I am hoping to find a less specialized admin role now. My former employer for the past few years has really been pushing to get fresh college grads over their experienced staff cause 1/3 the cost and now they are merging with another big enterprise IT services company. While the job search sucks right now I am kinda happy to be not employed by them anymore what kept me from jumping ship was they counted my 10 years with the company they took over the work from so I was getting 4 weeks of vacation and had a metric ton of sick leave.
Really? Why?
What need would they serve to fill that isn’t currently being serviced?
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Preparing people for technical work - especially technical desk work - without saddling them with several tens of thousands of dollars of debt for classes not pertaining to their field.
Yes, a well rounded liberal arts education is good, but self-sufficiency is better. Become self-sufficient, and you can always read a lot of books.
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I think you’re missing the point of my question. People have been bemoaning the decline of vocational for the past thirty years. If they solve so many problems, why aren’t they actually solving problems? It’s not like the major vocational school in my area doesn’t have room if I applied.
So we build more vocational schools.
What next?
???
Profit?
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Ah, gotcha. I think the other part of this equation is convincing employers to value vocational degrees.
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A smart and motivated person can squeeze an education out of very little. They might be able to cobble together an education without any schooling at all.
A dull and lazy person might not retain any education, even if it was spoon-fed to them.
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What are you defining as a ‘vocational degree’? I had always thought of that as more of a hands-on type of field which is traditionally done by becoming an apprentice, then advancing into journeyman and finally master, at which point you can strike out on your own. The hard trades like plumbing or electrician which require a license and tests are what I am considering vocational. These days, lots of stuff dealing with computers also fall under that type of program; what you learn in a classroom, aside from the basics, has a better than even chance of being obsolete in half a dozen years.
BTW, if you find a good plumber, electrician or car repair shop, keep them! They are worth their weight in gold.
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Way off topic. That particular usage of “any more” (meaning “these days”) is of particular interest to me. You’ve probably revealed where you’re from already … but where are you from?
not so much as obsolete as automated. heck as much fun as it was being on the we build the servers and get them ready and hand it off to break fix was at the time (no on call was so nice) now outside of things like a set of physical boxes that will be clustered is all fill out a form and wait for the virtual machines to get provisioned and set up by automated scripts then just do the post build checking.
a lot of the PITA stuff like configuring network switches individually is even going away where it is all configured on a controlling server and you just plug the router or switch into the panel and it goes out and asks for the configuration and gets it downloaded right away.
The main problem with that organization isn’t that it’s impossible to get a decent education out of their programs. The problem is that their business model often saddles students with Ivy-League levels of debt (upwards of $75K) even though their graduation rates are around 25 percent and their track record for job placement is abysmal. They also engage in deceptive marketing practices designed to mislead students about said cost, graduation rate, and job placement record.
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Many public community colleges have great (and affordable) vocational programs, but they usually don’t have a huge marketing budget like ITT and similar for-profit institutions so a lot of people are unaware of them.
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Are you being serious? Because there are a lot of jobs out there that require a degree of training and skill, but you don’t need to know when Prussia stopped being a thing. That is to say, people ~16-20+ need training to get a good job, but a 4 year college degree may not be what they need - especially since their cost has gone up.
Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs has written some well thought out things on this. I realize that there ARE classes for some vocations, like welding, mechanic, IT, etc. There are also apprenticeships, on the job training, etc. But there are a ton of jobs that I think the market would benefit from having a larger pool of trained people (construction, plumbing, Heating/Cooling tech, various technicians of various fields, machine shop work, etc). Then there is also the stigma socially (in some circles) that people doing non-office jobs are some how failing.
Yes, that is true. I am thinking more would be even better. Like my grandpa back in the day learned basic machining in high school, and then there were options for more training afterwards.
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Quoted for truth.
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As somebody who looks at technical resume’s after they’ve been filtered by HR, DeVry and ITT and similar local community college courses all fall into the same category, which is to say “better than nothing”. They tell me that you had the stick-to-it-iveness to follow through with something, even if it was mind-numbingly boring, and that you can probably think logically enough to handle basic technical problems. In other words, there’s potential.
I’ll add a bit more here since there seem to be a lot of early-career technical folks in the thread.
Better than DeVry etc is certifications…
Better than certifications is simply years of experience…
Better than simple years of experience is years of diverse experience… (now we’re getting towards the spark of curiousity that lies beneath a truly good technical person’s mind.)
And at or above years of diverse experience is things you have done that aren’t on your resume because you know they make HR people’s heads explode! 
Icing on the resume’ cake is if you can communicate well with non-technical people, especially on technical topics. Try to make that apparent in your resume and you’ll get a lot further…
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No, many public community colleges offer vocational degrees for at or less than the actual cost of providing the instruction. What was problematic here is the for-profit nature of the school, as well as the indiscriminate way it exploited students.
The benefit of a non-vocational college degree is, at least in principal, not just in the jobs that it prepares you for.
From the for-profit schools of that name or from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago? The latter is a legitimate school.
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I feel obligated to comment something because i spent a good 20 minutes writing a comment and realized the wall of text was unnecessary.
The for-profit nature of education nowadays might prove to be too strong of a temptation for most colleges and universities to shy away from.
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Having gone to one i can attest that there’s a high level of talent there. But the sticking point is not the students, but the accreditation of the school itself and it’s business practices as being shady/reprehensible.
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It was the former, the for-profit ones…
I wasn’t including community colleges in the problem, and I said they might be the solution, so we agree.
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I remember ITT sending me promo mail to my ivy league college mailbox asking to enroll, despite the fact that my mailing address was thousands of miles from their campus. It was clear they had a big marketing budget.
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