People who get a university degree and then go on to spend the rest of their lives working as office temps or video store employees or whatever

in first with 'lol ilx'

yeah, pretty much

(shoots self)

In first with a shout for John Doran

At least we had lots of random sex and wild student parties while others our age were already working.

keepin' it positive

less of the "we"

Keepin' it positive week is on ILM

xp

Damn, and I just told my therapist that I wasn't suicidal.

http://radioactiveliberty.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/nasrallah-death-to-america.jpg

So someone who, I DON'T KNOW, flunked out of college in three semesters and just got a menial job and never bothered going back to school would be placed how far above the lowest of the low? (lol my life etc)

<D_<D

http://madmikey.mu.nu/archives/Death%20to%20America.jpg

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a229/dhonig2/DeathtoAmerica383.jpg

Dom's running low on stereotypes to ridicule.

No, but seriously. A lot of the time these are lower middle class types who went to uni because clearly working a low-end service/clerical job was beneath them at 16, and so they take up a spot that could have gone to a more deserving candidate from a less priveleged background, raise the taxes of every manjack in the country, piss five/six years of their life up the wall, and end up back in exactly the same fucking place as they started. Well done all involved.

Ummm...lower middle class types?

I think that might be me.
What about going to university for the sake of learning? It's not all about having a career ffs.

lol USA > Britain; USA = land of lolportunity

I have an MA and gave up on my PhD to look after the kids because Mrs. T (who did less than one term at university) earned about 3 times my wage. I don't think I've wasted anyone's time or money.

http://www.ece.vill.edu/~mobasser/arminssite/ChileApecStupidAmericans.jpg

You've got yr tory in my chavs! No, you've got yr chavs in my tory!

Also in 1984 when I started my high-flying academic career even a "low-end service/clerical job" would have been good.

What about going to university for the sake of learning? It's not all about having a career ffs.

That's not "pissing your life up the wall" then, is it

No, and that's not what I was taking issue with, it was the assumption that not ending up with a career better than what you started with was 'pissing your life up the wall'.

going down the ladder is progress now?

so they take up a spot that could have gone to a more deserving candidate from a less priveleged background

How much does this happen outside, say, Oxbridge and a handful of others?

Learning for learning's sake can be done at libraries, night schools, OU. Why have you got to take away opportunities from the down-priveleged?

tell us about some under-privileged people you know personally

this method can be quite difficult to pull off (xp)

where does Dom work again?

http://www.defendamerica.mil/images/photos/ii021302e.jpg

Why does Dom hate everyone?

Learning for learning's sake can be done at libraries, night schools, OU. Why have you got to take away opportunities from the down-priveleged?

This is batshit My First Book Of Class Signifiers nonsense, how do you know the place isn't being taken away from another listless middle-class undeserving shitbag rather than a virtuous worthy working class kid? If you wipe out learning for learning's sake you wipe out vast swathes of academia, it's a far cry from unmotivated middle class people going to university purely because their parents will pay and they can't think of anything else to do.

xp
Or at least, seem to dislike?
And why is he forever trying to shoehorn disparate groups of people into various pigeonholes?
I mean, WHY, DOM WHY?

Why does Dom hate everyone?

not everyone, only women and middle classes

i think back to when i was 16/17 and the period where i didn't want to go to university at all because the thought of having no cash was too depressing and am mortified.

Why does Dom hate everyone?

Dom hates Dom.

i went to university to have sex with tuomas

that is horrible

i have to say, this does drive my crazy. my friend went to a really, really, really expensive school. her dad shelled out tons of money on it. then what does she do? gets married and doesn't work. arrrrrgggggghhh! i know it's none of my business, but it bothered me to no end.

^basically this.

What was her degree in?

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Thersites

her degree was in psychology

hm metal gear solid ps3 bundle, thanks pinefox!

let's just ban rich parents

TS: universities as places where people go because they want to learn about stuff vs: institutions that exist to help working class people further themselves in the world.

...because it's so easy to just walk into a worthwhile and fruitful career the second you get your degree, isn't it?

i have to say, this does drive my crazy. my friend went to a really, really, really expensive school. her dad shelled out tons of money on it. then what does she do? gets married and doesn't work. arrrrrgggggghhh! i know it's none of my business, but it bothered me to no end.

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/files/bush-mission.jpg

psych degrees do little more than qualify you to be a housewife. i doubt many people go into it with the plan of not utilizing their education. shit happens that no one can predict, esp 17 yr olds.

FWIW I think these people are fine if they go on to pursue an interest in, say, theology that enriches the rest of their life. If they then forget everything they learnt over three years and go on to leading a completely uninspired life tapping away on ILX staring at the wall then yes Dom's original post is OTM.

wait wait wait

are there actually universities out there looking at applications and thinking "gee, we'd love to take this non lower middle class applicant, but we simply have too many proper lower middle class kids who want to come here and waste 3/4 years on philosophy/history/english/arts degrees just so they can spend the rest of their 20s being a sponge" ‽

here I thought these sorts of things were decided on, y'know, academic performance and capabilities

I wasn't reading this thread yesterday, but just to be clear: "2:1 in English from Sussex" wasn't meant to be in any way derogatory or sneering. It was supposed to signify a "good degree" which due to the large numbers of people who manage to get similarly good degrees is not enough on its own to automatically qualify anyone for a graduate job on a graduate salary when they leave university.

i don't put my degree 'score' on my CV. is that an obvious sign that it's lower than 2:1 or do people really not give a flying fuck once you've amassed a few years of experience?

http://www.irishtownship.com/images/tutu_pics/desmond_tutu.jpg

just slip this in, make it a bit subtler

Knowing the (lack of) value of my 2:1 from Sussex I have sagely supplemented my CV with lies.

LOL B Right On.

The most sensible thing I've read on this whole thread was Cathy's initial post. No, a 2:1 from Sussex is great, but it's hard to make an arts degree work for you if you can't compete on a few of the other levels and you do get lumbered by desperate service job experience if you are from a family who doesn't know the form for going to uni, or you're a scholarship kid or whatever. I was pretty alert to that possibility in college/uni, did an internship for free at a magazine and decided never to 'experience' unpaid work again; times were such that I didn't have to. Rich kids used to have moral dilemmas about internships back when wealthier parents were not so keen to subsidise their offspring; now, not so much...if at all. Who wants to work with smelly poor people anyway? :D

I've lost track of all the responses here, but has anyone mentioned the opposite of this phenomenon? You know: people who are undertrained or generally incompetent who acquire jobs far beyond what they are capable of. I deal with people like that constantly, and it's far easier to be disgusted by them IMO (especially when they adversely affect the quality of other people's work).

yeah they are the real scum

This whole thread rests on the big assumption that it was a working class kid with good grades being kept out, and not some braying posho who fucked up their A-Levels beyond all measure

You are surely not suggesting that Dom's worldview is anything but wholly grounded in reality and sympathetic to the complexity of humankind. Surely that is not what you mean to suggest.

Deric, you may have heard of the music industry, where idiot men fail upward for 20 years until they can fail their way into a few directorships or fleece a group on the sly.

I'm sorry, after seeing how political maneuvering alone is enough to help complete chowderheads advance to positions way beyond them, I've become a huge fan of the idea of a meritocracy.

http://www.brazencareerist.com/2008/07/11/networking-what-your-liberal-arts-degree-was-made-for/

Classic material.

Y'know, when you've got no money to buy a car or get a house anywhere near a decent place of work and no industry contacts and fuck all experience in that chosen industry despite the fact that every job advertised requires you to have at least three years in a similar role even though the job title is "Office Sub-Junior Toilet Scrubber" and the only alternative is to spend £40 a day shimmying up to the capital on a £100 a week, 10-hour day, 8-month internship, then yeah I think being called the "lowest of the low" is a nice hard kick in the cranium don't ya think?

― the next grozart, Wednesday, July 23, 2008 3:05 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

I sort of feel like this. Only my problem is not no industry contacts and fuck all experience in that chosen industry, it's the fact that there are NO JOBS in that industry below the executive level right now. Fuck the economy, I'll take office temping if I can.

I totally understand. And ffs, it's not like University is a trade school. Higher education can definitely grease the wheels for employment, but I thought my parents were the only ones who thought they handed you a job when you left. I had hoped that idea had died 20 years ago.

I can count on both hands the number of friends I have who are NOT in any way working in the field in which they studied. And half of them, including me, wandered around in circles for a good long while. So what? I don't know any of them that resent or are ungrateful for the education they gained, and who says it's wasted anyway?

To the thread topic in general, I'd suggest that it's better that we have a system that allows people to seek and achieve higher education, in the classic old fashioned sense that it expands horizons and hopefully challenges your ways of thinking. The 'waste' of an education lies entirely in the eyes of the beholder...

oy. got carried away... sorry for being a threadkiller!

vegemite girrrrrrrrrrrrrlllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

She's back and watching more RiffTrax than ever! (Surely.)

Cinematic Titanic, actually. (Does that make me a secessionist?)

Not at all.

Even people I know who studied very specific things at uni (eg law) have had great dramas getting or keeping jobs in the legal arena.

And teaching too - you'd think we'd be desperate for good teachers but I know quite a few who find it fairly hard to get placements (and they're not being picky and turning down rural ones and such).

Half my friends studied Engineering...they pretty much designed that course to chuck half the students after first year, let alone graduate.

So far I'm doing the Office Temp thing but I graduated in May so I hope that gives me a little time. Damn Bush economy...

There is something to be said for the "classical" model of education as a means of becoming a culturally literate and contributing citizen. The "better citizen" part now seems to only exist in terms of becoming an employable, tax-paying citizen, but I'm serious.

higher education is as much about growing up as anything else.

Although I'm unemployed I'm feeling pretty lucky at the moment in that I can apply for internal jobs with BBC having just finished a traineeship there. Even in the current climate I know I'll get something there eventually. Having seen what's out there in the media other than this I think that's a major relief.

I think it's less "better citizen" and more "better consumer", although I'm fairly sure for a long long time those two have really been interchangeable.

I remember in elementary school, right after being taught how to read with simple See Spot books and all that, that the first thing we ever read and learned about that was written in full sentences was a layout of the capitalist system. I remember being in second or third grade or whenever that was and looking at these bold faced words and their definitions. Words like goods, consumer, market, etc. They were strange, they were unnatural, they were abstract and didn't have any connection to real life. If it wasn't for my parents who talked with me rather than plumped me in front of a TV for the previous years of my life, capitalism/the market system would have been the first abstract concert to enter my young mind. I'm sure for many kids in that class, it was.

Wow, really? I don't remember having a lesson like that until middle or high school history, learning about the Industrial Revolution & Enlightenment. The abstract concepts I got indoctrinated with in elementary school were "democracy" and "rights" (which probably explains a lot about me now). There was a required economics course in high school, but I do actually think of that as an important citizenship course, basic economics is important when everything from school budgets to national elections relates to tax policy.

There are going to be a ludicrous number of these people out there in the next couple of years.

Dom lobs a revive-grenade...

I swear to god. Maybe it was an economics class but I vividly remember it being like the first day of school, the teacher saying "Ok class, get out your books and turn to page 1", me thinking "Wow, my first ever textbook, wonder what I'll learn?" and then encountering this cumbersome and absurd thing known as free market capitalism. Any societal disillusionment I developed when I was in my teenage years, I can trace it all back to that moment.

You know what they say about dudes with tiny carbon footprints...

Instead of studying something more practical than the weird combination of sociopolitical theory and geography that I studied, I wish I had read Das Kapital a few times with my favorite professor and learned how to use a gun.

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

(Ron comes in w/ TV Eye riff...)

so did you get degree or drop out? what happened i am confused xp

all i'll say is: welcome to the rest of my life

this shit is making me so ridiculously desperate to get a useful MA like right now

these people are called "lucky" in this economy

this shit is making me so ridiculously desperate to get a useful MA like right now

― salsa shark, Tuesday, March 24, 2009 2:27 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

after two years as a student i just want a shitty fuckin job that pays enough for booze and rent tbqh.

^^^^^^ this

working in a video store was the best job ive ever had by a long shot

"video store"? aren't you like 20?

on paper my first post-grad job was the best i've ever had :(

not really in practice tho

if id stuck in the nhs id probably be on marcello money by now :/

so many coins to toss

lol very good!

farewell innocence

(they also vend classical music and jazz!)

after two years as a student i just want a shitty fuckin job that pays enough for booze and rent tbqh.

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Tuesday, March 24, 2009 6:32 AM Bookmark

ayo :/

I don't think video stores have been around long enough for anyone (unless they died young) to have spent the rest of their lives working at one. I think just about every job I had in my 20s was pretty crappy and low-paying. Eventually, I think most people in that position end up deciding whether it's more important that their job be less crappy or less low-paying and live their 30s accordingly.

I would give someone a break if they were only a few years out of college and doing this. I know people with BBA's who had to work for chicken feed when they were out of college, not to mention the staggering loans and the hazing that goes on.

This is more media b.s. The way some business majors are treated out of college would scare anyone into, you know, pouring coffee while taking grad classes.

On the other hand if you spend more than five years at that video store you either love the video business or have a vocation on the side like art or music.

or you're stuck at a bad job in a shitty economy!

This thread set out to achieve exactly what it meant and managed to troll me into a depressive breakdown back when it first came out. Let's not revive it again.