If you’re unfamiliar, basically in the US there’s a revolving argument door going on between trades workers and academic degree holders [usually boiling down to college=“useless” gender studies degree with $900000 in student loans or trade=Die at 35 from asbestos snorting]. As someone getting an engineering degree, I feel like I should be exempt from having to listen to these, bit unfortunately all the Spyware is loaded to show me ads before sending me to a camp for being a commie, instead of actually making my life better.
But I realized that a lot of arguments about it surround student loans, which a lot of other countries don’t have [as much of at least.] I know obviously there’s still going to be some white collar/ blue collar friction, but do they get anywhere near as heated, frequent, or constant as in the US?
Speaking for India, stuff that is done by tradies in the west is usually done by informally trained workers who have no union backing or worker rights. There isn’t any institution around trade union work whatsoever. So tradie-adjacents are just as precarious as the underemployed college graduates. The situation is wholly different from how it is in the west, so I don’t know how to contextualise it eloquently. But I can say that the “vocational/academic friction” does not exist for better or (most likely) for worse.
Didn’t the government start some kind of trade school scheme?
You mean PMKVY? I don’t know much about it.
Yeah, that.
That is not comparable to a trade school. It is geared towards unemployed and/or dropouts so that they may acquire a skill they can eke a living out with. I see courses like shoesmithing (cobbling) and “search engjne marketing executive” so it seems pretty broad spectrum.
In Brazil the public university sector is much more valued, but also ironically more restrictive than the private one. So you have upper middle-class (or very lucky poor) people who can get public education and get great job opportunities afterwards, and the majority either having no higher education or taking loans for lower quality private degrees.
Though the tuition fees are nowhere as offensive as the ones in the US. Besides that, our equivalent of a trade degree is a technical or professional degree, which is usually at max 2 years of training. It makes for good employment opportunities and many public institutions offer it for free. I think the main problem with the US is how commodified education is in general.
