obligated to protect it.

> The logic follows that we should have let the original and more deadly variants rip through society? I participate in two communities - one that completely ignores COVID (except for a couple months at the very very beginning). They don't test, they don't care if someone is positive. Lots of people are vaccinated, but lots aren't (they all had COVID, they can't think of any reason to get vaccinated since they alread…

I don't care about your two communities to be honest

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#658

Post by bumby »

subsubzero wrote: post #576
tempest_ wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to 1 A lot of the trades are hard on your body. By the time you are 45-50 your knees could be wrecked and that makes it hard to do service work like electric/HVAC. There are an argument that desk work isnt healthy either but that is a different discussion.

alot of engineers(and other tech employees) are forced out of the field due to ageism by 45-50 so its a wash.

Do you mean software engineers specifically? It seems like other engineering domains are kinder to oldies

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#659

Post by watwut »

indymike wrote: post #523
endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

> 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. I'm not sure what you mean by limited window unless we are talking about professional athletes and some categories of manual laborers. > In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e…

> This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e.g. cosmetologist, many medical roles).

As a woman who likes trades like manual work as hobby - a lot of those do actually depends on physical strength. At hobby level it does not matter that much, but to achieve actual commercial productivity is simply much harder without all those muscles.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#660

Post by ipaddr »

serverholic wrote: post #640
hardtke wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down. Similarly, when computer programming moved from a female dominated profession (early days) to male dominated (now) the pay went up. Medical fields that have higher proportions of women have lower pay. Along these lines, as college skews more female (college grads are like 60/40…

Source on programming starting out female dominated? Also, I'm curious what a programmer's job looked like in the beginning.

I've met many trained by IBM COBOL developers.
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