The Useless College Degree

i want to go back to college and take orgo and biochem! maybe someday.

lol, i am doing that right now. don't have a clear motivation for why, but i am anyway.

i don't think it should be legal to let people be english majors like i was

The greatest time of America is the turn of 20th century, when the industrial foundation was being built by great men and industrious labourers, most of those had no college education, and yet still learned to govern well and write well. The arch example is Andrew Carnegie. I strongly recommend you to read his booklet "the Empire of Business." I wish had read it in college so that I would not have wasted five years of my life pursuing a Ph.D. degree.

― Y. Chen, Saturday, November 30, 2002 1:56 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

didn't know thiel used to post here

Two English majors I knew wound up making mad $$$$ (to me, my standards are low) as advertising creatives

You may have noticed by now that all those claims made about a college degree being the key to a good job and increased lifetime earnings are never made by the actual institutions of higher learning, for this might be construed as a promise to provide one with that outcome. Their course materials only promise to provide a reading list and so many hours of classroom instruction, lectures, seminars, or labs. Which they deliver. Along with a hefty bill.

I think my English major was extremely useful, just overpriced.

my second-in-command was an English major and is doing just fine as far as I can tell

a friend of mine is a teacher and said she had students coming to her wanting to go to community colleges or local state colleges to avoid the 20-40k of debt and that she told them "Screw the debt, it's a priceless education, the benefits you get from it will offset the debt" or something like that.

I don't know if I have a frame of reference for whether that's good advice anymore, I assume it would depend on what your degree would be in. I have a bachelor's in psych and I do nothing with it but it did get me into the company I started at 11.5 years ago which (at the time) I wouldn't have gotten in without. but i can imagine someone not that lucky might be struggling with those debt payments/credit score/etc.

also depends if you're getting the education purely for career purposes or not I guess

I know we'll never do anything that Europe does first because GALLONS INCHES FAHRENHEIT MOTHERFUCKER but the 3-year degree concept seems like it could be pretty handy dandy especially if we want to make baccalaureates affordable (and accessible?) to everyone

a friend of mine is a teacher and said she had students coming to her wanting to go to community colleges or local state colleges to avoid the 20-40k of debt and that she told them "Screw the debt, it's a priceless education, the benefits you get from it will offset the debt" or something like that.

the world is a complicated place full of variables and i am an expert neither in education in general nor in these kids' cases in particular but fwiw the emotion this induced in me was blinding rage

In my own case, I loved my liberal arts education. I find academic subjects fascinating and I continue to pursue a loosely academic, but wholly autodidactic, education even into my seventh decade. But in a way this was my birthright. My family has a strong streak of academics and the liberal arts running through it.

I hate the idea of people mortgaging their futures to get a mediocre education in subjects they have no natural affinity with and scant appreciation for. It's a shame and a waste and leads to no good for anyone involved.

A friend of mine went six figures into student loan debt for a Masters in Library Science.

Today, she works at a library.

feel very blessed that my totally useless 4 year ba in history and spanish and latin american studies cost me < $7000 US, i only paid say $3000 of it, and my no longer paying it has no impact on anything including my credit rating #albagubrath

I guess some poignancy re: "forget the debt, embrace your college years" is tied up in nostalgia for a liberal arts college lifestyle overly represented in fiction that's unavailable to all but a few privileged kids... but if there was a moment when that wasn't true it was a very small moment anyway so fuck it.

the world is a complicated place full of variables and i am an expert neither in education in general nor in these kids' cases in particular but fwiw the emotion this induced in me was blinding rage

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour), Friday, August 12, 2016 10:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh I was annoyed by it too simply cos to me it's easy to tell someone else to take on 20k in debt when you ain't the one paying it back. esp when students are likely to listen to you when you're their teacher.

"forget the debt, embrace your college years"

gah, that makes my head explode in rage.

I have very strong opinions on the usefulness of English degrees (as I imagine would anyone who has to read crap foisted on them by a legion of seemingly only semi-literate co-workers).

The thing that aggravates me about Neanderthal's friend's comment is not the "it's a priceless education" aspect - I think people at 17-19 have a pretty good idea of whether they should pursue higher education or not, and assuming they got their HS diploma, aren't without the tools to make a reasonable decision - but the fact that she is pooping on local state colleges and community colleges, which I've come to decide is a fucked up attitude and contributes very much to long-lasting polarizations and disparities which are fucked up and bullshit

yup. we have good ones here too!

I started out as a journalism major. This seemed like a viable idea in 1989. Jobs were available, if not spectacularly remunerative. One could assemble a reasonably prestigious career, even a measure of notoriety.

Life intervened, and I ended up instead with a degree in English (w/ philosophy minor). I was near-certain this would be vocationally useless unless pursued to the PhD level.

Nothing about those initial assumptions turned out to be true. First, print journalism is barely a recognizable career path now. Second, I did fine with an English degree - I got a writing-centric job pretty much immediately and have pretty much done nothing else since. Third, I have done fine with just a BA. Every employer I've had has valued my work experience more highly than they would have valued graduate degrees, so it would have been wasted time and money.

state colleges part was my trigger too -- that people come up w a reasonable plan for their futures that will get them both the necessary credentials for the professional world and what it pleases us to call an education, without even crippling them for decades in penance, and the response is no no the movie has to end w you running through the streets of manhattan laughing in liberated joy as "rebellion (lies)" plays

(i wish i'd stayed at my state college)

this is also a teacher at a school in a very low-income area where many of the students' families are receiving some kind of public assistance.

I really wish I'd gone to like community college for the first two years and finished my Psych degree at a state uni cos I'd have probably half the debt right now for the same degree. there was that pesky year I was a music major at FSU tho that I woulda also needed to get rid of

the vast majority of private colleges in america are no better than your average state school - they're not even more prestigious

lotsa people chase a name

I feel like my residential liberal arts college would have been cool and fun if I went when I was a bit older and more mature. As it was I squandered much of my time, mildly abusing drugs and alcohol, getting deeply involved in a bad relationship, and learning a great deal about both the Western canon and various Marxist, postmodernist, feminist, and deconstructionist approaches to critiquing the Western canon.

state universities are ace, even though they will not (almost) guarantee you a spot in the ruling elite in the same way that a handful of prestige universities will. there's no reason to disrespect US public colleges and universities, except maybe to disrespect them for what they pay their football coaches.

doesn't it depend on what you're majoring in?

I have a philosophy BA from "last-chance U" (an experience which I enjoyed immensely, and hardly cost anything with the scholarship I had) and an MA from a much better-known program (which was $$$ and threw me into a depression). I'm not sure either helped me critical think any better, but it was a good major for me and I'm glad I did it. The BA anyway.

college was a waste for me. I was depressed and unmotivated and basically just attended class enough to get Cs and graduate. often would show up just to take tests. didn't begin to turn my life around until I got a corporate job that finally gave me an opportunity to establish a career and save for my future and I had to grow up fast. best thing that happened to me.

i got a D- in economics because my professor was a libertarian and i was too much of an idiot to spend time around someone with different opinions from me. i was also too lazy to drop out of the course. i just only went once in a while.

does anybody else have recurring dreams that they're in college last semester? been having them non-stop for twelve years

i got Ds and Fs all through high school (constantly doubling back to retake things or to gin up half-real "independent study" courses w sympathetic teachers) and something like Cs in college. the whole epic was pretty grim.

xp ha i def still have You're Failing The Class dreams.

my college transcript is, i think, all A's and A+s with the occasional D-, D or C-. Maybe I got like a B+ in a few English classes freshman year but in my sophomore, junior, and senior years i was a shining star in my english and art history classes. far too much of my identity was tied up in being a "humanities guy." i was a few years into my twenties before i truly understood that there is more to life than having the most refined opinions of all.

were you Donal Logue's character in Tao of Steve?

idk haven't seen that. i just see those years as being drawn deeper into some kind of fantasy, losing perspective, and getting less and less happy the whole while, culminating in something like a nervous breakdown after i graduated. this has much more to do with me than college.

I have two versions
-'they' figure out that I shouldn't have graduated from high school and I'm back taking one class per day for an entire year to my shame and horror; this one ends when I realize I'm <x> years old and at this point it doesn't matter anyway

- it's the last week of the semester and I have a college class (usually biology or a literature class) that I haven't shown up to all semester and I have to go in pretend like I've been there the whole time and figure out how to pass

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

real talk

- it's the last week of the semester and I have a college class (usually biology or a literature class) that I haven't shown up to all semester and I have to go in pretend like I've been there the whole time and figure out how to pass

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 12:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah yes this one!

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 12:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weirdly I also have concurrent dreams about still working at the mexican restaurant I did 14 years ago. in one of the dreams recently I was "fired" so I was hoping that was the end but nope....brain did a reboot of the series.

i have a recurring nightmare that i am forced to live in a cockroach infested apartment that is attached to a particularly bad job, so i just go downstairs during the day to the job and upstairs at night to the cockroaches

these aren't normal cockroaches though. they are sort of based on horseshoe crabs.

JOe's Apartment

I don't think humanities degrees are useless, but it really does seem to me that you need to be a sort of life acrobat, very outgoing and confident, in order to magic that kind of degree into a career. The sort of person who can 'network'. Or who may have kinda sorta been born into a few networks in the first place.

I say this after about 10 years of failing to get anywhere in journalism, publishing, or marketing, which was the idea when I went to university. At this point I don't have anything resembling a 'career', as such, only jobs (now and then, with rough stretches in between). Other people have got places though, with roughly the same education as me, and the education has been a key part of getting them there.

A friend of mine shared this on FB today: Four years ago she collected two degrees from UT-Austin. Two weeks ago she interviewed for a server job with four different managers at the same company/restaurant and doesn't hear back.

Even with all the grads who say they can't find work, I feel a lot more precarious as a 30-something with half a degree in fine arts and 2/3 of a degree in history.

Seriously considering starting from almost zero in accounting via a local community college's online program and then transferring. It doesn't have a lot of relevance to my immediate life but at the same time it gives me a parachute in a field that does seem to be producing subsistence level jobs at a decent rate.

Occasionally I'm not super sympathetic with grads in that situation, though - an acquaintance went back and graduated at 32 with a degree in marketing but he's driving Uber and constantly complaining that none of the music marketing jobs he applies for will hire him. Doesn't apply to anything outside of promotion/artist management/etc. jobs.. and the one time he did have a job in the industry it paid so little he was borrowing money to survive from his elderly parents.