You can tell this is an ancient meme because it prices college at 4 years at $9,000 per year instead of 5 years at $30,000 per year 😆
College is a scam nowadays
Government allows infinite lending to stupid unexperienced children, children tell colleges their tuition is on the house, colleges raise tuition costs knowing their premium is secured by either wealthy families or the infinite pockets of the government, students keep being told the lie college is the only outlet to a better life, keep taking more loans. Rinse and repeat.
So many soft losers in this thread who think the epitome of life is wasting away at a desk all day looking at code and coping with the lifelong debt they took to experience it. Unironically some moron who thinks that you can only gain critical thinking from going to a uni, completely ignoring children who show the predisposition for higher intelligence among their peers. You can’t teach intelligence. Stockholm syndrome cope fr.
Yup, I got a chemistry degree. Yeah I get paid marginally better but considering how much it cost and all the trouble I went through I could’ve done something else I wanted to make money. Education is great and enriching, but we shouldn’t become debt slaves over it.
I wonder why college board salaries keep rising but the overall availability and quality of education isn’t?? Curious…
Honestly, would my wife and I need to save up only $1k per month for the next 16 years to pay for my kid’s college? That sounds absurdly do-able and easy. I’m all for trade school too. My Wife and I went to a more technical college and are doing fairly good for ourselves. Will hope our kid goes the same path. We got our college degree and in between years we had jobs in our industry and did interning. That’s the best of both worlds IMO.
Honestly, would my wife and I need to save up only $1k per month for the next 16 years to pay for my kid’s college?
16x12 = 192,000… Where are you getting this number from? That’s enough to put 2 kids through even the more expensive US colleges, assuming investments outperform tuition hikes
Given inflation, current estimates put the cost of a 4 year degree at about 180k in 2040, so not an unreasonable savings estimate. That number is both available from online estimates as well as what my own financial planner gave me when discussing my daughter’s college fund
Never hurts to have extra if my Wife and I can afford it!
If you can afford to save 1k a month, you probably should lol
Yeah, if you can get an apprenticeship (nearly impossible).
Cool leave all the executive and judicial positions for the children of the rich. They’ll make ethical decisions that benefit everyone
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That’s where the dictatorship of the people comes in.
Frankly, this is where I borrow a page from Mao’s Little Red Book. If you had the sort of education that only wealth and privilege can grant you, you have no right to hold political power.
Your words are self-defeating. A dictatorship is based on privilege for the few.
Also: Your only solution for classism is put some power concentration on it?
One Worker to rule them all, One Worker to find them, One Worker to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
abolish the state
That, and they also keep changing it. When too many middle class people make good many with trades, they call it inflation and engineer a recession that depresses those wages.
When too many middle class people are getting higher education, they raise tuition and burden us with debt.
The real answer is: do what you love, if you’re good at it and if it provides objective value to society.
And all together, we must have middle class solidarity to reign in the power the elites have over us and make sure we own and control the wealth and housing stock, while they pay high taxes and not us.
If we don’t demand our share of the pie, we will end up with scraps and our children will end up with even less.
Maybe in America…
Here you have 5 years of free college for bachelor and 5 years free for masters.
It is valid path for some, maybe even for majority of people, but not for all. If you have smarts then college->undergrad-graduate school can lead you to the job of your dreams and well paid on top of this. For example, if you excel in math and physics, and want to be a rocket scientist, by all means, take a shot. Even if you miss, lots of STEM jobs pay well in industry.
This doesn’t work for some fields imo. I don’t know how I could train someone in computer science if they don’t even know how a for loop works yet.
Well maybe you couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn’t already exist.
Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.
Heck my local technical high school offers an “Information Technology” vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn’t it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?
For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with “bootcamps.” Increasingly you’ll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you’ve been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you’ll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.
These can vary from “pretty good, actually” to “predatory” to “a little bit like indentured servitude.” Wouldn’t it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they’re interested in?
I agree. I guess what I’m getting at is some fields require requisite knowledge to be useful as an apprentice on day one.
Like for an electrician, on day one you can hand me tools, pull wires, carry supplies, clean up behind me, measure, etc. You may not be able to design the layout or check that things are to code, but you can help me while I e.g. explain why I needed you to grab 3-1 wire instead of a 2-1 for this fixture.
Where as in software you need a requisite amount of knowledge to do anything useful. And it’s hard to sit there and explain what I’m doing when they can’t read the language. It could be done, it’s just harder to bring on someone that’s going to be paid when they can’t do much. I’d do it, but convincing the bean counters will be a lot harder
You’re right, you’re probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the “college intern” grunt work of a software dev team.
The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.
But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I’d just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don’t have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.
It really, really, really doesn’t take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I’ve worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.
Let’s make that even easier to do.
I agree, I guess the context of the meme made it look like I was saying people need a 4 year degree, but I don’t believe that. It helps, but it’s not necessary at all.
I was mainly saying I don’t think a transitional master and apprentice setup would be easily workable
I agree that an apprentice working with a single “master” probably wouldn’t work very well. But I’m also not sure how frequently other apprenticeships still operate on that model. Perhaps it’s more common for other trades due to a preponderance of independent contractors, but there’s no saying that the apprentice needs to be beholden to one individual “master.”
This already exists through college coop programs, and people can end a coop program with work experience and not much debt.
The problem with special programs being kicked down to high school is it creates scarcity further down the chain, meaning kids need to make their life choices early and following through depends on availability.
You fix the problem of program capacity and sure that’s great.
Certainly I’m not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn’t cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult’s life.
We’ve already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?
You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I’m misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I’m not sure I’m following.
Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?
Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?
I’m not talking about IT, or the workforce, I’m talking about equal access to education.
Wealthier children that monopolize access to the higher specialisation courses is a thing that could happen, and I could see colleges and universities start to require those as prerequisites for certain degrees.
There’s a lot of work that would need to be done to remove barriers to education, which is the thing that we want to do in offering an alternative credential to enter the workforce. Doing this work in the wrong way would reinforce income disparity, reduce class mobility. We are talking about big changes.
It’s a regular thing in Germany.
Our apprenticeships are a lot cheaper though, below minimum wage, so it’s easier for the employer to set aside time for training that doesn’t earn money.
I went to college for certification in c++ instead of a full degree.
Senior dev: "Hey junior… " waves a piece of paper “The fuck is this?”
Junior Dev: “My code, boss.”
SD: squints
JD: “I couldn’t figure out how to email it.”
SD: squints
JD: …
SD: “Why is there a picture of a cat?”
JD: “It’s Scratch, sir.”
This is so accurate it hurts
I’m dying lmao
There is a non-null chance the Senior Developer is an absolute God at scratch.
I’ll chime in with a comment above, but I am an apprenticeship mentor at a big tech company, and while you are somewhat correct, most apprenticeship schemes will mix in academic learning alongside on-the-job training.
It’s a great way to learn if you are motivated. If you’re not, it’s immensely stressful compared to studying for a degree.
That sounds perfect actually
This is correct, but it’s virtually impossible to get most desk jobs without a degree.
Not because the degree is important, only because it’s a requirement.
So if you can afford it, unfortunately, I would recommend the degree path.
It does show you’ll stick with something for 4 years.
Apprenticeships are infinitely more competitive than college applications. Not to say that the quality of education isn’t much better, too, but most mentors are already swamped with dozens of apprenticeship requests. It’s so competitive that most will expect you to already have some familiarity with the trade, whereas most colleges go into your education assuming you have very little experience with it.
Edit
Also
$19-$23 hour paid apprenticeships
Lmao only in already high COL areas. Plus having to compete with the 1,000+ other applicants (see above). Plus “we’ll select a candidate in 4-6 months.” Plus “must provide own tools. Our shop only allows Snap-On brand, here’s a $2,200 shopping list in case you get chosen.” Also “oh yeah that position was already filled last month, so-and-so’s son just got out of rehab and needed a job.”
T. An actual tradie of nearly a decade who has a proper 4 year university degree and tech school certification
Bro. Be more specific about where and what apprenticeship you are talking about. You’re casting a wide web as if all the apprenticeships are in the same position. My specific trades of electrician and instrumentation are highly in demand in lots of places in Canada. Can’t speak for everywhere, but there are a lot of large construction projects going on now that can’t find workers.
The availability of apprenticeships are based off the economy vs going to school is based on whether you can afford it.
Where are you from? I am a carpenter from Ontario, Canada and I was an apprentice in the carpenters union for a few years. They literally hired me on the spot when I sent them my resume. I also worked with a 19 year old kid who’d never had a job in his life before being hired instantly when he walked into the union hall.
Also the pay started as $20 an hour for first years, and went up about $5 an hour for every year of experience. I think if I remember correctly journeymen made around $45 an hour with benefits, and my zone wasn’t a super high COL area.
Maybe depends what apprenticeship you’re looking for but in my experience the carpenters union was dying for guys.
Electrician in IBEW here in a poor rural region. Those pay numbers are pretty close to our current rates, actually. And if you can pass a test, you can get into the apprenticeship program pretty easily. They don’t expect much from first year apprentices. I had a trade school diploma and my Limited Liability Electrician license already when I applied, but it didn’t matter much. The competitiveness is very dependent on your local.
You gotta buy your own hand tools, but power tools, conduit benders, etc are all provided.
So… like with everything career-related, it’s gonna depend on where you live.
‘Appreciceships’ is a pretty broad thing too. I can think of more mechanics and carpenters I know that had to buy their own tools then plumber and electricians.
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This is pretty representative of my area as well. The thing that is weird for me is that they priced it at 40 hrs per week. A friend of mine was an Electrician Apprentice and he worked 21 days in a row 10 hrs per day and he’s in a union.
Damn, that kinda OT is some good money but miss me with that. After 50 hours of solid work in a week I’m worthless lol.
But I do light commercial construction mostly, which is pretty go-go-go all day long with bird-dogging foremen. If I was doing industrial or large commercial there’s usually some more breathing room.
Yeah I said the same, but he was pretty pumped for it. Apparently it’s not so bad when you get out of the apprentice phase, but this is one of the concessions that their union makes. Essentially, the job has to get done by the deadline. The pros of it is that they have better benefits than government workers (his wife is a teacher), as an apprentice he was making $80k/year in 2019, and they were paying for him to go to night school for certifications (and giving him the time to do so).
I’m not sure on the classifications of work, but the kinds of jobs they did were things Amazon warehouses.
What would Bernie Sanders do?
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UK businesses abuse the apprenticeship system for profit.
Like fucking Subway were taking on apprentices. Because making a sandwich clearly takes years of training, rather than about a day. Nothing to do with being able to pay them half the minimum wage, oh no, can’t be that.
But then “not in my job description” is something I stopped hearing when I left school. In the real world, your job is what your boss tells you to do (within reason), otherwise you don’t have a job any more.
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The apprenticeship thing and pay scales only work when you’re talking about union jobs in skilled trades. Which are very hard to come by.
I’m not knocking blue-collar jobs–all labor deserves to be paid a living, and thriving, wage–but that’s not an honest assessment.
So infographics are memes now… Seriously?
Because people are bastardized the meaning of the word.
UK here, on an apprenticeship and earning £40,000+ a year.
Recognise I’m exceptionally lucky but no idea how anyone could afford to complete a degree while living independently in current times.
Benjamin Franklin wanted everyone to be apprentices.
36,000? I broke 6 figures in debt.
