American Gentry, or, the GOP's College-Educated Whites

[Person Man]

I’ve lived in Clearwater Beach as a teenager and in my downtrodden mid-20s, these people are mommy’s very special boys. At the very least, they’re bad influences. Very lucky to have the life I have now.

[Person Man]

Speaking as someone who works in GOP politics I can confirm that the notion that much of the GOP base are wealthy midsize town residents is certainly partially true, but both parties receive a ton of money from huge corporations.

Also, wealthy non-college voters are a HUGE proportion of the GOP's support. Look at the Southern United States or Florida if you ever need any proof.

Because education is increasingly not required to be a member of the Republican party.

The GOP is a hustler’s party. In fact, I think that is a big reason why Florida votes 10 points to the right of where the demographics lie. There are a lot of hustlers down here. I know at least a couple of people who pick up at prices of furniture at church donations, clean them up for a few bucks, and sell them for 100 bucks. Sometimes they’ll  get 200 but they always get at least 50.

[Person Man]

I agree with the general idea. Even in major metros you have these people. In Indianapolis you do have global elite types, the Simon and Lucas families, Lilly and Anthem executives etc. Below then you do have this “gentry” class. In addition to business owners I would add things like managers of factories, restaurant franchisers, county sheriffs, large farmers, insurance and pharmaceutical salesman, and even a lot of doctors and lawyers. These people range from upper middle class to very wealthy and in rural areas or red suburbs are almost always republicans.

I knew a lot of them when I was on my project at the bank in Stamford, CT. One of my roommates owned a cabin up in the Catskills and whose father built a masonry company from coming from Abruzzo in the 70s. We all probably know a lot of these people. Some of them are just hustlers who made legitimate businesses and some, like my cousin, built a small fortune as a scientific computing consultant for steel mills after starting out as a materials scientist.

[Person Man]

Speaking as someone who works in GOP politics I can confirm that the notion that much of the GOP base are wealthy midsize town residents is certainly partially true, but both parties receive a ton of money from huge corporations.

Also, wealthy non-college voters are a HUGE proportion of the GOP's support. Look at the Southern United States or Florida if you ever need any proof.

Because education is increasingly not required to be a member of the Republican party.

I mean a lot of the dem base by this same basis are people who got tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt majoring in useless sjw degrees which didnt have good job prospects at all and they ended up working jobs people with high school grads can as well.

Isnt it much smarter to be the kid who instead of doing that decided to work at his family business, go to trade school or obtain some type of professional license and end up making more money in the long run without ending up in so much debt.

At the end of the day the problem is the system that encourages people to take the path of option A instead of option B. Now you may argue college isnt just about bettering your job prospects but actually learning about something you want to learn, but in that case then the route that should be encouraged is going to a community college then a local university instead of incurring so much debt.

Just saying OSR you seem to have shifted further than -0.10 to 0.35 on social issues.

Anyway, I agree. The issue is that people have to make more considerations than just taking a job, like health care benefits and pensions plans.

College is, however, useful for degrees in non-SJW topics, of which there are many. One issue with getting jobs with a college degree is that most people go now, which is much different than decades ago. And these people are then picking dumb majors, like the 185,000 who enroll in gender studies programs every year.

We don't need anywhere near that number (or any), but this requires removing the stigma of not going to college, and of course to make sure there is an adequate job market for those who do (since there is a perception, with some truth, that non-college graduates can't get decent jobs).

I think the CA system used to be the top 10% for UC, next 30% for CS, and then the remainder to community college or trade schools. That is a good baseline, although we need to be careful to not end up like China or South Korea where class ranks are strict cut-offs that determine your life based off a few tests and result in hundreds of annual suicides.

There is a medium. What happens in places like Germany or France? It’s not quite as strict as China or Korea, but it does a good job at keeping the markets balanced by making sure every who starts can finish and everyone who finishes can get a job. That’s probably a good breakdown, though for who should go where. Perhaps those colleges for A students, should offer majors that require graduate study or have few good jobs while your typical B+ or A- students should go to schools that emphasize majors that have good career prospects without graduate study.

[Person Man]

Speaking as someone who works in GOP politics I can confirm that the notion that much of the GOP base are wealthy midsize town residents is certainly partially true, but both parties receive a ton of money from huge corporations.

Also, wealthy non-college voters are a HUGE proportion of the GOP's support. Look at the Southern United States or Florida if you ever need any proof.

Because education is increasingly not required to be a member of the Republican party.

I mean a lot of the dem base by this same basis are people who got tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt majoring in useless sjw degrees which didnt have good job prospects at all and they ended up working jobs people with high school grads can as well.

Isnt it much smarter to be the kid who instead of doing that decided to work at his family business, go to trade school or obtain some type of professional license and end up making more money in the long run without ending up in so much debt.

At the end of the day the problem is the system that encourages people to take the path of option A instead of option B. Now you may argue college isnt just about bettering your job prospects but actually learning about something you want to learn, but in that case then the route that should be encouraged is going to a community college then a local university instead of incurring so much debt.

Just saying OSR you seem to have shifted further than -0.10 to 0.35 on social issues.

Anyway, I agree. The issue is that people have to make more considerations than just taking a job, like health care benefits and pensions plans.

College is, however, useful for degrees in non-SJW topics, of which there are many. One issue with getting jobs with a college degree is that most people go now, which is much different than decades ago. And these people are then picking dumb majors, like the 185,000 who enroll in gender studies programs every year.

We don't need anywhere near that number (or any), but this requires removing the stigma of not going to college, and of course to make sure there is an adequate job market for those who do (since there is a perception, with some truth, that non-college graduates can't get decent jobs).

I think the CA system used to be the top 10% for UC, next 30% for CS, and then the remainder to community college or trade schools. That is a good baseline, although we need to be careful to not end up like China or South Korea where class ranks are strict cut-offs that determine your life based off a few tests and result in hundreds of annual suicides.

Its not only a socially liberal/conservative position I am taking but an economic one too. Having a system that incentives Scenario A over B has been a disaster and is clearly not working at all. A solution I have heard which I am not on board with right now is that companies should be barred from requiring a college degree in jobs that don't really require you to have a degree to actually do.
The reason I oppose that at the moment is I do think that would be an infringement on the rights of businesses to hire whomever they want.


Maybe you can create certain types of tax incentives for companies that train their employees for those types of jobs rather then punt job training to colleges.

That would be helpful for any new workers, regardless of education level. Provide tax incentives for companies to train new workers. I can get on board with that. Forcing companies to drop education requirements as some sort of Affirmative Action thing sounds like a welfare program where you just bury a barrel of cash in the ground and have them dig it up. Though in principle I support Affirmative Action for poor and working class people of all races. You don’t even have to call it Affirmative Action and just call it one candidate has done more for themselves and accomplished more than the other candidate even if that candidate is more qualified on paper and in a static sense. Look at the velocity and magnitude of a candidate, not their static position.

[Person Man]

Speaking as someone who works in GOP politics I can confirm that the notion that much of the GOP base are wealthy midsize town residents is certainly partially true, but both parties receive a ton of money from huge corporations.

Also, wealthy non-college voters are a HUGE proportion of the GOP's support. Look at the Southern United States or Florida if you ever need any proof.

Because education is increasingly not required to be a member of the Republican party.

I mean a lot of the dem base by this same basis are people who got tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt majoring in useless sjw degrees which didnt have good job prospects at all and they ended up working jobs people with high school grads can as well.

Isnt it much smarter to be the kid who instead of doing that decided to work at his family business, go to trade school or obtain some type of professional license and end up making more money in the long run without ending up in so much debt.

At the end of the day the problem is the system that encourages people to take the path of option A instead of option B. Now you may argue college isnt just about bettering your job prospects but actually learning about something you want to learn, but in that case then the route that should be encouraged is going to a community college then a local university instead of incurring so much debt.

 Great point. Why indeed didn't these these millions of people simply enter a completely non existent lucrative family business instead of going to college and earning a degree in order to increase their employment prospects?After all, getting a job after college unrelatedTo one's degree 90% of the time has been the norm for only (checks notes)  Well over a century.

How the hell is going into tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands in debt for a degree that has very little job prospects a good economic decision lol.

Also I notice how you also didnt read the part where I said or go to Trade School or get a Professional License.

So you're saying people who are born into wealthy families should go work at the family business and everyone else should go out and be a physical laborer or craftsman.

Congratulations, you just reinvented pre-Industrial Revolution Europe.

 Now, since you're half assed point on this has been decimated by the previous 2  Posts, let's get back to my query as to why you you personally chose to go off and get a 4 year degree rather than do the smart thing and avoid all that college debt by going to trade school?

I love how your reading skills are so bad that you couldn’t understand I was talking about particular majors and not degrees  in general .

Either that or you are being extremely disingenuous as usual

You're KIND OF right but what if there is someone who is an extremely talented writer? We need a bigger middle class than we have had in the class since the Industrial Revolution. It is what it is. My main gripe with OSR is that though there are good things in the argument, he lacks persuasion as a result of ironically becoming more enamored with a Trumpy-stryle anti-intellectualism. The point isn't that going to college is for idiots (a lot of the criminals I lived around believed this), or that we "don't need" people to go to college. The problem is that colleges admit too many people who aren't qualified and many majors and colleges will just take "the money" of the students regardless of whether or not those students are qualified. The reason why your buddy couldn't get a job after Art School or Honors College is because people who didn't have the skills were brought into the program anyways. That's why they can't get a job. There's even CS graduates that can't get jobs in technology because they can't "Fizz Buzz". Look it up. It was very depressing during the technical interview for the $131,560 job. I just got at Wells Fargo and I got that problem.

[Person Man]

There were a handful of that "American Gentry" at my alma mater.   Mostly dude-bros.  

Many of them cheated (blatantly plagiarized) their term papers and final exams.  Especially the higher-level 300 and 400 courses.   One of them even indirectly accused ME of ratting them out to the professor (but he was really nice about it.  I would have kicked his ass if he aggressively came at me like a bitch).

giggles.  *And no, they were not expelled.  But they should have.*

Oh. That's nothing. One of them at my college got away with masturbating in front of a Domestic Violence charity event. People were upset and he complained about the "universal complaint" against him by the town and the school. Nothing came of it. I don't even think he needed to apologize. Unfortunately, a lot of these "woke" problems are not borne out of aggression and boredom in the ways the voters and officials on the right side of the aisle tend to characterize it as.

[Person Man]

There were a handful of that "American Gentry" at my alma mater.   Mostly dude-bros.  

Many of them cheated (blatantly plagiarized) their term papers and final exams.  Especially the higher-level 300 and 400 courses.   One of them even indirectly accused ME of ratting them out to the professor (but he was really nice about it.  I would have kicked his ass if he aggressively came at me like a bitch).

giggles.  *And no, they were not expelled.  But they should have.*

Oh. That's nothing. One of them at my college got away with masturbating in front of a Domestic Violence charity event.

That's a victimless crime in my book.  

(it's just a penis, people)

Don't give me ideas. Me and my wife bought a "Hound" puppy(Beagle/Treeing Walker Mix) during the lockdown and she has grown into a very hyperactive and domineering dog. The "hunt" is very strong in her and she will howl at and hump other animals. She's not violent at least. It would be funny just to train her to hump random people by introducing her as "Dognald Hump". I don't think I could get away with it.

[Person Man]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

That’s basically what I did on accident.

[Person Man]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

That’s basically what I did on accident.

This strategy was viable pre-2008, when the most popular elite career tracks were finance and corporate law.  You could study the humanities and then get those jobs, particularly if you perform well on standardized tests and make the right friends.

Since then, elite jobs have become more and more tech dominated and the problem with the traditional humanities undergrad path is that it basically shuts you out of the tech world.  Also, academic humanities has basically become an impossible career path, so it doesn't give you a good plan B if the increasingly scarce banking jobs and high end law school slots don't work out for you.

The medical doctor path falls somewhere in between.  You don't have to major in science, but you do have to consistently get A's in science classes.  In today's environment, you might as well just major in something that could also get you a tech job as a plan B. 

That’s what my dad did when his grades turned out to be atrocious. I actually did OK in science classes when I had the discipline to do them. I still struggled with ODE 1 and Scientific Computing (C’s) and to a lesser extent Discrete Structures, and Linear Algebra(B’s). Got A’s in Engineering Physics and Biology, though. I don’t think your grades have to be that high if you went into Physics or Engineering to get into med school. Those classes are far harder than traditional pre-med classes except for maybe O Chem.

[Person Man]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

That’s basically what I did on accident.

This strategy was viable pre-2008, when the most popular elite career tracks were finance and corporate law.  You could study the humanities and then get those jobs, particularly if you perform well on standardized tests and make the right friends.

Since then, elite jobs have become more and more tech dominated and the problem with the traditional humanities undergrad path is that it basically shuts you out of the tech world.  Also, academic humanities has basically become an impossible career path, so it doesn't give you a good plan B if the increasingly scarce banking jobs and high end law school slots don't work out for you.

The medical doctor path falls somewhere in between.  You don't have to major in science, but you do have to consistently get A's in science classes.  In today's environment, you might as well just major in something that could also get you a tech job as a plan B.  

That would be much more true in finance than in the law. Being tech savvy is not what makes the best lawyers. Rather it is logic and the power of the pen. And that skill is about a liberal arts education and be widely read, and to use just the right words and phrases and tone at the right time.

I agree.  I'm just saying high end lawyers are declining as a % of elite jobs with the rise of tech, etc. making academically successful people on the fence less likely to choose that path.  

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis. The former you can get into from just having an OK GPA from an OK school, the latter you probably either need to get into a large state’s flagship’s school or a place Case Western Reserve and get A’s and B’s or get into a school like Fordham or Vanderbilt.

At a prestigious tech firm…well just look at levels.FYI. An engineer with an average level of experience makes about a quarter to a third million a year and their version of a junior law partner makes well north of half a million. You can’t ever get into a law firm like that from a non-ivy.

[Person Man]

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis.

You cannot compare someone making $120k in the Bay Area (poverty wage) vs $120k in Tampa or the job security of federal employment. You can get a 6-figure pension if you start your fed career as a GS-15 to max out the steps (hard to guarantee maxing out the steps if you start at GS-13 or 14), but then again, GS-15 jobs tend to be real jobs and are not that chill.

I’m talking about tech jobs in Places like Charlotte or Atlanta. I would need 200k tc at least  for the Bay Area. There are smaller law jobs in Brooklyn that pay 83k as a jr-mid associate. There are 100-120k tech jobs in the Bay Area, but they are for QA, prod support, and no-code jobs. One guy got a 95k job out of school as a QA, automated it in a few months, and played league of legends until he was fired 5 years later.

[Person Man]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

That’s basically what I did on accident.

This strategy was viable pre-2008, when the most popular elite career tracks were finance and corporate law.  You could study the humanities and then get those jobs, particularly if you perform well on standardized tests and make the right friends.

Since then, elite jobs have become more and more tech dominated and the problem with the traditional humanities undergrad path is that it basically shuts you out of the tech world.  Also, academic humanities has basically become an impossible career path, so it doesn't give you a good plan B if the increasingly scarce banking jobs and high end law school slots don't work out for you.

The medical doctor path falls somewhere in between.  You don't have to major in science, but you do have to consistently get A's in science classes.  In today's environment, you might as well just major in something that could also get you a tech job as a plan B.  

That would be much more true in finance than in the law. Being tech savvy is not what makes the best lawyers. Rather it is logic and the power of the pen. And that skill is about a liberal arts education and be widely read, and to use just the right words and phrases and tone at the right time.

I agree.  I'm just saying high end lawyers are declining as a % of elite jobs with the rise of tech, etc. making academically successful people on the fence less likely to choose that path.  

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis. The former you can get into from just having an OK GPA from an OK school, the latter you probably either need to get into a large state’s flagship’s school or a place Case Western Reserve and get A’s and B’s or get into a school like Fordham or Vanderbilt.

At a prestigious tech firm…well just look at levels.FYI. An engineer with an average level of experience makes about a quarter to a third million a year and their version of a junior law partner makes well north of half a million. You can’t ever get into a law firm like that from a non-ivy.

I wonder if it would be better for states to actively regulate law schools. Because there are so many low ranking law schools; and they don't have the quality that I would expect to create high quality lawyers.

Require only 100 law schools to be open at a time and require a minimum 160 LSAT? It’s around that level that you can get the mid-tier jobs and about 170 where you can get the jobs that you can get rich at.