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Comment by wikidani | Hacker News Reader

I believe that in the western world, specially in the countries that have free (or subsidized) universities there has been a lot of societal pressure that makes young people want to go to college but no idea why or for what. Now, one of the smartest decisions I made was going for the sort of equivalent of a trade school in my country, it's not a replacement of college but an alternative for what I believe americans call High School, so three years from fifteen to eighteen years old and I truly believe that the rest of the world would benefit massively from such a concept. I also believe we should stop viewing the preparation for university as universal and provide young people with a trade from the beginning.

(edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn't know about them

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To be clear, that's an option in America as well. They're usually called a "Joint Vocational School" or a "Career Center", and they offer a variety of options.

For example the one I went to had:

* Public Safety to learn firefighting and Emergency Medical Services

* HVAC to learn a heating and cooling

* Building trades to learn electrical, carpentry, plumbing

* Software development

* Medical Assisting (a pre-nursing route)

* Cosmetology for hair stylists and makeup artists

* Engineering and Precision Machining Technologies

There are plenty of other options at that specific career center as well.

A lot of my peers 'looked down' on this choice, as they viewed the "college path" as the only option to be successful in America, and considered this an inferior education.

> To be clear, that's an option in America as well.

Sort of. You're talking about college age, while the GP was talking about high school age.

edit: I'm wrong, this was for high school students. I did go to high school in America but I never knew about this.

Thanks for catching that. My mistake - I meant to clarify. This is in replacement of the last two years of High School.

So you take your Junior and Senior high school years at a Career Center or JVS.

Huh. I'm not sure if we just didn't have that or what, but this is the first I'm hearing about it. Thanks for pointing that out!

Well, it might be an Ohio specific thing, now that I’m looking into it more.

https://www.ohiohighered.org/students/find-a-career/career-t...

Under the section on Ohio > School districts may combine resources to form a fourth type of school district, the joint vocational school district, which focuses on a technical skills–based curriculum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_district

Yep. And, quite honestly, I think a large proportion of women going to college/university are going because they have been told to go, not because they believe it will help them reach any particular goals. Where are all of these university educated women ending up? Swathes of them end up in mediocre jobs like call centre operators or bullshit jobs at big finance companies and the like. It's a million miles from academia. Did they really all need 3 years of full-time education?

I think the numbers of men going to university is just closer to what is a sensible proportion.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, this is very frequent in my country where, about two thirds of the women I know do some kind of university career without actual job prospects because of some preconceived notion that it will give them an employment as soon they graduate. Most of them started around 2019 and now face an uncertain future because of the economical consequences of the pandemic affecting their parents, which are almost always their main source of economical support. The widespread rejection of regular, "not educated" jobs (I think you could say blue collar?) is creating this university diploma inflation effect that will probably pop in the next five to ten years

I also do believe that one of the main things that allow people to get into university is the support of middle class parents who wish their sons achieve anything in higher educaction because of a preconceived notion about the relationship between employability and a university diploma.

> Did they really all need 3 years of full-time education?

Higher ed has become extremely top heavy with administration, and those people DO need the women to take those classes.

Consider: The more women whom graduate with K-12 degrees, the better of a job the executives and administrators at my state U system have done. They get incredibly high salaries, in fact. The problem is they've done such a great job that they produce twice as many qualified educated K-12 young teachers as the statewide market can absorb. So my favorite Denny's restaurant waitress has a K-12 education degree and is making more money off tips at Dennys than her competitors whom got a job in public schools, where the average career length is only 6 years so they're already onto their second careers, selling real estate or working with her at Dennys. But having a K12 education degree doesn't make her a better waitress, it just makes her poorer.

The microeconomic solution to her problem is if only the top 50% in her graduating class get hired, she should have worked harder to be in the ever shrinking fraction of successfully people. The macroeconomic solution is to stop sending two times too many girls to K12 degree granting schools, which will kill the careers of the executive management at those schools so thats sure as hell never happening.

So its the usual American thing where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The president of our stateside uni system gets a payraise from $700K to $750K because he did such a great job producing more K12 diplomas. Meanwhile the poor girl is worse off than her mother, financially, because she has enormous loans to get a vocational job ticket for a job field she never worked in.

Can you please tell us more about your career trajectory?

I wouldn’t normally expect someone who went to trade school from 15-18 to be so proficient in a foreign language(English) like you.

Sure! First of all, thanks for saying I am proficient in english, it's something I am a bit insecure and always try to hide that english is a second language to me. I also must clarify that I am extremely fortunate to have parents that were both polyglots so language learning was kind of a given in my household, specially english. Right now, I am working in my second year in a big consultancy firm doing nearshore web development for a big healthcare provider in the US. Although right now I am working as a tester, my school taught us how to do (nearly) fullstack development, so I have been rotating duties in my work, ranging from normal, run of the mill web dev to backend in nodeJS and a bit of cosmosDB. I did learn a lot of stuff for myself before going to trade school but I did learn the basics of working in a development team while doing my third year thesis, which simulates the design, production and release of a real world, fullstack application with an actual use case.

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