Gen Z Are Increasingly Choosing Trade Schools over College

0USD + 2-4 years training, all expenses paid + access to highly in demand jobs

vs.

20k USD to 200k USD + 4-6 years education by professors who generally don't even want to teach you + a degree that may not even land you a job

Who wouldn't choose the former over the latter?

However during one of these sessions parents happened to be in the room, and one approached me afterward to say the following. He said that while it was true that some trades eventually pay very well (he was always in the trades), you pay the price with your body--long hours on your feet, a higher risk of occupational hazards, back problems from bending over frequently. He saw a desk job as the goal to aspire to and that is what he wished for his children. Of course, desk jobs come with their own occupational hazards [1], but that point stuck with me and I no longer blindly encourage young people to go into the trades without at least thinking about the big picture, whatever that may be.

Also I don't know how much I buy the 'straight path to a six-figure job' bit FTA. It's can also be a long slog to get to the owner-operator stage, and not everyone is cut out for all of the responsibilities that come with it.

[0]: I say that one risk of community colleges is that they very much feel like "high school v2" and it's easy to wander into them and waste time instead of thinking seriously where you do (or don't want to work). When I started working a "job", I quickly learned what I _didn't_ want to do, and it was motivating for me to take the idea of a career seriously.

[1]: RSI and poor ergonomics and the like, something I also tell students: "When you start noticing problems in your wrists, it will be too late and you won't be able to ignore ergonomics ever from that point onward".

Even South Park covered it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc1_AY7mufM

A lot of millennials were taught by boomers that getting any random liberal arts degree would be a sure ticket to easy street in the middle class, then ended up hosed by debt and lack of marketable skills when those promises turned out to be out of date. I'm glad Gen Z isn't falling into the same trap.

Somewhat related, but one of my favorite movies of all time, Margin Call, is underscored by this constant awareness that all the brilliant on Wall Street - all of the intellectual power, and occasionally sheer genius, harnessed for financial engineering - all this mental horsepower could have been spent building rockets, bridges, incredible new materials, predicting the weather, or teasing out the secrets of the cosmos and of existence. Propelling the nation into a new century.

I was about to quote a scene at length, but honestly, I'd feel bad ruining a single moment of the thing. If you're even tangentially interested in Wall Street . . or the aughtie's collapse of the financial system . . or even just the giant sucking sound of all our best and brightest getting pulled into shit that is dumb and wrong . . I'd seriously recommend it. Probably the best Wall Street movie ever made.

Anyway, it's somewhat related, but it's also very related, because, jesus. Do we really need another bumper crop of generic bachelor degrees feeding the paper machine? The last big enterprise software install I sat in on, a rotating cast of forty some different executives, with over sixty seven hours spent in meetings at an average cost of eleven hundred dollars per minute. That's just salaries. Somehow, in my gut, I feel like if we had more certified technical people laying around, we would not be seeing crap like that so damn often.