Yesterday I posted an email from retired Chief Petty Officer Art Brecher on how the U.S. Navy trains young people who haven’t gone to college to do all kinds of difficult work. Here is a similar e-mail from a fellow who learned his trade in the Marine Corps:

I joined the Marine Corps at 17 and was trained as an aviation electrician/avionics technician, working, while I was in, on fighter aircraft. After eight years, I got out, and have worked in the field ever since. The schooling I received while in the Marine Corps was quite intensive — the equivalent of an associate’s degree, and I took several courses while in, as well as some college as a civilian — I can probably cobble together three years of college credits, but I don’t have a bachelor’s degree.
I have worked on more than 50 types of civilian and military aircraft, from corporate aircraft, to small private planes, to 747s, to the Stealth Bomber, in my career, not just as a technician, but as a quality-assurance inspector, instructor, and supervisor. For the past five years, I’ve worked for Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems Division as a technical writer, helping to write the maintenance manuals and wire-data manuals for U.S. and allied military customers. Oh, and in 1992, I appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy.
In the Marines, we had a joke: Talking about the aircraft, we’d say — “It takes a college education to break them (our pilots), and a high-school education to fix them (us)”
Regards,
Jim McKain

A lot of Americans hold the mistaken belief that going through college is somehow necessary for an individual to be able to learn demanding jobs. Wrong. Most people are capable of learning when they have a strong incentive to do so. Going to college doesn’t magically throw a switch in your brain that makes it possible to learn difficult things.