My understanding of this new college is that it's aimed at solving the perceived problem of four-year Catholic liberal arts schools, namely that they graduate a lot of young adults with the same (or roughly the same) degrees, but without an obvious career path laid out for them.
So, to begin with, high school graduates who go to these schools were predisposed to go to a Catholic liberal arts college. If the College in the article is successful in its mission, these folks will graduate with the degree they wanted, in the surroundings/environment they wanted, but also with solid career possibilities.
People have been swearing up and down for over a decade that the US graduates far more people with bachelors degrees than we "need", and that more parents[0] should be encouraging their kids to learn a trade. This new college is a response to that.
[0] it's seldom "us"; the problem seems to be isolated, in many peoples' minds, to other peoples' kids, and they don't want their own kids to be the ones who learn a trade.
>>> People have been swearing up and down for over a decade that the US graduates far more people with bachelors degrees than we "need", and that more parents[0] should be encouraging their kids to learn a trade.
The trades are not without their issues, however. Many of them are physical jobs. The trades people who have come to work at my house, if they're my age (58) are hobbling and broken. Their hands look like hell. Many are sunburned. Many if not most of them work for tiny businesses that receive virtually no oversight.
Encouraging the trades might make sense in a country with a strong safety net, free health care, better labor laws, stronger unions. The American public figures who are promoting the trades also tend to be doing nothing about those things, or are even opposed to them. I've heard that the trades are a good option in Europe.
> Encouraging the trades might make sense in a country with a strong safety net, free health care, better labor laws, stronger unions.
This is just my own observation, but the tradesmen I've seen do OK in the US are those that own and run their own business -- even those that have just 1 tradesperson working. Think "Inland Plumbing LLC" run by a guy and his wife out of their house. Yes, many trades are back-breaking work. I have a relative who was a home inspector for years (crawling around in attics, crawl spaces, and roofs all day is exhausting), and he did struggle at times to pay to raise several kids.
Owner-operator electricians and plumbers in particular (and especially those rated for commercial work) can do very well.
The biggest problem (and not everyone sees it as one) with the trades is that there's a lot less opportunities to coast through middle age without putting in effort ahead of time.
You only see the 58yo that comes to unclog your drain. You don't see the 58yo who's name is on the van. You don't see the one who has some comfy job as a building manager for some commercial facility.
Kids go to college because even despite the wildly unacceptable costs, it remains the single best investment a person can make in their future earning potential. They go to college because it is actually very likely the correct decision with the information they have at the time.
College is the best investment a young person can make even outside of STEM. Obviously the odds of financial upside varies discipline to discipline, but within most of them, college degrees are worth the money as compared to not getting a college degree (not to mention that most disciplines are entirely inaccessible without a degree).
Lots of people out here who can actually affect the labor market and affect the way student financing works, and instead of hiring people without college degrees and instead of electing people who can reform financing, they just ask students to take a decidedly stupid bet on not getting a degree. It's a silly way to solve the problem.
My mom frequently encouraged me to learn a trade on top of my chosen (at the time) field (Special Effects). She always pointed out that people would need their cars fixed and would need their electrical wired.
People will always need their car fixed locally, though. It's reasonable to be concerned about jobs that could be performed anywhere. "Take this thing out" is a much easier request to ship off than even most other information/tech jobs.
I didn’t actually go into Special Effects. Sometimes I wish I did, but Software Development pays better with more flexibility.
I once had a friend comment when we were talking about job security that the first thing to go when a recession hits is dance lessons and Karate classes. At the time it felt like film making was very boom or bust
When the first dotcom crash hit, I paused working in tech and welded at a shipyard for a while. Enjoyed the work, and was very, very thankful I had a fallback skill!
I'd also like to mention that half of the parts in any given Tesla are off the shelf parts shared with other car brands. Just normal boring things you'd never think of... but ones that also require NHTSA approval, thus, a small number of Chinese companies have a monopoly on those otherwise boring parts. This came up when the pandemic started, and Tesla had to halt production lines waiting for the cargo ship to arrive from overseas because Tesla doesn't make that part.
We have like 3 actually good mechanics locally... most of what they do is related to alignment, suspensions, and consumables that owners don't feel comfortable doing themselves. All three of these still apply to a Tesla, even though they don't need their oil changed, they still have tires, antifreeze, air filters, brakes, etc, and that's still bread and butter work for the local shop.
There is definitely less overall maintenance required. The total number of mechanics needed would definitely decrease if everyone was driving electric. We did zero maintenance other than brake fluid check and tires in 3 years. This experience is typical. Certainly we will need more independent electric capable shops than we have now, but there is a definite first mover advantage at play. Also, cars get wrecked and need repairs. Body shops will always be a thing too. Still, these things are simpler, have less parts, and are easier to service in general.
> We did zero maintenance other than brake fluid check and tires in 3 years. This experience is typical.
That's nothing special these days, look at the maintenance schedule of a new Toyota Corolla, except 3 oil changes (and that's only in the US where this is done ridiculously often) there's nothing ICE specific on there...
There are valid reasons why US spec cars often have shorter intervals… heat and dust are both bad for oil, and the US has a lot
more of both than Europe or Japan.
And my 2016 F-150. Bought it used in 2017. I finally changed the front brakes yesterday not because it was necessary but because I felt that it should probably be done on a 5 year old vehicle with 47k miles on it. Took me all of an hour. I’d never changed brakes on my own before (saw and helped my dad as a kid lots of times.)
Fair enough, most new cars /should/ need little maintenance. On a 10 year time span the number of things that can (and likely will) need maintenance can only be greater on an ICE engine. Ignition systems, emission systems, so many more moving and friction parts on an ICE vehicle.
>but you should really call your local electric vehicle mechanic and ask him how business is doing.
that anecdote is only indicative of short term market conditions. It's sort of like saying that trucking jobs are safe because there are truck driver shortages today, ignoring the impending doom of automation in the next few decades.
> It's sort of like saying that trucking jobs are safe because there are truck driver shortages today, ignoring the impending doom of automation in the next few decades.
If it's still decades out, that means it's still reasonable to suggest to people looking for a career. Changing careers at 38 is something a lot of people do, for instance after 20 years in the military.
Teslas spend more time receiving service than almost any other modern car. EV's also need tires rotated and changed far more often than ICE due to their greater weight and torque.
My 4 year old Tesla has had several unscheduled service visits. None of them were for anything EV related. All of them were for Tesla-specific or "new car builder" things. Eg, main infotainment replacement (from ancient arm to modern intel for better performance), ball joint replacement at 40K miles, forgotten tow package when my car was delivered, improperly installed windows, etc, etc, etc.
> They would love it if you could fix a vehicle instead of having to replace the entire thing, which is what the OEMs want.
The auto insurance industry knows how to influence car makers, they run the IIHS crash testing rating system, and they could probably also rate cars on repairability. Although, sometimes the safety features make it hard to repair, so there's some tradeoffs there.
> My understanding of this new college is that it's aimed at solving the perceived problem of four-year Catholic liberal arts schools, namely that they graduate a lot of young adults with the same (or roughly the same) degrees, but without an obvious career path laid out for them.
The top of the home page states their aim, "Learn a trade,earn a degree, and graduate without crippling debt. The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor. We teach our students to think, but also to pray, to love, and to build."
That's their stated goal, but their staffing suggests a truer revealed goal, which is political rather than practical: they aren't accredited to offer a degree, the degree they offer isn't valuable in the trades they hope to serve, they don't have instructors with credentials in the trades, and they cost more than a community college. What they do have is a founder and coterie of teaching fellows that share a peculiar ideology.
By way of example: "electrician" is one of their 5 trades, and they have no listed electrician faculty.
> My understanding of this new college is that it's aimed at solving the perceived problem of four-year Catholic liberal arts schools, namely that they graduate a lot of young adults with the same (or roughly the same) degrees, but without an obvious career path laid out for them.
No, it's aimed at solving a perceived problem of the Catholic working class, that they aren't effectively equipped and harnessed as a political arm of the Church to shape civil society.
The people this is aimed to attract is not people who would otherwise go to traditional liberal arts colleges and universities, Catholic or otherwise.
This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture. The standard for "skilled trade" should be world-class skills (Hyperbaric Welding, Robotics, Civil Engineering; ie. "skills an advanced society would export") and not work that can be exported to the developing world. These, "advanced skills" require a level of critical thinking that requires college education. We're beginning to forget that we can't have an advanced society without a well-educated and informed voting populace.
First, we still need plumbers, painters, and tradesmen of all sorts.
Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.
Third, the demand for degrees — due to the idea that everyone must go to college, and misguided subsidies to make that happen — already far exceeds what colleges are able to supply while still being achievable by the majority of their customer base.
The result has been degree inflation, cost inflation, and a huge number of useless workers with useless degrees unable to pay off their crippling college debt.
>Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.
And even if equipped (whatever that means exactly) many simply have no interest in doing so. I assume I could have gotten into a PhD program of some sort had I had my heart set on it. (I did get a couple of Masters--and mostly quite enjoyed them.) But had very little interest in getting a PhD--and find the idea retrospectively even less appealing today.
If you broaden the historical context the result has been an advanced economy with computers and high speed communication. It's going to be this kind of anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist rhetoric that ends up killing innovation in the United States.
We're rich enough (for now) to import innovation; we don't need an educated populace. We have a robust military that makes us untouchable geopolitcally.
Do you see how dangerous this kind of bullshit is? Do you see what happens when enough of the people in your country don't value things like degrees and institutions of higher learning? The Athenians fell because of their hubris; not because they valued poetry and art.
It's not a question of if we value it - we have yet to automate trades, and we still require tradespeople to carry out the day to day work of construction and manufacturing. There's nothing wrong with that, as there are many people who'd rather work with their hands as opposed to sitting in front of a computer.
So long as people have ready access to a trade education if they want it, the wages afforded to various professions should be sufficient to handle the distribution of students into the future - clearly, degrees are still desirable enough to the alternative that trade wages will have to go higher before more people start moving into it.
What a curious line to draw, between "some Catholics think that postsecondary voc-ed might be a good idea" and "anyone with glasses might be an intellectual, best kill them just in case".
> This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture.
I’m Swedish and this is the ideology Sweden is based on. But I’ve come to see it as backwards, even immoral.
There’s a dream on the left side of the political spectrum that everyone is borne a blank slate that society can fill with whatever it wants. By this logic a rich country can fill their blank slates with wonderfully productive and innovative PhDs, because all it takes is economic resources invested in education.
But that’s simply not true. Highly challenging, creative, innovative thinking doesn’t work that way. Take Srinivasa Ramanujan as an example. With no formal education at all he wrote himself into the history books of mathematics. He’s an extreme example. But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.
I have one brother that has a mild intellectual handicap and one that has a PhD in medicine. The former makes sandwiches for the kids in a local school and works in a stable. The latter makes equipment for medical research. They are both perfectly happy with their stations in life. But taken to the extreme this ideology means that if they were borne in different countries then their positions may very well be switched. Nobody benefits from this. It would make them both miserable, the sandwiches worse and (probably :P) the medical research equipment less useful.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case I think that means every country on earth is going to have some brilliant innovators, and some skilled craftsmen. They’ll need both to stay rich.
> But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.
This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.
Skilled craftsmen exist because there are things that require a combination of capital in the form of tools and knowledge in the form of training on a small scale. Think about an electronics repair shop: they will pretty much always exist (and should) because as sophistication increases in electronics, when they break they always result in a unique snowflake of a situation that is basically impossible to automate the repair thereof. Repair also requires spare parts and tools that they buy one time and use many times.
In a dynamic economy both will exist, but it doesn't render the argument that we should want more Nvidias and fewer Subways any less valid.
> This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.
Another example of such a competition is the global innovation economy. If you’re in the 50th percentile of GPU companies then you’re not nVidia, and economically speaking you can just go home.
I understand it sounds harsh, and it is. But it’s the truth.
Sure, but college attendance is very high now and wasn’t back when we had a “more informed electorate”. Educational achievement is not a catch all for actually being a thinking and critical person.
Also, not everyone has equal potential, and the people who do have it may not want to use it. Having many trade paths, not just elite ones helps our society to match achievement and desire. We certainly need the full spectrum and should encourage the development of more choice.
I need a plumber. And I don't care what plumbers in Vietnam charge, because I need a plumber here. And if everyone I know made twice as much money, we'd still need plumbers, maybe even more so, and we'd just pay more for them.
So, to begin with, high school graduates who go to these schools were predisposed to go to a Catholic liberal arts college. If the College in the article is successful in its mission, these folks will graduate with the degree they wanted, in the surroundings/environment they wanted, but also with solid career possibilities.
People have been swearing up and down for over a decade that the US graduates far more people with bachelors degrees than we "need", and that more parents[0] should be encouraging their kids to learn a trade. This new college is a response to that.
[0] it's seldom "us"; the problem seems to be isolated, in many peoples' minds, to other peoples' kids, and they don't want their own kids to be the ones who learn a trade.