Mike Rowe: Stop cherry-picking one form of education

[KLATTU]

“Our elected officials have glommed onto college as the golden ticket, the wish fulfillment, the human right — and therefore, the thing that ought to be made free and available to all,” said Rowe. “If you’re going to say education should be made free, then own it across the board — talk to me about options of trade school, apprenticeships, fellowships, and training programs.”

Read more at: Mike Rowe: Dirty Jobs Can Be Good Jobs | National Review

He makes a lot of sense.
The GOP could use a guy like him.

 

[humbolt]

As long as I'm making progress toward a goal, I enjoy getting dirty if it's necessary. That kind of dirt washes off. It's the deeper dirt - the internal kind - that doesn't easily clean up. The former should be embraced and the latter avoided at all cost. I left professional pursuits for that very reason. I should've done it sooner than I did.

 

[katzgar]

I agree completely. He is advocating the German model. Many blue collar jobs have gone over seas and a trade school program would provide jobs and minimize their attraction to Trump.

 

[soot]

I totally agree with him.

I've got a college degree, a graduate degree, and a damn good corporate job that keeps me firmly planted in a big cushy chair in front of a big ol' oak desk banking away on a computer all day long in my climate-controlled home office.

The compensation at this job is great and it's allowed me to do things, and provide things for my children, that my blue collar father and grandfather could never even dream of.

But there isn't a week that goes by that I don't kinda wish, in some small way, that I was doing something else.

I've always loved landscaping and horticulture and that kind of thing and there's a piece of me that feels like I missed out on something by not banging out two years of landscape architecture at a community college and building my own small business many years ago.

Of course it's way to late for me to pull a complete 180 now and go pursue that kind of thing.

The financial obligations I've taken on over the years are contingent upon me continuing to earn what I'm currently earning so I'm not in a position where I can go out and "learn the ropes" of a new business and then establish myself.

And I'm not anything like the "unhappy investment banker" Rowe mentions in the article; I'm perfectly content doing what I'm doing, but I'll always wonder "what could have been".

My consolation is that I'm one of three guys in my neighborhood who does his own yard work.

I push my mower myself, prune my trees and hedges myself, care for my pool myself, tend my own garden, rake my own leaves, whatever.

I like to take a break from work on Tuesday afternoons and go out and do it while all the other lawns on my block are being done be Mexican landscaping crews, LOL; I pretend I'm one of them.

I've got two boys and there's going to be plenty of money in their 529s for them to go to school if they so choose.

But if either of them comes to me and wants to become a plumber or a welder or whatever I wouldn't even consider standing in their way.

I'd encourage them to get at least some business training through a conventional college, in marketing, accounting, purchasing, and that kind of thing because I can't help but think it'll help them build their own businesses.

But if they just want to take some business classes rather than get a full-blown degree I'd be fine with that.

Great article.