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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting point about college education:

Traditionally, contracting was the best paying "blue collar" job out there, and to a certain extent it still is. If you were smart, hardworking, but didn't go to college, you started hauling bricks on a construction site and then worked your way up to general contractor over the course of years. Lots of the best GCs out there did this. But, as less and less of super capable kids DON'T go to college, there are less super capable 18 yearolds hauling bricks and 10 years later, less super capable GCs.

As more and more kids are going to college, who will do these high-skill blue-collar jobs?

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To me it appears the same group of kids is doing it, but now with college degrees. I have a friend who was a GC at 25, the main obstacle to his success was access to capital, which he achieved through a friend's father who was already in the business and looking for investment opportunities.

He spent a bunch of years working on his skills and doing his own work, but now just subcontracts all the labor (mostly to immigrants), deals with legal/zoning issues, and keeps the client happy.

I suspect the old system (start at the bottom, amass skills & capital until you're on top) won't work anymore, because the capital arrangement strongly favors people with a money connection over skills. But time will tell.

Probably the same super capable kids just starting 10 years later as - still super capable - adults, realizing that their college degree has brought them virtually zero advantage over everyone else in the labour market.

Well, it's not the same thing.

When you are 20 and you are given an opportunity of growing fast through learning from experience, you are willing to do anything including brick laying and if you are actually super-capable by the time you are 30 or 35 you have no matches (and not in just brick laying).

But this is because you moved by hand thousands of bricks, and tons of mortar, and lots of double shifts and working weekends, and you did that because it was an opportunity to grow AND you were a blank sheet to begin with.

When you get 30 you have some 5 years of college, if in US a huge student debt, and 5 years of failures in getting an adequate job, possibly a family, you simply won't be able to put in the energy and the time that you already spent.

In a nutshell if you start from the bootom at 30 in this field you need to be super-super-capable, and it is rare enough, because if you were really super-super-capable you would have alredy found another job, another field, etc. and be successful at it.

>because if you were really super-super-capable you would have alredy found another job, another field, etc. and be successful at it.

Job markets aren't efficient at matching supply to demand. Trying different opportunities takes a large amount of time. I can't hit up construction, IT, healthcare, physics, retail, banking, and academic industries in a week to find out if I'm cut out for at least one of them.

> I can't hit up construction, IT, healthcare, physics, retail, banking, and academic industries in a week to find out if I'm cut out for at least one of them.

Sure, but the hypothetical 30ish super-super-capable would have had roughly 5 years (not just one week) to find something better before starting brick laying, and this is the typical CATCH 22, if you are super-super-capable it doesn't take you 5 years to fail to find something.

This is what happens when the upper-middle and upper classes are the only groups seeing an increase in quality of life. People would still be going into these industries if they were seen as long-term careers. If wages don't increase above real inflation, people will move to different industries.

This is the direct result of outsourcing and illegal immigration gutting the middle class.

They're making plenty of money -- as the article says, "[The general contractors] have all the power and charge accordingly." I'd say it has more to do with people (including their parents and peers) seeing college as necessary and not considering a construction industry career at all.

Now that the labor pool has adjusted following the recession, of course they change what they charge. For decades, though, wages for those folks have been stagnant and quality of life limited, which is why their parents and peers pushed them to go into different fields. I guarantee that if wages had increased as much as the stock market had in that time, there wouldn't be such a limited pool of contractors at the moment.

> As more and more kids are going to college, who will do these high-skill blue-collar jobs?

The ones that can't get jobs in their college major.

Still plenty of people doing those jobs, but they tend to be immigrants.

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