“What’s all this talk I hear about you fooling around with the college widow? No wonder you can’t get out of college. Twelve years in one college! I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows.” – Horse Feathers
In this episode, Gilligan eats the last cookies on the island. Ginger snaps.
The “traditional” path for students with good grades was to “go to college.” Honestly, this was pretty good advice for a long time. The number of high school graduates that went to college bounced between 40% and 60%, of course being higher during the Vietnam draft. When my uncle was in Vietnam, he killed a dozen soldiers. Next year we’re going on vacation to a different country.
Around 1974, however, the percentage boomed, with over 80% of high school graduates at least attending some college by 1978 or so. The rationale was that a college education was a ticket to a better life. Again, for the most part, the common wisdom was right.
But why? In 1971 after a Supreme Court decision, companies could no longer use I.Q. tests for employee selection, they had to use something because, despite what the Simpsons™ might suggest, you really want smart people operating nuclear power plants. Certificates and credentialism had always been nice, but now businesses desperately needed some way to select employees that were smart enough to do the job.
What did Three Mile Island say to Fukushima? “Nuke, I am your father.”
Thus: college degrees. The more selective the college, the greater the ACT® or SAT™ score required to get in. ACT© and SAT™ scores are actually a very good proxy for intelligence, so, graduate from a good school? That shows a (likely) innate intelligence along with enough foresight and planning to defer satisfaction until the degree was granted.
In 1970, going to college at Harvard™ could be paid for with the (current 2021) equivalent cost of $22,000 or so a year. Now it’s over $75,000 for the sticker price. College prices went up because demand went up. Harvard’s© prices went up more because they were more selective – it was harder to get in so they were a better sifter for I.Q., I mean, who would have guessed that Hawking had the same I.Q. as Evel Knievel? I mean, they both loved ramps . . . .
But another factor was the increase in money available. Politicians looked for ways to encourage people to go to college. So, colleges increased prices to better soak up all of the student loan dollars available. Getting students morphed from “here’s where our graduates work” to “here’s what our climbing wall looks like.” Millions were invested to make a college more of a theme park than a serious place of learning. They raised prices so high that during COVID, college even became the most expensive video streaming service.
Along the way, though, standards decreased to get more students in the door. Not only was it easier to get in, inflation hit grades as well. Right now, the average grade at Harvard© is an A-. The average.
Harvard®, the vegan Crossfit™ of colleges.
Even now, though, Harvard™ is still a great rate of return for students. It’s not the education, it’s who a student meets. Harvard® is useful for the connections with wealth and power a student can make. Get in good with the right family? A student can become engaged with that class, though often there’s a cost.
Harvard® is still a good investment, even though it’s supposedly hard to get in. Heck, I got in. They don’t even lock most of their windows.
Some colleges are horrible investments. Going to Podunk U in North Central BFE and majoring in Anthropology of French Basket-Weaving Poets? Yeah, that’s also known as majoring in pre-barista. But that student could have been a barista without rolling up $50,000-$75,000 in student loan debt. And, if the student majored in philosophy, they can ask, “Why do people want fries with that?”
The Mrs. told me I needed to grow up. I was speechless. It’s hard to talk with 45 gummy bears in your mouth.
So, if I were giving general advice to a kid who was determined to go to college, I’d suggest that they avoid anything that someone can do over the Internet from Bangladesh. I can hire 45 Bangladeshis for approximately half of a Slim Jim© an hour, so why compete against tens of millions? Engineering is good, if you have the knack. Medical fields are constantly in demand – I saw an ad here in Modern Mayberry for nurses. Five-figure signing bonus – and that wasn’t $199.99, it was over $10,000. That’s probably a good idea. The short answer is that it’s not 1970 anymore. A student can’t just do any degree – they have to major in something that will pay the cost of the college degree.
Is college a good idea? Not for all of the 80%. Probably, college is still a good idea for 40%, at most.
So, what about trades?
Just like college, the economics has been twisted there, too. Just like supply and demand has tossed prices for college into the stratosphere, an oversupply of laborers has cratered the cost of many trades. Except for carpenters who build stairs – they’re always thinking a step ahead.
Where did the labor come from? Immigrants, illegal or not. Entire construction trades in many parts of the United States are completely staffed by people who speak less English than Pepé Le Pew. Whereas they often do great work, they are part of the reason that wages are stagnant in many trades. Sure, in 2022 there are shortages everywhere putting an upward pressure on wages, but that’s a short-term event.
I had one plumber who was very polite. When he looked at my sink he said, “I am at your disposal.”
Certainly, some trades are doing well. Which ones? Once again, those that require credentials and those that require citizenship. Anything that lowers the competition.
Regardless, the time when most trade jobs had pensions has passed – many have the promise of . . . Social Security. And in 1970, getting a job that supported a family just out of high school without a college degree? It was possible. Tough? Certainly. But possible.
It’s still possible today. A small-town plumber in Modern Mayberry does pretty well, so well that he became a Christian missionary overseas – I guess he’ll bless the drain down in Africa. The local HVAC guy makes a killing, too. And power linemen? They live in some of the nicest houses in town.
Are there still paths for a young person in 2022? Yes. It’s far tougher than it was in 1970 for a kid today, though. The traditional paths are difficult.
Now thank me I didn’t find a picture of Rosie in a bikini – I bet she has a hairy back. Oops. Sorry about putting that thought in your head.
The path, like the path between Scylla and Charybdis, is narrow. On either side are monsters. It’s sort of like being caught between Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg – you’re always safer if you have a pocket full of hot pizza rolls to distract them.
Outlaw is the way to freedom and happiness.
Dullards can’t be helped and will go quietly to the Camp Wellness final solution while denouncing their whiteness under president Patrice Cullors and VP Stacey Abrams.
College is just expensive isolation from reality for people who can’t handle it anyway.
Anything useful is taught from parents or from studying the past civilizations.
Well said. But kids like avoiding reality. They just don’t like paying for it . . .
A few years ago, I was listening to a radio call-in show about the Nature of Work and Careers, and one caller came in with outrage: “Why is it,” she asked, “that when people who speak Spanish come here, we give them free English-language lessons, but when my son wants to get a job in construction, he can’t because he doesn’t speak Spanish, and we can’t afford for anyone to teach him?”
There was a half-page article in the Washington Post a few days ago, “explaining to us” that the decline in college enrollment will have terrible, terrible follow-on effects. People without college degrees don’t just earn less money, but they’re more likely to smoke tobacco, less likely to buy a home, more likely to die of suicide, etc. Every “expert” quoted in the story was a college officer, obviously representing their personal interest in bringing in the bodies.
Employers now have two types of workers to exploit: the undocumented, who can’t make a fuss about illegal working conditions, and the deep-in-debt graduates, who can’t afford not to keep working. On the other hand, my son worked at a college-town ice-cream shop during his summer “vacations”, starting as soon as he was old enough to work. At age 21, he was one of the oldest employees, and was appalled at the lack of basic work skills in his college-student peers. “They can’t show up on time, they can’t do their jobs, and they can’t carry on a conversation about work issues. They’re just BABIES!”
And that’s the case – 90% of success in life is still “showing up.” And, exploit is a perfect word for it.
Good for your son!!
Except for Doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant or nurse college has become obsolete. Mike Rowe will tell you. The trades are where the money is at. Low cost of education higher rate of pay after training.
The meme about the local utility electrician cutting off the power to the basement dweller with thousands in school debt is funny.
Not only obsolete, but also a net negative when you add in the college loan . . .
I’m a huge fan of the German model of education, but more ruthlessly applied. At most, 20% of the population should go to college. (80/20 rule at work again.) However, most of the rest (60%) would greatly benefit from attending a good trade school. The bottom 20% don’t need schooling to learn how to push a broom or use a shovel.
Schooling should not begin until age 8. Younger kids learn only one thing in school – sit down and shut up. Teach kids the basics from ages 8-13. That’s all the time it really takes. Then kids go to trade school (followed by apprenticeships), high school (it’s called that for a reason), or are mentored into the unskilled labor force following a brief “life skills” course. The important thing is to give these adolescents (formerly young adults) something real to work at or towards.
Well said, and, properly proportioned, I think. Bell curve away . . .
John, back in the days of the Pre-cooling Earth when I graduated from High School, the presumed assumption was that you would go to college. That was all that was ever talked about. And overall college has been great for my career – except for the fact that my job does not directly use my major, and has not for 25 years. In reality the degree opened a door for me, nothing more. Everything else I had to learn on my own. Which maybe proves your point.
What I told my children – and so far it seems to have stuck – is you have to major in something that will employ you upon graduation. If you want to follow your bliss and study 17th Century French Literature, great – there had better be a double major there with Accounting or some such employable skill.
My one concern about the continued specialization and proliferation in college “certifications” is that it is going to cut out people who, like me, did not have the major but the ability to work and learn. Were I to try and enter my industry now, I would likely not even be able to get the (literal) bottle washing position I started with – I do not have a science degree. That, I should imagine, ends up stifling the entire industry. Where will new and unorthodox ideas come from if not from outside?
They don’t. I think that is part of the idea. credentialism comes mainly from the desire to create economic fiefdoms . . . .
Education is the key, but college is not the only place to learn and become educated. Since most school teachers are required to have a masters degree, I think they have been programmed to assume that everyone needs to have a college degree too to be successful.
A few years ago, I volunteered as a mentor in a group that was trying to improve the success rate for giving state money for college to low income youth. The number of people actually getting degrees was shockingly low (I think less than 20%), especially when considering that they essentially had a “full ride” to any college in the state to which they could gain admission. As my mentee got closer to enrolling in college, it was clear that he had very little interest in college, and I was concerned about his chances of successfully completing a degree. I started nudging him toward military service, skilled trades, or take classes part time, and he showed more interested in that path. The agency overseeing this program is staffed primarily with college graduates who also assume college is the only viable path. When I spoke to the agency about military service and skilled trades apprenticeships, they did not appear to have thought about any non-college options. It was also disappointing to hear that the “full ride” scholarships available were only for full time students. My mentee could go away full time to a vey expensive college at virtually no cost to him, but they would do nothing for him if he worked part time and went to a local community college. Money is not the only obstacle to getting a college degree. The agency has adjusted the program now to include encouraging skilled trades, apprenticeships, and military service.
Perfect, and note Nick’s comments down below. College is (as has been noted) not for many.
There is an interesting book about this titled The Case Against Education (my review: https://www.arthursido.com/2018/04/book-review-case-against-education.html) He argues that college is not about education at all anymore.
My belief is that you should have to show how your degree will enable you to pay back your student loan before you get one. A medical degree? OK that makes sense. A degree in sociology? Sorry, here is your loan rejection letter.
I know lots and lots of very wealthy people and they all stopped attending school in 8th grade. What got them to be wealthy was working very hard and having a supportive family. You don’t need college if you have those two things. College now is mostly a way to prolong adolescence, like an extra four years of high school with even less parental supervision. If I could go back and do it all over I would learn some sort of skilled trade like machining and skip the whole college thing.
Remove the fed promise to repay part of the loan, and see how many people will pony up to finance a French poetry degree . . . simple as.
When my son graduated from high school, he was shrewd enough to understand that he was not yet ‘ready’ for college. Instead of rushing in at age 17, piling up debt and possibly washing out, he spent a few years working in the kitchen at a nursing home, pulling down a fat union wage and learning far more about life than he would have going to toga parties in the dorm.
He eventually went back to school while continuing to work, and earned a total of 3 degrees in the mental health field, paying as he went. Ten years later, he is finally making as much as an LPC as he did running the dishwasher at the old age home in his late teens. College, at least for him, was a zero-sum game. Sheesh.
Ditto for a relative or two that I know. One graduated while working a full time job, and is still in the same full time job. Degree meant . . . zero.
College is potentially a fabulous opportunity, but mostly intrinsically worthless.
There are only three things you need to know in life, none of which are taught in college:
1) What do I really like doing?
2) What am I really good at doing?
3) What can I make decent money doing?
When those three legs of that stool come together, you’ve found where you’re supposed to be, and what you ought to be, in life. Period.
But those legs need a seat to plug into, and those three questions must connect to one other thing, to be truly worthwhile:
Is this something that cannot be shipped to Shi*tholia or Trashcanistan and done for 5¢ on the dollar to wages here?
Why? Because if it can, it will be.
Loyalty is deader than canned tuna.
The days of 40 years, a gold watch, and a pension until you die left the building 40 years ago.
Employers (stupidly) expect, or even foolishly demand, loyalty to their interests, but never send any loyalty the other way.
They are as loyal to their employees as they are to used toilet paper, and always will be, for every position from janitor to CEO.
So answer those three questions, and then the fourth one, and ROWYBS.
If (as in about 5% of cases) that indicates a specific college course of study, go for it.
As to specifics:
Being a lawyer requires law school, not college. College is just to weed out the lazy and the really stupid f**ktards. (Looking at judges shows you how poorly it does at the latter.) Major in any damn thing you want to. Whatever it is, it will help you as a lawyer.
Including the anthropology of French basket-weaving poets. All that matters is an LSAT score to get in, and studying your ass off to get out. But only those who graduate from top-tier law schools will get top-tier salaries. The rest can make a living. Some can’t even manage that. (Getting to SCOTUS from night law school is a very narrow and unlikely road.) Things are tough all over.
Medicine requires college, especially physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. (See if you can guess what subjects the MCAT focuses on.) But once again, that’s just to weed out those with no aptitude for finishing medical school, because letting somebody in means telling 100 other bright young wannabees to eff off, so if they let you in, they have a not-so-vested interest in making sure you won’t screw the pooch and flunk out, thus wasting a chair that could have gone to any of 99 equally qualified candidates.
Engineering is all about college. To get you in the door with an engineering company.
But not all science degrees are equal. In the six months before I bailed out of computer science, I correctly recognized the scam. Computers were the hot thing, promising scads of jobs. But the course load was so bloatedly over-packed with prereqs and mandatory classes (in programming languages that are about as useful now as Latin and Sanskrit), and impacted by too damned many applicants, that it took an extra year – maybe even two years extra – to get a basic four-year degree. At the same starting salary coming out as the guys in business and engineering. Dumb idea, and I ditched it ASAP. Bonus: All the guys I started with made good money – for about a decade. Then they spent another ten years as waiters and barristas when all their jobs were shipped to India, Singapore, Pakistan, etc. The guys ahead of them pulled up the ladder, and sold them out in a heartbeat.
The architects, civil engineers, and electrical engineers made a good living. The aerospace engineers spent more time on unemployment than actors, with the booms and busts and constant consolidation of a once diverse employment industry.
Nursing? Hard to get in. But after losing out on a NROTC scholarship that would have sent me to Stanford or MIT for free, if only I hadn’t been white (they told me this to my face), then saw me unemployable in the fire and police departments for the same reasons, walking into the nursing department as a guy made me the same kind of diversity hire as if I was a handicapped gay black female: 2% of the field. Dean’s list grades, and top 1/2% SATs meant they knew I wasn’t going to flunk out, unlike 90% of their actual diversity selectees. Bonus: Can’t ship the job anywhere. Ever. Permanent shortage of them from now until Forever. What does college – even my nursing classes – have to do with my job? Damned little. It only guarantees that on Day One, there’s an 80% chance I won’t kill my patient out of outright stupidity. Nothing more is certain. The real education started after I had the license, and hit the floor. Sucked to be told that after I graduated. Really pissed me off. Sucked even harder to find out it was true.
College for anything else?
Okay, if they require it.
Major in whatever-the-hell you want, because it literally doesn’t matter.
The utility isn’t what you learn in college (which is always damned little, trust me.)
The value is in learning how to think, how to learn, and most important of all, how to teach yourself anything and everything, and how to teach it to others.
Someone that can learn, think, and teach others can (and will) excel in any business on the planet. That’s what businesses are hoping they get when they hire college graduates. What they mostly get instead is over-educated children who can’t tie their shoes, dress themselves appropriately, answer the phone without a 6-month training class, can’t show up on time, nor work long and hard without a boot in the ass from a boss with a high school diploma, and a Ph.D. from the School Of Hard Knocks, subbing in for idiot parents and rent-seeking public school teachers.
A horrible instructor teaches you what to think. (This describes 90% of all colleges, everywhere, at all times, BTW.)
A mediocre instructor teaches you what you should know. (This is maybe another 8%.)
A good one teaches you how to think, not what to think. (This is Top 2% stuff, and can be gotten anywhere, at any school.)
A great one teaches you how to integrate and synthesize that learning and integrate knowledge from diverse subject areas, and convey it to others. (In most cases, this is supposed to be what Master’s programs are all about, but seldom are).
Doctorates are supposed to be for those actually expanding the edge of knowledge beyond what is already known, plugging itinto what’s already known, and presenting it to everyone else.
College that fulfills that mission is worth the investment, if you need it, or want it for its own sake.
College just to get a job may as well be accomplished online or at the JC, for pennies on the dollar to Harvard or Stanford. (And both schools know that too.)
And you can make more money than college grads if you have aptitude for the trades.
A high school classmate, solid C student, nice guy, was a total gearhead. Not college material in any way, shape, or form, and he knew it. But a good guy, and good with transmissions and engines. Three years out of high school, he bought his boss’s shop. Ten years out, he owned ten auto shops. Was married, paid-off house, and worth $1M. Before age 30. Never even bothered with the SAT. Knew what he liked, did what he wanted. None of the college grads (which was 95% of my class) could touch that at the 10-year reunion.
A guy fixing air conditioners, transmissions, or furnaces and water heaters is going to make a good living anywhere but Trashcanistan, and the entry requirement is a GED, aptitude, and a work ethic.
Mike Rowe annually pounds the drum that Caterpillar every year has unfilled openings for people willing to learn how to repair bulldozers, cranes, and graders, has a full apprenticeship program, and that in 2 years, you’ll graduate with zero debt, and skill that can take you worldwide, and pay $100K a year within a couple of years after graduating, and can’t be shipped overseas, unless that’s where the broken bulldozer is. And they go begging for applicants, because people would rather mortgage their entire future and not get their fingernails dirty.
College is not for everybody, probably not even for most people, and totally unrelated to one’s education, or one’s career, in most cases. It’s the biggest scam and unexploded bubble market in the world at the moment, and it’s going to pop sooner or later.
What never goes out of fashion is being able to learn, and knowing how to think. With or without a sheepskin. Brighter folks figured that out by the end of The Wizard Of Oz.
Great write up! Both youse guys.
Aesop is the champ!
Law school teaches you to be a law professor. Internships, practicums and actual jobs teach you to be a lawyer. It used to be that lawyers were created by a practicing lawyer taking on an apprentice, and the bar exam was the local judge asking some questions.
Undergrad degree that is the best for law school grades: math, probably due to similarities in tests. The worst: pre-law.
I dropped out of comp sci for similar reasons. I was great at programming, but I’m not very good at rote memorization. I’d get a ‘C’ on the tests which required writing out lines of code and getting it 100% correct, even though in actual programming I could check to make sure it was ‘chkdsk’ rather than ‘ckdsk.’ But I would be one of the few people that actually got the programs to work, which strangely was only 20% of the grade. And I started to think that anything which can be offshored likely would be, and was proven right.
That seems to be the overlap between your advice and our hosts (and mine): look for something that can’t be done online or otherwise offshored. Because it will be. I’m wondering how much cogitating is going on in the C suite about how all these people that are loving working from home due to covid can be replaced by Pajeet Ramjunathonajon working from home.
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Do you know why employers treat their employees like shit? Because they can.
I had this epiphany some years ago when I was getting pissed at how so many co-workers just let the corporation do whatever it wanted, without even much griping. Why spend extra money on employees when 80% of them will put up with getting shit on; better to just replace the 20% as they quit, hopefully with more passive people. Guys in technical fields told me that they’d quit every couple of years because they knew raises wouldn’t keep up with inflation, then get a similar job in another company, quit after a couple years for the same reason, do it again, then get hired by the original company… and start off making a lot more than the people who had stayed loyal for the 6 or so years. I’ve seen this myself in several jobs, where I was told not to share how much I made or try to find out how much anyone else made. Which of course caused me to immediately try to figure out what everyone else made. It turns out that as the New Guy I was making more than veteran employees who’d bought the line about “economy bad, can’t give raises so sorry maybe next year” for however many years.
Same thing happens in nursing.
Hospital A won’t give you a market-value raise.
Quit.
Go to work at Hospital B. At market value.
A few years go by. Now B is stingy.
Quit. Go back to A. Suddenly HR sees you as someone worth more by leaving than they did by staying, forgetting the $100K (currently) they have to spend to attract one qualified applicant.
This has been going on my entire career.
And hospitals can’t figure out why they can’t find nurses, can’t make a profit, and people keep wondering why healthcare costs rise faster than inflation.
Like capitalism wasn’t a thing, or something.
Got fired at one hospital in a CYA lawsuit, to pro-actively discredit me if I testified accurately by making me the “disgruntled ex-employee”. Lawsuit never happened, so they trashed my job all for nothing.
Got a 50% raise over that salary by working registry gigs.
Got another 30% by signing on with a New Hospital a couple miles from the old hospital.
And when/if New Hospital gets stingy, I’ll move along again, maybe even to Original Hospital, for another 30-40% raise.
I’ve got a decade or so to retirement. I’ll probably interview in five years or so, someplace closer to my eventual Camp Snoopy retirement LZ, mainly to see what I should be making.
Everyone else should do the same, in any job.
Keeps your resume current, shows you what skills and quals you need to stay competitive, and gives you bargaining leverage at the annual review.
Managers and CEOs hate that sh*t. 🙂
Excellent work, as always. I don’t disagree with a jot or tittle. I’m interested to watch it pop, but we have to reach peak credentialism first . . . .
The high school guidance counselors are partly to blame. Lots of poor kids who graduated high school with my son were pushed into college, paid for by Pell grants and loans. They couldn’t handle the academic requirements and left after a year or two. Working now as convenience store clerks and waitresses. Wasted time and money.
Yup. Lots of cases like that, and they’re weighed down with debt now.
It was obvious that the idea of a semi-skilled worker making it into comfortable middle class was going extinct by the 1970s. The major problem that I saw was suburban youths exhibiting high degrees of anomie by the mid 70s. This rejection of their places on the socio-economic ladder has resulted in the kinds of economic disruptions manifest with their children. The men of the Depression/WW2 era did not wish their sons to grow up with the kinds of pain and suffering that they experienced and gave them everything they needed for a softer life EXCEPT the discipline needed to enjoy it. It’s no coincidence that those ethnic groups that resisted the temptations of the Advertising industry and easy credit are now chewing up and relocating the formerly white middle class enclaves in places like SoCal.
Skilled labor is still needed, as are the professions. However, the day of the factory laborer is gone. Tool and die men are still needed, with high pay. As are elevator techs, with even higher pay. But one best be able to handle applied math and physics. Carrying a hod to homeownership was never a long time strategy.
I have a second job taking care of a little old lady & her disabled 60 yro son. The oldest son is an exec at Intel-high level, high functioning guy. He lives in a multimillion dollar house and now has two kids in college. The daughter is 20, total air head, and her whole reason going to Arizona was to party foolhardy. The son is a little older, seems like he has a head on his shoulders as he graduates soon with an engineering degree. Except……..mommy & daddy gave him a brand new Subaru Ascent as a pre-grad gift. Yep, plowed it up in Colorado over skiing. So, the boy gets a new one since their loaded. I don’t think that either kid will get much out of college but degrees. It must run in the family as grandma was a teacher. There is a “college education” and then there is “becoming educated”. The ancient Romans spoke both Latin and Greek: try that on a PHD now.
Yup – spoil the kid, and the education stops. Even 100 years ago, the average high school graduated students fluent in Latin.
Colleges are businesses, selling degrees, and really don’t care if their product is sub-standard for those that bought. I can’t blame them for their sales techniques, or their attitude, since regardless of the years of selling garbage, people are still standing in line for their opportunity to buy the product.
Don’t forget to show them the climbing wall!!!
SOME of the jobs that can’t be offshored they will onshore replacement workforce. H1B visas, etc. for the legal, open border policy for the illegal versions.
Some of the jobs that can’t be offshored will have the WORK offshored. You have to be at the jobsite to install plumbing the way things are structured now, but if each room in the motel is factory built in Shitholistan, and shipped here to be assembled like legos, 90% of the work, and all of the ‘skilled’ part gets done elsewhere. Panelized construction does some of this too. The unions know it. In NYFC there are rules that some things like shower head and valve assemblies can’t be pre-assembled in a shop or factory. I’m sure there are others too. Bust the unions and lots of onsite assembly will be done elsewhere by low cost worker, just like a large part of meal prep has been moved out of individual kitchens and into distant factories.
WRT schools not considering anything but college, the district I live in (part of Houston, but not part of Houston’s schools) has a program in place called T-2-4 where they explicitly define their goal as graduating a student that is prepared to continue study in a trade (T) or join the military, attend a 2 year local Associate’s degree program (which focus on employment skills, like dental hygienist or electric company lineman), or a traditional (4) year college. Over 80% of our district is non-white first generation American or 0 generation American, and they are not particularly interested in college anyway. They need to start earning to support their ‘vigorous’ family growth.
It certainly helps that we have a robust and growing local economy with jobs for anyone that wants one.
n
Well, we have that economy now . . . I’ve advised The Boy that whatever he does, it should be an “on site” thing. He’s moving along with that.