Why Are Technically Skilled Jobs Still A Stigma In the United States?
Currently there is a problem with schooling in the United States, which is that too much emphasis is put on students going to college and not enough going to trade schools for technical skills. Growing up in a suburb of NYC, in a relatively wealthy area, it was taught the only way to succeed in life was a 4 year college and anything less was considered a failure. The only students who were pushed into trade schools were behavioral problems or students that didn’t have the mental capacity to pass high school. The irony of the situation is, most of the jobs that are seen in our community as blue collar or undesirable, end up making more money than a large portion of the people who ended up going to a 4 year institution.
Many of the future electricians, plumbers and technically skilled workers that either went to a school or joined an apprenticeship out of high school in my area average around 75k-80k a year because they are in such demand. In fact , when the government ranks jobs that currently have shortages, year after year technical jobs are in demand. So the real question is why are people avoiding these jobs?
A major factor has to do with there still being a stigma against blue collar labor in many areas of the country. In a way people consider anyone who works with their hands to be of a lower class and intelligence than themselves, which is often not the case at all. I was never in the group of people who believed that our public schools are doing what is best for the students and this is one of those cases where I feel that shows. Public schools want to earn a better reputation by saying things like “99% of our students went to a 4 year college” when the reality is many of those students will struggle finding jobs and paying back a massive amount of loans in the future.
As part of one of my economics classes, we looked at the performance of specific degrees, certifications and their estimated return over the years. When using averages, almost all bachelor’s degrees paid off in the long term , however most of the time the return on technical degrees was much greater than many majors. Most people probably aren’t aware of these statistics, but then again most people don’t look at a college degree as an investment.
Mike Rowe gives a great speech about how following your passions as a job is sometimes the worst advice someone can give you. Sometimes going after a job that you can learn to love that can give you the income to pursue your passions in your free time, is the best thing you can do. You don’t need a degree in literature to be a writer, or a degree in art to be an artist, so why pay ludicrous tuition fees to get a degree that will leave you with very few opportunities for a job after you graduate. Supporting yourself and having money to pursue your passions when not working is a much better outcome than working two jobs for minimum wage, not having the money or the time for the passion at all.
We as a country need to start putting importance on these jobs that are in shortage , in the high schools we attend. Teachers and institutions need to stop putting an emphasis on the idea that a 4 year institution is the only way one can be successful. I know the idea of public education is just to pump out as much people into the workforce as possible, but better structured electives need to be offered to students. My school had a plethora of different electives and besides woodcutting not a single one was catered to potentially introducing a student to alternate employment opportunities that did not require a bachelors degree. Not only do I think this is a huge injustice to the students, but its an injustice to our country and the people who do some of the most important and hardest work in our societies. Without the people who are doing the technical work, we wouldn’t have the infrastructure and quality of life we have today.
I think its about time we revaluated how we as a society look at certain jobs and have the government and public school systems openly support alternative opportunities for students, outside the realm of academics. The labor shortages that we will most likely see in the near future are going to be a direct result of the massive push towards college that has occurred in the last 30 years in this country. There should be no shame or stigma on a job that provides such a large amount of value to our communities.
-Calaber24p
I just had a conversation about this with someone today.
Myself, I went to college (over my objections) rather than continuing to work for my father (a 3rd generation carpenter that could literally build anything... framing, electric, plumbing, you name it).
The end result is that I quit school and took up a hobby that started one summer as a child when I mowed lawns, chopped wood, and washed log trucks to save up for a computer (programming).
Today, I really wish that I had been allowed to work for my father and learned what he knew. Not only could I be making a very good living (which I currently do), but I could be passing on the critical skills that he had to my children... giving them a lot better chance of striking out on their own.
Trades should definitely not be overlooked.
I completely agree with you and your story is proof that trades need to not be overlooked especially by our school systems.
I've long maintained that the "grimy trades" are vastly underappreciated. I kid you not, just today, our Public Works Dept. was cleaning out the storm drains downtown and I thanked this one guy within range for his valuable work. In fact, I think I said "Man, if it wasn't for you guys, I'd be up to my neck in black water. THANKS."
It amazes me how many people have no clue about how the light goes on when you flip the switch. Or, how the water system works, let alone how to repair and maintain a house.
Great post. I couldn't agree more. I do have to say that, while living for 4 years in a very rural area with generational poverty largely created by industries going overseas - the schools there are just the opposite. They encourage everyone to go into the technical trades. When a student shows high mental acuity, it is hard to get the will together to encourage them to pursue a higher education. And higher education is good for the hard sciences where highly educated professionals create new compounds for improvements like SIP construction and PEX water lines.
Its true, the people who do the grimy trades are really the ones who are the backbone of our society, without them our infrastructure wont be upkept and we would be living in terrible conditions.
Until I read this article I'd never thought that in the USA technical jobs are a stigma. The same shit in Russia. People strive to obtain college degrees even if in reality they have talent for something else and then prove to be quite bad as specialists. They label men of trade as unintelligent and uncultivated, and this social stigma consequently forms the reality.
I can only speak from my experience, coming from a upper middle class neighborhood where 99% of people go to college after they graduate, but it is definitely looked down upon here. I think maybe in school districts where a large majority of people end up working right out of highschool, it might not be as much as a stigma, but definitely in my area (NYC suburb area) people want their children to have prestigious jobs on Wall Street.
The world needs plumbers, and electricians etc. If you are attending university for a degree in general studies, where do you think that degree will take you? There is no shame in learning a trade, many very wealthy business owners started out learning a trade.
exactly, but you hardly ever hear this from our school systems which is a problem.
Universities foster an elitist culture. Public school teachers must have college degrees, which means they spent the formative years immersed in that culture. Of course most of them will then impress upon their students the superiority of a college degree. These children grow up hearing over and over that the path to success, and by extension happiness, is through the pursuit of a college degree. Now you have bright young adults, who could have been capable of contributing so much to the world, arrogantly flaunting their gender studies degrees while not having the faintest notion of how to go about producing anything of value to anyone.
I am by no means anti intellectual, but the type of people I have described are truly detestable. Of course, you can not blame them sometimes solely for this behavior. They are only doing what seems logical to them based on their understanding of the world around them.
Watch out for assuming how vast swathes of people "are," especially if your assumption is that they are "truly detestable." It's an easy thing to say and I actually appreciate the sentiment, however, in more cases than not, if you actually got to know a person, you wouldn't call them detestable.
I don't like people vs. people right now. The elite have made sure that the news channels suit opposing narratives and the conservatives and liberals are yelling at each other while the central & federal bankers are fleecing ALL of us.
True. I was speaking more of a hypothetical 'they' in reference to a particular behavior rather than a demographic.
Indeed. My apologies, I was on a bit of a tear ...
No need to apologize. :)
:-)
I think there are some people who truly should go to universities and many who do go to these four year schools come out providing value , but I do agree there is an elitist culture in the academic world when half of the teachers and professors are paid wages lower than a union mail man.
Truly! As I said, I am far from being anti-intellectual. Education is important and Universities are (or should be) temples of knowledge and scientific inquiry. Their role in modern society has been grossly distorted however, as has the public's understanding of education in general. Whether or not you have the means or desire to attend college, you still have a human responsibility, I believe, to seek knowledge. I personally have tried college and didn't care for it. I have never even completed an associate's degree. I also will be the first to insist that in an age where literally all the world's collective knowledge is available at your fingertips, (and probably accessible from a pocket-sized device which you carry with you every day,) there is absolutely no forgivable excuse for ignorance.
So very true. . . if I ever get sick of office work, I think I'll study to be an electrician.
i am a master of 3 trades. i learn everything i can, every chance i get. the people who own businesses are squeezed to the point that they try to get by on the lowest paid worker who can get a third rate, slapdash job done as quickly as possible. since they are usually business people and not trades people, they may not recognize the difference in a quality or sub standard job. getting quality results, costs more money, that this walmart shopper generation doesn't want to or cannot pay. so we get crap, done by low skilled third world immigration criminals. i have worked with these people. some of them do not have even rudimentary education, let alone know anything about their trade. i have known welders who didn't know what PSI is, carpenters who have never heard of the Pythagorean theorem. if we want to live in a third world country, then lets keep paying for a third rate job. the last job i had there were no raises for any one of the hundred of us for 3 years, and everyone that left was replaced by someone who barely or didn't speak english. there is a disconnect that these "bosses" think that skilled jobs are able to be done by the unskilled and uneducated with pay to fit. something's gotta give. the jobs pay less, the quality gets less. because of the market competition the employers can pay less. i was content scraping by, until the unaffordable health care act went into effect and now i can't make enough to cover my commute. so, no job, been couch surfing for 2 years now, looking for work. i have three trades, i had steady work, with decreasing pay for the previous 10 years. i worked for 9 years straight with no vacation, none. i have no work now, i'm competing with people who don't pay taxes and get as much government assistance as they can, which i will not do. from where i stand, there are not necessarily just a lack of educated, skilled workers but an unwillingness or inability to pay the educated and skilled what they are worth or even enough to barely get by. i'm learning naturopathic medicine right now. i have lots of experience from keeping myself out of the doctor's office for the last 30 plus years. maybe this line of work won't get pulled out from under me. i know it will be in demand, with the medical system in the state it is in. i don't think it can be outsourced, or done by the lowest bidder. we'll see.
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The harsh truth of the matter is that college is not for everyone, the time and costs associated with going to college are simply too high with respect to the return that it can yield. For the most part, college students are not making any significant amount of money. Despite this, pretty much every single college student carries a smartphone and macbook, luxuries they cannot responsibly purchase. In my opinion, I think this is due to the marketing tactics that Apple and other big companies employ to sell their products. The societal perception of technology has evolved from viewing these things as a luxury into a basic need. College is more or less the same story. The push towards higher education is derived from the cover propaganda that the public is exposed to, that leads them to believe that their opinion was their own.
While I do agree with you that not everyone should be pursuing a degree from a 4 year university, I still think that there is value in exposing people to a collegiate level of education from a JC. Attending a community college exposes people to many fields of study for a very low cost. I realize that this idea is equivalent to just blindly casting a net in an attempt to link students up with an interest they might not have even known about, but I think that the cost is low enough that the return will outweigh it.Lets assume a scenario where a student discovers that he or she is fascinated by economics and engineering. That student could create a means manufacturing that eliminates the need for unskilled labor entirely. Although the likelihood of this is small, it only takes one person to make a change that significant. The unemployment rate will surely rise after this, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. With the elimination of the need for unskilled labor, the public can use their time to fulfill more significant duties.
Yes! Yes, and yes!!