I’m a significant proponent of college attendance for social and educational reasons, but even with that bias, I don’t agree with “necessary for 95%”.
It's much less the case in Western countries, especially here in Australia, where tradespeople tend to earn on-par or more than white collar professionals.
I'm perfectly happy to pay a competent trade for good work, at whatever rate gets me out of painting/plumbing/pumping sewage.
A large proportion of professionals are completely incapable of doing the work that tradespeople do, most people can't even replace a tap washer on their own, let alone replace the transmission in their car. It's conceited and elitist to think you're more valuable than somebody else just because you have the luxury of sitting in front of a computer screen all day. It's not even an intelligence thing (which I think shouldn't matter at all), plenty tradespeople are just as clever as programmers or accountants, they just don't want a job that keeps them cooped up in an office all day. Especially when it comes to trades like electricians or plumbers, where you're still diagnosing problems and creating solutions, a good tradie is worth their weight in gold.
This applies only in the case of the US, because university implies a $100k student loan.
But yeah it was worded strangely.
I’m not sure what the correlation between income (or other life outcomes) is between “attended college” vs “would typically have chosen college but took another route” but I suspect it’s a lot smaller than between that latter group and the “was never even considering college” group.
It’s not clear for an individual who “should” attend college how important the decision to actually attend is. I seem to recall studies that suggested there was a much stronger correlation between applying to Harvard than there was between that and attending Harvard.
As summarized by the Atlantic: "For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college."
To be fair, the Atlantic continues on to say that the effect is different for women (which they ascribe primarily to increased workforce participation rates).
And would we imagine a society of capable, educated, useful people is not preferable to a society of ignorant unskilled people? Why would we wish that on ourselves? How does that improve the world?
Even worse, the implied understanding that our society cannot function without an uneducated subject class is worrisome. Are the socialists right, and Capitalism/the free market demands a slave class?
Anyway, with automation any such demand diminishes yearly and is already small.
