What these men don't understand, and nobody is telling them directly, is that college is how you essesntially conspire to manage (extract value from) the people who didn't go. College education is a tribe initiation, and you are in or you aren't. The pretenses and pretexts of subject matter and socializing are secondary to this one big thing.
Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it, because it's our source of social power, but for young men who need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't. The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to them. As an individual non-graduate, you will always be working against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the ceiling and keep you running on hope.
Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable social status to your kids.
The result is predictable, where they're having their countries, political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them because they didn't realize they needed defending.
If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass. They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably never understand.
Ignoring the flowery text here.. this is pretty spot-on. My brother in law is an amazing people person. He's able to convince anyone of anything. He always "knows a guy" and "is that person's second cousin". Never waits on line at a bar, and always the life of the party.
This guy was born for sales.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he also was terrible in college. Just did not work with his brain. He dropped out, worked some odd jobs, settled in to working a tree company, cutting down trees. Dangerous work to say the least.
He finally went back to school and took like 2 classes a semester and graduated with whatever degree he could string together from the local college, and it took him ages, I think he spent 7 years total in undergrad. It was affordable because it was just some local state school.
2 months after graduation? He's a sales rep at a B2B software firm. A year later he's the top of his sales group. His potential is huge now, and that door was firmly shut to him before he graduated. College, for him, was just a piece of paper he needed, and his life took a dramatic turn when he got it.
Disagree, I have several friends who dropped out, and my brother dropped out of high school, and he is making 150k. A college degree will soon be a recognized as unnecessary.
Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it, because it's our source of social power, but for young men who need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't. The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to them. As an individual non-graduate, you will always be working against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the ceiling and keep you running on hope.
Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable social status to your kids.
The result is predictable, where they're having their countries, political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them because they didn't realize they needed defending.
If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass. They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably never understand.