(06-21-2019 02:28 PM)XLance Wrote: (06-20-2019 11:38 PM)TexanMark Wrote: (06-20-2019 10:08 PM)Kit-Cat Wrote: (06-20-2019 10:57 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (06-20-2019 10:28 AM)TexanMark Wrote: Accounting is about as close to STEM as you get...as Math is big part of the study.
That is true. The marketplace is rewarding not so much being specifically "STEM", as most pure "S" degrees (e.g. biology) actually don't fair much better in the marketplace than liberal arts degrees, but whether there's a heavy quantitative component. The most marketable "S" degree is physics, which not coincidentally is very quantitative. Accounting and finance have a lot of quantitative work, as well.
Local politicians making peanuts with policy sci degrees tout routes like trade school and STEM as the investment area.
But the demand outside of the medical field is in information technology and those who have developer level ability in emerging technologies.
The mechanical, civil, industrial engineers are often forced into becoming IT project managers for their companies since their is so much IT crossover with everything today. However they couldn't even score an interview for a IT architect job despite having a stout STEM background. The programming they were exposed to in college for industrial controls ect, machine level programing doesn't translate into full stack software development.
In the billion dollar IT departments with the big money Technology Architects having a degree in computer engineering they think of you as just a manager where in smaller organizations that person is branded as "technical". The big shops want to bring in PhD directors for 300k to lead a project because it so process and delivery driven that a small thinker wouldn't succeed.
I guess it also comes down to what you consider a good living. Someone who went to a prestigious engineering school, making 50hr is like working at McDonalds. For a city council member in Peoria Illinois touting STEM it seems like big money.
STEM has been politicized but it is not very well understood by outsiders. Trade school is not going to make you any money.
Trade schools are very important, sure graduates aren´t making huge money but they are vital for this country to function. Lots of kids getting pushed into college should be going to trade schools.
You don't even need trade school or a high school education anymore. The UPS driver that delivers to my business recently confessed that he made over $110K per year and gets twice as much vacation as I take.
Well sure, we can all point to anecdotes like this, but that doesn't make it the general rule for the whole population. One of the wealthiest people that I know is my wife's uncle, who was able to climb the corporate ladder at a large company without even finishing his high school degree (much less getting a college degree). However, the vast, vast, VAST majority of people with his wealth would need to have obtained a college degree. His career trajectory couldn't have been planned any more than having my financial "plan" being to win the lottery next week.
I feel like there's a complete disconnect between a lot of Internet discussions (not necessarily with this particular forum, but definitely on places like Reddit) between what they observe immediately around them and the general reality. A disproportionate number of people in Internet forums are fairly tech savvy, so they see that people with quantifiable coding and IT skills are getting hired without degrees due to the current supply and demand imbalance and shortsightedly come to the conclusion that college degrees increasingly aren't necessary. That actually couldn't be farther from the truth. The reality (as you can see with literally every legitimate metric available) is that the income gap between college grads and non-college grads is increasing more and more and that has accelerated faster than ever over the past 10 years since the Great Recession.
Does that mean that *every* college grad is better off than *every* non-college grad? Of course not. However, when looking at the population as a whole, the income gap between college grads and non-college grads is wider than ever and it's only accelerating. To the extent that a college degree is worth "less", it's because it has become a baseline expectation for most professional jobs in a way that a high school degree used to be.
Would anyone here say tell their own kids that they should simply not attend high school because a high school degree by itself won't get them a good job anymore? I doubt it because we all realize that a high school degree is a necessary step to go through to their next levels of education as opposed to the end point of their education. Well, the same logic applies to college degrees. A generation ago, a college degree in and of itself might have been a sufficient end point, but in today's world, a college degree is essentially worth what a high school degree used to be worth. As a result, that doesn't mean that a college degree is somehow not worth it anymore, but rather that it is a step that needs to be taken in the same way as you need to go through kindergarten, middle school or high school.
One other important point: demographically, people are marrying within their social classes (which includes educational levels) more than ever. It is more likely today that a college grad will marry another college grad (as opposed to a non-college grad) compared to prior generations and it increases going up the proverbial food chain (e.g. it is more likely today that someone with a MD/JD/PhD will marry another MD/JD/PhD than prior generations). This "assortive mating" is a perpetually underrated reason for rising inequality - when college grads generally make higher incomes and they generally end up marrying each other, the result is that you have household incomes that are doubling, tripling or quadrupling up on the households below them. On paper, the accountant that makes $20,000 more than a plumber isn't necessarily a massive difference individually when taking into account college tuition costs and the opportunity cost of several years of schooling. However, when that accountant marries a marketing executive that also makes $20,000 more than the plumber's spouse, then that turns into a $40,000 total household income gap... which translates into being able to afford to pay $100,000 to $150,000 more for a house... which means that they can afford to live in a better school district... which means that their own kids get an advantage throughout life, etc. Those gaps only widen when doctors marry other doctors or lawyers marry other lawyers (which, once again, is increasingly more common today than a generation ago).
Once again, that doesn't mean that *every* college grad is only marrying another college grad (as we can all probably point to anecdotes where that isn't the case), but over the entire general population, that is something that is accelerating in society. I'm not talking about the old fashioned "MRS." degree trope, but rather the impact of rising number of dual income households where both spouses have college degrees or higher.
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Newbury College shutdown: Atlantic Article from Alia Wong
