Man, got a hate on for trades, hey? I’m going from memory here, but when I was in gr12 one of the teachers I had saw fit to go over some statistics regarding university with us, and it changed my mind about attending university for sure. Iirc, somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of people with degrees do not use them; i.e. work in a different field or don’t work at all. 4/5 people, in the early 2000s were not employed in a field they studied for. So it begs the question; what is the probable value of your education given that you have a 20% chance of using it, but a 100% chance of being liable for the debt? There’s some cost/benefit analysis that needs to be done before attending, and there is no shame in knowing yourself well enough to cut your own trail. At least for me, it was expected that I attended university, even with no plan regarding what it is I wanted to study or plan to use the education for something productive.
Looking back these nearly 2 decades later, I can say now that I’m far better off having gone the trades route. I work regularly with engineers, and in my position I absolutely crush what they are paid. And I incurred no debt while doing it: in fact I was paid a respectable wage the whole time. Not to mention, I have far more job security than they do. Perhaps my situation is anomalous, but a direct comparison between most tradesmen I know and engineers I know leaves me wondering how it is that we constantly con young people into believing that a degree is some sort of panacea for the problems of life and employment. University can be a good thing, but it’s certainly not something that I think should be encouraged and promoted the way it is. Although, to be fair, almost all the promoters of university are either university grads themselves or actual universities, so the motives aren’t exactly pure.
