In Switzerland, apprenticeship is the standard for a good middle class income. It's a win-win situation for all involved and if you later feel like you want to go further in your career, there's a "master" training for your profession, which is considered by employers as equivalent to a master degree from an university. I'm not sure why such a system is not more popular in other countries.
Possibly has to do with status as pretty much since forever, university schooling has been a separator of middle class and "elite" (culturally) even though it has been made to be accessible by most people. At least one possible theory.
I have to strongly disagree here. It was the case until neoliberalism hit hard on the country. From the middle 90s, the apprenticeship isn't the standard to a good living anymore. We have roughly half of the households which are poor or near powerty. If the apprenticeship was a gold standard, it would not be the case. Teenagers learned it very well as they prefer to choose to study even after an apprenticeship.
Everything has took an exponential price hike. Healthcare insurance, rent, food, energy and more skyrocket and living is more and more difficult if you don't have a tertiary diploma.
You can tell this is an ancient meme because you somehow expect "non-full-time job" position to be worthwhile in any shape or form. If it's not a full-time position, my personal belief is that either 1) they're probably going to screw you over somehow, or 2) the government regulations are going to screw you over. (I'm in Finland. The government's going to screw you over if you do anything besides staring at the phone and accept the first full-time position that miraculously comes your way. In recent years, they invented a new activity: SPAM JOB APPLICATIONS. This has not worked as well the government thinks it did.)
Our apprenticeships are a lot cheaper though, below minimum wage, so it's easier for the employer to set aside time for training that doesn't earn money.
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?
I agree. I guess what I'm getting at is some fields require requisite knowledge to be useful as an apprentice on day one.
Like for an electrician, on day one you can hand me tools, pull wires, carry supplies, clean up behind me, measure, etc. You may not be able to design the layout or check that things are to code, but you can help me while I e.g. explain why I needed you to grab 3-1 wire instead of a 2-1 for this fixture.
Where as in software you need a requisite amount of knowledge to do anything useful. And it's hard to sit there and explain what I'm doing when they can't read the language. It could be done, it's just harder to bring on someone that's going to be paid when they can't do much. I'd do it, but convincing the bean counters will be a lot harder
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.
I'll chime in with a comment above, but I am an apprenticeship mentor at a big tech company, and while you are somewhat correct, most apprenticeship schemes will mix in academic learning alongside on-the-job training.
It's a great way to learn if you are motivated. If you're not, it's immensely stressful compared to studying for a degree.
I hear that HVAC payscales are pretty nuts. The trick apparently is putting yourself back on the market at the start of each summer season -- there are never enough HVAC people when July comes around.
To combat heat, I built a cooled water loop tubing into a breathable one piece suit, I like to say I got the idea from NASA to get people to not worry about my dress attire when I arrive. Wikipedia has it under the name liquid cooled garment.
Government allows infinite lending to stupid unexperienced children, children tell colleges their tuition is on the house, colleges raise tuition costs knowing their premium is secured by either wealthy families or the infinite pockets of the government, students keep being told the lie college is the only outlet to a better life, keep taking more loans. Rinse and repeat.
So many soft losers in this thread who think the epitome of life is wasting away at a desk all day looking at code and coping with the lifelong debt they took to experience it. Unironically some moron who thinks that you can only gain critical thinking from going to a uni, completely ignoring children who show the predisposition for higher intelligence among their peers. You can't teach intelligence. Stockholm syndrome cope fr.
Yup, I got a chemistry degree. Yeah I get paid marginally better but considering how much it cost and all the trouble I went through I could've done something else I wanted to make money. Education is great and enriching, but we shouldn't become debt slaves over it.
I work as a mentor for an apprenticeship scheme at a large tech company, and work alongside several apprentices.
While it's not fully serious, there are a few inaccuracies. On the whole, I think the apprenticeship scheme is a great way to get people into work, especially as software engineers. In fact, I would put them way above bootcamps, which are essentially ways to part someone with their money in return for cheap labour.
With that being said, here are a few gotchas:
Most employers/mentors don't give a fuck about your progression. You're an additional resource, and you're treated as such. Sadly, mentors that do give a shit typically end up getting shit from their managers because it's not "a priority".
The money is often poor, even at FAANG companies. This is because you're not a full-time employee, so you are heavily downlevelled, earning the same as other non-tech office positions. In some locations, it's the difference between being able to go for lunch outside of the office with the rest of the team, and being forced to eat leftovers with the other apprentices/interns because you cannot afford lunch.
There is a classroom aspect to apprenticeships, like with any part-time degree course.
That four years of experience you hold at the end often isn't viewed as valid by other employers. I've worked with apprentices that have finished 4-5 years at a FAANG company, only to struggle to find work afterwards, despite being fully qualified with a degree-equivalent qualification, and having worked on production services. Some get treated worse than new CS grads for roles.
Many subjects require a mix of academic and manual skilled work, software engineering is no different. Many apprentices feel the lack of CS fundamentals to severely limit them, even if just as a habit of FOMO, given that many of them can complete the standard LeetCode curriculums you see online. If you work at a company full of Oxbridge, Harvard, and MIT grads, it's hard to not feel inferior at times.
I still fully recommend people take apprenticeships, but I always say that it's not a route for everyone. The people I work with that have benefited most are self-sufficient, humble, and willing to learn. Those that aren't often find it extremely stressful and end up questioning whether a degree is better for them. As with most things, it's an option, and options are a good thing.
community college can be $5,000ish per year (in community rn), and if you go to a smaller local college after that it might be like double or triple that per year. the average of $9,000 is still lowballing it a good bit, but you can lower the $30,000 figure a decent bit
(i am in no way saying that college isn't as expensive as people say-- it is. i am saying that community college and lower quality colleges are options many people don't include in these sorts of averages. i thought i was boned but community college saved my ass.)
Honestly, would my wife and I need to save up only $1k per month for the next 16 years to pay for my kid's college? That sounds absurdly do-able and easy. I'm all for trade school too. My Wife and I went to a more technical college and are doing fairly good for ourselves. Will hope our kid goes the same path. We got our college degree and in between years we had jobs in our industry and did interning. That's the best of both worlds IMO.
Honestly, would my wife and I need to save up only $1k per month for the next 16 years to pay for my kidโs college?
16x12 = 192,000.. Where are you getting this number from? That's enough to put 2 kids through even the more expensive US colleges, assuming investments outperform tuition hikes
Given inflation, current estimates put the cost of a 4 year degree at about 180k in 2040, so not an unreasonable savings estimate. That number is both available from online estimates as well as what my own financial planner gave me when discussing my daughter's college fund