Premier Doug Ford had choice words for students expressing concerns over recent cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) Tuesday, telling them to “not pick basket-weaving courses” and to invest in education that gives people in-demand jobs.
Speaking to reporters at Queen’s Park, Ford said he received “thousands of calls” from students over the long weekend, who expressed concerns about the province cutting the amount of grant money students can receive through OSAP.
“I mentioned to the students, you have to invest in your future, into in-demand jobs,” he said.
“You’re picking basket-weaving courses, and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”
There’s no such thing as a viable degree. It’s a myth. You’re asking teenagers to look into a magic crystal ball and figure out what skill set is going to have any value at all in 5 years. Meanwhile the richest men and all the experts on Earth can’t tell you what’s going to be valuable in 5 months. If they want to go to a vocational school, send them to a vocational school. The market will be flooded by the time they graduate so they aren’t going to make good money. Don’t expect to actually get an apprenticeship either, you don’t even want to know how few of those there are to go around.
You may as well tell those kids to take $1000 to Vegas and hope they win enough for a down payment on a house.
The trades have been a good bet for the last 30 years and look to be so for the next while. Sure, no one knows with dead certainty but the odds that we are going to need tradespeople, nurses, doctors etc vastly outweighs the odds we’ll need someone with a major in critical literature.
That’s what they said about Coding for the last 20 years.
If you want a job, learn how to make friends, preferably in high places. You take a good look at who you have access to, and study whatever it is they tell you they need you to know to work for them, and if that’s underwater basket weaving, plumbing, or communications, you learn it, because who you know is how you get a job. What you know is how you keep it. Your competence means nothing. Your connections mean everything.
That’s a wild take. I’m pretty confident of most of the successful folks I know, that’s pretty untrue. The ones who work for the magnificent 7 knew no one in there beforehand. My engineering friends didn’t have connections, they had really good degrees and work ethics.
And good coders aren’t hungry for work. They might have a harder time finding quarter million salaries these days but that’s a pretty good baseline.
Edit: Oh, for the lawyers, maybe sort of? There’s a lot of networking etc to try to find a firm with a good partner track etc but that happens midway through law school, and your competence is essential.