Free College for Everyone Is Not About Educating the Masses. It's About Saving A Dying Industry.

a reply to: Aazadan

College is 100% useless in most fields, including most high tech fields, all it does is check the HR box. Which is becoming more rare these days, especially in the technology field. You must have missed the part where I mention that even with the degree's my buddy makes more than I do, or the fact that every single person senior to myself has either no formal education or less than myself.

Want to know what I learned from my BS and MS? Absolutely nothing that I didn't already know from self study and real life experience. I only did them because they made financial sense for me to do so at the time, for example my employer covered the costs. Now that I'm a bit later in my career, guess what makes the most impact aside from my experience? My network of contacts, none of which I gained from college.

Just my anecdotal experience.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Graysen
Seriously, the best predictor of lifetime wealth accumulation is the age at which you enter the workforce. Most people who enter the force at age 19 will out-earn their college-attending peers by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I really don't see how this is possible. With nothing more than a high school diploma, you honestly aren't even qualified for a minimum wage job. You will never do something impactful with that level of education. You won't cure HIV or cancer, you won't send people to Mars (or goto Mars yourself), you will never solve an interesting problem the human race has, you won't even have the knowledge to run a business successfully unless you get lucky. All you will ever be able to do, is take orders from others... and maybe memorize enough of those orders, after being given them long enough, that you can repeat them to others.

I wasn't talking about impactful. I was talking about earning dollars.

With a welding certificate, you can start at $50 an hour. Underwater welding on the gulf coast pays between $80 and $120 per hour. Of the leading occupations of American millionaires, (people who are worth more than $1 million, not people who get paid more and spend it all on fancy cars and graduate degrees), welder is always in the top five occupations. And an independent contractor, not "taking orders", but filling them.

Seriously, I know 3 welders who are millionaires. Not because of the wage they earn welding (though it's up above what most corporate mid-level managers make). Welders also deal in scrap metal, a by-product of their contract-work. Scrap is literally trash at one jobsite, but they sell it at a profit to the next job site, when "specialty gussets and reinforcements" are needed. An 18 inch piece of schedule 10 pipe the welder takes away from one site as trash becomes a reinforcing corner brace---$110 at the next site. One welder I know is a pipe fitter for a natural gas utility. He has a side-business making barbecue smokers "from re-cylcled pipe". His smokers sell for north of $2,000 a piece.


Most common occupations of Americans with > $1 million net worth? Owner of a janitorial services company. You employ a bunch of immigrants who are used to working hard, and who are thrilled with US minimum wage. You contract labor, and sell the supplies your workers use. There's low overhead, and you get contracts by doing the job cheaper than your competition. And you tend to hold contracts for decades...

You know who is UNDER-represented in the million-dollars-net-worth category? Athletes, doctors and lawyers. Because they have expensive lifestyles (and student loans!) that keep them from every developing large bank accounts....

So, the way to maximize your lifetime income is to enter the workforce as young as possible, and spin off your work into owning a business. Guys who own a plumbing or HVAC business are more likely to be millionaires than someone who runs an office or a medical practice. Medical malpractice insurance can top a quarter of a million a year for the head of a OB-gyn practice. Plumbers just carry regular liability insurance.

It's all what Andrew Carnegie said back in the 19th century:

"watch your costs, and your profits will take care of themselves."

originally posted by: Graysen

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Graysen
Seriously, the best predictor of lifetime wealth accumulation is the age at which you enter the workforce. Most people who enter the force at age 19 will out-earn their college-attending peers by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I really don't see how this is possible. With nothing more than a high school diploma, you honestly aren't even qualified for a minimum wage job. You will never do something impactful with that level of education. You won't cure HIV or cancer, you won't send people to Mars (or goto Mars yourself), you will never solve an interesting problem the human race has, you won't even have the knowledge to run a business successfully unless you get lucky. All you will ever be able to do, is take orders from others... and maybe memorize enough of those orders, after being given them long enough, that you can repeat them to others.

I wasn't talking about impactful. I was talking about earning dollars.

With a welding certificate, you can start at $50 an hour. Underwater welding on the gulf coast pays between $80 and $120 per hour. Of the leading occupations of American millionaires, (people who are worth more than $1 million, not people who get paid more and spend it all on fancy cars and graduate degrees), welder is always in the top five occupations. And an independent contractor, not "taking orders", but filling them.

Seriously, I know 3 welders who are millionaires. Not because of the wage they earn welding (though it's up above what most corporate mid-level managers make). Welders also deal in scrap metal, a by-product of their contract-work. Scrap is literally trash at one jobsite, but they sell it at a profit to the next job site, when "specialty gussets and reinforcements" are needed. An 18 inch piece of schedule 10 pipe the welder takes away from one site as trash becomes a reinforcing corner brace---$110 at the next site. One welder I know is a pipe fitter for a natural gas utility. He has a side-business making barbecue smokers "from re-cylcled pipe". His smokers sell for north of $2,000 a piece.


Most common occupations of Americans with > $1 million net worth? Owner of a janitorial services company. You employ a bunch of immigrants who are used to working hard, and who are thrilled with US minimum wage. You contract labor, and sell the supplies your workers use. There's low overhead, and you get contracts by doing the job cheaper than your competition. And you tend to hold contracts for decades...

You know who is UNDER-represented in the million-dollars-net-worth category? Athletes, doctors and lawyers. Because they have expensive lifestyles (and student loans!) that keep them from every developing large bank accounts....

So, the way to maximize your lifetime income is to enter the workforce as young as possible, and spin off your work into owning a business. Guys who own a plumbing or HVAC business are more likely to be millionaires than someone who runs an office or a medical practice. Medical malpractice insurance can top a quarter of a million a year for the head of a OB-gyn practice. Plumbers just carry regular liability insurance.

It's all what Andrew Carnegie said back in the 19th century:

"watch your costs, and your profits will take care of themselves."

I'd rather be a blue collar millionaire than broke and educated....

I say this as someone who has top tier master's degree. Many of my friends and classmates are more concerned about "prestige" in their social circle. I care about how much money I have in the bank. Not what firm someone works for or where they went to school.

I've always been the type who could work the cash register of a McDonald's with a smile because I own the restaurant while the smug guy ordering is looking down on me.

a reply to: Hypntick

That’s making a case then that tech jobs are overpaid. Considering the types of backgrounds necessarily to come up with new AI and graphics techniques though or quant stuff, I don’t think that’s the case and even in lower end stuff like what you see from boot camp grads though... those people’s earnings are definitely out of line with the barrier to entry necessary.

a reply to: Graysen

Millionaire is a very bad metric, a million dollars is not what it once was.

The rest comes down to motivation to work. Do you want to make the world a better place or merely keep yourself in a good financial position? Welding does one of those, the right education does both.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: Graysen
Do you want to make the world a better place or merely keep yourself in a good financial position?

Those are the same thing

The fact that you don't think welding "makes the world a better place" explains the fact that you have silky-smooth, non-callused hands.

Every hospital, every electrical sub-station, every building on the campus where you got your diploma, all of them required welding.

Building stuff allows the rest of this Tinkertoy civilization of ours to keep on keepin' on.

I have multiple degrees. I am well educated enough to empathize with the labor and exertions of the common (wo)man. "The Art of War" says that the single most important quality of a general is empathy for the toil of the people whose fields and workshops you trample through.

a reply to: Graysen

I have plenty of empathy for people. But no, earning a living and improving the world are not the same thing. Welding techniques change and improve over time. Are you content to be taught new techniques, or do you want to be the one that invents them? You don't invent electron beam welding which enabled the construction of new types of aircraft without knowing how to weld and having some additional education under your belt.

Knowing a field is necessary to work in it, but I put next to zero value on that because that's just training. It's about as useful as teaching a dog to shake hands... all training. The only value is in coming up with something new (and useful), advancing whatever field you decide to work in, and thereby advancing the collective of human knowledge.

a reply to: Aazadan


When I was 23, I was such a genius that the owner could have fired senior management and just let me run the company.


But lots of people are NOT Rex Dangervest; they are never going to be disruptors in their industries. Their quiet lives can have fulfillment and meaning even if they DON'T revolutionize the way the rest of us play guitar or make toast.

I look forward to seeing you on the news and the cover of the Rolling Stone. Til then, make every day count.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: Graysen

I have plenty of empathy for people. But no, earning a living and improving the world are not the same thing. Welding techniques change and improve over time. Are you content to be taught new techniques, or do you want to be the one that invents them? You don't invent electron beam welding which enabled the construction of new types of aircraft without knowing how to weld and having some additional education under your belt.

Knowing a field is necessary to work in it, but I put next to zero value on that because that's just training. It's about as useful as teaching a dog to shake hands... all training. The only value is in coming up with something new (and useful), advancing whatever field you decide to work in, and thereby advancing the collective of human knowledge.

99.9% of college graduates are just a cog in a wheel toiling away in corporate cube farms. Very few people in this world "make a mark" so to speak.

There is a reason a significant number of the wealthiest people are college drop outs....

a reply to: Edumakated

There’s also a reason the poorest people are college dropouts.

Anyways everyone has the potential to make a mark, those who don’t only fail to do so because society failed them by not expecting enough, not motivating them enough, and not educating them enough. Every time someone settles for just being a cog is a collective failure on each and every one of us as we robbed that person from reaching their potential.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: Edumakated

There’s also a reason the poorest people are college dropouts.

Anyways everyone has the potential to make a mark, those who don’t only fail to do so because society failed them by not expecting enough, not motivating them enough, and not educating them enough. Every time someone settles for just being a cog is a collective failure on each and every one of us as we robbed that person from reaching their potential.

Kanye, is that you? lol.

The millennial, participation-trophied, helicopter parented, credo. You've been told all your young life that "we just know you're going to do great things" until you're an Incredible Hulk of the ego. The personality of a brain surgeon (not a complement).

The only celebrity rock-star personalities with that kind of ego are scam-artists like Trump and Musk and Jobs. You talk to pullitzer-prize winners and you'll find an incredible humility about their work. Same with the bulk of people who are not just Trump-level rich, but warren Buffett level rich. The hucksters like Trump and Zuckerberg are the ones who got rich using other people's creativity, who don't really own a unique process, and who are more famous than rich.

Being a young white male is hard work. You're expected to actually be good at stuff; nobody is going to cut you the slack they would to one of the victims of our society. And you aren't old enough to have actually accomplished anything yet. But keep telling everyone how much more competent you are than the rest of them. Maybe some of them will believe it for a while.

The real question posed by life, is how you will deal with disappointment and failure. Anybody can deal with success, adulation, and riches. The real test of your mettle is how you deal with being used, being unfairly wronged, having your work stolen and your good name ruined. You know, classic literature stuff like "the man in the iron mask.' If you can rise above it, rather than being crushed by it, you will have accomplished something. You will have made the world a better place, as much as any innovator ever does.

A massive ego is a sorry substitute for actual accomplishment. But when you're too young to have actually done very much, it may be all you've got.

a reply to: Graysen

What does anything I’ve said have to do with ego? We live in a competitive society. Competition means better, faster, and cheaper. There are physical limits on how long people can work, and on how cheap they can work. That means that competition dictates that it is the primary responsibility of every worker to innovate and do the job better.

However, the US is no longer competitive. Since other nations are out competing us while cheating in university were not losing to an education gap. This suggests that either free market competition doesn’t work, or that we’re not enabling our citizens to compete.

If you cannot innovate in your field, quite frankly you are unemployable.

I fully agree with you, I do not understand these prejudices at all.