I have to agree. From my perspective as a HS Counselor, I saw the worst abuses–and not just from Lincoln Tech’s auto repair program. The one that really stands out in my mind was in regard to a Special Education student, whose parent–unbeknown to me–sent in an application for him, to DeVry, for their electronic engineering technology program!
I found out about the student’s application to this program when I received a request from DeVry for his transcript, and my hair stood on end when I saw which program he had applied for. But, I thought, when they receive his transcript–which only listed courses such as Basic Math I, Practical Math II, Earth Science I, Life Science II–with no mention of Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, or Physics, that would be the end of it.
Nope! They accepted him!
I tried to talk his mother out of subjecting him to a program that would only frustrate him, but she wouldn’t hear of it. So, he did enroll, and DeVry kept him for two semesters until he became so frustrated that he dropped out. In the process, of course, DeVry got to keep thousands of dollars of his tuition money, for a program for which he was never even vaguely qualified.
That’s one abuse. The other is actually passing a student like that (which I’ve seen). They accept these students where no other decent accredited college would accept, then dumb the classes down so much they kids graduate (some with honors) and are ill-prepared for their career.
I interviewed one kid who graduated with Honors from University of Phoenix with a degree in Computer Science. He could barely answer any of the technical questions (which we expect fresh-outs to have a good understand of). I did some digging into his high-school background further understand what was going on. This kid scored something like 420 - Math and 490 English on his SATs. His high-school GPA was a 2.0. There isn’t a decent college I know of that would have accepted this kid into their school. I’m not even talking about MIT, or Harvard…but UNH, or BC or BU - no way would this kid have been accepted there. Yet University of Phoenix accepted him and he passed with a 3.5 average. I refused to even look at their graduates anymore. And I’m not the only manager.
There also have been kids who spent 2-3 years at these colleges and tried to transfer to other colleges. Usually colleges will accept 1-2 years of study from transferring students. Very few colleges (if any) accept even one class from these colleges.
There are some good tech colleges that are accredited and actually teach the students something. NHTI is one. They accept almost anyone in NH who has a high-school diploma. But they still expect you to do the work. I understand that some kids finally wake up after they graduate from high-school. I’ve seen kids go there for 2 years and do well, then transfer to UNH or BC.
When her caseload was low, my attorney decided to teach a Paralegal Studies course at Berkeley “College” in order to make a few extra bucks. No, not the real college in CA. This one was the for-profit, open-admission diploma mill.
She quickly discovered that a huge percentage of her students had neither the motivation nor the ability to pass her class, and she was venting about this situation one day in the faculty room. When she stated that she would probably have to fail ~1/3 of the class, almost like a chorus the other faculty members announced, “Just do it like we do, and pass everyone!”.
She resigned in disgust at the end of the semester.
And, just to keep this on an automotive footing, she drives a Mazda Miata, which she dearly loves.
I still can’t figure out how she stuffs her ample frame into that car, but somehow she manages to do it.
A state community college offered me a position teaching auto mechanics and on paper the proposition looked very good but as terrible as politics can be in a corporation a state funded school is outrageous. The sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory directives of county, state and federal regulations and worse the demands of individuals in well established positions at each of those levels eliminated any authority at the classroom level. Possibly 1/3 of the students were actually capable and desiring an education to be a mechanic and eventually would likely learn the basics and find work while most were in the way. Some students attended class enough to satisfy the requirments of a grant program. Some attended often enough to stay on the rolls to satisfy their families who supported them. But despite all the problems those who wanted to become mechanics could find success thanks to the handfull of well experienced mechanic instructors who unlike me were able to deal with the politics while baby sitting the deadbeats.
That reminded me of biker I saw over the weekend. Now that the weather is nice, the bikes are out.
This woman was on this extremely small Suzuki. I’d be surprised if it was more then 200cc.
Basically all you saw was this woman riding on top of two wheels. Her super 8x Large frame was hanging down covering the rest of the bike. And the bike was struggling. I don’t know what would happen if she ever fell over.
Well, he paid less, but there was still a fair cost paid by everyone else’s taxes. I’m not suggesting this is a bad investment in creating a useful citizen. It probably is a good investment. That is the case with me. I got half my college education paid for by my deceased father’s civil service benefits, and a fair amount of money from them while I was in junior high and high school. Social security benefits, too! That was money well spent in my case. I pay more in taxes each year than it cost them to send me to college for 4 years. Programs like this do pay off, but we should acknowledge the real cost and thank the payers. So, thanks from me to your parents for paying for my college education.
Over the years I’ve seen a few of the UTI type students hire on at dealers where I worked.
Not a single one of them seemed to have a clue even for the basics and every single one of them was out of the field inside of a year.
One of them graduated after 2 years with an Associates Degree in Diesel Technology from Okmulgee Tech; a satellite campus of OK State University.
So the first week we had a diesel VW towed in so I figured this would be a good and fairly easy repair to get him rolling.
I told him that the glow plug fuse had likely given up (very common) and that the battery was probably dead from cranking. I was the shop foreman so I meandered off to do a dozen other things.
Later that morning he came up and told me that he was stumped. He had charged the dead battery and the engine would still not start.
Did you check the glow plug fuse as I mentioned? Uhhhhhh…no. Where is it at?
Right where I told you when I first gave you the job.
He still never got it so I had to step in an hour later and fix it. A 2 minute job eating up half a day…
Less than a year later he quit the auto field and became a city cop in a neighboring state.
If you can’t cut it, either step up to the plate and acquire the skills, so that you CAN perform your job duties, or move on to something else
Sadly, a lot of the guys I’ve seen just want somebody to tell them what the problem is. They don’t want to learn the skills to diagnose it for themselves next time. And many of these are graduates of UTI and other such schools.
I was the last non-UTI guy hired at the dealership I worked at. Right after I showed up, the first batch of UTI guys started showing up. And many of them didn’t last long, for various and obvious reasons, as already mentioned.
Some of them even left for the real estate business, shortly before the bubble burst . . .
Out of all those guys, only a handful stood out as being really smart and/or interested in learning. Many of them were fast, but didn’t have the patience and/or mindset for diagnosis. If they didn’t figure something out within 5 minutes, they either gave up, or asked somebody for the answer. It would be nice if every car could be diagnosed in 5 minutes, but that’s not always the case.
One thing that has always bothered me a bit is the tendency of some mechanics (even allegedly skilled ones) to wild guess a diagnosis without even considering how far off base their guess is.
Example. Car randomly dies. Some will guess head gaskets, or spark plugs, or a fuel filter. A few seconds of thought should make them realize that none of those will cause an engine to randomly die.
I’ve related the story before so I won’t relate the full story again. An elderly gentleman owned a Ford that would randomly die and may or may not restart at some point.
The last diagnosis he got from his local shop was that the “engine has bad rocker arms and bad valve springs”. A shade over 1100 bucks later he had new rockers and springs along with a Ford that still randomly died.
It boggles the mind that a shop could come up with something like that. It also tarnishes everyone because odds are he told his neighbors and they lumped all mechanics together as being wild guessing, parts slinging hacks.
When I talked to him on the phone I asked him to bring the box of “bad rockers and springs” with him. Of course there was nothing wrong with any of them. The shop did replace them so that means they’re horribly incompetent but not crooked. The end result is the same; 1100 bucks for nothing.
I think one thing that has people lumping mechanics into the same pile of hacks is the general practice to avoid owning their mistakes. If I hire a carpenter to build me kitchen cabinets, and he installs them upside down, he’s expected to come out and re-do the work. If I hire a plumber to unclog my toilet and he replaces the water heater, I don’t have to pay him for the work because that’s not what was needed.
Even doctors have to own their mistakes - diagnose me improperly and lop an arm off unnecessarily? That’s a malpractice settlement.
But mechanics can generally get away with bad diagnoses because the customer is still expected to pay for any work they do, whether the work was necessary or not. That’s actually what pushed me into learning about cars. I was a broke college student with a car that kept stalling. Took it to a recommended local mechanic. He diagnosed a bad distributor. Swapped it out, that didn’t fix it. Then he diagnosed a bad ECU. Swapped that out, no fix. Then he decided the fuel pump needed to be replaced. Still didn’t work. By that point I was over $1,000 into it with no fix in sight, so I parked the car and bought a different one. I used the old car to start learning about how to work on cars, and eventually got to the point where I was able to diagnose the original problem - a bad fuel injector.
I should’ve been out the door for $150 or so, but he charged me over a grand to do nothing productive, and there was absolutely no expectation that he make good on what I actually contracted him for - to fix the car. If that changed so that customers didn’t always feel like they were risking their money, blindly hoping that the guy they’re forking it over to isn’t a diagnostic idiot, I suspect the general reputation of mechanics would improve. Of course, a lot of mechanics would go broke from bad diagnoses, but that might be good too - they’d either learn to do the job right, or go out of business.
There are mechanics who can do the work. - Hey - Replace the wheel bearing on this vehicle. No problem - done in a good time an correct.
However that same mechanic may NOT be able to diagnose that the car needed it’s wheel bearing needed replacing. If he was left to diagnose the problem, he might have replaced $500 in parts and wasted 5 hours and still not find the problem.
Diagnosing the problem is a skill set based on logic and experience. Without either the mechanic may fail.
I also started working on my own cars for pretty much the same reason that Shadowfax mentioned.
One of the few times I took a vehicle in, I pretty much knew what was wrong- bad fuel pump. But I just left them a note with the symptoms on it. They called back with a laundry list of things they wanted to do, none of it remotely related to the problem. I asked if they had followed the factory troubleshooting chart (check fuel pressure one of first steps) nope. OK pack it up, I’ll be in to pick it up. But but but…
It’s been decades, but I recently sought help on a wheel bearing issue just due to no time to do it myself. I was pretty convinced it was a particular side. When they called, they mentioned the other side as being bad. We had a discussion and finally I asked- what if you’re wrong and it’s the other side? Then we won’t charge you anything for the mistake. Great! How refreshing. Please proceed…
It should be noted they were right and it fixed the problem.
Briefly. I am now re-doing that bearing a year later and something like 1200 miles on it. Hopefully it’s just due to cheap parts or them pressing it in incorrectly…
One reason why it’s difficult to find mechanics with diagnostic ability is that we don’t teach students how to think, reason and solve problems beginning in 1st grade and going through college. Training students to pass standardized tests is not teaching them how to think and reason. I taught mathematics from calculus through graduate statistics and teaching students how to apply mathematics was the most difficult part of my job. When I taught computer science courses, it took time to teach students how to diagnose problems in the programs I had them write. I had real problems with students who only wanted to memorize facts but didn’t want to think.
There’s a reason the OEM repair manuals have diagnostic trees in them.
It shortens the time required to find the root cause and so ultimately, the cost associated with the repair
Not everyone has to be a diagnostic wizard to be reasonably successful
Overall, I agree with the lack of education in fundamental reasoning and problem solving. At the same time, not everyone is cut from the same cloth.
My solution is apparently heresy in the automotive repair field; convert everyone to salary and have at least one super tech that is responsible for mentoring more junior staff and help solve the tougher problems by working with the more junior techs to help guide them through it. Thus elevating them along the way to eventually take over the mentoring role for the next generation. Imagine that…
That’s what I’d like to see too, in many industries. But doing so requires a fundamental shift in the way modern Americans view economics. We’re so busy chasing short-term profits right now that such future planning, which costs more money right now but pays off handsomely in the long run, is anathema to the way businesses are expected to run. Until we stop getting angry if this quarter made us less than last quarter, it’ll never change.
I’m with @TwinTurbo I like the hourly wage idea plus incentives for production. Between semesters I worked assembling air cooling units in an assembly line of 9 guys. We got paid by hour but also got incentive pay if we produced more. It was not uncommon for us to make 110%-120% of the standard rate. So instead of getting $2.40 an hour, I would take home $2.80 for the 40 hours. But the whole team had to cooperate to do it. It depended on what the whole line did and not just one person. So we worked hard and everyone cooperated with everyone else and made lots of money. It was the best system I ever worked under.
I found it very profitable for me and mechanics who worked for me to pay a guaranteed weekly salary that was comparable to the average overall income in the area and then keep up with their flat rate time and pay them the diference at the end of the month. The weeks at Christmas and New Years were slow and often December’s flat rate time was minimal but year end bonuses based on net profits more than made up for it. But contrary to @shadowfax’s observation of the economic plans of many industries these days I ran a DBA business and paid myself a weekly salary comparable to my best mechanic and allowed my success to accumulate until the end of the year when I would run a quick P&L summary and congratulate myself, then reward those who made it possible, and of course myself. I seem to recall once paying a $2700 Christmas bonus to a good mechanic one year. That was a considerable chunk of change at the time here in Mayberry II.
