I actually see what you’re getting at.
You know, the ‘pink’ part isn’t entirely off. Corporations are following the same long march as the university, with female-dominated marketing and HR departments, shuffling paper around, making ‘presentations,’ and calling it work.
Indeed, your advice sounds more solid than what I’ve been idealistically ruminating upon. The only “trade” I might be good at might be professional musician, being that I spend so much free-time with it anyway, or with writing, but both seem pretty unreliable choices in comparison to say, carpentry or engineering. History seemed like a good choice regarding my interests, but probably falls under the category of the more useless degrees.
A friend offered for me to come along if / when he goes to Japan to teach, so I might consider that if it proves to be an opportunity (being that I study the language whenever I can). I am bit stymied because so far I’ve been unable to find anything that I could seriously consider deriving a possible career from.
In the end, it’s just about putting food on the table. Family and hobbies are what will keep you engaged in life.
Someone needs to do a f*cking study on worker productivity. Get 100 white males, 100 white females, and 100 black males doing the same task, and see who gets the most work done, so we can stop having to speculate that blacks and women are actually less productive than Stan Smiths.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If school indoctrinates everyone into believing in the awesome power of their credentials, it becomes true by that fact alone when those same people become the next generation of employers.
Not to mention that public service pay is linked to the amount of credentials achieved. It is possible to be doing the same job as the person next to you and still earn $15000 less because they spent 3 years in a BA while you where in the lowest grades of the service, assembling chairs and filing paperwork.