Educated countries: Good or bad?

[Mark6]

Vocational education in the US has all but disappeared from the public high schools. I agree that there has been an erosion of respect for the dignity of "blue collar" work over the past few decades. I have to wonder what would have precipitated that decline? Is it an innate class-sim? Some sort of built in bourgeois bias against the "working class?" Is it a natural prejudice among the people who make education their career?

I think all these are factors, but there is another nasty and rarely acknowledged fact -- teaching "blue collar" work skills to public school students is expensive. To teach English Literature all you need is a room with chairs and a teacher. Probably costs the school district $10,000 a year (I assume teacher teaches other classes, not just this one). Whereas teaching welding -- by which I mean real welding the way it is done in modern industry, -- can run into tens of millions of dollars between equipment, insurance, OSHA compliance, and experienced person to teach it.

In 2001 there was a big news when a US Navy submarine surfaced directly underneath a Japanese high school fishing boat, sinking it and killing 9 crewmembers, including 4 high school students. When I first heard about it, I was struck by the fact that a Japanese prefecture owns and operates a 500 ton fishing boat just to teach high school students how to fish professionally. What would be the equivalent in US? Is there an equivalent?

 

[joesixpack]

... teaching "blue collar" work skills to public school students is expensive. ...

I'll bet you got all "A"s in your wood shop class because I think you hit that nail right on the head.

That had never occurred to me before, but I think you're right. Cutting budgets is always unpopular, so you cut the budgets of the classes that cater mostly to the poor peoples kids. The poor folks aren't going to show up at the school board meeting and make waves, and they aren't going to vote you out either.

 

[WildCat]

Here's one article about it.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_skilled-labor.html

Which proves my point: "A new hire in this position must have knowledge of programming, metallurgy, cutting-tool technology, geometry, drafting, and engineering."

I'm sorry, no trade school can possibly train to such a small niche. The only way Ariel is going top get an employee with such a specialized skill set is to train them themselves. A trade school can do the basics, but it's no substitute for on the job training, which apparently companies like Ariel aren't willing to provide. So long as they have such ridiculous requirements for new hires they aren't going to find replacements. Companies used to train their workers, I'd bet every single one of Ariel's aging machinists got their skill set on the job and not from some trade school.

IMHO what Ariel and like-minded companies are doing is attempting to get public money to train their private work force. Corporate welfare.

 

[WildCat]

I think all these are factors, but there is another nasty and rarely acknowledged fact -- teaching "blue collar" work skills to public school students is expensive. To teach English Literature all you need is a room with chairs and a teacher. Probably costs the school district $10,000 a year (I assume teacher teaches other classes, not just this one). Whereas teaching welding -- by which I mean real welding the way it is done in modern industry, -- can run into tens of millions of dollars between equipment, insurance, OSHA compliance, and experienced person to teach it.

The very companies who need these workers already have those things. Which is why they are uniquely able to train apprentices (sounds old-fashioned, doesn't it?) the specialized skills unique to virtually every corporation.

 

[WildCat]

And those high-paying skilled manufacturing jobs may be a thing of the past:

Machinists who approved a contract Friday withCaterpillar Inc.may have set the groundwork for companies to be able to demand concessions from workers even while they are reaping healthy profits, labor experts said.

Caterpillar broke the link between a company's profit and what it pays its workers, said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He said the contract marks a new era in contract negotiations and predicted, "Other companies now will follow suit."

The six-year contract calls for a one-time 3 percent wage increase for workers hired after May 2005, but it freezes wages of those hired before that date. The approval came after the heavy equipment maker sweetened a ratification bonus to $3,100 from $1,000 just before the vote.

The machinists, who make hydraulic parts at a Joliet plant, are paid $11.50 to $28 per hour. About 250 to 300 of the union's 780 members who work at the plant are on the lower end of the pay scale. Under the contract, workers' health care premiums will be doubled, pensions eliminated and seniority rights diminished.

The new hires are at the lower end of that pay scale, and they top out far less than the $28 some older workers are getting. This is because of a 2-tier pay scale in place depending on when a worker was hired.

So yeah, become a machinist and get $14/hr! You can make $75K a year... if you average 103 hours a week.

 

[joesixpack]

"Caterpillar broke the link between a company's profit and what it pays its workers, said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He said the contract marks a new era in contract negotiations and predicted, 'Other companies now will follow suit.' "


The union leadership themselves have helped lead the way in destroying the gains made by labor in the past century.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

 

[Delvo]

So long as they have such ridiculous requirements for new hires they aren't going to find replacements.

Companies which overstate their hiring requirements tend to hire someone who doesn't meet the stated requirements, which they don't mind because they knew they were overstating it in the first place. Apparently, it controls the number of applications they have to pick through, which might otherwise be excessive. Some of them probably also think it helps them by filtering applicants based on some trait such as ambition. For job-seekers, it creates a situation in which you can't tell which ads state real requirements and which ones exaggerate... and creates an incentive to overstate qualifications.

Another thing that's going on sometimes with excessively narrow job descriptions is that an employer is required to hire from an open public competition but already knows who they want, they write a job description based on that person. For example, when I was a forestry student, I learned a bunch of GIS at a nearby USGS ecological research station outside of class time. (Little known fact: the mineral resources division was only part of the USGS, which also included a water resources division and a biological resources division, although I think it's been reorganized since then.) After a while, right when I was about to graduate from forestry school, the USGS site had a paying job open, running a website where they wanted to put up, among other things, interactive GIS-based maps. They already knew they wanted to hire me, but still had to announce the opening to the public and take all applications anyway. So they wrote a job description that was essentially a me description, including not only my ecological education but also the eclectic mix of computer skills they knew I'd picked up along the way outside of either school or their own GIS tutorials.

Of course, that's not "blue collar", but I don't believe that what we're talking about here is limited to blue collar jobs.

IMHO what Ariel and like-minded companies are doing is attempting to get public money to train their private work force. Corporate welfare.

Another thing from my past life in forestry... new graduates are more likely to work for a state government than for a private company. Private companies tend to hire foresters who've been working for a government agency for several years. Many of those who work in state agencies have noticed this trend and commented about the state agencies' role as private industry's trainers, and at least one state agency I know of has made it an explicit part of how it describes itself.

The very companies who need these workers already have those things. Which is why they are uniquely able to train apprentices (sounds old-fashioned, doesn't it?) the specialized skills unique to virtually every corporation.

Perhaps industries that aren't doing this very well could look to hospitals for an example. Training programs for various medically-related fields, from nursing to phlebotomy to imaging technology to laboratory work to running an operating room/theater (not the surgeons but everybody else around them who makes the surgeon's work possible), are like apprenticeships, except that the apprentices get multiple mentors.

As China's economy booms, it's inevitable that costs to manufacture overseas will go up, and eventually it will be cheaper to bring it back.

China's appearance of a boom is the same kind of illusion that ours in the Occident has been for the last few decades, only much larger. Our bubble was in the form of things like houses whose owners couldn't afford them and promises of long wealthy retirements without enough money to follow through... theirs is in the form of entire large cities/metropolises of unaffordability and fakery.

 

[WildCat]

Companies which overstate their hiring requirements tend to hire someone who doesn't meet the stated requirements, which they don't mind because they knew they were overstating it in the first place. Apparently, it controls the number of applications they have to pick through, which might otherwise be excessive. Some of them probably also think it helps them by filtering applicants based on some trait such as ambition. For job-seekers, it creates a situation in which you can't tell which ads state real requirements and which ones exaggerate... and creates an incentive to overstate qualifications.

Another thing that's going on sometimes with excessively narrow job descriptions is that an employer is required to hire from an open public competition but already knows who they want, they write a job description based on that person. For example, when I was a forestry student, I learned a bunch of GIS at a nearby USGS ecological research station outside of class time. (Little known fact: the mineral resources division was only part of the USGS, which also included a water resources division and a biological resources division, although I think it's been reorganized since then.) After a while, right when I was about to graduate from forestry school, the USGS site had a paying job open, running a website where they wanted to put up, among other things, interactive GIS-based maps. They already knew they wanted to hire me, but still had to announce the opening to the public and take all applications anyway. So they wrote a job description that was essentially a me description, including not only my ecological education but also the eclectic mix of computer skills they knew I'd picked up along the way outside of either school or their own GIS tutorials.

Of course, that's not "blue collar", but I don't believe that what we're talking about here is limited to blue collar jobs.

But this particular company is claiming there's a shortage of labor, not an abundance of it like in your examples.

 

[WildCat]

(free registration required) Good-paying manufacturing jobs are a thing of the past:

Jim Ellishad a jobwith benefitsbut gave it up for a shot at something with a bright future, if he could just get his foot in the door.
In this part of the country, that meant he wanted to work for Caterpillar Inc., the construction equipment powerhouse. Now the Canton, Ill., resident is on the morning shift at the company's East Peoria plant, installing fenders on tractors and working on hydraulic lines, a manufacturing job description that once promised an American middle-class lifestyle.

The reality for Ellis is nothing like that.

With the new job he started in January, Ellis' pay jumped by $5, to $15.57 per hour, but he has no medical benefits for himself or his 3-year-old daughter, whom he shares custody of with his ex-girlfriend. Between rent and child support, he acknowledges falling back on his parents for support.

...Factory jobs can still be good, but over the last three decades benefits have eroded and pay has stagnated for many, or even fallen. Some entry-level manufacturing jobs pay so little that workers depend on government aid to feed their families and pay for health care.

Take Charles Montgomery, also of Canton, Ill. Until he was laid off in mid-September, he worked for a staffing agency that supplies labor to Caterpillar. Montgomery, 28, was paid $8.75 an hour as a forklift operator and put in as many as 70 hours a week to support his three children and fiancee, and he relied on roughly $800 in government aid to buy food. Even then, he said he pinched pennies to pay for a $3.65 doctor's visit or a $2 prescription, made affordable through a government-backed health care program for the poor.

...Joe Haynes, a welder,makes $19.34 per hour, roughly in the middle range of pay ($11.30 to $27.72 per hour) for the unionized workforce at Caterpillar's plant in East Peoria. It is good money, he said, more than he would make elsewhere, but not enough to live on his own. It is not like he wants to live with his parents, but day care for his son, Sebastian, an active 4-year-old, is nearly as much as the $450 monthly rent he pays his folks.

"I can't say poor me, but then again, I wish it was better," said Haynes, 35, a slender man with tired eyes.

Haynes relies on overtime for extra money to get by.

The $75K/yr welding or machinist job is a myth. If this is the state of affairs at UAW-represented Caterpillar in union-friendly Illinois it's even worse for other industries in other parts of the country.

 

[PhantomWolf]

(free registration required) Good-paying manufacturing jobs are a thing of the past:


The $75K/yr welding or machinist job is a myth. If this is the state of affairs at UAW-represented Caterpillar in union-friendly Illinois it's even worse for other industries in other parts of the country.

You just aren't looking in the right country.....

http://content.mycareer.com.au/salary-centre/trades/fitting-welding-metalworking/wa

and for those that didn't realise the $A is > the $US currently, so those figures go upwards converted.

 

[Caper]

(free registration required) Good-paying manufacturing jobs are a thing of the past:


The $75K/yr welding or machinist job is a myth. If this is the state of affairs at UAW-represented Caterpillar in union-friendly Illinois it's even worse for other industries in other parts of the country.

Man... when I was in Alberta... Welders were king. I think Welders start at around $35 an hour and you can basically work as many hours as you like. I don't think these are Union jobs either. There is lots of money in oil I guess.

 

[Caper]

Wildcat,

That Caterpillar story was a big one in Canada earlier this year.

The closing infuriated Mr. Lewenza, whose union represents the plant’s workers. Caterpillar had demanded pay cuts of 50 per cent in many job categories, elimination of a defined-benefit pension plan, reductions in dental and other benefits and the end of a cost-of-living adjustment.

“I’ve never had a situation where I’ve dealt with such an unethical, immoral, disrespectful, highly profitable company like Caterpillar,” Mr. Lewenza said in a telephone interview Friday as he drove to London from Toronto to meet with the workers.

That story makes me sick and despite being in a Union... I'm not much of a Union sympathizer in most cases.

 

[Caper]

And to add to that.... America must be in decline... I can't believe those types of jobs are going fo 8 to $15 an hour.

 

[WildCat]

You just aren't looking in the right country.....

http://content.mycareer.com.au/salary-centre/trades/fitting-welding-metalworking/wa

and for those that didn't realise the $A is > the $US currently, so those figures go upwards converted.

It sounds like a lot, but in another threads it was pointed out that in Australia rent for a small house out in the boonies is upwards of $3,000/month. I can't imagine what rents are in the big cities. Salary may be high, but the cost of living is even higher.

 

[geni]

Regardless, the 'everyone must go to University' culture persists; the quality of the degree (many of which are decidedly Mickey Mouse) plays second fiddle to the 'experience' of the university years.

Not really. The days of going to university for the experience largely finished in the early 90s. Certianly when I was going through the system pretty much everyone had career plan of some sort. Increasingly the lead factor in uni choice is how close to home they are.

It's tantamount to wasting three years, in which you could be earning and giving something to society, sitting on your sofa watching Jeremy Kyle building up an enormous debt burden and gaining some meaningless qualification in 'surf science' or similar.

Ah popular sterotypes but it misses what is really going on. Firstly its important to remember that a lot of the so called Mickey Mouse courses aren't. They tend to be specialised business studies courses.

The problem tends to be more one of over subscription. Media studies being the classic example (yes there is a demand for PR people just not that many) however we also have far to many Psychology graduates. There is also the hopeless overload in Forensic science but fortunately they make reasonable analytical chemists. The current glut of law graduates may be a more significant problem.

It should also be noted that the lates rise in tuition fees has seen a significant refocusing towards degrees with perceived earning potential.

 

[rustypouch]

(free registration required) Good-paying manufacturing jobs are a thing of the past:


The $75K/yr welding or machinist job is a myth. If this is the state of affairs at UAW-represented Caterpillar in union-friendly Illinois it's even worse for other industries in other parts of the country.

Around here welders and machinists can make that much.

Example: http://jobview.monster.ca/CNC-Programer-Machinist-Job-Calgary-AB-CA-113756304.aspx

 

[Cuddles]

I have to doubt the value of a UK degree vs.(say) a S Korean degree in computer science when with 2 crappy 'A' levels UKians can major in "Air guitar studies" at the University of Middling-Wiggle-on-the-Cotswolds. And then go out into the world and be totally qualified to flip burgers.

This is exactly why comparing simple raw numbers of people with degrees is meaningless. It's stupid to dismiss the value of a UK degree when some of our universities are consistently rated among the best in the world. The problem is simply that the value of a degree is not consistent. An MSc from Cambridge* is in no way similar to a mail order degree in David Beckham studies (yes, such a degree actually existed, although I don't know if it's still available). But if you just look at the number of graduates, both will be counted as equal.

The problem is, as others have mentioned, there's been such a focus on simply getting people into university no matter what, that obviously a lot of their degrees end up being completely worthless bits of paper for people who shouldn't have been there in the first place. That's why it's important to look not only at what specific degrees people have but also where they got them from, and it's why a simplistic look at number of graduates tells you very little about how well educated a country actually is.

* And of course, even degrees from Cambridge aren't all equivalent. I deliberately used an MSc as an example, because an MA doesn't actually mean anything at all. If you get a bachelors degree, a few years later you're given the option of paying a bit of money to be given an MA.

 

[WildCat]

It's stupid to dismiss the value of a UK degree when some of our universities are consistently rated among the best in the world.

Nonsense, no UK university appears on any of these lists.

 

[drewid]

This is exactly why comparing simple raw numbers of people with degrees is meaningless. It's stupid to dismiss the value of a UK degree when some of our universities are consistently rated among the best in the world. The problem is simply that the value of a degree is not consistent. An MSc from Cambridge* is in no way similar to a mail order degree in David Beckham studies (yes, such a degree actually existed, although I don't know if it's still available). But if you just look at the number of graduates, both will be counted as equal.

The problem is, as others have mentioned, there's been such a focus on simply getting people into university no matter what, that obviously a lot of their degrees end up being completely worthless bits of paper for people who shouldn't have been there in the first place. That's why it's important to look not only at what specific degrees people have but also where they got them from, and it's why a simplistic look at number of graduates tells you very little about how well educated a country actually is.

* And of course, even degrees from Cambridge aren't all equivalent. I deliberately used an MSc as an example, because an MA doesn't actually mean anything at all. If you get a bachelors degree, a few years later you're given the option of paying a bit of money to be given an MA.

I have a friend who is a maths teacher. He was incensed when the college he worked at started offer a degree in nails, (the things that stop your fingers fraying), which being a degree would be equivalent to the English and maths degrees they also offered.

 

[WildCat]

I have a friend who is a maths teacher. He was incensed when the college he worked at started offer a degree in nails, (the things that stop your fingers fraying), which being a degree would be equivalent to the English and maths degrees they also offered.

That's crazy, nail techs have much better employment opportunities than English majors. But I guess the world needs burger flippers who can quote Hamlet.