That was nuts and I don't see how it doesn't damage the kids

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Employers will go on looking for degrees because it’s tough to find a business at this point that isn’t complex enough to require significant reading, thinking, and communication abilities, and often much more. We don’t make a lot of simple jobs anymore. I think this is a mistake, but this is where we are, and I don’t see us pulling away from that. The degree’s also a vetting point for “will show up, do assigned work, etc.”

For trade schools to sub in for college, trades would have to be regulated to an extent that’d make you scream. First they’d have to be regulated much (much) more aggressively against hiring/promotion/wage/opportunity bias against women, older workers, and various minorities, and then you’d also need licensure and continuous retraining requirements for those trade schools that would essentially push them back to the community colleges and in some areas state universities. If you think OSHA’s a headache now, it’d be a headache from another dimension in that imaginary world. You’d also wind up with a lot more employee lawsuits against employers who’ve been running things slipshod and not actually taking care of business in legal ways; the employees would be more demanding.

All of which, btw, I’m in favor of. We need a large technical workforce that can do practical things with hands. But it needs to be an equitable workforce that can and does read and do math, is well-versed in the principles that drive the things they’re working with as well as specifics of the systems, is less inclined to cowboy, and works like it’s professional. It would not be cheap, but it would be good. I think it would also feel like a different business: less male, for one thing, and with considerably less chronic bellyaching about customers, suppliers, equipment, etc. It’d sound more like other professions.

I live in a town that does have such tradespeople – and also has a lot of normal tradesmen. I can count on the normal tradesmen to make an expensive mess of anything they haven’t done a million times before, and to do a fairly slapdash job of the things they know well. Yesterday I was walking around and saw littered all over the sidewalk a printed ad for various general-trades services weighted with an alligator clip – someone had driven down the street just throwing these things out the window at each house. I looked him up – ex-firefighter and arena football player with a contracting business and what looks like some chronic good-ol-boyism. I’m guessing he doesn’t even show up himself, just hires the cheapest labor he can and sends them out. I wouldn’t hire this person even if he was half the price of others, which he wouldn’t be. I pay extra to hire people who’ll do a job for real, and as it happens most of them also have degrees. It’d be fantastic to have more of them around.

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I’m not sure how complex some of these jobs are that sufficent “reading, thinking, and communication abilities” can only be taught at a 4-year college.

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My recent go-to example:

I have a friend who runs a city symphony’s digital concerthall. Union trades. Recently he ordered a very fancy new system for them, heavily computerized Dutch state-of-art deal, really beautiful. The system assumes a fair degree of technical training on the part of its users.

The lighting foreman wouldn’t go near it. Just flat refused. Said he learned through his hands. This turned out to be a problem with tech after tech, and when my friend insisted these guys sit down and learn the system, they were sweating bullets, and it emerged that some of them don’t actually read so well. Yes, they’re very good at hanging cans, and they understood the old system, which didn’t actually require them to know much about it, well enough. But this thing has tremendous flexibility and power, the choices required thought, and they were just blanking out in front of the screens.

Another recent example:

I had a tankless water heater installed last year, and I did quite a lot of research on it first, so by the time I ordered it I understood how it works and what sort of performance I could expect out of it (thank you, State of Minnesota research teams). I also ordered a German non-saline high-tech water softening system. After trying to sell me a system that’s too big, because it’s what most people order for their larger (and more wasteful) households, the owner of the plumbing company tried to seel me a different softener, and when I looked into how this thing works – which I can do, because I have the requisite chemistry background – I found that actually it doesn’t, and found out why. He didn’t understand the explanation, but I said that’s fine, I’m sticking with the German thing. No problem.

The installer gets here without having prepped to install this thing, so I tell him he has to read the manual first. He refuses, gets salty about it, tells me how much experience he has and how much he knows what he’s doing, and proceeds to do exactly what the long, well-written, very German and technical and thorough manual says not to do: connect the filter to new copper pipes. (The copper ions wind up fouling the polymer beads in the filter.) Fortunately, I had read the manual, so I knew that essentially I not only had no softener, but that I’d have to replace the expensive filter core. If I hadn’t known this, I’d have risked damaging a very expensive water heater that should last decades.

The plumbing-co owner had to pay for the new filter. The installer also failed to check local code about what can and can’t be plugged in using a heavy-duty extension cord, and situated the thing in a way that pleased him but did need and extension cord. While this was only for electronics, so it’s probably safe, and it certainly works, it is very much against code. I’ll have to get another box put in. And the owner had to pay for that, too.

I replaced the filter myself after giving the pipes a few months to oxidize. When I did that, I noticed a whole lot of drainage coming from both the water heater and the new efficient furnace, did a bit of research and realized oh, of course, dilute carbonic acid. Even so, I don’t want a steady stream of carbonic acid solution going into the drainpipe, and the acid should be neutralized first, otherwise over time it’ll damage the drainpipe. Why do I know this? College chemistry. So I went to a different plumber and said hey, can you install a limestone filter for this, and now I have a properly functioning system, recently flushed to remove the scale that built up in that initial period.

Complexity, education, thinking, communication. Necessary for highly-engineered, highly-configurable systems going into diverse locations.

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But also, the physicians in Germany are not carrying $300,000 of educational debt, right?

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@MWolf Im afraid that this must be my last post on this because otherwise we will be called out for the dreaded “debating” offense.

But you’re simply wrong.

Tuition fees in Germany did exist, until 1970. Around 300 USD per semester, so very reasonable by today’s standard, but a significant barrier at the time for low income students. That was when the higher education participation rate was around 5 to 10%.

Tuition fees were scrapped at the same time the government made a major push to widen access by raising the rate of students who gained university entrance qualifications.

In the 90s, when access was probably around 20 or 30%, the debate about tuition fees picked up again. Two arguments: everybody pays taxes to fund higher education, but not everyone participates, and students enjoyed being able to stay enrolled forever, leisurely picking up credits while working unskilled part time jobs, in many cases not properly entering the workforce until they were 30 or older. However, the additional access barrier to low income students was an argument against.

After some legal battles, tuition fees were introduced again in almost all states in 2006 (when participation rates approached 40%), still only around 600 USD per semester. At the same time, regulations about access (university entrance qualifications via the vocational route) were loosened, while regulations about academic progress were tightened. Graduating ages dropped.

Tuition fees were then scrapped again in 2014. When participation rates approached 50%. Because voters hated them. The overwhelming feeling is that access control by academic readiness is fair, barriers thrown up by parental income, or lack of it, is not. But this is against a background of ever widening access and removal of academic barriers.

A number of states have reinstituted them for long term students, second degrees and non EU students.

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So I guess we’ll just disagree and move on.

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Since we’re not actually arguing about the facts, but about their interpretation (I don’t think that the data you shared contradicts what I was claiming), you’re right in that it is becoming a debate. So we just disagree, and that’s that.

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Feel free to insist that “social conditions were very different” in 2014. I can’t follow you there, so I’m done.

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In either one of your examples, I’d argue that a 4-year college degree wouldn’t offer material advantage over training at a trade school. Being able to read a manual and follow instructions shouldn’t require a college degree. Many manuals are poorly written these days. User friendliness isn’t a top design priority for some tech equipments. But these are different matters. Products with better user interface and/or instructions will win the competition in the marketplace. In the case of your water softener installer, I’m not sure whether he had a 4-year college degree. But even if he did, the result wouldn’t likely be any different. IMO, if he had training in the subject matter at a trade school, it could actually have made a difference.

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Salaries aren’t set that way. If they were, the people with $200k in debt and social work degrees from Columbia would be making a lot more money. Its a myth that physician salaries are so high because their education is expensive. We should make medical school free and reimburse anyone who graduates from medical school for their undergrad costs and then set doctor salaries where they are in Germany. Would save significant amounts on our medical costs.

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However, if physician pay were lower compared to medical school debt, fewer students would choose that route. Perhaps then, we would have omainly physicians from wealthy families or immigrant physicians who got their medical education less expensively. Plus a few who did not do the math like those with expensive social work degrees.

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Thats true of every job that requires a college degree. Reduce the pay and there will be fewer people getting those degrees. But for some reason when you hear someone say that X group of people make so much money because their education is so expensive, its pretty much always about doctors.

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Yes, college education is free, including for non-EU students such as Americans. So US students with good German do have a cheap alternative.

In 2014, Germany’s 16 states [abolished tuition fees for undergraduate students] at all public German universities. This means that currently both domestic and international undergraduates at public universities in Germany can study for free, with just a small fee to cover administration and other costs per semester.

My point was that the German trade schools provide a good option for many students that are not interested in going to University. Not only this is not an option in the Bay Area but increasingly students are going into a handful of pre-professional fields such as Engineering, pre-med and business which drives the competition for admission.

ETA: As mentioned upthread fees were re-introduced in some German states and now the US students pay the shocking fee of $3,500 per year.

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I thought part of this issue is that German students can’t choose to attend university (even if they are interested in that), unless that’s the track they have been on for the previous 4-6 years (Gymnasium).

Is that the case, or are there paths for students, those who didn’t attend Gymnasium, but instead went to Hauptschule, etc, to still choose to attend university in Germany?

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Not an expert on the German system so cannot comment with certainty. However, I work in an international company and have many foreign colleagues. One of them, a bright Swiss engineer, wasn’t a very studious secondary student, went to a trade school for machinists, then took some exams and was able to get an Engineering degree. One of the best ME in our group.

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It should not, but unfortunately, at this point you’re not getting this reliably for K-12 even for the 4-year college-bound until you get to some pretty elite reaches of K-12. How do I know? I teach writing courses that involve reading. We spend a lot of time

a lot of time

really a lot of time

on reading. For real, not pretend reading. It takes quite a lot of time to get to “acknowledge current reading mode is pretend reading” and then some painful work to get to “reading for real, like with attention, comprehension, synthesis.”

For a trade school to do the job effectively, even in a case like mine, not only would it have to teach reading, but it would have to wrench people away from the idea that you can learn a procedure and just apply it. The approach, as the kit and environment get more complex, has to be "read well, understand, study environment, ask questions about how adaptable your complex system is to complex environment and what else might have to be considered (meaning good understanding of principles on which both kit and environment are operating), formulate solutions, narrow to affordable solutions, apply.

This is engineering, not “get training in installing product X”. There’s a reason why engineering students are still babies at 4 years. There’s a lot to know.

I have found, incidentally, that the quality of the manual-writing for the products I’ve been buying has gone through the roof. That water-heater manual was exemplary, but so was the hardwood-flooring manual and documentation. But it does require actually sitting down, reading, reading again, thinking, asking yourself questions about whether you genuinely understand, and reading again to make sure you read the words that were there, rather than whatever you think you already know. Because a lot goes into these things, many types of systems are operating simultaneously, and a lot can break or simply not function if applied incorrectly. When that’s the case, there’s a limit to how simple the UI can be. At that point the person operating the stuff has to be able to keep up with the complexity of the system(s).

I just spent an hour talking witha scientist who’s trying to get an IT guy to understand why his Firewire device must keep operating regardless of university IT policy. To explain, he gave me a very simplified version of his research, with which I have passing familiarity. We got to a point where I said, “At some point you have to explain to me how [technique] works, because I’ve been banging my head on this for five years and I still don’t get it.” He has a new, stripped down slide show explaining, he took me through it, it’s beautiful, and I got it. But to get this very simple explanation, I’ve got two decades’ worth of approximately advanced-undergrad/early-grad-student chemistry and biology and physics. I do understand why he needs that Firewire device and how it relates to his research, why there has to be a policy exception. There are similar issues all the time with air handling, building temperature controls, all kinds of trades-related problems.

Complexity is an unavoidable part of the landscape, and “do this” training is not sufficient.

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The technicalities and complexities you described aren’t taught in a typical 4-year college. So I’m not sure a college degree is going to help. Plenty of college graduates struggle with these things. Firewire is a communication interface that was introduced more than two decades ago (commercially in an Apple product) and it has been superceded by many generations of newer and faster interfaces, so it’s no wonder the IT guy wouldn’t want to support it. Part of the price we pay in this technological age. Things, both hardware and software, become obsolete. We probably all have had experiences that our older equipments couldn’t be connected and our older data/files couldn’t be accessed. It’s common and happens frequently.

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I actually meant back when free tuition was first proposed and enacted, in the mid-1970s.

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Right. So the issue here isn’t “IT guy doesn’t want to deal with old kit” – he knows how. The problem, again, is of complexity. He’s dealing with a scientist client whose science does not move like IT does; old ideas are still very much relevant, and old questions, for which there’s only old kit. (In explaining the problem to the IT guy, the scientist pointed out that in the physics department, they have machines that communicate with Voyager. You cannot upgrade Voyager, and there’s still quite a lot of science being done with what that spacecraft’s sending back, so you just have to go on being able to communicate on Voyager’s terms.) He’s also dealing with an IT infrastructure for a large public bureaucracy that needs functioning, consistent policies, including security policies, and has a pretty hefty personnel turnover rate. There’s a limited budget for handling exceptions, meaning the urgencies of individual exceptions have to be well-understood. Maybe a piece of equipment is essential to a research grant that’s supporting five graduate students and a chunk of other university infrastructure, or is key to a strategic initiative. All these things are real. The negotiation among them is complex and happening in the context of many other complex negotiations.

This sort of thing is absolutely being taught in 4-year colleges now, because interdisciplinarity and complexity are the name of the game. They’re the world that is and has been for a while. It’s why engineering students wind up learning about public policy and science students meet journalists. Why I had a political scientist, an old Soviet studies guy, in to talk to young radiochemists about the Russian nuclear program’s history, so that they could understand the context of recent reported accidents and also some of why there was money for their science. And in turn they gave the poli sci guy a lesson in the meanings of certain radioisotopes.

The question of how you know how much you need to know, how much time do you actually need to devote to things that don’t look relevant but in fact are, how far do you actually have to put together understanding from the ground up when you’re looking at a situation and working with people – in college is where people are learning to see these as questions and take them seriously. By the time they come out, they don’t know enough to be able to give solid answers. They’re not old and experienced enough yet. But they have an idea of what sort of things they need to pay attention to.

Including reading carefully and knowing that what they assume is there – before they’ve read the words in the right order and thought about them, without substituting their own words and half-thoughts – is probably not what’s actually there.

If your trade school can offer that, groovy. At the moment, though, this is what universities are doing. Not very well, usually. But it’s in the right direction.

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This has been an interesting thread, and I think you have hit on something important. The most necessary skill these days may be simply thinking. A lot of different academic fields teach thinking in a disciplined way - law, engineering, economics, etc., etc. Each field approaches thinking in a different way, but there is always a structure that encourages discipline in problem-solving. In a world that is changing as fast as ours is, thinking is an underrated skill - I remember all the way back when we were looking for a pre-school for our S19, the headmaster at the local Montessori school told us that the way to think about school is to focus on the fact you are educating your child for a future we can’t really imagine, so what you need to do is give them the tools that will enable them to adapt and thrive in whatever the future turns out to be. We ended up choosing a different preschool for my son (my daughter later attended), but the headmaster’s advice stayed with us. My son has ended up being very interdisciplinary, majoring in psychology and sports science and dabbling in lots of other areas. On the other hand, my daughter, who just graduated from high school, may end up going the trade school/art school route. She has zero interest in doing the four-year college thing and pushing her to do that would not be the way to help her develop the mental elasticity she will need in the future. As with everything else, it seems, it depends on the kid

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