Just wonder how many young folks that attend/graduate a major well-known college/university, actually go into some type of labor work or if their chosen career is working behind a desk and still making well over $100k a year?
I understand the first part but the second part is fairly vague. Those who do not have scholarships nor funding from parents have three choices’. either work to pay their way, get a student loan or find a less expensive institution. I paid my own way by working as did a few people I know. Others take on the burden of student loans which sometimes take many years to repay. Sadly, there are a lot of graduates out there without the careers they went to college for and have had to resort to working in other fields whilst still having to pay off that loan. I hired a guy at the Monteleone Hotel who had a degree in engineering. He was a great waiter and believe it or not, he preferred being a waiter.
I'd say a couple of things to that: First is (as I mentioned before), I mourn the fact that college is no longer there to make a well-rounded adult out of students, that it's now regarded as a path to a career. So given the right education, I would assert that one should still derive a life-long benefit regardless of their chosen vocation. Second, those salary levels really vary depending on where you live. When I was working outside of DC, we paid entry-level college grads $60,000 as entry-level trainees, primarily because rents in the area were nearly $2,000 a month for small single-bedroom apartments and houses in the immediate region went for $1 million (you could buy cheaper further out and be subject to a 2+ hour commute each way.) So $100,000 in DC is not the same as $100,000 in the remote parts of West Virginia. I know you know that...I'm just throwing it out there to set the frame of reference. Lastly (and this might not be too far-afield from the topic, since it seems to be a class-status thing), I noticed that when I lived outside of DC, everyone was very title-centric. When meeting someone for the first time at a party or any gathering, within 5 minutes you knew where they worked and what they did and how long they had been there. And you had swapped cards to "network." I moved to this rural county and one day it struck me that I had known folks here for months and neither of us had a clue what the other did for a living, nor did we care. "What we do" is not "who we are."
I would not recommend going to a college unless it was to a "trade" such as law, medicine , engineering, social work, etc. The debt load is just too great. I required all of our children to acquire some kind of post-high school education, as I believed that high school just wasn't enough to lead a successful life for most people. Five of our six children chose to go to college. I also told them if they chose college, they had to look at at least one private school and one public university. Three attended a state school, mostly for financial reasons, and two chose private colleges. The two that attended private colleges graduated in four years. The three that attended state schools took six years to achieve a bachelor's degree. The one that attended a private college ended up with almost no debt, as her loans were converted to grants if she graduated. Supposedly, that was made illegal by the Clinton Administration when the Feds took over almost all of the student loans, so the other child attending a private school carried a significant debt. All the graduates have found their degrees helpful, but only two found them necessary. As I said before, one child became a diesel mechanic and he is earning more than any of the others, even the mechanical engineer with project manager certification and carried no debt.
Then there's the story of 5 Guys Burgers out my way. There were 4 brothers (then a 5th came along) and their father said "We can take this money and send you to college, or we can start a business together." Fast-forward 30 years and they have 1,500 locations with another 1,500 under development. Revenue is bumping up against $1 Billion.
It is amazing how many people feel that people are indeed defined by their career and / or where they obtained their sheepskins. One’s character (e.g. honesty, work ethic etc) takes a back seat to the facade of one’s “caste”.
The damage occurs when someone is laid off and they literally lose their identities. The folks here have followed industry to industry to industry. There were sewing factories that closed, then the logging went away, then they commuted literally 100 miles each day each direction to work on construction and road building outside of DC during the boom years. I considered myself to be so fortunate that I did a bunch of blue collar stuff before getting into "professional work" because (a) it set my baseline for an attitude of gratitude, and (b) when I got laid off, I just did other stuff (like cleaning out rental properties) until the sun shined again. It was not fun, but it was not calamitous.
College, well, let's just say, "I wasn't the college type" and, with a few others in my high school class, we were very, very lucky to have even graduated. But, for a few months, after getting out of the Navy, I did attend a Jr. College, and the VA paid me for it. Not much, but some. When I was in the Navy, and seen just how hard of work: "Deck Aids" mostly Seaman Apprentice, in the Boatswains Mate Department did How hard, and dirty, BT's (Boiler Techs) got in the Boiler Room And, sometimes, just how dirty Machinist Mates can get I, 100% knew I didn't want that kind of Navy job. Now, on the other hand, how easy some other Navy Rates were, like: Storekeeper, Personnel Man were. It took me way to many years to understand that I was suppose to be an "office" person, not a "physical labor" one (no matter what the salary was). I'm still a firm believer in college/university and am extremely proud of my wife for getting her Bachelors (Business/Accounting) Degree at age 49. When I met her, she had already graduated and got a pretty nice paying job in Accounting dealing with manufacturing. Many people that we have told about her getting her Bachelors, they act sort of shocked when they find out at what age she got that Degree.
All my professional life I primarily worked with college graduates, usually with advanced degrees in research fields (engineers, computer science, chemists, etc.) Those professionals were largely recruited from major universities and never had to beat the bushes in search of a job... headhunters found them. In a large corporation, rating and ranking determines whether you advance within the ranks, get a raise, or whether you are expendable with reduction in force. A degree definitely gives you a leg up to land a job but your talent and contributions will keep that job. That said, many union represented hourly employees (mechanics, electricians, machinists) made a lot more money and usually had buckets more common sense than the overly-educated. They were also protected by a union contract and seniority, which is another can o' worms.
I happen to have THREE sheepskins--two of them happen to be on actual sheep. The third I didn't use much. My daughter had an address made by a retired congressman, at her graduation, who told the graduates that most would not use their degrees in their eventual field, according to statistics back in the nineties. It helped some get their feet in the door, I think.
I might be bending the topic a bit but this small notice came up on my face book page and I thought (1) Ken Anderson might be interested in this and. (2) I have to look it up but I doubt if she went to college to learn engineering. Here’s a wiki article about her also which does stipulate that she could have gone farther if she would have had a formal education. (ha!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_E._Knight
Especially considering this was in the 1800s, that's pretty impressive. There were very few women even working in any of the paper bag plants that I worked in, and none who were allowed to be promoted beyond the entry-level position at the last company I worked for. I was proud of having designed a manual paper roll stripper that made it easier to strip off the damaged outer layers of a 2-ton roll of paper before putting it on the machine. Made from silicon, it worked quite well, so I made some for the other machine operators and, from there, it moved to other bag plants. When I transferred to Duro in Brownsville, Texas after Champion closed the plant I was working at in Anaheim, I found that the design had made it there, only they were making them out of pressed-board, which didn't work as well as silicon. But that was no machine.