I'm not arguing against trade schools at all. In a conversation about potentially making some forms of higher ed free, trade school would and should be one of the options discussed as I've said repeatedly. I'm completely and unequivocally in support of an increase in trade education. And in community college -- that's actually the form of college that's most often cited as being something we could realistically make 'free'. (Acknowledging that, yes, that would come from taxes.)
It really feels like we're talking past each other in this conversation. I keep offering evidence to indicate that 1) the vast majority of students already enroll in public education; 2) a massive portion (40%) already enroll in community college; and 3) all sectors are bearing unsustainable debt levels.
As of 2008, 73% of students were enrolled in public post-secondary options, 19% were enrolled in private, non-profit schools, and 8% were enrolled in private, for-profit schools (which primarily are trade or highly professionalized schools). That breakdown shows that the significant majority of students are already taking the low-cost higher education options -- and they're still bearing a debt burden that will impact their future ability to do things like buy houses and cars and so on. This is a problem for all of us, not just for the people with the debt.
The response to me providing this data is videos like the one above, which is laughably terrible. No, it doesn't engender sympathy. Instead it propagates this straw-man idea that the debt crisis is b/c ditzy kids who never bothered to research anything and majored in film at fancy private universities are saddled with $160,000 in debt and are giggling about it. That's a statistically tiny portion of the population. And it's a portion of the population that's really easy to dismiss. If the only people who were being burdened with debt were those kids, this would not be a serious problem.
The problem is a lot more complicated and a lot broader. For instance, the rate of default on debt incurred from community college loans is much higher than the rate of default on 4-year loans:
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/fres...-community-college-leave-so-many-debt-n441881
Or look at the top 10 majors: the top 7 are Business, Psychology, Nursing, Biology, Education, Criminal Justice, and Accounting. Those don't seem like indications of wild impracticality to me:
http://college.usatoday.com/2014/10/26/same-as-it-ever-was-top-10-most-popular-college-majors/ (Even the bottom three: Liberal Arts, English and History aren't Film Studies or Women's Studies or Environmental Art or whatever. They're fairly generic liberal arts degrees that lots of employers cite as a hire-able baseline degree.)
I'm not saying that the perfect solution has been proposed -- in fact, I don't think it's been proposed. But I truly believe this is an issue that we need to start talking and thinking about creatively without a knee-jerk reaction about "entitlement" or "consequences". It has to do with exploding prices, it has to do with a wildly complicated college financing system, it has to do with this system incentivizing a rise in usurious private loan providers, it has to the do with the largely unregulated growth of for-profit higher education.
The issue is endemic to higher education -- including trade school and community college -- not to entitled kids who want to go to private colleges. Not a single piece of evidence has been offered to indicate that the phenomenon of kids opting for fancy options over un-fancy options has much to do with it. It has much more to do with the fact that what Mike Rowe describes about his path -- being able to go to a $28/credit hour community college and get some skills and consider his future unencumbered by debt or financial pressure -- hardly exists any longer. It's becoming so rare it's nearly vanishing. People make bad decisions because they have a bunch of not great options. There are certainly exceptions. But there's a certain Lake Woebegon effect operating in a lot of the conversation on this thread -- the idea that everyone just needs to seek out an exception. Fine, fine, but exceptions are, definitionally, not options for a majority of seekers.
If you're overarching argument is that there are plenty of jobs out there that allow someone to not live at the poverty line and require no higher education -- no trade school, no community college, no college of any kind -- then I'd love to see that data! Please, provide it. That would be absolutely awesome.
I just don't think those jobs exist in the numbers to answer this issue -- I think that's pretty fundamentally what economists have been observing for the past 30 years, which is a major part of why kids have been funneled toward college. I agree, maybe that advice has been ill-advised, but again, it hasn't been so they can just party and major in ceramics and 'find themselves' or 'feel good'.
Maybe part of the issue here is just that we perceive people's motivations differently. Personally, I've taught in public schools, as well as at a public university and a private university. I haven't seen a lot of evidence that young people are larking about being irresponsible and not caring about consequences -- neither personally nor with research. If anything, I feel like I've seen a growing focus in the past decade on professionalization and taking a path that will lead to a job. I certainly know some lazy teenagers and 20-somethings, but the majority that I've met are far more focused and determined and worried about the stability of their futures than I was at their age. They worry about this because they perceive diminishing economic opportunities, and they simultaneously are all too aware of the debt they (or their friends) are accruing in order to try to capture a chance at those diminishing opportunities. I just don't know a lot of people who are like the kids in the video above. And I don't think the aggregate data indicates that's the majority of the 18-25 set.