Posted on 05/03/2025 10:18:28 AM PDT by RomanSoldier19
College graduates are calling their degrees worthless. According to new data from Indeed, piling student loans and fears of AI reshaping the workplace are to blame. While experts say higher education is still important, Gen Z should constantly prioritize “upgrading their toolkit” to be successful. College is often advertised as the best four years of one’s life, but many Americans now have regrets.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
If your nephew is going into hardcore industrial pipe fitting, math is necessary. If he’s just going to be a residential plumber, not so much.
AI will replace a lot of things. Will that include illegals?
AI can’t weld, do electrical work, carpentry, plumbing; can’t build landscaping, can’t paint a house or put a new roof on it; can’t repair an engine or transmission or even change a tire; can’t cook, can’t care for the sick..... can’t really DO much at all.
So.. DO something!
Yes, we do. For those spoiled kids who are adverse to manual labor like plumbing, electrical repair, etc., there are many hi-tech trade schools popping up all the time. The parents of these whiners are doing them no favors by sending them to pricey Ivy League schools.
There are many posters on this board who became successful without a degree in stupid social crap. I'm one of them. I retired at 47 by making the right choices for my future. I'm now 75 and still living on those choices.
I use Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok at work. Just yesterday I challenged Gemini on its answer and it agreed I was correct.
You really have to be very specific about your questions.
To give it credit it pointed me to a converter in Indiana which turned out to be a great supplier.
Of course. It also requires a certain amount of commonsense and observing what does and doesn't work. My discipline, integrity, work ethic, self accountability and other values we once held dear, comes from my 11 years Navy that I applied to the civilian work force. That is why I support a Draft of at least 1 or 2 years of active OR reserve duty. The youth of Harvard are now spoiled and don't learn true life lessons to compete.
One of the sad consequences of the decline of the Boy Scouts is that it truly was a great way for young boys to learn critical life skills.
Probably. I mean, I hope so. ;^)
We’ll need skilled tradesmen for a long time. You must be a desk jockey.
Good post.
Good for you and thanks for your service.
I’m almost 75, an army vet and have done about the same thing.
Despite what some people say, we’re going to need skilled tradesmen for a long time. And they will do very well.
There is also the problem that they have dumbed down high school.
AI and robotics will replace huge numbers of tradesmen in the next two decades.
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Nope. I was a fuel systems industrial pipe fitter/designer. I had to ‘draw in’ everything I built. Also called ‘as built’. There were no plans for me to go by except the ones I did on site in my head. AI will be able to do that in maybe 100 years if that. Stay in your tree.
You must have low reading comprehension. I said huge numbers of tradesmen, not all. If you think technology is not going after trades then you are delusional. Any job that currently has highly paid skill positions is fair game for technology to replace it for cost savings. Technology has been replacing or decreasing the work time for tradesmen for decades already. I remember being a land surveyor where a crew consisted of a Chief, and instrument operator and a Rodman. Now with technology, on many jobs a Chief can go out and do the whole job himself with no need for the two other men.
What you wrote does not disprove what I stated at all. I never said every tradesman, I said huge numbers of them. Sheesh I hope you measured better than you read.
Their liberal arts trash, sure.
” He is math gifted and utterly bored because the class teaches down to the dummies.”
He certainly didn’t go to the universities I went to!
Most classes I was in, failed well over 50% of the people that started out.
They used Calculus I to clear out the deadwood.
It accelerated after that.
I was originally a Math major, but to get that degree you had to have a B+ or better in every Math class.
Full time job, and full time family, I could only pull a “B” in Linear Algebra, so I switched to Computer science which is still very math heavy.
I design software systems, then hand it off to programmers to implement.
Sorry about my misreading.
It doesn’t need to be a waste of money, but it is quite often overpriced.
Jim Robinson could probably tell you I don’t pay $80,000/year to improve my writing skills.
“AI can’t weld, do electrical work, carpentry, plumbing; can’t build landscaping, can’t paint a house or put a new roof on it; can’t repair an engine or transmission or even change a tire; can’t cook, can’t care for the sick..... can’t really DO much at all.”
Expect AI to be able to paint a house.
Much of the rest can be AI assisted. AI can also give estimates. If you push paper in a routine manner, expect to be replaced.
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