As a B.A. holding custodian I resemble that remark!
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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me_irl
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Because a degree isn't job training. Education and training are very different.
Think of how sex education and sex training are wildly different things. They can compliment each other but they aren't the same. You go to college for the education.
I think that "get a degree so you can get a job" mentality that our parents and parents parents touted is advice from an era gone by. An era when having a degree set you apart from a sea of high school diplomas. It didnt matter if it was in medieval art History. It was a university degree (so you were smarter than the average bear/could learn and be taught).
It got distorted over the years and now we are here. Lots of degrees, people "go to school to get a job", and then can't land one because...well. it just sucks
I'm on the older side of being a millennial. When I was in highschool (late '90s early 2k), guidance counselors were absolutely telling kids to just get any college degree they could and there'd be a job waiting for them when they graduated.
On the other hand if they didn't get a degree they'd be losers working jobs like having to be a garbage man and or would probably end up as homeless drug addicted losers.
My fallback when I decided being a marine mechanic wasn’t for me was a garbage collector. Hard work but paid well compared to the world view I had. The garbage men I knew always seemed hard working, friendly, and took pride in their job. I ended up with many blessings in my life that resulted in a more comfortable life than that would have been. Maybe I glamorized the job because it seems like a respectable career choice to me to go into for folks that higher education isn’t a good fit for. It’s a shame that their isn’t broadly viable ways for differing individuals to positively contribute to society in a functionally effective way to sustain their life and aspirations. As a hiring manager I have to set salaries for positions within my allotted budget and have employees making between $85k and $200k so I understand differences in skills, educations, experience necessitate different salary rates to compel qualified candidates. At the same time we are failing if there are folks that don’t know when their next meal will be or where they are going to be sleeping. It’s inexcusable and the people that should have the most compassion and empathy seem to be so easily swayed to defend the ruling class of degenerate narcissists.
This was true for me too. A big part they left out was that you would need to develop skills for the career you wanted - whether that happened in school or not. If your career interest is in computers, but your education interests are in medieval history, make sure you have some computer skills to offer future employers and let your degree put you at the top of the candidate pool.
But still yeah this whole process was screwed from the start. Everybody has degrees now and most careers use it as a barrier to entry rather than a leg up.
You think twinks are smarter?
My parents actually stressed the liberal arts idea that you go to college to learn how to learn and that it doesn't really matter what you major in. I respect their viewpoint even more now because they paid the absurd tuition at my liberal arts college. In my case, however, it really did cost me professionally. I ended up becoming a computer programmer, and while I was indeed quite capable of learning whatever I needed to learn to do any particular task, I was hamstrung by my lack of a degree in Computer Science proper.
Another thing I think a lot of people forget about is networking. Nepotism and cronyism gets you jobs, not a piece of paper.
Online job hunting is like online dating. It sucks. (And not in the good way) If you want to find the person or the job that's the love of your life you really need to know someone at the company, or who has connections at the company. It's possible to find the right person/job online, but the chance of getting to actually talk to them is almost nothing.