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It's an offensive joke to tout "vocational school will get you a college degree!" in an article like this. The wages quoted for electricians should make it pretty clear how unnecessary that is - $28/hour is an exceedingly livable salary, and that's just for a journeyman.

I think this piece just reveals how ingrained "college is necessary" is for the upper-middle class. Even when they tried to write a post about the power of vocational training the best the NYT could manage is "because maybe it'll send you to college".

The punchline is that 53% of recent college graduates are employed in jobs that don't require that degree: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-re....

You have an entire generation that's being pushed into getting their degree in journalism and putting together poverty wages with freelance gigs when they could have gotten into a real profession making decent money.

It's either a joke or a magic trick - you set up a generation by saying one thing, and then reveal that the world has been doing a completely different thing while they were distracted.

I grew up with adults suggesting journalism and law as careers for me. I'd have been richer and happier with a vocational education in forestry or advanced mechanical work, but I didn't even know those careers existed until late in high school. I just got damned lucky that software caught my attention instead.

Along the same lines, there's the ridiculous cultural meme that is recited to kids: "Follow your dreams" implying that it's a perfectly reasonable and even admirable idea to fixate on some particular career early on in life and pursue it despite any setbacks.

This is awful, because a young kid may only have heard of a handful of well-known "classic" careers like journalist, lawyer, athlete, nurse, and then they end up fixating on achieving one of those simply because they committed too early -- before they had a chance to hear about careers less likely to be in a Richard Scary book like forestry, mechanical work, system administration, helicopter piloting, whatever, even though one of those might be just as exciting or more.

As a result the "popular" careers that everyone's heard of by the age of ten are all oversubscribed, and all other careers are undersubscribed. Because "follow your dreams"

Also, any academic post-graduate role is oversubscribed because too many people go to college, and in college, hear a disproportionate amount from people who did well through the post-graduate route. (Though that's changing as the actual instructors are increasingly made of famished adjuncts and TAs.)

It's funny you mention journalism. As a software engineer, I'm often wishing I studied journalism -- I feel like a newspaper serves as a pretty decent model for how a software team should function.

> I'd be curious about pre-recession numbers of high school grad employment vs. now, post-recession.

Don't forget automation, which is behind a lot of the discrepancy between recovered business sales/overall production figures while the jobs numbers lag behind. Automation means fewer employees getting more work done.

> I also think it's a tremendous disadvantage to say "Oh yeah, vocational school can get to you an associate's or a college degree" because at some point we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all.

This times a THOUSAND, I know plenty of people who make really good money and left their vocational schools with useful, in-demand skills and practically no debt. (I'm a little jealous TBH, though I still prefer my desk job.)

If you want to solve this problem in one step, make it illegal for employers to make decisions based on educational background.

Maybe make exceptions for doctors or lawyers, just to keep that from distracting us.

People will go to college to learn things, not to credentialize. Right now, we are in the middle of a zero-sum credential race, which hurts the poorest the hardest, and bizarrely the only real discussion of helping the poor is how to force them to do better in the credential race.

Wow, the idea that you shouldn't ask about educational background is pretty fascinating.

If it were placed at the same level as, say, sexual orientation in interview questions (e.g. verboten)... it would be a very effective way to skip straight to your capabilities and make a self-taught homeschooler be on the same playing field as an Ivy Leaguer.

The only "problem" would be one of getting off the ground. Currently there's a reasonable ecosystem around interning and recruiting on campuses and so on, which would muddy that "I don't know where you came from" line. Further, when you're straight-out-of-college there's a fair expectation that you're nigh useless at virtually every complex job and will need to be trained, so there's a fall-back that education is essentially vetting-by-proxy and gets you "street cred".

e.g. "Hey, look, I managed these activities and was a member of these honor societies and still managed to get a 4.0 GPA, you should hire me because I've proven that whatever I'm in, I kick ass at."

If I'm not allowed to talk about school, what the hell do I tell you I've been doing?

Still... pretty cool thought experiment.

I've actually been convinced of this stance for some years, though everyone I've talked to seems to think it's nuts.

The thing is that education--and particularly choice of school--is tightly linked with class, which in turn is linked with race, etc. Add to that the bias of "I graduated from here, therefore I favor people who graduated from similar" and I'm pretty sure there's some bad stuff that comes out of it.

We already recognize a little bit of this in that there's often advice not to put the schooling dates on your resume because it implies age, but people somehow don't make the jump to the schooling itself implying other discriminatory factors.

Plus the emphasis on schooling filters non-traditional learners and autodidacts. The software industry exploded in part because we historically haven't done that, at least during the high-growth periods that corresponded to high-demand periods. There are obviously some sectors for which you absolutely want formal training (medicine, EIT/PE-type engineering, etc.) but I'd argue that's the exception and not the rule. In most jobs it just matters that you know what you're doing.

We should figure out a way to evaluate and select on actual competencies rather than trying to use school as a surrogate for them. For many professions this should be relatively straightforward. Competencies are not the be-all/end-all (as we know from programming interviews) but to the extent that we expect schools to represent them we should be able to evaluate with testing if they're truly anywhere near objective.

Unfortunately, that won't happen as long as the easy option is available.

> though everyone I've talked to seems to think it's nuts.

gee, I guess everyone else is just wrong.

A stance can be nuts and have value at the same time. Most anything resulting in a social change will be nutty at the outset since it challenges assumptions around status quo. Basic income was pretty nutty too when I became a vocal proponent ten-odd years ago, but the world seems to be catching up.

Yeah, it seems like they wouldn't be dead ends because they get you to a vocation.

>we have GOT to stop acting like a college degree is the be-all-end-all. We cannot keep protesting against the tremendous student loan debt burden that's creeping ever bigger on the one hand while touting college degrees as being the ONLY way to get a high-paying "respectable" job.

It's not "us", it's politicians who service the wealthy that like to lay down those two contradictory pieces of advice ("why did you get a degree if you didn't want debt?" / "why did you not get a degree if you wanted a decent job?").

Oh c'mon. "Get a college degree" is the mantra of baby boomer parents at all levels. It's not the wealthy elite pushing that message.

College isn't the end-all, but the education helps, even if it's not purely technical or vocational. Spending a few years just learning how to think about various problems, discipline to study instead of drink (or if you're me, you didn't do well with this), etc.

I do think that we over-emphasize the school itself. What I mean by that, at least in my opinion, is that if it's not an Ivy and not the top school in the field that you are 150% sure you will absolutely do (and won't change majors 3x like I did), then take the reasonably priced state option.

Time has flown and I recently realized I'm 12 years out of college. My education was ~10k a year at a public school - a decent one, but not even the best one in the state. I would not be materially farther ahead in life if I'd spent 30k a year at UVA or 50k at Georgetown. And I'm not paying off undergraduate debt right now. I am paying off grad (law school) debt, but that's another story - I was a night student and by the time I graduated it didn't make sense to restart my career in law when I was pretty well along in my industry. And the mistake I made was not going to the cheaper, public state school (and I didn't attend an Ivy).

By all means, get your education, but control the costs. To an 18 year old graduating high school it might sound like a no brainer to spend 50k at the "good" private school over the state option, but the reality is, there are few circumstances where that's true. I did it the right way once, and the wrong way once, so just my two cents.

"I do think that we over-emphasize the school itself."

God yes. I remember an article I read earlier this year (can't remember the title or I'd link it) that followed students at Ivies and at State schools and found that (controlling for grades) it was the students' commitment to networking, extracurricular activities, volunteering, internships, etc. that made the most difference to their long-term success. I WISH SOMEONE HAD TAUGHT ME THAT! I graduated 10 years ago and oh my god I wish I had done more to network/intern/volunteer when I was in school.

It does come down to that, and it makes sense if you think about it. Fresh grads come in batches of thousands at a time, many of them took the same classes, similar majors, etc, even across schools. Grades sometimes matter, sometimes don't (I had a low GPA because I had a bad habit of picking and choosing what I wanted to learn about, and it didn't come in full course increments). So what's left is the network and internships - the demonstrated ability to act human enough that people will talk to you, and listen to your ideas and think enough of you to give you a shot at something. That's why I say Ivies still matter - there's access from there to a very different network, and it opens up a job market that people like me would have very little access to.

This will be very New England focused, since that's where I live, but if my daughter doesn't get into an Ivy, I'd really try to talk her out of Colby or Bates as a consolation prize. They're fine schools, but very expensive, and probably not a whole lot better than some of the state options like UNH, UMaine, UMass, UVM, etc. They're not 20-30k more per year better anyway.

The one that I never figured out, is who on God's great earth would go to a state university, in a state that you don't live in? Out of state tuition at UNH, to pick one of them that's close by and I have interns from, is not very much cheaper than going to Colby or Bates or BC/BU.

I could have picked better examples, I suppose. I went to a state school as an out of state student because it was still reasonable (James Madison was 10k a year).

UNH is a bad example and I shouldn't have used it. It's expensive even for in-state because the state is not funding it as much as they used to. But my point was that I wouldn't spend Ivy money on Bates or Colby when going there is not clearly better than a state school as it would be with an Ivy.

Depends on what degree you want. Plenty of state schools like Texas, Michigan, Berkeley, and Georgia Tech are in the top-20 for one field or another. Wanting to go to one of those for one of their specialties is reasonable.

Top 20 in a specialty is a stretch for me. I could see if something was the top school for something - otherwise, we get into the wishy-washy world of school rankings which really can be manipulated and start to mean less as you go down the list. However, let's hypothetically say that top 20 is a good cutoff - there is still the very real issue of a 17 year old kid (because that's when we apply to college) following through on that specialty. It doesn't matter how good a CS program CMU has if you decide two semesters in to pursue that BFA.

Now, for your specific examples, provided that you are in-state, they actually are reasonable options for any degree. Texas (10k), Michigan (14k), Cal Berkeley (14k) and GT (10k), all excluding room and board. On the other hand, I'd really not want to send my kid to those schools from out of state unless she had some pretty specific plans and seemed reasonably likely to follow through. And if that were the case, we'd probably pay that first year out of state while figuring out residency to try and bring that down.

I'll bet there's an untapped hiring pool that consists of 18 year olds newly admitted to good colleges (or rising sophomores who don't want more debt). They've been admitted, and outside of internships and technical majors the "college advantage" is largely selection bias.

Come to think of it, one recruiter at my school did offer bonuses to any student who dropped out to work for him instead of graduating. The department organizer didn't look thrilled.

I believe a lot in the value of undergraduate education in general as a time to learn how to think and even just grow up a bit and learn how to live independently and such. Even just exploring and figuring out what on earth you want to be when you grow up (at 34 I still struggle with that). Beyond that, internships really open doors. I think that some kind of post-secondary education is important - just do it reasonably in terms of course of study and cost. Take up a trade if you prefer, that's education as well. But do something to develop yourself - and I don't necessarily think going right into the corporate meat grinder is the best way to start since you'll get such a narrow view of the way to do things right out of the gate.

I do wish that we did gap years in the US like some countries do. If my daughter grows up and decides to take a year or two between high school and college, I'd be thrilled. Shit, I'd pay for it if she found something reasonably constructive to do. I'd have been way better off had I delayed my freshman year by 1-2 years - I had a great time, but I didn't go to class much.