So many people are going to college these days, the blue-collar sector is running out of people to do its job. (H/T.)
When I was in school, I knew a shitton of people who had no business going to college. They weren't unintelligent, they just weren't academic types. They were perfectly suited for vocational ed and a decent-paying job at one of the local factories or in the local service industry -- quite possibly a unionized position that would pay more than they'd ever make in a dead-end white-collar job with no chance of advancement past their Peter-Principle ceiling.
I'm sorry to say that out of that shitton of people, a whole bunchaton were women, mostly in English Lit., El Ed, or Social Work tracks. (Nursing school is a vocational school that happens to issue a bachelor's degree and makes you take a few liberal arts courses along the way to "broaden" your education. I know some nurses who think they are more important than the overpaid doctors they take orders from, and I'm not sure they're wrong about that, although I do admit I'm a little tired of hearing about it.)
This is part and parcel of what's wrong with this country. Everybody wants to work in a nice office where you don't get your hands dirty and you work from 9 to 5 and go home nights and weekends to your little pied à terre.* The problem with that is that so many of you want to do that, there aren't enough up-and-comers who can take the place of, well, Og for instance.
I myself was, variously, a skilled factory worker, an HVAC installer and serviceman (and had passed the City of Indianapolis' licensing test for that), an electrician, and a framing carpenter before I went back to college at the age of 24. (Yeah, I got an early start; when your dad goes into the skilled trades when you're 11, you learn it at his knee.) I could probably go back to those skills now if I could actually crawl under houses and in attics and stand on a ladder or in front of a machine all day. Problem is, my body can't handle that anymore, so I got out when I realized that day was coming and went back to school to learn something I could use to get a job where I didn't have to. At 34 I found that job after quite some time in the wilderness.
But I had no business going to college at 18. And in hindsight I'm glad I didn't. (Well, I did, but I quit before I was asked to leave. I got off on the wrong foot in the wrong major.) And I'm guessing at least half of the kids who go to school at 18 would be a lot happier if they'd opted for military service or vocational college, instead. Not everybody can be a doctor or a lawyer or a history professor, but there are sure a lot of jobs out there for grease monkeys and linemen and building tradesmen (and women). And a lot of those jobs are going begging for people to take them.
It seems a sin to push every kid who manages to graduate from our secondary babysitting palaces (er, high schools) to go to college. Not everyone is really suited for that, and wouldn't be even if the high schools were actually teaching to 12th-grade levels that would protect their college-bound progeny from the horrors of Bonehead English.
It would also protect them from an increasingly-left-wing elite faculty that has little thought other than to turn them into obedient Obamabots while sucking more and more money from both the private and public teat, but that's beside the point.
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* Yes, I know it means "second/vacation home" but I was in the mood to write a little French, savez-vous ce que je veux dire?
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