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Tell me more about that, because when I was in college I didn't demand any of that. I wanted cheaper textbooks and affordable housing close to campus. I went to local restaurants or cooked at home. Our gym was a little old, but it was fine. I don't recall any student protests demanding fancies facilities. Maybe that's a common thing at other universities that I'm just not aware of?
They're not "demanding" it by protesting, they're demanding it by choosing to attend one university over another and therefore sending tuition dollars to one university instead of the other one. It's demand in the economic sense, not the political sense.
Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.
I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.
However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")
This seems plausible, but I remember when visiting colleges a lot about five star chefs and dorms with private bathrooms and campus gyms. Not a lot about the scholarships available. Granted this was over a decade ago.
I am in my mid-30s, so I imagine we were looking at colleges around the same time. To be fair, I do also remember being shown the shiny new cafeteria and student union, and hearing about the new football stadium they were building, but I didn't care at all as a 17 year old. My parents were there with me, though. In hindsight, perhaps these amenities were aimed at convincing the parents, since they would be the ones actually footing the bill. Kind of obvious now that I write it out.
To be clear I opted not to go to college, so don't claim to be the expert on how 17 year olds pick which one(I didn't really get that far into the process). I have a hard time imagining 'your meal card will cover chic-fil-a' was aimed at parents so much as students, but I remember my mom commenting on who had free laundromats vs paid, so that might be part of it.
How has that worked out for you? I have been thinking about whether or not I should send my kids to college. My kids are smarter than average and we plan to homeschool, so I think we could set them up for success pretty well. At the same time, I'm concerned that not having the magic paper might hinder them early in their careers. Have you experienced that?
I'm an HVAC tech. I make a comfortable living, I might put in somewhat more hours onsite than a typical white collar worker for a roughly equivalent salary, but I spend a lot less time working from home. IDK if it evens out in my case, but there's a lot of HVAC techs who work ludicrous amounts of overtime. My training pipeline wasn't any shorter but it was mostly paid(granted, often at fast food wages), whereas college would not have been. Good tech schools for commercial are far cheaper(and shorter) than college, good tech schools for residential are shorter but have similar per-semester cost. I moved out at a similar age to my college educated peers but could buy a house sooner(I have thanked my lucky stars ever since, given the trajectory of DFW real estate). Benefits are roughly equivalent to white collar workers, but in a less comfortable work environment. I do have to pay for tools but I get a take home vehicle so it roughly evens out after a large initial investment. If your son is not white-passing, he will likely face some level of discrimination in entering the field. If it's your daughter, she will face a ginormous amount of discrimination in entering the field; in this case that discrimination is probably justified due to the physical demands. Neither of these problems is going to get fixed anytime soon. Health problems shorten HVAC careers brutally; diabetes can be a fatal condition if you work on a roof in the summer, even if it's well managed, and one sign of a good tech school is that it tells students to go ahead and drop out if they have less than perfect health on the first day. Drug tests are industry standard, including for pot, and a good driving record is necessary for most jobs. I have a fairly steady year-round work position, but this is definitely not universal in the industry and budgeting is a necessary skill.
A lot, but not all, of what I said is just generally applicable to any trades career.
Thanks, this is a good reality check. There seems to be a lot of romanticization of the trades happening these days, and I've always been a little skeptical. Sounds like hard but steady work that comes with its own set of tradeoffs. One of my sons is technically inclined but a bit ADHD/on the spectrum. I've been wondering if he would do better as a field tech of some sort rather than as a white collar desk jockey. Personally, my years as an IT dispatch tech were the most fun I ever had in my working years. Long hours and lots of BS, but a great crew, rewarding work (you can see the things you fix), and I loved getting paid to drive around and see different towns and the "backstage" side of many businesses. Sounds like working a trade has some similarities.
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