<p>I am in my early 50's- probably the last generation for it to be common to be able to earn a living with skills acquired in high school or on the job for their entire working history.</p>
<p>My grandfather was able to pay cash for a very nice home in a very nice Seattle neighborhood with an 8th grade education ( and assiduous frugality by himself & my grandmother- on the other hand, my paternal grandfather was assiduous at accumulating wives/children & gambling debt :rolleyes:)</p>
<p>When I was in high school- few people I knew attended college & vocational courses ( especially the ones that attracted boys like wood/metal/auto shop) at the high school level were taken seriously and students could learn solid skills.
( I took wood shop in jr high- which I really liked, but I was the only girl and that made me feel weird enough that I didn't stick with it- even though that was not the fault of the teacher or the other students- however this particular * school* had a very "50's" mentality of male/female roles)</p>
<p>Now 90% of my circle of friends/family have had at least some college if not advanced degrees- however- I would also say that over half of them have had a * major* career change at least once. ( even the ones without a college degree have changed fields)</p>
<p>One had an Anthro BA & an MBA worked in the health industry & is now doing alterations & working at a retail sewing machine shop.
Another with a degree in linguistics & was working with international students in the university is trying to find pt work ( she gave up on full time) in horticulture.
Lots of people who were retired/laid off engineers in my horticulture classes.
English professor w/out tenure is now in school to get his R.N.</p>
<p>( and these are people who are * at least* in their mid-50s & blessed with good health & energy- heaven help the ones whose health doesn't permit that)</p>
<p>People are really cobbling together any experience/skills in order to find work & it seems to be easier for those with the perspective of being flexible than it does for people who are set on a certain job description or industry.</p>
<p>I wonder how flexible we are encouraging our kids to be?</p>
<p>I don’t know, but my father had a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering.</p>
<p>His theory about advanced degrees was this: The more advanced your degree, the smaller the area you concentrate in. Therefore he believed people with advanced degrees learned more and more about less and less, until eventually they knew everything about nothing. :p</p>
<p>I am not sure if your experience reflects overall changes in society at large as it does your own life circumstances. When I went to college, almost no one from my highschool did. Where we live now? Every home is dual income professional, everyone has advanced degrees, and every kid goes to college. Its another planet. But if I go back to the old hood, people still aren’t going to college, and they are still working like my parents did. They are hairdressers, mailmen, appliance repair people, and doing road work for the city crew. I don’t have it handy but I’m sure the general statistics point to increased college attendance but there is still huge diversity out there in terms of formal education and occupations. </p>
<p>However I do think being flexible is important, but it always has been. But I think it won’t take more than a year out of college to realize the reality and adapt accordingly. Most kids on cc have their lives mapped out to death as if it will be so, but the vast majority of course will end up changnig majors, doing occupations very unrelated to what they did major in, and probably changing occupations even more than our generation. I think its good to have a plan but at the same time, entirely realize you have to just go with the flow of opportunities and interests that emerge in your life.</p>
<p>LOL, could easily happen if you’re not careful. Back when I was in college. Cambridge Cab boasted about having the largest number of PhDs of any taxi company in America.</p>
<p>*herefore he believed people with advanced degrees learned more and more about less and less, until eventually they knew everything about nothing. *</p>
<p>I had a prof who used to say that Ph.d just meant * piled higher & deeper*</p>
<p>I think it is realistic to expect that advanced education means specializing, but I was thinking more about students who narrow the field even more by getting a professional type major- for their BA.</p>
<p>In college in the 70s, I studied journalism. I learned how to type text into a typesetting machine the size of a baby grand which would spit out copy on wet shiny paper. We’d hang the paper on a clothesline to dry, then run it through a hot wax machine to make the reverse side sticky. Finally, we would cut and paste - literally, with scissors. “Oops, that column is a couple inches too long - cut the last couple inches off and stick it over there on page six!”</p>
<p>Fortunately, I double-majored in the liberal arts where I learned to reason, communicate, and compile new understandings from multiple sources. I’ve gotten a lot more career advancement from those skills than from my typesetting savvy. </p>
<p>A lot of our kids will find their lives’ work in fields that don’t even exist right now. Breadth and flexibility are what we need to mean today in talking about getting an education in something “practical.”</p>
<p>I don’t know - engineering majors tend to be specialized, but still there are different things people do with an engineering degree. My kids are amazed when I tell them I never wrote a paper in college - I tested out of the english comp class, and took my humanities sequence in psych where all the tests were multiple choice. My S is chafing under the broad education in high school and can’t wait to get to college where he can narrow his focus and have more classes he is actually interested in. My H has 2 bachelors degrees in very different fields. One can go back to school if switching careers; it’s not necessary to learn everything at once in college.</p>
<p>A lot of our kids will find their lives’ work in fields that don’t even exist right now. Breadth and flexibility are what we need to mean today in talking about getting an education in something “practical.”</p>
<p>I agree that what they learn today may or may not be applicable to what they are doing in 10 years.</p>
<p>I love that Steve Jobs was taking a calligraphy class @ Reed ( they still teach calligraphy during Paideia), just for fun.</p>
<p>My degree from the 70’s is in accounting, one of the few fields that doesn’t change much over time, or it’s not supposed to. (When you hear the term “creative accounting” in a news story, you’ll often hear “arrested” right along with it.) But like gadad, many of the tools of my trade have changed beyond all recognition. I remember as a young accountant slaving for hours over 13-column worksheets; the same data can now be produced with a couple of keystrokes in Excel. D is highly amused when I tell her about the one computer course I took, which involved punch cards and reams of green-and-white striped paper.</p>
<p>emeraldkity4: Thanks for posting that Jobs quote. For whatever reason, it gave me goosebumps (or maybe it’s the 10deg temperature outside).</p>
<p>When I was in college, I read an interview with Dr. Chandrasekhar, a Nobel winning physicist whom NASA has honored with naming one of their 4 Great Observatories circling the Earth after. He was asked how he kept up his interest in his chosen field of study and he answered that every 10 years, he dropped whatever field he had been working on, and changed to something different. Mind you, it was all within Astrophysics, but this allowed it all to be fresh for him. </p>
<p>In medicine, we say it takes 5 years to climb your learning curve, 5-15 are your golden years, then its all downhill thereafter. And having been there, done that, I can attest to the truth of that axiom. </p>
<p>As much as the breadth of ones education, its also how one chooses to live ones life and their priorities.</p>
<p>A friend’s son was recently offered $27,000/year for an architect position, with a 2010 master degree in architecture, for a 40-hour but more likely 50 to 60-hour work week. He’s lucky to get an offer at all, since the unemployment rate for architects nationally hovers around 30% unemployed. He’s taking it. Our local Aldi’s discount grocery offers $12/hour for cashier=stocker positions, which works out to $25,000/year based on hypothetical 40-hour work week, but doesn’t require a M.Arch, or B.Arch, or eventual completion of professional license examinations after 3+ years of steady work. But I bet an Aldi’s manager makes about $24/hour, which would match the licensed architect’s salary after 3+ years.</p>