Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans, nothing will change. Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades. It is a problem of culture, not economics.
Source? I think most people view these jobs as the foundation of the American middle class. At least we do in the Midwest, where I grew up.
==Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades.==
Having a Harvard degree gives you higher earning potential than a career in the trades [1].
==It is a problem of culture, not economics.==
Oddly, all the jobs you mention are historically union jobs. Meanwhile, one side of the political aisle has attempted to weaken unions over the past 4 decades. If we want people to embrace union jobs, maybe we should embrace unions?
[1] https://www.scholarshipcare.com/average-income-of-harvard-un...
That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.
This is not unlike the required courses that predominate pre-major studies at a traditional university (in the U.S., at least)
If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.
I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.
Once you need a career it doesn't really work like that though, often you're working years as an apprentice in a specified trade before you can even think about branching out on your own.
If you switch trades you're back at the bottom with apprenticeships all over again.
Someone like an English major can much easily change careers as long as they're somewhat adjacent (e.g., copywriting, research, journalism, etc) and generally starts off at a higher salary depending on their degree level. Until you hit masters level most degrees are broad generalized education.
Trades are specializations. If you're unsure about which trade you want to get into, you'd likely be better served with a business degree (which is another generalized area of study)... at least that can be applied across trades. Many tradespeople struggle with the business side of things despite being very practiced at their trade.
You can start college at 20 as easily as at 18. The problem is that you get nothing for the two years (except, I suppose, you can work as an electrician to pay for college, instead of working at McDonalds).
I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.
There are art degrees, for artists, not people expecting to make well paying careers out of it.
I know my limits of what I can do. I can sew my own buttons, do a shitty hem on something that doesn't matter. Repairing the plumbing on a bathroom sink I did catastrophic damage too is towards my upper limit; I was able to source replacement material and do the labor myself, but I consider myself fortunate that I was able to do that with only a week without a bathroom sink. Also, don't tell my landlord but now I do have a plumber's wrench on hand.
So I go to the experts. The tailor, the seamstress, the plumber. "This broke, I messed up, you can fix it better, yes next Thursday after 4pm sounds fantastic."
Yes, I understand the pride in doing things yourself. I also see no shame in shooting up a flair.
My brother is 4 years younger than me, dropped out of high school, and makes a TON of money mowing lawns and doing pools and HVAC work in Florida.
That lifestyle ages you fast though. I have plenty of energy to be physically active after work and have no aches/pains to speak of. I wouldn't give that up for the money he makes. And that physical divide is only going to get bigger as we age.
But the trades also include indoor trades such as medical technicians and assistants.
My father didn’t want me to follow grandpa and be farmer or carpenter because it was a hard life. Most hvac, plumber, electricians I’ve known were following in family footsteps because it was lucrative and they were raised in it. It’s non-trivial to break into, physically demanding and years of apprenticing before you can go your own way.
It can be done, and there are great opps for those who can stick with it for 5 years. And like all trades, your market is growing because all the old guys are getting old.
Of all the kids who could go to college or go to tradeschool they all chose college.
If you want to be happy and healthy in America, you must have a way to make money. (Or your parents must give you so much money that you're set for life.)
Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.
That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.
Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.
Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.
I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.
The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.
Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.
The idea that "social desirability" does not reflect actually valuable stuff is foolish. Class exists in some form in every society. People are always hyper-aware of class issues, and it has always been a primary part of the college/career decision process.
We even take the next step of referring those who point out racism as the actual racists.
In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists in a more amorphous form broadly.
I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.
It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.