<story><title>More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-students-are-turning-away-from-college-and-toward-apprenticeships-15f3a05d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alsaaro</author><text>As someone who has worked two of the most intensive blue collar jobs, people should be wary of romanticizing blue collar work.&lt;p&gt;Blue collar workers are expected to really work at their jobs. White collar workers can chill if there is no work to be done, or be sent home early with pay, or take a relaxation day and just browse the internet and listen to podcasts. They have perks, you see white collar workers leaving work early to attend baseball games and do fun activities with their colleagues.&lt;p&gt;Indeed, some white collar workers are so &amp;quot;underworked&amp;quot; they can literally work multiple full time remote jobs. Blue collar guys can&amp;#x27;t work remote, so expect to pay for child care and endure the mourning commute.&lt;p&gt;Blue collar workers aren&amp;#x27;t necessarily paid based on merit, this is formally true if you work in a union-shop where promotions are primarily based on tenue; if non-union there may be no promotion path for most workers because management has a &amp;quot;fresh meat for the grinder&amp;quot; approach to entry level staffing.&lt;p&gt;From a social perspective people don&amp;#x27;t respect blue collar workers. Believe that nobody who writes think pieces praising blue collar workers wants their daughters dating a blue collar worker or wants their children becoming them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>listless</author><text>At the risk of sounding like a terrible person, I&amp;#x27;d like to be honest for a second about why I went to college, which is to avoid this exactly reality that you just laid out.&lt;p&gt;I enlisted in the military after finding college to be too boring for my taste. 3 months later I found myself doing the hardest manual labor of my life on a riverboat for the Coast Guard. The pay was not great and nobody cared if you didn&amp;#x27;t feel like working or were exhausted. The system (as is the military) is not merit based and the guys at the top were pretty awful to the ones at the bottom. By contrast, the officers in the coast guard had nice offices, nice crisp uniforms, nice private rooms, nice private dining quarters, ect. And the difference between those two (enlisted and officer) is a college degree.&lt;p&gt;What I learned is that I did not want to be an enlisted man. It&amp;#x27;s a lot of very hard work for little pay and even the highest enlisted man is still saluting the lowest officer.&lt;p&gt;This was enough to galvanize me to go to college and finish as quickly as I could.&lt;p&gt;Blue collar jobs are not for everyone. They were not for me. I realize the Coast Guard is not a perfect microcosm of the real world, but in a lot of ways it is. Now that I have the white collar job, I still chuckle at &amp;quot;mental health days&amp;quot; and people complaining about being &amp;quot;burnt out&amp;quot;. I chuckle because I remember those days on the river, baking in the hot sun after working for 36 hours straight and how much we all would have laughed until we cried if those words had come out of someone&amp;#x27;s mouth.</text></comment>
<story><title>More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-students-are-turning-away-from-college-and-toward-apprenticeships-15f3a05d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alsaaro</author><text>As someone who has worked two of the most intensive blue collar jobs, people should be wary of romanticizing blue collar work.&lt;p&gt;Blue collar workers are expected to really work at their jobs. White collar workers can chill if there is no work to be done, or be sent home early with pay, or take a relaxation day and just browse the internet and listen to podcasts. They have perks, you see white collar workers leaving work early to attend baseball games and do fun activities with their colleagues.&lt;p&gt;Indeed, some white collar workers are so &amp;quot;underworked&amp;quot; they can literally work multiple full time remote jobs. Blue collar guys can&amp;#x27;t work remote, so expect to pay for child care and endure the mourning commute.&lt;p&gt;Blue collar workers aren&amp;#x27;t necessarily paid based on merit, this is formally true if you work in a union-shop where promotions are primarily based on tenue; if non-union there may be no promotion path for most workers because management has a &amp;quot;fresh meat for the grinder&amp;quot; approach to entry level staffing.&lt;p&gt;From a social perspective people don&amp;#x27;t respect blue collar workers. Believe that nobody who writes think pieces praising blue collar workers wants their daughters dating a blue collar worker or wants their children becoming them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>briHass</author><text>Anyone that hasn&amp;#x27;t done manual labor really has no idea how rough it can be. I worked as an office-furniture-mover in my early 20s (Summers in college), and some days were pretty tough. Granted, that&amp;#x27;s pretty low on the manual labor skills spectrum, but even for a guy in prime physical shape, it&amp;#x27;s tiring and has elements of danger.&lt;p&gt;Now that I&amp;#x27;m double that age, the manual labor I&amp;#x27;ve done like rewiring my house, installing all my own HVAC equipment, and all the yard work for a large property is much harder. I stay sore for days, and it&amp;#x27;s easy to push too hard to get something done and get injured or overwork my body to where my heart rate stays elevated for hours.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s something to be said for working with your brain. The worst days dealing with idiot product management and never-ending Jira tickets don&amp;#x27;t compare to unloading a truck in a hot warehouse or kneeling in a crawlspace for hours re-piping a sewer line.</text></comment>