I want to know if Rubio was implying welding should be taught in college. Seemed so.
No implication, he was speaking directly about vocational training as he said.
Average the salaries of philosophers and welders. Hell, WalMart Truck drivers average 81k according to their commercials.
RE: I want to know if Rubio was implying welding should be taught in college. Seemed so.
I don’t think that’s true at all. He was implying that we should encourage those who aren’t really college ready to train vocationally for a skill that the industry needs ( Welding being one of them ).
Here’s what Rubio said, from the transcripts:
“Here’s the best way to raise wages. Make America the best place in the world to start a business or expand an existing business, tax reform and regulatory reform, bring our debt under control, fully utilize our energy resources so we can reinvigorate manufacturing, repeal and replace Obamacare, and make higher education faster and easier to access, especially vocational training. For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.”
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So he was not advocating teaching welding in college, but he was (correctly) lamenting the we have “stigmatized vocational education”.
Plus, I suspect his definition of “philosophers” would include anyone with an Ethnic Studies or Gender Studies “degree”.
I’m no fan of Rubio (though he’s far preferable to any Democrat for sure), but I thought he did well with this topic at the debate.
Rubio was promoting vocational training. I was one of the first freshmen girls allowed to attend Albert Lane Technical High School in Chicago. At that time to graduate HS with a math and science major you had to have 2 years of shop training (wood, electrical, machine, foundry, welding, auto or print) . You had to take wood and electric and were assigned (no freedom to choose) two of the remaining shops. You also had to take two years of drafting along with all the math, science courses, English, history, foreign language and PE courses. It was a great education. I have used my shop and drafting training quite a bit.
Welding is taught in a lot of colleges (especially community colleges). (Just do a quick Google search on welding in college.)
In addition to that, here is at least one major University (Ohio State University - College of Engineering) that also teaches welding engineering, and offers a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and even a doctorate degree in welding engineering.
Welding Engineering - OSU
Payscale is notoriously bad at wages. Here is a test ... take the Payscale rate for your job, and see where you fit on the continuum. Most people are under 50% of the average, even high performers. Better yet, take Payscale data with you next time you are getting a job offer to try to negotiate your salary. The response that you will get is that nobody believes Payscale data, because it is all self reported by the employees themselves. Yep, people lie about what they are making so that the averages for their field will go up so that their boss will be pressured to pay them more.