==Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans==

Source? I think most people view these jobs as the foundation of the American middle class. At least we do in the Midwest, where I grew up.

==Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades.==

Having a Harvard degree gives you higher earning potential than a career in the trades [1].

==It is a problem of culture, not economics.==

Oddly, all the jobs you mention are historically union jobs. Meanwhile, one side of the political aisle has attempted to weaken unions over the past 4 decades. If we want people to embrace union jobs, maybe we should embrace unions?

[1] https://www.scholarshipcare.com/average-income-of-harvard-un...

Things are viewed differently on the coasts, where those roles are very much lower class, even though they pay well.

Which political party runs the coastal cities? I'll give you a hint, it's the same party that calls the rest of America "fly over states"

The same political party that runs the inland cities? I’m not sure “fly over states” is a phrase you can blame on Democrats, seems like a stretch.

College vs. trade school isn't just about money or 'social acceptability', it's also about opportunity. A 18 year old who goes to trade school to become an electrician is going to become an electrician, they are not going to be able to change their minds in two years and become a biologist.

That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.

It seems like an easy solution to this is to have a 'trade academy' or a coalition of trade schools that allow / require you to do a rotation in each of the related trade specialties, i.e., if building / construction related, you spend a week / month / quarter learning about plumbing, electrical, framing, mechanical, landscape, etc. This would both promote understanding of related fields and give people an exposure to a variety of potential interests.

This is not unlike the required courses that predominate pre-major studies at a traditional university (in the U.S., at least)

I think it's still going to be hard to get 'middle class' parents to embrace this for their kids - and I am a 'middle class' parent.

If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.

I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.

What you're describing is often done in trade high schools. Freshman will rotate through trades and pick one to continue on.

Once you need a career it doesn't really work like that though, often you're working years as an apprentice in a specified trade before you can even think about branching out on your own.

If you switch trades you're back at the bottom with apprenticeships all over again.

Someone like an English major can much easily change careers as long as they're somewhat adjacent (e.g., copywriting, research, journalism, etc) and generally starts off at a higher salary depending on their degree level. Until you hit masters level most degrees are broad generalized education.

Trades are specializations. If you're unsure about which trade you want to get into, you'd likely be better served with a business degree (which is another generalized area of study)... at least that can be applied across trades. Many tradespeople struggle with the business side of things despite being very practiced at their trade.

Sure, they can change their mind and become a biologist. But in doing so, they throw away the two years. They have to start college from zero, because their trade-school classes don't translate into college credits.

You can start college at 20 as easily as at 18. The problem is that you get nothing for the two years (except, I suppose, you can work as an electrician to pay for college, instead of working at McDonalds).

I'm guessing that our hypothetical student must or might take a college-level Biology course as part of their undergrad degree, and that exposure might cause them to change their mind about their chosen field.

I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.

"Underwater basket weaving degrees" is a great piece of rhetoric because it lets the listener project their personal most hated field in its place. If you think gender studies degrees are useless, I don't see the value in marketing, and we run into this little meme: boom, suddenly we're attacking higher education hand in hand. Epstein conspiracies are another example. Lots of people think he didn't kill himself. Ask them what did happen and they're at loggerheads, but if you can steer thoughts away from that you have broad public support. It's a clever if disastrous way to build American anti-intellectualism.

At the risk of being a Starship Troopers "I'm Doing My Part!" recruitment video, I respect all of the plumbers, seamstresses, tailors, drycleaners, carpenters, &c that I have hired for help.

I know my limits of what I can do. I can sew my own buttons, do a shitty hem on something that doesn't matter. Repairing the plumbing on a bathroom sink I did catastrophic damage too is towards my upper limit; I was able to source replacement material and do the labor myself, but I consider myself fortunate that I was able to do that with only a week without a bathroom sink. Also, don't tell my landlord but now I do have a plumber's wrench on hand.

So I go to the experts. The tailor, the seamstress, the plumber. "This broke, I messed up, you can fix it better, yes next Thursday after 4pm sounds fantastic."

Yes, I understand the pride in doing things yourself. I also see no shame in shooting up a flair.

My best tool in my toolbox is my checking account!

Trades are tough on the body. A job-related injury can leave you unable to work. It seems like a rational choice to make the same amount of money typing on a computer, especially in a country lacking a significant social net.

Sitting and typing at a computer all day isn't particularly healthy either, for what it's worth. I do recognize that standing desks can mitigate this, but it's even tough on the wrists.

Several of my family members work in the trades. The level of damage done to their bodies is way higher than any desk job and you can at least somewhat mitigate the damage in a desk job. My cousin is a bricklayer and has severe medical problems in his 30s (though he does earn more than me).

Also the physical toll of working in a trade can't be underestimated.

My brother is 4 years younger than me, dropped out of high school, and makes a TON of money mowing lawns and doing pools and HVAC work in Florida.

That lifestyle ages you fast though. I have plenty of energy to be physically active after work and have no aches/pains to speak of. I wouldn't give that up for the money he makes. And that physical divide is only going to get bigger as we age.

Indeed, the trades people who are my age, mid 50's, tend to be broken and hobbling. It might work in a country with a strong safety net, retirement system, and health care system, otherwise forget it. Trades people have a double whammy of working in a weak-labor country to begin with, and then having to work for typically small family owned businesses that skirt the labor laws and offer no career opportunities for non family members.

But the trades also include indoor trades such as medical technicians and assistants.

I'm not sure if you are implying negative connotation to "culture" because of an identity politics view that blue collar workers are a bunch of uneducated racist white guys, or if bigoted elites in general look down on labor jobs. Either way, both are elitist and bigoted views.

IMO, they’re not so socially undesireable as they’re hard physical work and parents/kids aren’t motivated to work that hard when an AC office awaits a liberal arts grad.

My father didn’t want me to follow grandpa and be farmer or carpenter because it was a hard life. Most hvac, plumber, electricians I’ve known were following in family footsteps because it was lucrative and they were raised in it. It’s non-trivial to break into, physically demanding and years of apprenticing before you can go your own way.

It can be done, and there are great opps for those who can stick with it for 5 years. And like all trades, your market is growing because all the old guys are getting old.

http://sfelectricaltraining.org/

Do you have a source for this? It's commonly stated, but I've read that earnings for trades are over-stated. Just googling around, it looks like a plumber around here makes $35-70k, which I'd expect most to be able attain in an entry-level corporate job.

The allegation is that reporting on the earnings for trades have focused on how much you can make as an underwater titanium welder, instead of basic steel welding which makes up the majority of the labor market.

In my social group almost all of the parents working in the trades sent their kids to 4-year universities. Of the few who didn't, they didn't have much of a choice. The kids who didn't have the grades for college, enrolled in tradeschool.

Of all the kids who could go to college or go to tradeschool they all chose college.

Any parent who thinks that way is a moron. Educated uselessness is to the detriment of the kid.

If you want to be happy and healthy in America, you must have a way to make money. (Or your parents must give you so much money that you're set for life.)

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but having gone to a similar university I suspect that the underwater basketweaving degree from Harvard will come with lucrative enough connections to make up for the lack of actual skills.

Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.

That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.

But I don't think one enters Harvard committed to taking underwater basketweaving. At least as an undergrad, once you're there, I would assume that, like any college, you have a wide range of courses and majors to choose from, restricted only by needing to follow "X is a prerequisite for Y" structure and possibly being required to take some core classes. (The situation would be different for graduate degrees.) So if you're at Harvard and you decide to take underwater basketweaving, that's on you.

Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.

I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.

Sure, I agree with that. But the parent was talking about, well, the parents' motivation.

The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.

Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.

Exactly. People are not extremely attentive to social status & class-adjacent stuff out of foolishness. This stuff has always been extremely important to everything job/money related.

Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.

I would say that any parent who outright rejects this logic is a moron too, probably moreso.

The idea that "social desirability" does not reflect actually valuable stuff is foolish. Class exists in some form in every society. People are always hyper-aware of class issues, and it has always been a primary part of the college/career decision process.

In the US we pretend that class doesn’t exist here. We have risen above that, you see, anybody here can become anything they want. Much the same way we pretend that racism doesn’t exist.

Anyone can move up in class, if they want to. We don’t pretend to understand or support those who would take an upper middle class background and then go work in the trades.

In most republics we pretend that class doesn't exist, and it doesn't in the rigid ways that it did previously. It does however, always exist in some form.

In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists in a more amorphous form broadly.

From the US outside looking in there is an ironic mirror of the usual commentary about US vacation time or lack of national healthcare. "Why do you accept this irrelevant bullshit?"

I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.

It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.

France is much better at pretending race doesn’t exist

==Much the same way we pretend that racism doesn’t exist.==

We even take the next step of referring those who point out racism as the actual racists.

I don’t disagree with you, but I think it’s an extremely common viewpoint among the Upper Middle Class and potential Ivy Leaguers.