Arts Degree Or Trades? You Pick!

Compare and contrast! Arts degree or trades? If you were facing that choice today, which would you choose?

Years ago, in my first year of commerce at the U of A, I was asked to go into honours English. I thought about it for around two minutes, then kept on in business. I have never regretted that decision. What exactly do you do with an honours English degree? As far as I could figure out at the time, you would have to go on and get your PhD, and then teach at a university.

The path you take in life, is yours. The decisions are yours. If you make the wrong choice, you have no-one to blame except yourself, unless you are a Quebec university student, then the blame lies with the government.

It’s a little hard for the rest of us to muster sympathy for Quebec’s downtrodden students, who pay the lowest tuition fees in all of North America. Even if the government has its way – no sure thing if the Parti Québécois gets back in power – they’ll still have the lowest tuition fees in North America. The total increase would amount to the cost of a daily grande cappuccino.............

  The truth is, the education they’re getting is overpriced at any cost. The protesters do not include accounting, science and engineering students, who have better things to do than hurl projectiles at police. They’re the sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts, and victim-studies students, whose degrees are increasingly worthless in a world that increasingly demands hard skills. The world will not be kind to them. They’re the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it, because the adults in their lives have sheltered them and encouraged their mass flight from reality.

Let's say that the Quebec students and unions get their way and get free post secondary education for all. Wouldn't that be wonderful? No student debt, everyone gets in to university, everyone gets a degree for free! Utopia!

Let's increase enrollment, and crank out those arts and business degrees. Maybe force every university student to take a basic economics course, teaching them about supply and demand.  If there are too many arts degrees (excess supply), the salaries offered will go down. Is this too hard a concept for supposedly intelligent students to understand?  Watching the Quebec students riot, I guess it is.

How about those students try something productive, like the trades? Back to economics, there is a severe shortage of tradespeople right now, and because of this, they are getting better than average salaries. The companies actually pay the apprentices wages while they are in school, so they get out with little or no debt and great paying jobs as well. What a concept!

 Thank goodness, we’re starting to give skilled workers their due respect, and our country is making huge strides toward this. We had better, because, if things keep going the way they’re going, Canada will be short one million tradespeople by 2020. If you think things are bad now — and they are — you don’t want to know what they’ll be like if half our skilled tradespeople are missing.

The only downside to the trades are the unions that have control. Ironically they are the ones who are funding the Quebec student protestors, and the union members have no say in how their union dues are being spent. I bet the Alberta pipefitters union is ticked off by the other unions support of the eco-activists. 

Get your "free" arts degree, and protest about how you want to tax the rich because you somehow deserve their money for your bad decision, or actually contribute to the betterment of society by working in the trades? Your choice...arts degree or trades? 

Respect For Single Mom's.

I asked a young adult the other day, why do we still have people poor people in Canada, the response was "bad choices in life".

This got me thinking about single mom's. They had a choice according to the abortion supporters, they could have killed the baby and gone on with life as if nothing had happened. Instead, they kept the baby and now face a more difficult life because of their choice. Funny that not very many single mom's I have met regret the choice they made, most are the proudest mom's you could ever meet.

Single mom's are not just young unmarried women like we hear about all the time, they are divorced women, immigrant women, and married women with husbands that work away from home. Two of my son's friends are from immigrant families, one from China and one from Africa, their fathers are back in China and Africa working, so the kids see them rarely. The mom's are left with the task of raising the family without the father, and both boys are wonderful kids. They both respect their mom's, and help them with the other kids. They are not out hanging around at the mall, they are home studying.

Funny how feminists want us to kill our kids before they are born so we can work, and when we don't, they accuse us of being bad mother's because we work to support them. Bad kids are blamed on single mom's, never the absent dad.

I think we should help single mom's by paying their tuition and child care expenses if they go back to school and pass. Instead of having the welfare mom who pops out kids faster because she gets more for each kid, while she is living with a guy who works in the oil patch and earns excellent money, (yes this does happen) get them off the gravy train, with education. The welfare mom should only get more funds if she goes to school and upgrades her skills. Let her get a bonus for passing but only if she gets and holds down a job for a year.

This has been done with some success in Canada.

Description of the intervention: The Canadian Self-Sufficiency Project, administered by the provincial governments of British Columbia and New Brunswick, provided monthly cash payments (“earnings supplements”) to long-term recipients of income assistance (Canadian equivalent to U.S. welfare), contingent on their finding full-time employment and leaving the income assistance program. Canadian Self-Sufficiency Project participants had one year to find full-time employment, and thus become eligible for the supplements. Participants could receive supplements for up to three years as long as they continued to work full-time.

The earnings supplements were sizeable. As an illustrative example -- based on the experiment’s formula for determining the size of a supplement payment, a single mother in New Brunswick who worked full-time for a year and earned $20,000 would receive monthly supplements totaling $5,000 for that year.*

The program cost $5,000-$8,000 per year per welfare recipient offered an earnings supplement (the precise cost depended on the specific welfare population to which it was offered). However, as discussed below, the program's net costs to the government were much lower than this amount because the program substantially increased income tax revenues and reduced government welfare payments.

This program seemed to work....in the short term, but not in the long term. So, with some changes like education grants, it might work in the long term. It's something worth looking into.

I respect single mom's who make the decision to keep their child even though they know it will make their lives more difficult. I respect those single mom's who go back to school, or university/college, I can't imagine how hard it is for them.

Let's encourage single mom's to go back to school, and discourage those who just want to live on welfare. Forget about giving unions higher wages, and give single mom's self respect and a sense of honour for the choice they made.