If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else.

And if you slap a college degree requirement on every job it's not. There's like five paragraphs up there that directly refute your arguments. The trade school thing is new - and I say that having spent three quarters in trade school within the past ten years. Even then the trade school represents a weird imbalance; the rich kids were leaning harder into 4-years while the poor kids were discovering the difference between "trade school degree" and "learning as you go" was $20k you don't have to pay back.

It's the fuckin' colleges and the system of colleges. The jobs did not go away. There's a whole f'n chart up there showing what a lie that is.

MORE FUCKING ANECDATA BECAUSE APPARENTLY PLATITUDES ARE ALL ANYBODY THINKS ANYMORE

1. The "Harvard of the Cascades"

Friend of mine has a daughter who was pulling in about $6k a month as a babysitter at the age of 17. She's a hella good babysitter. Not spectacular at academics? It actually makes me uncomfortable how much her dad rags on her. She looked at a few degree programs, all highly competitive. The one she opted into has an admittance rate of around 5%. Her dad was super-stoked when she got in.

It's for dental hygienics. Little mountain community college three hours out of town. 70 students per quarter. I was talking to my dental hygienist (her name is Gina, and she's awesome) and she said "yeah, it's always been that way. Anybody out of that program writes their own ticket. I had seven job offers without having to apply for anything." Gina graduated in '89. The other programs my friend's daughter were also med-tech related; they were all also programs utterly bereft of boys.

2. What if you threw a degree program and nobody came

I went to a couple regents' meetings of the machining program I was in. It was one of four degree programs that particular school ditched in the three years I had any involvement with it. The basic problem was that students would enroll, employers would offer them jobs after a quarter or two, graduation rate would drop to 17% because the only people left in the program were the ones nobody wanted to hire. That college lost their automotive repair program, their small engine repair program and their welding program while I was there and is in the process of losing their machining program (three other local colleges already have).

People in that program were leaving for jobs that paid $60, $70k a year, no degree required... or they were doing Running Start. The only guys I know who finished their degrees were a buddy of mine who was going into business for himself and a retiree who mostly liked hanging out with the kids all day. In the time I've been gone they've churned faculty four times because as a state school, their operating expenses are tied to graduation rate and as a state school, their salary levels are flat across the state so an assistant professor in Microsoft's back yard gets the same salary as an assistant professor teaching dental hygiene three hours up into the mountains.

__________________________________________________

You don't go to school to be an electrician. You pull wire for an electrician until you're an apprentice, then you twist nuts until you're a journeyman, then you earn enough hours to get a bond and you're done without ever cracking a book. Plumbing is similar. To no one's surprise, there are a lot of "dude jobs" that end up the same - I've got like six people I'm paying over $80 an hour to right now and not a one of them has so much as a quarter of voc. tech under their belts. I'm waiting on all of them - they're all busy AF and if I don't have work for them I get to wait in line with everyone else. You hear about the death of the construction industry and dumb shit like that but if I wanted a GC to take over my job I would be waiting until TWENTY TWENTY EIGHT.

There are plenty of jobs that require actual job training. There are plenty of jobs that don't require actual job training. What happened is we ended up with so many people going to college that the ones that don't require actual job training started requiring a degree just to thin the pile, which ended up with a bunch of kids spending four years getting a bachelor's in English just so they can end up in the right pile.

You can want this to be about globalization. You can pretend that this is somehow related to off-shoring. But you don't have any facts to back it up. It's about the proliferation of needless degrees and the inflation of the costs of earning them.

Full stop.