OT. College Loan Forgiveness

College was not required for some jobs back in the 1960s. I went to night school but never got a degree. I made about 50% more than the college grads that worked for me.

Kids are pushed to the over priced schools and often are taking courses that are interesting and fun but offer no practical use in job performance. College is expected but real useful education is not always chosen.

It does seem that college is being pushed very hard but many courses are worthless. Seems they only exists to make more professors in the field. Bill Gates one of the richest men in the world was a college dropout. I am not sure about some of the Apple founders, but would not surprise me if they never finished college either. Now other companies are getting away from college students and training them their selves.

Many would be much better off going to a trade school if they can find one. Around here plumbers seem hard to come by. Most of the time you have to wait several days to over a week. Had one out here the othe day and he charges $ 110 an hour. Now Not that he makes that much to put in his pocket, but I am sure he gets a fair portion of it as he is self employed. I don't have a problem with whit he charges .

I put in a carport type garage. I had to wait about 4 months to get the concrete work done. I was first told they were booked up for atleast 2 months, then the rain set in and it was about 4 months before they could do the job.

IBM trained its own programmers for some time. As secretaries became superfluous, they retrained them as coders. At the time there was a "no layoffs" policy in the company so it was a good idea, and worked. Programming was set up so the specifications were so well done that it didn't take a lot to write the programs from the specifications. The design was done by the computer "scientists" and the actual putting it into bits was done by "coders".

A lot of this is, or has been, union driven. It probably still is in many places. The unions own Chicago, for example.

Truckers are making a killing right now. I'm told that drivers just getting out of driving school are getting $60K. Seasoned drivers were getting $40K just a few years ago. They can make over $100K now. Tough job but it's in high demand right now.

We had a tornado go through town in April (may have been late February). It destroyed a lot of homes, ripped the roofs off hundreds, and did a lot more damage. This isn't the time to be looking for carpenters or roofers. Apparently the blue tarp business is brisk, though.

IBM trained all of their hardware people in house and was not impressed by degrees. In the early 70s they tried some EEs and half went into management or an engineering department, mostly Federal Systems. The other half were just advised to seek other opportunities somewhere else. The skills they brought were generally years behind the current technology and that was changing yearly. They did offer tuition refunds but there was little incentive to use them. A CE with a degree was still paid the same as one without a degree. It was not going to get you promoted either. Most of us had plenty of classroom time, just keeping up with the technology we were working on.