Submitted 2 days ago by Doinita@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
That’s not anti intellectualism, that’s careers advice. When there are so many people in higher education that the jobs , grants and possibilities in general are extremely difficult to come by, and people in the trades are making much more money, it’s practical advice to young people who need to start plotting out their lives.
Your point of view is also valid, but I’m answering your central issue that you came here to ask.
This person has never applied to white collar jobs for a year with no response from employers and it shows
This is career advice, not anti-intellectualism. With the rising cost of schools that leave so many in debt bondage University has risks. If you pick a field of study that you find rewarding but the jobs associated crush your soul or if there is no job then you end up in fantastic amounts of debt that unlike other debt cannot be forgiven. A lot of education via a university route is padded or inflated with requirements for the degree that do not add to one’s meaningful body of knowledge but exist to line the pockets of the institutions.
None of this is to say that one shouldn’t pursue knowledge, university is not the only route toward intellectualism. Being in trades does not stop one from learning from other resources. Autodiadactism is on the rise. What people are against is a predatory system of for profit post secondary education.
Misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of bigotry are also not inherent in blue collar positions by default. It more depends on your geographical location and crew in either situation because the more culturally normal it is in a given city to be queer or how many women are hired in a work place change those workplaces. As a trans person I have worked a number of blue collar jobs that compared to trans friends of mine in whitecollar positions have been more universally accepting of my identity. A number of my co-workers in those construction jobs are also damn near always in classes of some variety, sometimes in accredited institutions but not always. We are all in situations where the job market and personal survival pushes us to the practicality of going where the money is for work but not allowing ourselves to be entirely defined by our jobs. Sometimes the blue collar positions are very meaningful. They are often tied in to incredibly basic facets of quality of life, helping people be properly sheltered, hygenic and comfortable or improving communities through infrastructure.
Your post in some ways comes across as a bit elitist as though white collar positions demanding high levels of acreditied education are more valid than blue collar ones. We should be looking to support blue collar positions as not failure states and provide safety nets for the physical strain of those positions while offering workers chances to obtain education for education sake at reasonable cost to allow them career flexibility and personal enrichment while critiquing systems that place so great a financial burden on students.
A few reasons that I can see. None of them anti-intellectual.
I don’t see a particularly anti-intellectual bent to the push for the trades so much as an anticorporate one.
I don’t see how working in the trades is supposed to close the door for intellectualism or then we just mean different things with that word. Just because person rather works with their hands than deals with office politics and stares at a monitor for 8 hours a day doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Your future job prospects also look much better if you’re a plumber rather than computer scientist.
It isn’t anti intellectualism, it is a overcorrection for the decades of insisting that going to college (and taking on massive debt in the US at least) isn’t worth it anymore. It isn’t saying that knowledge and learning are bad, but they aren’t as economically advantageous as they were a couple decades ago.
The trades are good for a fairly quick return, but you are correct that they and to take a physical toll and the pay is generally exaggerated.
Offices are full of misogyny, homophobiaz and other forms of bigotry too.
A better approach would be to promote both on their own positives and negatives, but humans tend to swing wildly from one extreme to another.
That’s true to an extent, but saying that a feminine woman or a feminine gay man (for example) would be treated better in a blue-collar job than in a white-collar one isn’t really grounded in reality.
Is anyone saying that?
What?
, just go into the trades instead.” This view seems increasingly common, and it’s worrying. There’s a trend of glorifying blue-collar work while demeaning white-collar paths, as if pursuing higher education is somehow less valid. Young people should be encouraged to reach for higher education and intellectual growth, not steered toward careers that can wreck their bodies with manual labor.
It sounds like you’re upset that some people are saying you should go to school for something that will have available jobs…
By all means, if you want to be an unemployed coder, go into coding.
I understand why so many people keep telling you specifically not to go to college now at least
There’s definite anti-intellectualism, but what you’re describing is the loss of qualified/high innovation industry in the US.
The previous generation of higher education graduates cannot find gainful employment offsetting their student loans, not to mention qualified work at all. There isn’t enough employment or market to make use of that knowledge (there’s also a discussion to be had about the quality of that knowledge, but with the rest of the world managing – let’s set that aside for now), whereas there’s high demand for the trades.
The last few centuries have shown that economic growth is greatly accelerated with higher education, and that access to an educated workforce has been key to post-world-war growth. Meaning it might get rough for the next US generation…
Sitting in front of a computer for 40 hours a week isn’t exactly great for our bodies either. IT and programming job markets have been saturated, entry level jobs are almost non existant. It ain’t all that.
I think it’s the wrong label, anti-intellectualusm. Sense of reality might do it more justice. I think there are two factors at play. 1) how much does higher education cost you? Does it put you in debt you’ll be lucky to have paid off before you retire? Have other people gotten degrees and still ended up unemployed? Why get majorly in debt to get no job in the end? That’s more a North American specific problem. I’m in Asia and I haven’t heard anybody shit talking college degrees in favor of the trades. 2) We need plumbers and carpenters and welders and whatnot. And due to declining birth rates in many places and the fact that the numerous birth years of the boomers are retiring and will continue to retire in the short term, we are running out of sparkies, masons, and HVACs. So if you had to career advise people today, you’d be silly not to bring up a profession with near certainty of getting a job once you’re trained up.
Shitty work environments exist in more high brow professions as well.
Common opinion among millennial graduates with ed debt whose careers were thwarted by various recessions.
The more nuanced perspective is that not everyone’s long term goals will be greatly furthered by higher education. It does have value on its own, and to some extent broadens the outer limits of the perspectives you might achieve in life, but it doesn’t teach you anything you can’t teach yourself with a library card. The argument for going into trades instead is a strong one, especially from a financial angle, but also job stability, work-life balance, mental health, etc.
All the same, I not-for-profit higher ed generally offers too much good in an individual to discount it as a scam. For many, it’s where the curtains are thrown open on their world. It just shouldn’t be considered the only viable path as perhaps it once was.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I think this is a fair question.
My ignorant two cents: the internet. As always. It’s the internet polluting people’s minds. The far right used their billions to essentially purchase most media outlets. A stupid population is one easily controlled. Welcome to populism.
Step one: control content on the internet and media generally Step two: control the minds of folks perpetually online/consuming media Step three: control everything
When it comes to higher ed—you’re absolutely right. It remains true that folks with degrees on average earn more than folks without. Especially if you don’t have to sink yourself into student loan debt, a college degree is a phenomenal investment.
The problem is that literal 19 yr olds, who have never worked a fulltime job in their lives and have no assets and no financial literacy, take out $100,000 in loans to pursue a degree they know nothing about. And the parents are just like, “sure teenage son! Take out thousands—you’ll pay it back in no time!” Then the next thing you know, you’re 32 and you owe MORE on student loans than you did at 19 and feel hopelessly fucked. I get why some people—who go through shit like that—recommend avoiding college. But that’s a different motivation than what I see more on the far right which simply wants people less educated so that the population is generally stupider and easier to manipulate.
Ironic that in the olden days people stopped paying for college as a waste so they could get certificates to go into tech and make bank xD.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I think this is due to the exact opposite happening for a lot of Millenials. University was touted as the only option, and a lot of people went and got degrees in things that didn’t make them employable. At the same time the trades were downplayed. This has bred a lot of resentment of any university degree, as a lot of people see theirs as a failure that may have crippled their finances/lives.