[rlmorel]

That is true. You cannot teach engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, or surgery on the fly to a walk-in.

I have two degrees, one I never used (Chemistry) and one I DID use, but do not any longer (Nuclear Medicine). My assessment of college, from when I was in it, was that it mostly taught me “how to think”, and less on “how to do”. I learned far more on the job than I did in college, but...I had to know the technical underpinnings to the work before I could begin to learn on the job.

So, yes. Unless men want to wholly surrender those STEM fields to females, men will need to attend college to learn the fundamentals that cannot be taught on the job, or even by a technical school.

As for women vs. men in college?

This nation has dedicated billions of dollars over the last 40 years trying to “overcome” the “sexist barriers” to women entering various STEM fields, but even with all that money spent, attention given, affirmative action applied, preferences and quotas disproportionally applied, psychic massaging, application of victimhood mentality, women STILL only make up 13% of the Electrical Engineers in the workforce.

It is one of three things-women aren’t smart enough to do it, women aren’t naturally inclined to do it, or women don’t want to do it.

My money is on “women aren’t naturally inclined to do it” due to a variety of reasons. And often the same reasons in reverse that men are not inclined to go into nursing.

To many, that makes me a “sexist”. So be it. Facts are facts.

It isn’t due to barriers intentionally put in place to keep men out of nursing, and yes, there are men who DO go into nursing, and are quite good. It is due to the fact that men are not inclined to go into nursing.

[bert]

Did you develop the ability to write in college?

The absolute necessity to write is learned in college. A person who can not live by email is doomed to no raises

[Tell It Right]

When I got my computer science degree decades ago, there were almost no women in my CS and higher math courses. My son (24) says it's still the same. Of course, now you can take months long courses in Python instead of going to college to try to get your foot in the door. But if you want your team to know nerd-level software design, at least one person needs a CS degree. For example, even though I was the kind of geek that learned how to program my home computer beginning at age 14, and I learned a lot later on the job, there's something to be said about learning how to do software engineering in a good college to make our custom software more robust and re-usable for many projects across decades so that we could depend on the same libraries that are already tested and had the bugs worked out.

Are young white men going to vocational school? I hear that's the case. But if we don't have many going into STEM, then our future higher paying engineering/software jobs are going to people from Asia.

[beef]

“And often the same reasons in reverse that men are not inclined to go into nursing.”

TPTB do not want men in nursing. If they did, they would not call it nursing.

[Mr Rogers]

“Unless men want to wholly surrender those STEM fields to females...”

The statistics I just looked up have around 70% of STEM grads being male. Lots of women on colleges but they aren’t all that interested in working hard.

I studied biology in college. You couldn’t have paid me to study anything outside of STEM (although it wasn’t called that in the 70s). I CLEP’d my general ed requirements do I finished in 3 years.