Well put. Once upon a time, you knew that if you wanted to be an artist, you'd probably spend most of your life working other jobs in order to keep on painting, say, or painting portraits of boring people or doing other artistic grunt work just to stay in the field. And you had very little chance of ever getting popular enough to really strike it rich - and even that happened only after long years of near poverty. But now people feel that society owes them a comfortable living so that they can "follow their bliss," as that weird saying goes. Unfortunately, the money has run out - sorry, kids, you've got to pay for your own bliss.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of engineering and tech jobs, almost all of them paying over $50,000 a year to start, going unfilled all over the country or being filled by young Indians and even Arabs brought here on visas. That's because our colleges produce only a tiny handful of native born engineering or science grads every year, mostly because the kids are so underprepared in lower school that they don't even consider going into those majors. But maybe that's because they had puppetry in school instead of math.
Yep, I’m an engineer and (super-duper gasp! to liberals) it didn’t happen overnight. I did 6 years in the military and worked MANY crappy jobs through college to make that happen. I didn’t get an engineering job until I was 31. My biggest motivator for getting through school was telling myself, “If you don’t finish school, this is your life right here,” while working at the construction road crew, cutting plastic parts, cheese factory, and other jobs I did in college.
I wouldn’t have it any other day, the experience was a lot more rich than if I’d hit college at 18 with mommy & daddy paying for it all. And I probably would’ve gotten drunk and failed out in a big way anyway.
“There are literally hundreds of thousands of engineering and tech jobs, almost all of them paying over $50,000 a year to start, going unfilled all over the country or being filled by young Indians and even Arabs brought here on visas. That’s because our colleges produce only a tiny handful of native born engineering or science grads every year, mostly because the kids are so underprepared in lower school that they don’t even consider going into those majors. But maybe that’s because they had puppetry in school instead of math.”
You’re putting the cart before the horse; American students turned their back on tech jobs (and the schooling) when it became obvious that Asians were being imported to suppress wages regardless of the size of the native talent pool. That is still done today; many American tech workers are unemployed, due to a fabricated shortage used to bring in Asia’s white-collar “wetbacks”. Once tech companies threatend to go to Vancouver or Asia itself, the government folded and opened the floodgates.
I'm not sure that's true this year. One of my boys graduated with dual degrees in Math and Chemistry, but couldn't find a job. The closest he got was one he was clearly qualfied for, but because it said "Chem Engineering" on the job spec, the HR person blew him off. Discouraged, he did the wise thing and hid in a Ph.D. program. He really did want to work for a couple of years, though.