The Wordsmith's Forge

methylethyl has written a brilliant and detailed analysis of the trades (e.g. plumbing, construction) vs. a 4-year liberal arts degree, with attention to various things that are wrong with the American economy and lifestyle. Let's take a look ...


Everybody's pushing the trades lately. I'm onboard with that: I WANT the trades to be a viable career path, a good way to support a family, etc.

Agreed.

In my particular case, I want this so we can HAVE them. In my area, we're running out. Demand exceeds supply. It's very difficult to get someone to come out and repair or do anything. We have fallen tree-sized limbs lying in the yard that have been there for several years because we could not get someone to come out and turn them into usable firewood and wood chips. That's just one example. It's what happens when young people are pressured down an academic path whether it suits them or not.

The trades are for people who are good with their hands, who enjoy doing practical things instead of riding a desk all day. It's one of the few job categories that cannot be outsourced and is extremely difficult to replace with any kind of automation beyond a power tool held in someone's hands. These are vitally important professions. We need them, and we need enough spread around so that whenever people go to hire one, it's possible to get the work done in hours (for emergencies, like broken pipe spraying water) or a few days (for non-emergencies like a fallen tree that's not blocking anything) -- instead of 3-6 months, or never, which is often how things are now.


The only thing they knew was: go to college----> get a good job.

That's the only thing most people know and push, whether it is a good fit or not, whether it is true or not. That's a problem, because one size definitely does not fit all. Everyone needs a route to a decent life, even if they're not academics. Furthermore, when you try to force everyone into college, it stops being a step up. A high school diploma is all but worthless now. A bachelor's degree has become the equivalent of a high school diploma, except it's not free; it's ruinously expensive. A master's degree is now the equivalent of what a bachelor's degree used to be: the minimum to enter many fields. That's a massive increase in means testing to enter the job market, with crushing impact on the economy.

Compare with a better example. Terramagne-America has a much wider range of school styles, but also, a lot more options after high school.

* College is much more accessible there than here.

* Trade school is better respected and more popular. Handymen for Humanity is a Terramagne-American training program as part of Habitat for Humanity. It teaches all kinds of construction, home repair, and home maintenance skills. Interested volunteers simply describe what they want to learn, and a volunteer coordinator finds mentors to teach those skills.

* Some trades, such as blacksmith / farrier, are still routinely taught via apprenticeship, which is a great way to learn many practical skills.

* If you want to start a family, various Family Life classes start in high school, go through college, and are also available through community centers and other places.

* If you want to start a business, various entrepreneurship / business classes start in high school, go through college, and are also available through community centers and other places. Future Entrepreneurs of America is a Terramagne-American club with branches at junior high, high school, and college level.

* If you are broke and don't have a particular career in mind, the top 10 or so jobs with the worst worker shortage offer free training, so you can enter a field that desperately needs workers and expect to get hired immediately after you pass the training.

* You can collect certifications for specific skills that can be turned into jobs, from classes available through community centers, first responder departments, libraries, local businesses, etc. For instance, a chainsaw certificate makes it easier to start a business or get a job cutting up fallen trees and/or delivering firewood. This is often the fastest option, as a few hours to a few days can give you a marketable skill. It's also one of the most versatile; if you have a home business in mind, you can collect whatever certs you need for it, like business budgeting or marketing.

* 10,000 Hours is an intensive 5-year program for people who already know the basics of their craft and want to concentrate on practice.

* The Academy of Hypatia is a loose array of autodidactic programs run through libraries. The Alexandrian Year is a travel program similar to Get a Life. Members travel around from one library to the next, usually for a year although shorter and longer spans are available.

* The Get a Life program assists creative youth in personal development through travel. It offers tour guides and travel programs at two levels, one for people who want to travel between high school and college, the other for those who want to do it after college; and participants may do both if they wish. Travelers often find a job, a life partner, a home, and/or other major life components along the way in addition to the lived experience and creative inspiration that everyone gets.

* Peace Trail is a Terramagne-American program with opportunities both domestic and abroad. It connects nonprofit groups, intentional communities, schools, and other organizations that work in conflict resolution, holistic wellness, mediation and negotiation, mindfulness, multiculturalism, nonviolent action, pacifism, participatory decision-making, personal growth and enlightenment, spiritual awareness, sustainability, tolerance, and other related fields of peacework and the bohemian culture.

* Succession for Success: Building a Better Future is a program that connects disadvantaged youth with older people who have no heirs, usually owners of a farm or business. The goal is to secure succession to maintain local farms and businesses after the current owner retires, and increase the resources of young people so they can be successful.

As you can see, a lot of these grew out of clubs or other small programs and extended their reach. The same could be done here. So many people are sick of the college bubble that there is tremendous opportunity for developing other options and opportunities.


We were the first generation through the ed. pipeline, for whom that failed. I never quite finished the degree (just as well: I quit when I realized I'd need to borrow money to finish-- at least we don't have debt!), and my husband has a very beautiful BA-with-honors, that is worth less than nothing.

It is becoming more common for college to make life worse instead of better, because of the lost time (rising from 2 years to 4 to 7+), usually no money earned during that time, delay of life achievements (e.g. starting a family, buying a house), crippling debt, and more. But you have to take the gamble, even if you can't afford it, to apply for any job that might make enough to live on. Going into business for yourself remains an option, but fewer and fewer fields permit that nowadays.

In my observation, many jobs require a college degree just as a means test -- they don't care what it's in. But that's here. I don't dispute that in other places, a degree may indeed undermine job searching. Do local research to determine if a degree is helpful or harmful in your locale.


For us, the viable career path was: forget the degree, go back to the local 2yr college, get a 2yr professional certification in a medical specialty, and now yay, we have an almost-median income.

Community colleges often have 2-year degrees that lead directly to jobs. But then you are spending 2 years and a lot of money to get a job that probably doesn't pay very well. Do the math very carefully and check the job market in your area. On the bright side, many of these will be jobs that cannot be outsourced, offering job security.


College is strictly for if you are laser-focused on a specific career path, such as engineering, that you can't get into without an advanced degree AND that career pays at least twice median income. Otherwise you're wasting seven years of your life in order to be a permanent rent serf and struggle to support a family.

This matches my observations. But bear in mind, if you want a family, you're wasting 7 of your most fertile years not breeding and maybe not even finding a mate.


I dig Mike Rowe out there pushing skilled trades, I respect all the guys I grew up with whose skill in construction, plumbing, electrical, repair, hvac, etc. literally keep our lives running... and those jobs still look like a raw deal and I can't see advising my kids to do any of that, except as a way to pay for college.

Point.


These guys are crippled from work-related injuries and toxic exposures well before retirement age. What do they get in return? A median US income, maybe a little under.

We need better work safety, health care, etc. too.


But if you're most guys on this track, you can typically sign on with a company like Caterpillar (which pays OK and has good benefits) and then spend like the first five years of your career working nights and swing shift. So if like most working class families your wife works too... you had better have some live-in grandparents to watch the kids, or just not have a family until you've reached mid-career at least.

Also not a great situation, although multigenerational living does solve many problems if you have a healthy family.


And in spite of this extraordinary level of thrift, we are unable to build savings. That is what a median income gets you these days. And that's only because we're lucky enough to live in a relatively low-cost part of the country.

Well, most Americans are poor now. It's just hidden in a lot of creative ways by government book-cooking. But people who are one paycheck from disaster damn well know that, and it enrages them when politicians call that "middle class" and claim the economy is "good." It's shitty.


We DO need more skilled labor, but we need it in a broader context where people working skilled trades are making enough money to have a family, buy a modest house, save for retirement, and buy new shoes for their kids once in a while, and have working conditions that let them have a stable family life.

Agreed.


In order to be worthwhile careers (and as a society, we NEED them to be), they need to pay 30-50% more now and rise in tune with inflation AND OR we need to get the dang inflation under control.

The problem is, trade prices like other prices are capped at what people are willing and able to spend. When most people are poor, if they can't afford a plumber or roofer or whatever, the repair just ... doesn't get done. That's why poor neighborhoods have things that are falling apart. Jack up the price by 30-50% and that means the same amount of more work will not get done. So then, raising wages for the trades would require an overall raise in income for people to afford it, such as by raising the minimum wage to an actual living wage.


The debt-and-rental economy needs to end, if we still want to have people who maintain the basic things that make a first-world American way of life possible***.

True.


*When the revolution comes, these guys will be the first to sign up: the ones who did the responsible thing, got training in a job that was essential and couldn't be outsourced, and then still couldn't afford to move out of their parents' house, get married, and have kids. They're competent, hardworking, and they're probably just as good with guns as they are with wrenches.

Yep. Poverty is a massive weakness for a country. Because those people will flock to anyone offering them a better deal. If you're on top of them, you are standing on sand.


**One way this could be solved, is by letting prices collapse in all the radically inflated sectors: housing, doctoring, and education, notably. Those things didn't get more expensive because they got better. They got snowed under by bureaucratic compliance requirements, metastasizing admin, and a crippling burden of middlemen (insurance, bankers, investors, professional licensing organizations). Price collapse would solve all of that, very quickly, as the industries would be forced to de-worm themselves.

All bubbles pop eventually, like it or not. College could collapse at any minute now. You can get just as good an education for most things online, mostly free, with the exception of a few elite fields like law, medicine, engineering, etc. Cry me a river, bitches.


***Of course, another way this could play out, is we drop the idea of a first-world way of life. Everyone's living standards are going to decline as resource extraction becomes more expensive.

This is also what will happen if people don't solve problems. Hell, it's already happening; most people can't afford health care anymore.


Why do we need all this junk we have in our house, stateside?

You don't need ALL of it. Even the building-code stuff depends on locale, and many places aren't zoned or coded at all, which is why you can build a cabin in the woods if you want.


Because the architecture is climate-inappropriate (no ventilation, too much upholstery) so if you don't run the hvac, everything gets moldy. We need a vacuum because of the carpet.

You can, especially if you live in a wet area, choose materials that are smooth and less prone to mildew such as wooden furniture and tile floors. Plus a house with a breezeway for ventilation. They exist. I myself think the chickee -- a hut on stilts with walls that roll up -- is an excellent building for climate change.


We have to have a fridge because everywhere you buy food is too far away to walk every day (not so in the developing world!). We need the junky electronic entertainment because we live too far from each other and have completely forgotten how to have a social life or religious observances.

This is all fixable with intentional community, or a walkable neighborhood. They exist and we need to make more of them. Plus gardening, of course. And there are many interesting alternatives to food preservation than a fridge.


We need the mower because of the lawn.

Rip out the grass and replace it with native plants. Less care, less expense, less work, and massively more wildlife value.


We need the washing machine because clothing is cheap, we have too much of it, and we aren't careful with it.

It's getting harder and harder to find clothes that don't fall apart quickly, but they do still exist. I like clothes that can be washed by flogging against a rock if necessary.


We need the dishwasher because we use too many dishes, and we use too many dishes because we have a dishwasher.

That's pure lifestyle. We don't use a dishwasher, we wash dishes by hand, and yes that makes us more conscious of how many we use. <3 one-dish meals.


Nothing about this is necessary, or sensible, and nothing about it makes our lives better. So much of it is just expensive ways to cope with the fact that our family and social networks are broken, and our zoning laws prevent us living in people-friendly environments. What if we invested in *those* instead?

See intentional community, intentional neighboring, walkable neighborhoods, and Strong Towns. These are fixable issues.

Most problems, humans create for themselves and thus humans can solve if they wish by making different choices.