I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted.
This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the book Boys Adrift.
My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company. He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very much embodied.
[0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.
Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.
In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.
In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.
As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well on his way to financial security at least as early if not earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).
I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in order to justify your son's work environment, implying that all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to find people suggesting that an all female work environment is inherently bad.
It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been in my house recently.
This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess.
It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.
If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.
Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!
HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.
I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.
I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.
I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.
For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.
Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.
I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.
That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.
> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation
If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.
https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s...
>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.
I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.
> I’m a black college student now and every conversation
> with friends back home includes some mention of
> dropping out because it’s not for us as well.
And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.
https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori...
> we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees.
You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.
Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.
As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.
Stay the course. Good things await.
But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.
It's the only way to innovate imo.
taway1343@gmail.com
Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).
If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.
If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.
I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down.
However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.
Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well.
I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more achievable if there is collective investment into those goals rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily milk a atomized, divided population.
Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.
Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%
The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.
There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.10.a...
That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.
But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly difficult.
I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't always so.
> all the Grievance Studies majors
So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to people majoring in something you presumably disagree with? And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or electrician for some reason?
Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in the room you're standing in?
I’m a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic background to turn it into a profession.
Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life that they’ve resigned into accepting.
I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can’t possibly imagine going back to the physicality of it all.
This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.
I hate to have to mention this, but not all American men are white.
Its schrodingers privilege. the privilege was being so priveleged that you were pushed out of the traditional credentialing system.
I read somewhere that (ironocally) plumbing it the less likely thing to be "automated" via an AI or something.
Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.
The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.
Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.
Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.
I do not recommend non-union construction at all.
Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.
Your interest will change as you age.
It's easier to think people are being misled than to think people are taking different decisions because their reality is actually different.
The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for university education, our future electricians won't have one. Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people are less educated.
What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some sources?
I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard but your skin color is not one of the things making your life hard.
I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so different from the narratives I've read about privilege.
It is. In France college is 400€ a year.
It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face of that culture.
While there’s going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem more important than a message of privilege.
Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?
Men who fail to provide or "fit in" to their "role" in society become depressed, and then they kill themselves. :/
If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best, marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a firm/practice.
Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under someone who already has the license to ensure that you've "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting everyone once you get your license.
You give three examples but only tie the last to the admissions issue. Could you expand on the others and how they might be relevant to this issue?
Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they are still recognized more for leading positions. They also dominate about every trade related job.
Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it to do is do whatever they want.
People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for example, can't just do what they want, since there are no opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.
What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities in the labor market and education"?
Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades in school (which some say is because of discrimination), which makes it harder for them to enter university.
Its just like the Ed loan program..
Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.
We should not bet on society losing this time around such as the elites did in the US!
I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they need school?
I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to college over it.
Like the claim that all those people that joined the extreme right wing groups because the "libs said they were Nazis so why not".
As a brown person I think the former is definitely still true. The latter is definitely not true, at least looking at the average white man's number of tinder matches compared to mine.
So this is a direct result of the move away from color blind policies, to race based policies.
> Keith E. Smith, a mental-health counselor and men’s outreach coordinator at the University of Vermont, said that when he started working at the school in 2006 he found that men were much more likely to face consequences for the trouble they caused under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
This is exactly what black students report as racism in school.
Seems like evidence that race based policies are just racist.
> In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said. Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.
Obviously white men are not in fact privileged on university campuses.
“Female students in the U.S. benefit from a support system established decades ago, spanning a period when women struggled to gain a foothold on college campuses. There are more than 500 women’s centers at schools nationwide. Most centers host clubs and organizations that work to help female students succeed.”
Men are failing because it is the policy not to support them.
History is just that: history. A white male going to uni _right now_ hasn't really enjoyed those historical advantages; they were before their time.
Yes there are other advantages in the modern world to being a white male, but there are also equivalent disadvantages, too. Easier to get power...but if you're male nobody is there to defend you or help you. Help yourself, defend yourself _and_ others, be the breadwinner (otherwise you're useless) "man up".
And because men need the support. I suspect that a lot fewer men needed support in, say, 1950.
Why do more men need support than did in 1950? I think the first reason may be because of education. Our education system is failing in a way that it wasn't in 1950. (This may be too harsh. If, say, 10% of high school graduates went to college in 1950, and 50% do now, then that means that the top 10% then were more prepared for college than the top 50% are now. But apples-to-apples would be to ask whether the top 10% then were better prepared than the top 10% are now. I don't have a good feel for the answer to that question.)
My answer is that when men were the vast majority consumers of higher education the system was built to support them.
This accords with what the social justice people would say, and I think they are right about that.
What they are wrong about is that men today should be denied support that other groups have today because men in the 1950s had support that other groups in the 1950s did not have.
It is also worth noting that providing supports for men does not mean removing supports for other under represented groups.
Are Academics Disproportionately Gay? A new analysis suggests that's the case, and that academic work -- at once solitary and social in nature -- makes it particularly attractive to those who are not straight.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/study-suggest...
Observations (based on the figure alone):
1. White-Males had the lowest college-enrollment-rates across all categories. They got the lowest in the two lowest income-brackets; basically a three-way tie in the next income-bracket; and just a little higher than Hispanic-Males in the highest income-bracket.
2. Asians had the highest enrollment-rates across all income-brackets.
3. Asians were relatively constant in their enrollment-rates, regardless of income or gender, always above 70%. (Always above ~83%, if excluding the lowest income-bracket.) The gender-gap still leaned toward Asian-Females over Asian-Males, but not by much.
4. Blacks varied heavily by income. Blacks had pretty low enrollment-rates in the lowest income-bracket, but got some of the highest enrollment-rates in the higher income-brackets (after Asians).
5. Black-Females had an odd pattern-deviation: like Black-Males, their enrollment-rates increased dramatically with family-income, getting the highest non-Asian enrollment-rate by the second-highest income-bracket. But then, oddly, their enrollment-rate fell by ~8% from the second-highest to the highest income-bracket.
6. Hispanics were pretty consistent with Whites, especially for Males. For Females, Whites had higher rates in the lowest income-bracket, while Hispanics had somewhat higher rates in all other income-brackets.
7. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates increased significantly with family-income.
8. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates were much higher for Females than Males across all income-brackets.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/publications/homecoming-a...
>Once barriers to female careers were lowered and their access to higher education was expanded, two key factors may have played a role in the female college advantage: relatively greater economic benefits of college for females and relatively higher effort costs of college going and prepara- tion for males. (girls exceeded boys in secondary school performance and attainment)
End of the day if the loan can't be written off, if the loan is just handed out to 18 year olds and has almost no limit then the organization that asks for the loan will inevitably balloon out of all proportion and no longer be reflective at all of the value you get back for almost all cases.
I say that as someone who managed to actually pay off their student loan, dread to think how people who are late 30s, still renting and still with 5 figures of college debt feel.
Hope this trend continues, why throw away the down payment of a mortgage to an institution that has spent the past decade telling you they don't want you. If in 10 years I'm seeing headlines about colleges unable to stay open from low admissions I'll be smiling.
I guess it means what you mean by “succeed”. Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.
If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it’s unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people, rather than having younger generations opt out due to the high cost.
0 - Degree dependent, of course. Music degrees have been always poorly valued by the market.
If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college looks like an incredibly good investment.
On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video at 1% that price being described as overpriced.
That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning more money. At least net more money.
IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).
To do that, would be very helpful if the government stopped giving zero interest loans. This is resulting in costs skyrocketing.
You'd think so. But then again look at healthcare in the US.
At the same time, the "elites" do make sure their offspring does get a prestigious (signaling) college/university education. So baring big changes to how society is run, some things will be difficult to get to without a college education.
Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There’s clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA, and it’s hard to see why, given everyone in the industry seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”?
And to top that off, career "fit" has been marketed so hard to kids that no one wants to go into specialized trades, which will both almost definitely pay way better and be way more fulfilling than the random inside sales job that they land right out of school
There was this pervading "common sense" that if you didn't go to college, you weren't going to be able to attract the kind of spouse that you wanted, or that you would somehow be looked down on in the reproductive market. The smart ones figured out that this was actually a handy way to filter out superficial candidates.
Fast forward 25 years, and I see many middle-aged men who are dissatisfied with their corporate lives but haven't build any income potential in something other than corporate America, so they are stuck in jobs that are increasingly subject to the pressures of globalism, etc.
Not necessarily. Bad deals are generally taken due to deceptive marketing, something that drove a lot of the college applications over the last two generations. If deceptive marketing is still in play but one group, e.g. American men, is no longer being targeted...
The other part of this is kids and biological reality. Can't imagine doing a trade or physical job while pregnant. Even after birth it took my wife a solid year or more before she was physically back to "normal".
You don't need to go to college to be successful, but the data speaks for itself. College graduates have always, on average, earned more and enjoyed significantly lower unemployment. Even if that weren't the case, the fact that college-level jobs are easier on the body and people can generally do them well for 20+ years longer is a huge benefit.
I was raised by two blue collar people and my parents were big on college. My father worked as an electrician and even by the time I was 16, his body was starting to give out. He's basically unable to ply his trade at this point due to several complications related to his career, and works a near-minimum wage office job now. I'm sure he would gladly trade half a years salary when he was 18 to get an additional 20 high-earning working years.
I know classmates of mine (2008) who still have 20, 30, 40k in debt. Even some of the kids who came from a bit of family money still struggled for the better part of their 20's to pay everything back.
The moment that a serious, legitimate credential system appears, every average university will disappear overnight. We'll be left with an oligarch class that attends the top ±30 universities and everyone else getting a AmaGoogBook certificate of completion.
Because there is much more possible value in college than just the education.
Socializing is a huge part of it. College is a good place to learn how to make friends, date, network, etc.
It's also nearly free at many schools, so I don't envision the future you're describing ever happening. Most 18-22 year olds couldn't think of a better place to be than on a campus almost exclusively filled with people in their age group.
No one does it because we intuitively understand that there is no real value in doing so; the purpose such institutions serve is credentialing, not education.
(End paraphrase)
- Education
- Certification
- Network
I don't get that line of thinking:
1. Education isn't a passive lecture-consumption activity. A "world-class professor" who put a lecture on youtube is going to have exactly zero time to talk to you as a student.
2. There's probably not that much difference between the teaching ability of a "world-class professor" and your "average" good professor. That's especially true for undergrad subjects.
I think you're assuming a false equivalency, akin to "why have parents when you can watch videos made by the best parents in the world on television?" The tech version may have many similarities, but it's not equivalent.
That's what I spent a semester (total)... in the early 90's.
These days it is more like $5,000 a semester (per class)!
Because most employers will not even consider your application without a degree.
My brother tried several different educational paths, pushed by my parents. In the end he got a sort of burnout. After years now he is picking up some work, mainly helping elderly still living alone on any tasks (from computer related to doing groceries). He seems happy, finally.
My other brother hated all his schools, got bullied a lot, he specialized in agriculture in the end. Now he's a truck driver (with one of those super big ones), he likes it. He can still give nice advice on what to plant in my garden, so there's that.
I see that my son is also really interested in many things, but school is not so much "his thing". Sitting still, listening, it's not making him happy. If he has any aspiration of building a life without formal schooling I'd support it. There is so much to learn online. He can be an entrepreneur and we can help him get there. In fact, I'd enjoy it.
Who knows with the insane cost of education, this generation of men may end up self-taught, happy and (in the US important) debt free. Maybe we should worry about the people missing out on this opportunity?
My brother was a professional basketball player up until his mid-30s. I remember when he was about the same age as the males of the story, he was deciding between a four-year scholarship at an American college, or a four-year contract in the Australian professional league. The pitch from the college was that he could return to Australia in year five and earn x. The pitch from the local team was that he could earn x by year five, but have been earning for each of the first four years; the pro team offered university payments, car, and so on. Pros and cons either way.
He eventually got his degree studying remotely in the later years of his basketball career and transitioned to a desk job. There's always a sense of what might've been, but I think things worked out well enough.
Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it, because it's our source of social power, but for young men who need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't. The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to them. As an individual non-graduate, you will always be working against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the ceiling and keep you running on hope.
Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable social status to your kids.
The result is predictable, where they're having their countries, political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them because they didn't realize they needed defending.
If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass. They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably never understand.
This guy was born for sales.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he also was terrible in college. Just did not work with his brain. He dropped out, worked some odd jobs, settled in to working a tree company, cutting down trees. Dangerous work to say the least.
He finally went back to school and took like 2 classes a semester and graduated with whatever degree he could string together from the local college, and it took him ages, I think he spent 7 years total in undergrad. It was affordable because it was just some local state school.
2 months after graduation? He's a sales rep at a B2B software firm. A year later he's the top of his sales group. His potential is huge now, and that door was firmly shut to him before he graduated. College, for him, was just a piece of paper he needed, and his life took a dramatic turn when he got it.
5000 people applied for a single position and 15 of them were women. This was for a high paying tech job.
There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back."
I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
The knowledge is there and completely trivial to obtain. Google "starting salaries for XXXX major".
Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
Is your company paying a reasonable rate? I know a few people looking for entry level jobs in tech and they have trouble getting callbacks
Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk.
Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.
Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
High paying usually means senior, seniority is usually 5-10 years, so you would need 15% 10 years ago.
There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago.
And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
Still, doesn't that story also point to a surplus of engineers?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-...
Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.
Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort. We've had movies made about this for many years and still it's so strange how it's not acknowledged.
Also: who is friend or foe? The lines have blurred significantly, which is a driving force in WANTING to change things in the first place. There's even loss of solidarity between family members, next generations.
There's no incentive to try. If I were the same age as these young men, I wouldn't bother either.
The funny thing is we also don't give a shit about credentials anymore. We just want work ethic followed loosely by experience.
Willingness to endure difficult things and learn is all we are really going for in a new hire these days.
What is amazing to me is all of the business leaders who still insist on upholding these arbitrary gatekeepers. You are leaving a ton of talent on the table.
I think the answer for many is to focus harder on the business value equation and to just let the people be free. Running a business like a power fantasy is not going to get you there. The more you try to control people the harder it will be to make money with them in the long term.
I know this is the thing in US and shouldn't surprise me but I'm based in central Europe and honestly the thought of this still feels so abstract to me. I'd love to have an option of choosing jobs that offer stock options.
This seems to characterise almost every single place I have worked for or interviewed at in different ways. I have interviewed at smaller businesses where the entire "management" team doesn't do anything, doesn't come into the office, and is just various family members of the original founder.
Then there are the larger businesses that have a network of people who all know each other and connected and occupy positions with "manager" in them, whose day consists of just telling people to do things that the person they are telling could figure out and do without their existence and better.
https://www.amazon.com/Aint-No-making-2nd-Second/dp/B002NAUW...
I never felt like this kind of victim while in college (mid-2000s). I wonder if all colleges have changed or if society has changed. If it is society that has changed, maybe our colleges are simply reflecting the real-world change.
And it's not that I'm against such structures or groups on the basis of shared identity that you're born with, but I think it would be beneficial for those structures ( especially when they're company funded ) to have niches for those who don't fit niches.
What is 'merit' for?
If your answer is 'distinguishing between things of worth and things that are valueless' then there's a problem, and you are prematurely contextualizing. Briefly, you cannot be trusted to dictate the contexts of value for the whole world around you. You're missing far too much. And it matters. Not just morally, but practically.
Might vary where you live, but my understanding is that the author of a piece is not usually the one picking images and writing the headline. There are some instances where the writer and photographer are the same, but that's not the case here.
It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why would they have photos of males in school? Stats about "people considering not going to college" is not as compelling as this story with stronger stats about what people are actually doing, IMO.
Plus that’s assuming your parents aren’t already old and can afford to feed and house you without seriously harming their own old age plans.
What can university truly offer an 18 year old who already knows what they want to do and is already doing it without an expensive education.
Wish I was that on track when I was 18 and he'll probably be ahead of his peers who went to college by the time they graduate.
You can break into music production without a degree, of course, but it's going to be a challenge in the middle of nowhere Minnesota.
The fact that they were able to buy things while living at home just drives the point home even more- he would not have the disposable income to make those purchases for many years if he decides to go to college.
Zillow has a number of houses for sale in Toledo for under $40k. Like, they need some work, but a real house, under 40k.
I think that guy is doing fine, he should just keep doing exactly what he's doing.
And regarding repairs, I've been to houses that have decent photos online, but upon entering, they're clearly rotting out. It'd be cheaper to knock the house down and start again.
1) Enlist in the military. pay is sub-par, but your living expenses are well taken care of. picking a job that has a civilian equivalent is clutch here.. eg combat medic, electrician, plumber, various IT-related fields.
2) Skilled trades - eg plumber, electrician, HVAC-related. These pay from 50k to 150k depending on what type of work you do. The "high end" for example being a new-construction electrician, working for themselves, making $75/hr with overtime. All these fields have high job security - plumbing, electricity, and HVAC are not a 'fad', and are likely to increase in demand over time.
3) Own a "low tech" business, the sort you might already work for if you are a teenager. Eg...landscaping. You can make $15/hr running a weed eater, or with a small investment and some people skills - you can pay other people $15/hr to run a weed eater, and you run the business. This is more difficult than it seems on the surface (management and people skills), but it is not something you need a college education to succeed at.
4) Specialty/niche fields...these are more difficult to break into if you don't know someone already. Some examples are mosquito spraying(for a city), [water] well digging, or roadside assistance for a larger contract(like cell phone roadside assistance, AAA, or dealer contracts). These are easier to break into if you already know someone who owns that type of business, who will show you the ropes so you know what you are getting into.
This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but hopefully someone finds it stimulating enough to come up with some ideas about work options that do not involve a mountain of student debt.
Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.
When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.
That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial experiences, if you find the right the person to train you. There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.
I hear this line parroted all the time, and it just rings so hollow. I can't remember any optional classes that I took in undergrad.
I’m not so sure. Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?
The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to take the course seriously.
From the article.
There are folks getting useless degrees and/or taking on too much debt, but getting a college degree on the whole is worthwhile.
Going deep into debt for a credential that doesn't have a reasonably large future value is a huge mistake many are pushed into making.
You shouldn't go to college if you aren't going to be a serious student and you'll be a legitimate risk for dropping out. But if you are willing to commit yourself and get decent grades, you'll be in much better shape than most people with just a high school diploma.
Your advice is also sounds really out of touch with what various jobs pay. The average new college grad makes like 60k or so.
I can only speak to my workplace and team, but we pay product designers with very little experience around 90k a year. I have no licenses and am not a professional engineer, and I make several times that.
The issue is that far too many people are going into debt for college degrees and not getting the degrees. That's the biggest. The secondary issue is that college is becoming more and more expensive, but it is still paying off for the majority of bachelor degree holders.
Are most of them making a huge mistake? I guess it depends heavily in the credential(s), but I think there has to be a deeper reason for falling and unbalanced undergraduate enrollment amongst men.
Engineering or bust just isn’t true.
If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512; I have no idea what it means ("girls are much more interested in using the library?") but I think it's significant.
If each arrival at the desk were an independent draw from the full class, then, sure, the chance of any given set of 9 arrivals having 9 women would be 1/512. (Though the chance of the sequence of 10 including 9 women and 1 man is 10/1024, or about 5 times more likely; by cherry-picking the set of arrivals to consider, you are añready making the set around you seem more unlikely than it is.)
Of course, if they were where independent the case, there’d also be a non-negligible case of a repeat in that set of arrivals; the fact that you chose a set in line at the same time demonstrates that they aren't a set of independent events. So the whole basis of your 1/512 even on the cherry-picked set is invalid.
There is zero significance to that observation.
- women more likely to study and solve logistical study problems together
- men more likely to pirate books
- men less likely to be out during normal hours
- men less likely to choose majors requiring library books
- and of course, higher college enrollment by women
I am not saying any of these were necessarily in play in your situation, but some probably are and colleges and employers should be thinking about them.
My former boss of the department learned enough chemistry through self-study. I heard Raspberry Pi was hiring guys to work as microchip design with little prior exposure.
In my worldview, everyone gets their GCSEs and goes and gets a job. OR, they follow a trade route, and attend a technical college (in the UK meaning of the word) to learn a skill. OR, the really brainy ones take an academic route, get their A levels, then head off to university to become part of the intellectual elite. I'm thinking 5% of the population here. OR, you get your A levels and then go into a polytechnic for a highly-skilled vocational job.
Polytechnics don't really exist anymore, they've all converted to universities.
Basically, we should all just return to an educational system that we had in the 70's. It was a system that wasn't broken, but we decided to "fix" it anyway.
1: https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
You sure about that? Or is it that the majority of women don't see themselves unclogging toilets for a living? I have never seen it, but I would suspect list of female applications to plumbing or electrician school is very very short.
Of course clearly when women were under-represented in college, that was due to misogyny. And now that they are over-represented, it's also due to misogyny. No matter what the facts are, the conclusion is the same.
There's a word for that.
It's a lot easier for men to find a decent paying job that doesn't require a college degree and where you won't get regularly harassed.
Most women just don't want to do that. I don't think it has much to do with acceptance. Women that want to become plumbers are few an far between.
Tech likes to pretend credentials don’t matter, but that’s entirely not true.
Not surprising that enrollment is down when too many men think learning things is for nerds.
Source: am an American male
People can be really mean, especially when you aren't "smart". I had to read a lot about a lot of things just so I could go to lunch and participate in the chatter with coworkers.
But, not getting a degree never blocked me from getting great money or any position, I just had to work hard for it, always had to prove myself, earn trust. It's life on hard mode for sure, but not a blocker.
There are tons of high paying jobs available to people who learn trades, either in trade schools or on the job. Much of tech is like a trade - as a software engineer, I certainly have more in common with a car mechanic working on custom builds than I do with an accountant, lawyer, doctor or CEO. A lot of Americans were sold the false idea that college would help them know what they wanted to do, and make money. But it's not a magic beansprout you just ride up to the heights of society... definitely not when everyone else is doing it and everyone else is in debt. You have to actually be motivated. And if you're motivated... well it's kike George Carlin said about self help books: You went to the bookstore to go find a self help book, you're motivated, what do you need the book for?
I don't know if this is true, but it seems to pop up in several areas.
This tends to be after the wave of early risk takers made it such.
Example: We're seeing more % women entering the crypto space every year.
If you read the article, I recommend at least the free preview from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Crisis-Boys-Struggling-About/dp/1...
First review the blatant, widespread corruption in Chinese academia, before you consider fully accepting the value of education in China
"In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China. Later in the same year, Germany’s Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all from Chinese scholars, while the Dutch publishing company Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by Chinese researchers.
"In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017 retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012 and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from universities in Shanghai."
https://wenr.wes.org/2018/04/the-economy-of-fraud-in-academi...
2 year associate degrees from community college are very affordable and cover the general education. Even those going into other work could afford that and their employer could offer assistance if not. If for example, the cost of a 2 year associates degree was $5,000- $10,000. That would make college affordable, but we as a society would have to recognize that as more than it currently is recognized for.
The 4 year degree is meaningless now. It doesn't even translate to a useable skill most the time, but it's become the bare minimum.
Then if certificates of specific skills...say "certificate of statistics" which could just be 3-5 classes on statistics were added for those who could afford it, that would bring down the cost.
The idea of "going to college" and moving on campus is not an economical decision most 20 years old are prepared enough to understand. There appears to be too many people losing from that bet.
And I've done well for myself. I hear college graduates earn more over their lifetimes but anecdotally I don't see it. Financially I'm doing better than almost every person I know that went, the vast majority of my peers who went have a negative net worth due to student debt and own no property, so the bar is low, but I'm doing fantastic. I think the truth is, when credentials aren't rare, how well you do is more based on your mind and some quality you have than on credentials.
I'd be curious what the numbers looked like when controlling for all the other variables which influence someone's income.
But social stigma stemms from everything from dating to parents to friends etc if one does not complete a 4-year degree.
Most tech firms are lifitng the requirement for such a degree as in tech if you can do the work you can do the work and can (I'd say should) be hired. (In a sense, most coding/programming work is blue collar in that sense -- you don't need rocket science to center a div ;)
Interesting. Maybe guys who are not super-interested scientifically in a subject realize that it becomes a waste of time. Even their academically inclined peers will struggle since there arent nearly enough academic prospects for the number of Phd graduates. Then also these men grew up watching youtube stars etc. making it big without formal education.
Maybe these men should be encouraged to get their education in europe. Credentialism of Ivy Leagues is becoming increasingly irrelevant, but the academic environment is still stimulating and not hostile to either men or women.
That said, I think university doesn't count as much as it did before. At least in softwareworld you can make it without a degree just fine. You have disadvantages for some higher positions in large companies. But who wants to do that job anyway? It seems rather unattractive today.
Does this lead to many more unmarried people like Japan?
Clearly, this is not the case with paid education in US, UK and some other developed countries.
>>> “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant
And many aren't even putting in the proper diligence:
>>> "Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered."
It’s part gatekeeping and part wishful thinking.
1) There's a point to education. Decide what you're going to do and then prepare for it. Most likely you will need to get a job that either does something for someone because it's specialized, do something for someone because it's boring, or you will entertain people. If you want to be an electrician, great, line that up and get on with it. We need electricians. Going to college isn't a goal. It's a strategy to get to a goal, but that's not what we tell kids. We tell them it's the goal. If you want to go to college because you want to work as a civil engineer - awesome - we need civil engineers. Going to college to study civil engineering isn't the goal - working as a civil engineer is the goal. Many jobs, like licensed Civil Engineer, oncologist, or attorney from YouTube videos (even if you read all the comments), require education ** as a strategy to get the job **. Other jobs require you work for a licensed practitioner. Some require a mix of the two (e.g. CPA or Welder).
2) I see too many men have extended adolescences into their 40's. If you want to man up, here's the list: 1) take care of the kids, 2) take care of the spouse, 3) take care of your job, 4) take care of your house, 5) your community, and somewhere along 8, 9 or 10 is 'spend Saturday on the phone with you college buddies from 2007, on your fantasy draft.' If you're childless an unmarried, the list is 1) take care of your job, take care of your house, 3) take care of your community. I see too many guys with the list that focuses on fun. Many of them are unmarried. Mammals are expected to invest in their children. Men who show no ability to invest in anything besides themselves are probably signaling they are poor choices as mates. This is not to say they can't get laid, but are probably not messaging well as a long term bet. I suspect they over-compensate for their poor signaling by signaling hyper masculinity. They buy trucks they don't need, spend too much time at the gym, or engage in high-risk activities.
3) The better the job, the farther it is away from being automated. No one runs to a room to look up your records at the DMV any more - we've automated those clerks away through computers. Call centers are largely automated - thanks to computers. Bus and truck drivers will eventually be automated away - thanks to computers. If your job can be done by anyone with a few hours or days of training, chances are it will be automated away. This includes programmers, as well. Companies like Square will chip away at the market from the bottom up and hyper-scalers from the top down. Developers with the depth of knowledge (usually obtained by getting degrees and often advanced degrees) are better off than going through a boot camp to put buttons on a page. Whatever your field, make sure you are able to do something that automating it away would be impractical.
4) Some skills and jobs are more valuable than others. If you want to be a music producer or DJ, awesome. You be you. Just realize that unless you're better than 99.999% of the other wannabe music producers, DJs, indie game developers, founders with a 'great idea,' or whatever it is, you will make little money. If you want to be a successful book keeper, it's nowhere near as hard and requires only a little more preparation. While people may stream your latest mix on as free wall paper music, they will pay you good money to maintain their financial records and any related filings with the US Treasury or state agencies. That's not saying music is worthless, but it does say the average book keeper is more valuable to most people than the average musician. You're more likely to pay off that degree you got in Empathy Studies as a book keeper than DJ.
What does all this have to do with the article? 1) people are becoming disillusioned with education for the wrong reason. They think that being smart and learned is just a con because they (or someone they know) got an education in a random major and is struggling. 2) Growing up asks how you can be of service rather than how someone can serve you - and I see a lot of men not growing up. Signaling you're a grownup will generally improve your fit and function in a society where people expect grownups. 3) Easy jobs disappear easily - you need to have enough investment in your skill, trade, or business that you provide more value than a shell script. 4) No one cares about your shitty music except maybe your girlfriend (she's lying) and your mother (also lying). Even if you're an entrepreneur, you're filling a need for someone else so think about the utility and value of what you're doing.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
#MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101
https://www.thedailybeast.com/metoo-is-making-colleges-teach...
Toxic Masculinity and Higher Education
https://www.higheredjobs.com/Articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=...
And so on. A quick search turns up 1000's of such links
It has led to an atmosphere of intellectual immaturity and victim-mentality-agrandizement. Universities now feel more like a coddled highschool experience than adulthood.
Don't expect intelligent, strong-minded, strong-willed men to accept such silly, degenerate distractions from the supposed goal of these universities (to provide "education", skills, network, etc.).
Why not?