College hoax thread

rombald: My husband went back to college in his mid-forties. He only had a 2-year degree and realized he really wanted to teach elementary age kids. Of course, it will never pay off in the long run in tuition-to-earning ratio numbers particularly since he has to continue on to get a masters in education in our state, but ever since his first lay-off due to downsizing (when I was expecting our first child in 1992-3) he was almost always among the first to go in any downsizing in his following computer-assisted-design jobs. Now he has a small bit of job security and is happy to get up in the morning.

My point is there must surely be a way of finding a job you'd enjoy and getting training in it, maybe not apprentice to a master clock maker, but something you'd enjoy doing. Age shouldn't enter into it.
If it is a regulation thing,i.e.you can't apprentice after a certain age, maybe you need to fight to get the regulations changed. After all 40 is the new 30 or whatever.

rombald - unfortunately, I am now too old, at 44, to retrain.

I agree it likely to late to train as a plumber but might I suggest you consider landscaping. In the right area a guy with hustle, a truck and a few hundred buck worth of tools could make a start. It should be relatively cheap to educate yourself well enough to move up.

Or get a management job with a big general contractor.

Or become a land lord - buy carefully and cheaply restore them yourself. Then rent them.

who knew - Now he has a small bit of job security and is happy to get up in the morning.

No. Actually what he has now is a union the Republican's haven't broken.

Yet.

Let's be realistic - there are a large group of people in this country - who must not be named in politically correct circles - who take those jobs (like in landscaping) at pay rates far below what used to be the prevailing wage.

Zach, you are fortunate indeed, I guess if you graduated high school four years ago you are 22 and have discovered the true secret of vocational happiness. Too often we try to force smart people into college course work when their smarts are in another form. You have to be pretty damn smart to be , say for example, a welder like my daughter's boyfriend or an electrician like my brother in law. The technical knowledge required for these professions, for such they are, may not be taught in college, but are mentally challenging nonetheless. Electrical theory is not all that easy. My brother in law, a very smart guy, went to vocational school and he makes a good living as a self employed electrician and he is a happy camper! Good luck to you in whatever you do. He does not care one whit about not having a college degree to hang on the wall. It doesn't pay the bills or provide worth and meaning to life. I am not dissing college, I went myself, but it's not the be-all and end-all that so many go thousands and thousands of dollars into debt for. And it does seem that bachelor's degrees have become the high school diplomas of yore--people feel they must go on for a master's.

I suck at math. Despite my college degree, I am an administrative assistant (i.e., secretary). It's OK, but I didn't need college to get here.

Zach, check with your local community college district - you may be able to get plumbing or electrical training there. Oftentimes at the community college, kids are just steered (esp. by parents) into the 4-year degree prep programs, and the trades programs are totally overlooked. Our CC District also has people who are more than willing to help students sit down and explore what they can / want to do. Yours might as well. Good luck!

Zach: I had doubts about being able to focus on the classwork, but my family's constant peer pressure ("Oh, of course you're going to college, you're the smart one in the family") pushed me in. Frankly, I'd be perfectly happy being a plumber or electrician.

Zach, you sound like my dad. He told me many times that his real love was construction. Dad's one of the smartest men I know, but his intelligence was geared toward building things, not sitting in a classroom. He invented a hydraulic woodsplitter when I was a kid; if he'd patented it, he might have made some money. But that's not how he is: he needed to split wood for the fireplace, and got tired of swinging an axe, so he thought up something to solve his problem. He's got a restless mind, and loves working with his hands. And yet -- and yet! -- he was forced into college because his family kept telling him he had the responsibility to be the first one of their lot to go to college. So he got his university degree, and spent a good portion of his life miserable behind a desk, when he really wanted to be outside letting his intelligence roam.

Don't be like him. I know he'd tell you that. You have been given a gift, I think, to have seen this at an early age.

Nowhere does the critic and historian in me have an easier time of it - if a more painful one in personal recognition - than in the sphere of American education; if I had the proverbial do-over, the easiest decision I'd have reversed would have come in sticking to my guns at 18 when my doubts about attending college, nominally brushed aside as though I were merely playing "Harley Quinn, C(ourt). J(ester).", by my corporate-state parents' power of the purse, began to hum beneath the official soundtrack of the college track. My work across the quarter-century since, selling books and music at retail and over the web, never enlisted or required my college degree. Unvaried boredom in the classroom, from kindergarten to B.A., reproduced itself off and on in politicised office drudgery, the moral equivalent of castration by Graham Chapman's infamous dirty knife; only the selling of books and music at retail (1991-1999) and, later, over the web on a shoestring (2007-), brought my temperament and paycheck into approximate harmony.

When I ponder the result of having allowed my "college fund" to sit untouched in an index fund since 1980, I marvel over the size of my squandered fortune as over the road not taken, perhaps into a skilled-craft apprenticeship or outdoor, pastoral work, instanter upon graduation in 1980...one moral: qualifying as "college material" in scholastic aptitude and/or social stratum is no guarantee that one actually belongs on the academic "career track" whose sanctified role as one-size-for-all Universal Ticket to the Good (mistyped first as "Goof") Life is but one aspect of the appalling waste generated at every level of our economy. Factory farming of chickens and hogs is horrific enough. To the extent the destructively regimented and oversold academic racket apes and mirrors thus the agricultural-industrial complex, it portends the eventual blowup, as its imbecile contradictions reveal themselves, of a system as unsustainable in mind as it is in matter.

Such thoughts rose to the ever-near surface once more as I browsed what became, in spontaneous out-of-the-woodwork, *I*-AM-SCOTTACVS fashion and by general agreement, one of the most engaged, all-points-compassed threads ever pulled, dangling, from the waistcoats of those social engineers but one unraveling away from shivering, barrel-clad, medicine-show nakedness. This is yet another arena in which what appears to the dominant mind to be human-torch radicalism is in truth but the deep-distilled import of the world's wisdom traditions, east and west alike.

I can't wait for the movie version.

Having taught at both a university and a community college, I agree that college per se is not for everyone. Some people just don't have the capacity for college level work. I am not thinking in terms of intelligence but rather personality and cultural factors. My take on this is that anyone can pass college with effort and some interest. But so many people are not prepared for it. It does not suit some people because our culture is becoming increasingly anti-intellectual and our public school system is a failure. It should be noted that even students on vo-tech track still need higher level math English etc....! 19th century visitors from Britain to the United States were astounded that factory workers were literate in the US. Little did they realize that this gave our society increased productive capacity that allowed us to become the leading economic power in the world. Read Dicken's description of his visit to the Unites States and his visit to the mill towns of New England. Much of our competitive edge over other economies for the past two centuries has been due to our educational system. How will we compete in a global marketplace with the current crop of quasi-literate teenagers emerging from our public school systems? Where will they work? What jobs are available for them?? Minimum wage factory work at the poultry plant or the coal mine. However, in the area where I taught, rural Tennessee, there is a larger context. Traditional southern culture is anti-intellectual to a degree. Tennessee ranks 48th or 49th in terms of educational achievement. The schools are grossly underfunded. Those persons and entities who have economic power in the rural south want to maintain the status quo and things like education threatens that status quo. God forbid the worker drones ever question anything or learn to actually think for themselves, let alone dream of a better life.

I enjoyed college enormously, but I also really like sewing and cooking (problem: the handcrafts traditionally assigned to women for some reason don't pay as well as the ones mostly done by men, like construction. Indeed, mostly they don't pay at all.) Now my hands are starting to freeze up from arthritis, so I couldn't do hand-work, even though at this stage of my life I could probably spare the time to do it. Foo.

As TomP at the DailyKos posts:

"If terrorists were poisoning babies and creating brain damage among thousands of our babies, we'd invade a few countries that were not involved. But childhood lead poisoning is doing just that...."

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/12/162948/830/226/514370

Where is lead paint concentrated? In urban neighborhoods where slumlords rent to people too poor to escape their fate or prevent the same poisoning of their kids ...

Sorry "two" should be "too" and 'arguement' should be 'argument'.

if you hate dumb topics, just delete it. (^: