You can tell this is an ancient meme because it prices college at 4 years at $9,000 per year instead of 5 years at $30,000 per year ๐
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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This doesn't work for some fields imo. I don't know how I could train someone in computer science if they don't even know how a for loop works yet.
Well maybe you couldn't, but that doesn't mean there's no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn't already exist.
Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.
Heck my local technical high school offers an "Information Technology" vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn't it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?
For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with "bootcamps." Increasingly you'll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you've been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you'll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.
These can vary from "pretty good, actually" to "predatory" to "a little bit like indentured servitude." Wouldn't it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they're interested in?
This already exists through college coop programs, and people can end a coop program with work experience and not much debt.
The problem with special programs being kicked down to high school is it creates scarcity further down the chain, meaning kids need to make their life choices early and following through depends on availability.
You fix the problem of program capacity and sure that's great.
Certainly I'm not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn't cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult's life.
We've already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?
You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I'm misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I'm not sure I'm following.
Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?
Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?
I'm not talking about IT, or the workforce, I'm talking about equal access to education.
Wealthier children that monopolize access to the higher specialisation courses is a thing that could happen, and I could see colleges and universities start to require those as prerequisites for certain degrees.
There's a lot of work that would need to be done to remove barriers to education, which is the thing that we want to do in offering an alternative credential to enter the workforce. Doing this work in the wrong way would reinforce income disparity, reduce class mobility. We are talking about big changes.