The Useless College Degree

(at least you only chose 1 useless undergrad major. I chose 2 -- political science and english).

Now, I also have three good friends that are plumbers. They each make approx $70,000 a year. But, they work there asses off. Up at 4am each morning, at the job for 6am. Outside in the heat all day, outside in the freezing cold all winter, outside in the rain. Sure they make a lot of money but would you want to bust your ass like that for the rest of your life. I bet that most of their bodies will be broken down by the time they are 40 years old. And they agree.

Psychology is a pretty decent degree though, you could go into Educational Psychology (pays OK), Business/Management Psychology (pays better), That-form-of-psychology-where-you-work-in-a-mental- ward (must be interesting but you get bullied by the psychiatrists i.e. the PROPER scientists), Sports Psychology and so on.

Taduez is right, Law is a pretty tempting option for a lot of Arts grads, but here in the UK legal course fees (CPE & LPC/BVC) cost anywhere betweem £8,000 and £12,000. Before living expenses and on top of your student loans assuming you have any.

The UK is crying out for teachers at the minute and will even give you £6,000 to help finance the 1 year training course. You'll be overworked and underpaid but you do get those nice long holidays and it's socially useful after all. I'd do it myself if my mum hadn't put me off it, and I still can't get GBS's "Those who can, do - those who can't, teach" dictum out of my head.

And anyway, isn't an Education supposed to be about something more than vocational training?

I have virtually no regrets that I've never done any pain manual work in my life (well, it's measurable in days rather than years...). And none that I've had formal education to a really quite large extent (B. A. ).

I want to move around and be outside and meet people. Or at least move around. I can't think of anything to study that would be likely to get me a career I'd really love, except if I were to get really lucky and do field research in anthropology or be a travel writer something, so I've decided on a hotel/restaurant/murder-mystery/Victorian reenactment business as the best thing to do if I could find the money for it. Oh yeah and I want a commune so I need to learn to farm.

I think, Mike, that you're suppose to get a Masters, or P.H.D. in psychology after your initial degree. That is infact, the purpose of gaining the Bachlors. People frown upon 2 year collages and trade schools for their short sighted attitude and infrence of the students lack of potential for "more".

Being an Art school graduate, every other degree seems to have more practical application than my own. But thats just my grass is greener perspective.

Hell, I'm doing it!

As the job market is slow for us all, now would be a great time to take Masters courses (as was suggested), or explore another field you've always liked. There's no shame in adding on to the skills you've already got. Employers look for people who are well rounded in hobbies AND academia.

The liberal arts education was meant to enrich the minds of wealthy people's sons and daughters so that they can become enlightened and effective leaders of the society. This tradition can be traced all the way back to Plato. Vocational training is deemed unnecesssary for the priviledge kids who are supposed to inherit the family business and get trained on-the-job.

For the common folks, the liberal arts education is a luxury. The more important concern for them is to acquire the skills necessary for them to enter the workforce upon graduation. Engineering, for example, is a ticket for most middle-class or lower-middle class kids to a well-paying, white-collar job. To some extent, film making and journalism also fall into this category. One rarely finds a well-to-do kid studying engineering (or film making, or journalism), for his/her future job function is governing the business (or community).

Current college programs tend to combine liberal arts with vocational training. However, this tends to confuse young minds as what is most important for them. Most kids do not come from a privileged background; hence for them, a vocational training is a must; while a little bit of liberal arts can enrich their minds. Hence a degree in electric engineering and a minor in literature, or psychologoy, or history, or whatever would be a sound choice. But majoring in literature without the talent of becoming a good writer seems ridiculous to me, unless the person comes from well-to-do family.

One can always acquire most liberal arts education through self study. After all, most great thinkers (and women) in history did NOT go to college. But acquisition of technical skills require practice, and hence cannot be done through merely reading books. Since most firms today use college degrees as a filter to sieve out under-motivated people, few opportunities exist for high-school grads to get into a position that allow them to practise complex technical skills at a firm today. Of course, there are exceptions. When the technology is new, one can get into the field with relatively little formal education. Consider Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison.

The American colleges provide a wealth of mind-enriching programs. If only the students know how to select! One can go a public state college and still get a decent education. I went to one here. I also went to an Ivy league school to get my doctorate (what a waste of time) and noticed that the kids there weren't that well educated as I had expected.

Finally, from my own experience, the academia in US is largely a scam. On each campus, there are a few professors who are serious and excellent. Taking a few courses with them is a great experience. But I don't see the value in spending four precious years of one's life devoting to academic pursuit. By introspection and reflection, any mature man and woman can figure out for him or herself most of the stuff that is taught today on campus. Yes, one may reach revelation five or ten years later after college. But such revelation will be from personal experience and hence real. An intelligent college student, with little experience in life, may "understand" what the professor is saying, be awed by him or her, and write a clever essay on the subject. But such understanding is not based on real life experience and hence unreal in my opinion.

College education today, and graduate education (ph.d and masters) has become more and more a self-serving system for the professors who need a large class of students to milk tuitions and a large pool of foreign graduate students to help him/her get federal grants. Most of the research coming out of universities is pure junk, permit me to say so.

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.

My motivation for going to college was, in fact, to put off having to work full time. (I hardly had to work at all during college, since my parents paid for it.) In retrospect, I wish I had given more thought to how I was going to making a living once I got out. (Ironically, though, I wish I had majored in philosophy, despite the relative vocational uselessness of a BA in philosophy.) I was an English major and didn't have any career plans, beyond some extremely vague, and lazy, idea about going into publishing. ("We'll just send some resumes and cover letters out and see what happens.")

Anyhow, after floundering for a couple years, I decided to get an MLS and join the librarian's guild, so to speak. It was a strictly career-oriented degree. Even then, I didn't think nearly as much as I should have about what area of librarianship I wanted to go into. I almost dropped out to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, though the question of how I was going to support myself kept coming up. By the time I graduated with the MLS, I had a vague notion that I could find a job at a certain local university library and do a PhD there. I did very little research into the practical aspect of any of this (the fact, for example, that academic libraries tend to require an additional MA in a subject area). Although my MLS eventually found me a library job, I don't feel that the degree makes me very marketable. The range of positions which would be open to me seem limited.

There are many other things about legal education in the USA that piss me off, but I'd just bore everyone shitless.

I myself graduated with a degree in Art History and proceeded to work as a waiter and wine steward for two years before returning to school. I'll give you three guesses as to what I study now.

Having said that, the line between vocational and non-vocational degrees isn't exactly clear cut - sure, a BSc in Golf Course Management leads you in a certain direction, but what about Modern Languages, English Literature, History, Psychology or Philosophy? Whilst you aren't being trained to do any particular job when studying those subjects you WILL develop skills that are readily applicable to a number of 'professions'. OK, I accept that those professions range from Management Consultancy for the Oxbridge grads to Market Research and Spiritual Prostitution for everybody else, but on the other hand you might graduate to find that Golf Course Management isn't really your thing.

Re. Tad's point: Yes it is expensive to train to be a lawyer, but:-
a) any PRUDENT STUDENT will be aware of that before they apply to a law course and;
b) earning obscene amount of money must be some kind of compensation. Plus, if you're a barrister, you get to wear a wig - I mean come on! How cool is that?

I have never met an Art History student that didn't have a cocaine habit or a trust fund but don't get me wrong - I'm sure I'd be the same after 15 years in a single sex boarding school.

While I haven't used my MA degree in English lit as a career thing, the combination of teaching experience, critical knowledge and general associations gained from the activities outside of class (radio station, newspaper, etc.) meant I don't find it useless. But I will say that I was lucky enough to get a fellowship. Without it, I would sing a much different tune...

not over here, you don't. Nor are litigators called "barristers" -- just "litigator" or "trial lawyer" (if you do personal injury work).

i agree that the wigs are cool, though.

www.halfpastnine.com

blog and rant!

http://www.twentyhood.com/images/mydegree.jpg

mind = blown

I'm sitting here writing down receipt numbers and account numbers and dollar amounts from hundreds of receipts for entry fees for a juried art show, and all I keep thinking about is the relationship between artistic success and winning the lottery.

i like that being where I'm from I "wasted" four years doing a degree which hasn't been of any use to me since but I'm only £2000 pounds in debt and I pay it back at the rate of about £90 a year.

mind = blown

― fleetwood (max), Saturday, October 10, 2009 6:51 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Seriously, isn't all this sort of a given at this point. Does anyone, bachelors degree or no, find this controversial or enlightening?

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f all of u for pretending like i'm t-bombin

or challoping or whatever

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I didn't think it was a t-bomb or a challop, thought it was meant to be somewhere between a zing and a o_O post. but, ya know, done out of character.

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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.

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

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 4:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stay in school nightmares, kids

xxp that's funny, milo, i was thinking the same thing - while paging through an accounting ethics textbook i'm going to use for a business ethics class i have to teach. then i was wondering if i should conceal my educational background so my imaginary accounting professor wouldn't make fun of me and call me 'doctor'.

the question of whether or not it was worth it for me to go to college, or graduate school, doesn't really make much sense. realistically if i hadn't gone it would have meant trying to work my way into the tech industry in the 90s, following $$$$ at a moment when talent and informal knowledge were enough to get you ahead. but i had half a BS by the time i 'went to college' at 18 and two degrees and most of an MS by the time i was done five years later, and then a phd, all veering toward the most useless fields of study you could want, making me a more and more academic person along the way. it wasn't about the credentials for me, i just believed that what i should be was as educated as possible, most likely to become a professor in something. like cardamon i know lots of people in my circles who have gotten somewhere with roughly the same, or less, but aside from networking or background connections it seems like they've mostly just been fortunate to be counted useful. say from specializing in the things that are in demand, from having the experience to teach that one class, from having the attitude to fit in with a certain group. mostly just thanks to the incredible standardization/functionalization of our labor market.

i've never been entrepreneurial and i've never been any kind of joiner. unfortunately i also never really concentrated on making myself useful to others; it has happened that i was useful sometimes. mostly i pursued my education with reference to myself, and not even to what would be most useful for me. i think that in terms of 'uselessness' the trick with college is probably finding a way to make sure you're useful to others, if nothing else, because lacking those other sources of... whatever, that gets you places and keeps you going... you will remain dependent upon others finding you useful somehow, for most of your life.

very otm

Treesh, I'm sorry to hear that your college memories are so unhappy, but what you describe sounds pretty standard for me and most of my social circle: drugs, alcohol, doomed relationships, despair, self-doubt, retreat into fantasy, one or more psychological rough patches, way too much lit crit.

On some level I half-suspect that is more or less how college is supposed to go, and that going through those things was as indispensable a part of the learning process as anything I heard from a professor in a classroom. Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from poor judgement.

My B.A.'s usefulness was limited to getting me over the minimum requirements for getting into a graduate program. My M.S. has definitely been worth actual money in the bank. And I got the company to pay for it. I've been an incredibly fortunate son of a bitch.

Not as fortunate as someone born in europe tbf

them's fightin words

thats a more localised birthright tbh

Srsly tho

Didnt get into first choice (law) by a matter of a few points, took a year off for family reasons, did a business degree at the local technical institite to enable me to stay in town, got me into the public sector and took me 8 years to get back to get an IT degree. Cant imagine having managed any of it under a debt system.

i went to college for free and was paid to work thru grad school (per usual in the states), with a bit of loan debt to make the latter more doable. i don't know what i would have chosen to do if i were paying for college, probably gotten a computer science degree. : /

xp my memories are not as bad as that makes them sound. but those years do seem kind of arbitrary in hindsight.. i think it wasn't the right time for me to be pursuing higher education. i guess everyone is different but at 18-22 i was quite young and had very little grasp of the world

i believe in the gap year. and also in pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

in denmark i remember going to a party at this weird residential school that was like, in between high school and undergrad. at one point all this amazing food appeared but i didn't see any kitchen facilities or staff. they seemed to have dance parties every night at this place.

looked it up -- it was called a Folkehøjskole. i'm probably explaining it wrong, but i remember they didn't have grades and it was in the middle of the woods basically, deep in the copenhagen suburbs

or the suburbs of cph rather

pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

― Treeship

iirc u either get a degree or u gain credit by sharing the correct blogs on message boards

not blogs, anecdotes

With 50 year working lives approaching soon, it wont be an issue of either/or (life-learning vs undergrad).

An undergraduate degree, or masters, in your early 20s isn't going to last 40 to 45 years, so you can get to have at least one more go at it, if not two. You might need to choose which student debts you want to pass on to your heirs.

Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/meet-the-parents-who-wont-let-their-children-study-literature/?hpid=hp_regional-hp-cards_rhp-card-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.f5ebc1131368

"at George Mason University"

stopped reading there

But seriously you should look at GMU's list of the world-changing titans who studied English! I mean, Howard Cosell, Tom Clancy, Emma Watson, Clarence Thomas, AND Mark Knopfler!

Who would not wish to be among such company as they begin their career journey. I mean, the list even includes a former EPA head and numerous prominent librarians.