[QUOTE=J. Robinson]I have started 3 times to reply to this thread and each time I realized I could write a book on this subject.

I started over three times also. Each time I did so I bogged my skinny rear end down in a bunch of wordy B.S. by trying to comment on nearly every line of thought presented in this excellent thread.

Didn't work. I wound up deleting the whole mess and stomping out to my "play pen" (that's what my wife calls my little shop).

Uncle Bob's frustrating experiences with the CETA program and technical schools are not uncommon. "Continuing Education" programs offered by a lot of high schools, junior colleges, and other such entities frequently suffer from mismanagement, lack of proper promotion, and, I'd suggest, lack of understanding by "academic" (as opposed to more practical and job-oriented) administrators. As an example of that, here's an experience of my own: I was living in a fairly large midwestern city when the public school system decided to offer some trade skills oriented courses at night. One of those courses was oxy-acetylene welding, I (and maybe a dozen other people) went down to sign up. A guy from the registrar's office and the class instructor were at the meeting. The instructor got up and said that the class was open to only those people whose jobs were "welding related". In other words, if a knowledge of welding isn't needed for the job you have, then go away.

HUH? ....... Like in Uncle Bob's situation, the "smart ass" in me woke up and I said "What? Are you telling us that if there is some poor devil out there washing dishes and he wants to improve himself and learn a good paying trade HE CAN'T TAKE THIS COURSE BECAUSE WELDING ISN'T RELATED TO DISH WASHING!"

The instructor loved me. The registrar gave me a dirty look and said they would consider "some individual circumstances".

Welding wasn't related to my job, either, so I did what was necessary .... I lied!

In the case of automotive training, there must be bunches of prospective students, people for whom cars is their main interest in life, out there who need only a nudge in the direction of conveniently located schools offering to teach them all about cars and things car related. In my area there are two long established institutions, Tarrant County College and and farther south, Texas State Technical Institute, and both are considered very good. My own nephew graduated from TSTI and went to work for a large European car company. He is now service manager for the firm and, to shorten this long, boring speech, he recently completed construction of a big new home, and it wasn't cheap. To touch on Uncle Bob's posting once again, the money is there!

I graduated from high school in 1951. No comments, please I know that a lot of you guys don't exactly qualify as "spring chickens" either. Anyway, at that time, any young man who didn't pursue a career in engineering was just something less than a man, so I enrolled in engineering classes even though I had absolutely NO aptitude for math and/or science. The result was that I wasted lot of my hard-working dad's money and a year of time.

...... And to give an idea of how good my grades were, I got drafted right after my freshman year.

I think I would have been better off had I found a good technical training school.

That's assuming such schools were available in prehistoric times!


Jim