Posted on 11/12/2015 8:39:42 AM PST by SeekAndFind
He got a round of applause for this at last night’s debate but it’s a silly claim when you think about it. His point is that there are good livings to be had in vocational training without any of the debt or fascism that come with today’s university experience. True enough, but the cultural bias towards college grads in hiring means that even a lowly philosophy major with a B.A. probably stands a better chance of higher earnings out of school than the average welder does. According to Bloomberg, despite comprising just 34 percent of the total work force, college grads earn 53 percent of the total wages. Analysts both left and right ran the numbers this morning and found that philosophy majors do quite a bit better than welders, even if they don’t go on to become professors of philosophy. (Although those who do become professors do better on average than welders too.) Ethan Epstein at the Weekly Standard writes:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual salary of a mid-career American welder is $37,000 a year. The median starting salary of a philosophy graduate, meanwhile, is $39,000 a year, according to Payscale. The mid-career median salary of a philosophy graduate, meanwhile, tops $80,000 annually. Thatâs right: Contrary to Rubioâs assertion, philosophy majors make twice as much as welders. That philosophy majors are poor must come as a shock to philosophy grads Peter Thiel, Carl Icahn, and . . . Carly Fiorina. (Iâm hoping Fiorina took the opportunity to educate her opponent on the subject backstage after the debate.)
Think Progress, also citing Payscale, finds that the average salary for someone with a B.A. in philosophy is $97,000 per year while the average for someone with an associate’s degree in welding technology is $58,500. How can that be? How can it be that philosophy majors, whom Rubio wants you to imagine behind the counter at Starbucks pouring lattes because they didn’t choose a more practical major, are raking it in at a higher rate than someone who chose a profession for which there’s reliable demand? Simple: Many philosophy majors end up taking jobs in other professional fields. Some go into business, some go into law, some go into tech, and so forth. A few years ago, when the punching-bag major of choice for critics of college was art history rather than philosophy, Virginia Postrel explained why a degree in the humanities wasn’t necessarily an economic liability:
The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning — the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the âsoftâ professions that complement them…
The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or âgreenâ industries. Itâs just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that philosophy majors gravitate towards higher-paying white-collar jobs upon graduation, not because of the pay but because they’re drawn to the sort of argumentation and abstract problem-solving that those jobs usually involve. But the pay is what it is, and it’s going to beat the welder’s on average. What could have semi-salvaged this argument for Rubio is if he’d emphasized student loan debt as a counterweight. “Sure,” he could have said, “college grads earn more, but they also owe much more than someone with vocational trading would.” That’s certainly true, but even there, philosophy majors might out-earn welders by enough of a margin to make the debt worthwhile. As of last year, the average college grad left school owing nearly $30,000. That’s a lot, but Epstein’s Payscale numbers show a $40,000 mid-career median gap between philosophers and welders each year. The mean, per Think Progress, is almost as much. That’s a lot of lost income just to avoid some debt.
Exit question via Postrel: What if thousands of high-school students took Rubio’s advice and skipped college to train as welders instead? What would happen to wages in the welding field with a fresh glut of labor?
Oh please. Most working philosophers are teachers. The degree has little value beyond that. And considering that what passes for philosophy are the ivory tower scrawlings of academic eggheads like Kant, Spencer, Malthus, Nietzsche, Marx and Hegel a philosophy degree has little value outside of academia. In fact one can attribute much of the rise of the modern totalitarian state to the maundering of these birds., almost none of whom ever held a job.
About $72K/year for men. That includes the S-T-E-M grads who actually have a demand > supply so $97K BA philosophers must be nonsense, unless it's just the ones who went to law and medical school.
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
I know we need more welders. The last stat I saw was there was a shortage of about 500,000 qualified welders in the United States.
Last year we had a remodeling job done in our building; it turned out the foreman and I had worked on the same job about 35 years ago. I asked him what concerned him most about the construction industry today and he said it was the lack of young people entering the skilled trades as a career. There is good money to be made but too few of the current generation want to do it. Most of the guys on his job were in their 40s or 50s and he was concerned about what happens when they retire.
He said the illegals were good for grunt work but were worthless in anything requiring technical skill.
Cali is outrageous. They pay the heck out of government connected jobs and the shipyards are quasi government.
All the unions blackmail holding products off shore indefinitely on ships that can not get to port with products.
Blackmails the economy and so far the unions have not had criminal charges against them because they give hundreds of millions to Democrats.
Think Progress is the source? It behooves them to promote philosophy.
"You know, Nietzsche says that 'Out of Chaos Comes Order.'"
"Oh, blow it out your ass, Howard."
“Welder a make $10 in the private sector, $18 for government and maybe 180k a year in some Union shipyard I guess.”
Welders make $30 - $40 per hour average, but some specialized pipe welders much more.
As I’ve replied twice on this thread, shipyard welders in Mobile, Alabama make over $20.00 an hour. You guys may have a totally diffent perspective on what constitutes good pay, but I would say that’s pretty good especially with the overtime they get. There are some small piece of crap shipyards where the wages are lower, but there are two fairly big ones and one small one with a combined workforce of around 3,000 who pay over $20.00 an hour for shipyard welders with normal benefits (medical, etc.).
"What a bunch of philosophers."
There are zero jobs in philosophy. There are some jobs in academic philosophy.
That one is a stretch.
The local community college offers night classes for those who want to learn for themselves and a track for the trade fairly reasonably.
Until I had Lasik, wearing glasses and fighting a welders helmet was a pain. I was chronic nearsighted. Maybe next year, I’d like to sign up for the intro home welding class. Every now and then I need some rods burned.
EAA offers a tig welding class every so often and I am going to go to it and some others they offer next year.
The Left likes to use fake “statistics” to embellish their lies.
There is a rather obvious distinction between “a philosophy major” and “a tenured Philosophy professor...”
Or do you think our “pundits” are just too stupid to see that?
Nor does not majoring in Philosophy mean that one can't be a philosopher. See, that was almost philosophical!
Much better.
I knew there had to be a Monty Python skit out there.
Well done.
..Paging Phil Ossifer, please pick up a white courtesy phone.
Oh I understand. Worked in Texas for 35 years and now retired pipefitter here in north east Alabama. In Texas it would be hard to get a welder to load his toolbox for $22.50. Had a guy here who wanted to hire me as a pipefitter and run his crew, asked me what kind of wages I needed. Told him I needed somewhere in the mid $20’s to come out of retirement. Told me that was more than the prevailing wage and couldn’t pay that much.Told him too bad.
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.