While Vegas may be an outlier, the main point the author was making was highlighting the disdain that has arisen in our society for blue collar work.
Most of SoCal has a huge no traditional income market There are a lot of people making a lot of money doing neither white collar nor blue collar work and it isn’t all illicit
Overall I think the authors quote of the colleague terming the service job survival job how disconnected the disdain much of the educational system has for the real world. How likely is it that the one school the author is at has more grad students in her field than the state of Nevada is going to hire in the next decade? That is the reality I see when I see classrooms Kids chasing the dream with a marginally better chance of realizing it than the kids on the basketball court chasing theirs
Yes STEm, I know, 90% of the kids aren’t doing STEM. The kids aren’t really in the schools getting educated. They checking of prerequisites to go apply for jobs.
Universities used to teach you to think. Now they teach you to follow the rules in the box. It gets better. We taking many of the service industries and now starting to wrap requirements around them to have BA degrees.[/quote]
The author was trying to highlight many different, but related, ideas. Yes, this disdain for blue-collar work is something that has bothered me tremendously for many, many years. Having worked in both blue and white collar jobs, I can say for a fact that one group is absolutely NOT superior to the other. As some of the commenters from the article mentioned, there are a large number of “average” Joes in blue collar jobs who can run rings around many of the high-society types, both intellectually and with respect to character and integrity.
As for the STEM degrees, only some of them are lucrative degrees/professions. I know more than a few scientists with PhDs (physicists, biochemists, etc.) who are making about as much as a plumber or electrician.
And if the other 90% of the students went into the STEM subjects, the pay there would go even lower! That’s why I’ve never understood why working types would want everyone to get those degrees. It makes sense that the PTB want it, because then they could have highly-educated worker-slaves with STEM degrees who would be forced to work for $10/hour, just like everyone else. Add to this the fact that India and China are churning out STEM majors every year (about a million every year from each country, IIRC), and the future doesn’t look so bright there, either.
Liberal Arts subjects were meant to teach people how to think, but we know how those degrees are viewed today.
