Those jobs tend not to pay as well as jobs that require a career focused college degree (e.g. business, engineering, computer science, and even teaching).
Sure, but those are generally degrees which are well known for having poor employment prospects (philosophy, art, history, etc.). Doesn't that just change the advice from "go to college" to "go to college in one of the majors with a track record or leading to a good career"?
Yep, some plumbers are making way more...even than grads in "majors with a track record" (whatever that means).
The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).
For the record, I know many cases of philosophy majors getting good jobs (as computer programmers). Apparently some employers find that people who take Logic classes can be taught to program, and then cost less (at least for a while). But your point stands, that most people have a reasonable idea of which majors give good employment prospects, and if they don't they can nowadays find out online what they are.
But, and here's the kicker, there are a lot of people who lump all college degrees together, either mentally or in their writing on the topic, and then justify going into debt to get a degree based on that. "Go to college" is not that easy to swap out with "go to college in one of the majors with a track record of leading to a good career", not least because there are numerous colleges (Fine Arts, some parts of Liberal Arts, etc.) where if that were the way people thought, that college would shrink to half its current size or less.
Which, maybe is what needs to happen, or maybe we need to find another way for society to fund people who study those topics (my preference), but either way it's not what's happening now, and those closest to the university system are generally the ones most hostile to the idea of looking plainly at the facts about the current situation.
I think getting four years of head-start would make up for it a lot. Plus, not everybody is suited to the career focused college degrees and not everybody should be in them.
I agree with you that everyone shouldn't have to work the sorts of jobs that require a degree. However, as long as college is the most effective way to a better job, I think that people are going to keep preferring to go to college.
Hmm, it's a good point that having a four year head start would help balance things. However, I think in the long run things would probably workout in the favor of the person that went to college. Especially in the higher paying majors such as business, CS, and engineering.
A barista is never going to make as much money as a CS major, but not everybody wants to spend all their time coding, and not everybody will be good enough at it to get paid. Lots of people want to be baristas and are capable of getting paid for making coffee, though, and society still needs baristas.
This is primarily because manufacturing has been moved, and there are no manufacturing apprenticeships.
A low-wage manufacturing job can lead to high-wage automation and tooling maintenance and eventually design positions, or shop steward, training or mentoring.
And “learn to code” should be a basic school curriculum topic! It is well, frankly, disgusting that such a universally powerful, useful and accessible skill has been withheld from the vast majority of students, and now made almost into an “epithet” meaning disrespect toward lower-skilled people. I don’t know any job, no matter how menial, that couldn’t be improved by some automation of it’s most repetitive book-keeping tasks.
