The problem isn't going to college vs. trade schools, it's the idea that everyone is special and they need to grow and discover themselves. After college they be able to find who they really are and pursue their ideal job which makes them money and is something they enjoy.

In Canada a teacher was fired for giving a student a failing grade =/

If someone doesn't learn there are consequences for doing poor work then they'll never learn how to do the job properly. Do we really want a generation of trade workers who will do the minimum or worse to get the job done?

Personally a lot of this generation can't cut it as trades workers. Being a trades worked is possibly harder than many other professions since you need to be constantly learning and on the job problem solving. Also being a traders worker is physically taxing and in some cases you need to be able to run your own business.

In my opinion it's way easier to have a office job, since most of the work is not "skilled" but specialized. Meaning it takes learning a few select details. Once you get in it's all business as usual and politics.

well,it depends on what you purse. I wish I would have went to college,my job as a simple grocery stocker fucking sucks and I've done it for 11 yrs. the only recent I do okay,is because I'm single and I've been there forever. I regret being lazy and not pursing the college route every single day of my life. I forced to go into the army,after highschool,but that only lasted a year and a half. they said I out a personality disorder out of all things,lol. Yea,it's called bi-polar. Most of it was due to laziness though. So,yeah I would tell people to go to college are at least a trade school and get some kind of education,beyond a simple high school education,unless win the lotto are have some kind of hollywood like talent.

Most of the rich people in Toronto made their money back in the 50s in construction. *shrugs shoulders*

U can use statistic to your advantage. here let me paraphrase the article a different way for you. "Half of them did not improve", which means half of them did improve. that's 50% that did, 1 out of 2. not bad. 45% did not show signification gain but that means 55% did showed an significant gain? Article did not provide p values and they did not specify their null and alternative hypothesis; so I am only assuming the opposite to be true, of course if their study was designed only to show there is NOT a significance difference I may not be able to make those assumption. 

I can probably find a bunch of studies to support my point that college is linked to higher average life time earning, IQ, and other markers. I don't just randomly search the web for sources though; I only read things with methodology, studies with adequate power, a small P value < 0.05 and confidence interval that does not cross the midline, so I know that it is not due to chance. (how would you know what i am even talking about if you had no education on statistics, you would believe everything you area online as gospel)

Higher education is definately linked to higher scores in problem solving skills (this will be student dependent, if u dont' show up to class and go clubbing everyday, of course you won't improve). Like the guy above me majoring in Aerospace Engineering, who's going to build the next space shuttle if no one goes to college, I am quite sure street folks are less likely to understanding and problem solve aerospace engineering related problem.

Well it's maybe some luck, but alot of hard work. To be an internist (internal medicine doctor); u need to do 4 yrs of college, 4 yrs of med school, 3 yrs of slave work called residency. Then you apply for a job and you will get hire pretty easy. I put out 10 resume, i got 3 offers in 1 week.. ranging from 185k to 240k

Here's a hypothetical situation for you to better demonstrate my point ...

Suppose there is a school that argues that it teaches its students to read. (Roughly) 50% of the students who are enrolled in the school never graduate, 40% of the graduates didn't learn how to read at a higher level than when they entered the school, and 30% of people who never entered the school saw similar improvements in reading ability as the 60% of graduates who showed improvement in their reading ability. Tuition in this schools costs $20,000 per year and the program is 4 years long. To what extent does this school demonstrate value in improving their student's reading abilities?

Essentially, when you combine this study with typical drop/fail-out rates of colleges and universities, (roughly) 32% of students who enter college will graduate with a demonstrated improvement in critical thinking skills. We don't know what the improvement of critical thinking skills are of people who don't go to college after highschool, but there (most likely) will be a portion of this group that demonstrates improvement in critical thinking skills; and the value of the college education towards building critical thinking skills is only realized by the students who developed critical thinking skills they otherwise wouldn't have developed. As a rough guestimate, I wouldn't be surprised if this only represented 10% of students.

College is the most fun I've had in a long time, and its only been a month!

One thing I notice, and it pops up in this thread, is the attitude of viewing labor in a negative light.

"You don't want to be flipping burgers, do you?" Is repeated over and over to put fear into young people. No, they say, I don't want to have to work hard (and trust me, fast food work is laborious) I want to live the good life (what ever that is). So, go to University and avoid the toil of "flipping burgers". Ah.

Then something happened. Those degrees were no longer the ticket aware from "flipping burgers". In fact, my generation found that viewing University having value by the single metric of no burger flipping was becoming less and less true. Why is this?

University costs more than it did a generation ago regardless of how you quantify it, yet more people are going because it is their golden ticket. For me, I went to a solid public university I could afford, with job and scholarship I graduated with zero debt. My peers? Not so much. They believed they'd make 50K right out at 22-23 and their 20, 40, 60K worth of debt be gone in few years. That did not happen. They needed money now and had no leverage due to debt collectors.

Yet, these "entitled" youth did not want to work flipping burgers. Can you blame them? Their whole life they were told it was beneath them and degree would avoid such a fate...yet here they were. Many had to flip burgers next to people who were actually better off financially due to lack of debt. Their parents viewed them as failures, and they felt like ones.

My point? There does need to be a re-assessment of quantifying education's value solely along earnings benefit. If you think simply having a degree is magic ticket to middle class assurance....those days are not here, and likely are gone. However, if you view that from a University setting you can benefit as a human being the equation changes. What value does being informed have? Having critical thinking have? Being exposed to various view points? How about financial planning?

I have done all right for myself, and I can say there was no direct correlation between my degree and my occupation. However, the tangential learning and skills I gained proved invaluable. Also, I never dismissed getting dirty and doing work myself (fixing a machine is not glamorous) when needed, I was never "above" doing anything and do not expect to be. I am grateful for my University days that improved my mind and made me a more complex individual. I will consent that young people now should have reasonable expectations of the world and plan accordingly (big thing, avoid as much debt as possible!)

Appreciate the thoughtful debate here, as to me this is the topic of my generation.

Education doesn't come cheap, my student loan from college and med school is 200k.

There is indeed some way to do this, but it would be kind of unethical. first you find 2 large groups of people (to give your study adequate power and a low P value so things are not due to chance); with similar baseline characteristics (economic, social, ethnicity, race, age, baseline IQ prior to study) to elimate selection bias; then you designed a double blinded randomized longitudinal study to look for changes. One of the group that you have randomized will be forced to go to college; the other group will be forced to not go to college. Then you come back in 10 years and you measure your outcomes.

The outcome you can choose, is it income? is it IQ? is it "happiness?" Maybe someone flipping burger is happier than the engineer or doctor; but then you have to come up with a scale for happiness (survey being the worst, but happiness is subjective, so I assume no objective way to measure it).

This is different then just looking at people who has already gone through college; because that would be retrospective study, does not always show causation in relationship; it does however, show associations.