generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

If you want a symbol of our time it is not the unemployed puppeteers it is the unemployed JDs

totally

yeah I have a friend who is applying to law schools for the third year in a row, despite becoming increasingly aware that (a) he will hate it (b) he will be just as unemployed after he graduates as he is now

he is an idiot

tell him you read on the internet he should just be a paralegal and work for one of the new on-line firms

at least hell have a job in 10 years

it's really not worth telling him to do anything, I don't think he wants my advice. I think in reality he's just waiting for his grandmother to die so he can inherit some unfair amount of money.

(also my advice is probably of dubious value given my decision to apply to PhD programs)

yeah, I knew a person who completely failed across the board all her classes one semester, was given a mulligan

try doing that at a public school

there was also a story in the student newspaper about a student who stopped going to classes because she was playing WoW 16 hours a day

oh man I am so glad WoW didn't exist when I was in college

For us, if you failed 2+ classes in a semester, or failed a class in consecutive semesters, you had to take a mandatory year off and came back on academic probation. Interestingly, this happened to about... 75%? of my close social circle. (NOTE: If you are going to spend 3 consecutive weeks playing Asshole every night until 4 AM, make sure someone is funneling your class assignments to you, like I did.)

(also, all of the guys who had an enforced year off came back and completely kicked ass in their majors, while I basically did the bare minimum to graduate in 4 years; I would really like to do that section of my life over)

If you are going to spend 3 consecutive weeks playing Asshole every night until 4 AM

In that I am perhaps sheltered, this phrase raises questions.

haha - its a card game

lol

here are the basic rules, there are several variants: http://assholerules.com/

We always played with a President, Vice-President, Vice-Asshole and Asshole; President and Asshole swapped 2 cards, Vice-President and Vice-Asshole swapped one. Also, if you lost the Presidency you were automatically the Asshole in the next round. You could also order anyone below you in the hierarchy to drink at any time. We also didn't have special rules for the 3 or 4 cards; whoever had the 3 of clubs always started play.

A popular rule in our games was the Waterfall, where everyone would start chugging and you could only stop when the person directly above you in the hierarchy stopped; usually that meant someone in the middle would be torturing everyone below them.

srsly tho, discovering Asshole after playing Bullshit for years ruined several of my friends.

asshole is one of my fav card games ever tho i prob haven't played it in over a decade (fuck) and have never played it as a drinking game

yeah bullshit is pretty lame in comparison

at dan's college the president actually gets to be president when the game's over

I played an unbelievable amount of asshole in high school

yeah we played the hell out of it in high school but in college ppl only wanted to play kings cup

lol iatee

we also turned Cosmic Wimpout into a drinking game

no one wanted in on my attempts to make Lunch Money into a drinking game tho

(97% graduation rate, remember)

If you are going to spend 3 consecutive weeks playing Asshole every night until 4 AM

see I thought y'all were talking about the Gene Simmons album Asshole

actually for us it would have been Beck or Morrissey

they did not often let me control the music

Asshole was known as Capitalism at my high school, didn't play a lot of card games in college.

presumably because the internet had been invented by then

wait what are we talking about?

I too am in the belly of the beast but I wanna say that teaching at a public 4-year institution & seeing how the students perform / attend class gives special insight into why graduation rates are as low as they are at such institutions.

like, maybe college isn't worth it b/c it doesn't teach valuable skills---I disagree---but keep in mind how many people absolutely waste those years & think, maybe that's part of the problem too.

weve argued abt this before i think and im p sympathetic in general i mean i get enough students coming to office hours not having attended lectures in two months wanting me to help them solve half a semesters worth of problem sets cuz now its midterms but at the same time ive attended a fair share of lectures simply regurgitating information from assigned texts or that was garbled and unclear and thought 'i have to work tonight and finish a lab and a newspaper article to write and i really couldve used an extra hour of sleep, thanks a fucking lot' so

agreed that shitty teaching is a thing but it's not the only thing here. I mean the cynical take that "we fuck off 'cos they fuck off 'cos we fuck off..." is wrong...I think?

I read threads on ILX occasionally (less these days 'cos life is nuts!) in which there's the sentiment of "lol college, I really fucked off" & it seems like around here, there's nothing to be ashamed of in saying that, & I think that's indicative of the problem. I feel very out of touch on here sometimes.

I was reading something recently that suggested that the problem is that some people just don't have the skills to work super hard, & that it's bad that our culture expects everyone to be able to do that. & I think that's a terrible concession.

sometimes there are actually no good reasons to wok hard

like if someone is graduating from your college and not planning on grad school the difference between them getting an A and a C is pretty minimal. i mean my gf graduated from an ivy league school w/ like a 4.3 and the only field where that really would 'matter' is finance. nobody else really gave a shit. so I mean it's completely rational for a lot of people to not work that hard.

haha wok hard

wok hard pay hard

ive certainly noticed that the public university i work for does a much better job of treating students as adults and that, while support services are there, its up to students to seek help and make the initial effort, as opposed to having faculty/admin intervene and guide students the way they wld @ a top tier private school (ime). im sort of ambivalent abt this, there are obvious advantages to both but i think ambitious, dedicated students from public schools probably graduate stronger people w/ better overall knowledge and skills

my big problem is: there still seems to be a declining correlation btw the work that students do at a university and their job prospects after? i think im probably exaggerating this since most evidence says otherwise (haha) and that complicates things. the fundamental/systemic issues are still there no matter how diligent an undergrad you are i guess

ive had this argument w/friends irl too: when i was an undergrad (half a decade ago now!) i was p driven, i played sports and wrote for the newspaper and did charity work and worked at a job in my field and basically made sure i had the sort of resume that wld get me job afterwards, as much as i was able. and it worked, i had a job waiting for me @ graduation and when i left finance i got another well-paying job right away. and i think on an individual level these things matter. but if everyone does them then they sort of end up losing their value, like an A- at princeton or w/e. i also think its worth asking whether some amount of goofing around isnt useful/part of the point? idk...

I wok hard every day

another thing - outside of grad school what jobs ask for your transcript? almost none! even fairly official jobs usually believe you. as long as that's the case it really is more logical for someone at euler's school to just fuck around and then put a 3.9 on their resume.

like if someone is graduating from your college and not planning on grad school the difference between them getting an A and a C is pretty minimal. i mean my gf graduated from an ivy league school w/ like a 4.3 and the only field where that really would 'matter' is finance. nobody else really gave a shit. so I mean it's completely rational for a lot of people to not work that hard.

― iatee, Wednesday, November 9, 2011 4:54 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

one thing you hear a lot is that your gpa only matters insofar as helping you get that first sweet job out of college, then everything else thereafter is gonna be based on work experience. which kinda sucks.

also sucks that 'time gaps' in your resume are so frowned upon - so what if I decided to take a few years off to 'find myself' or w/e? well fuck you, some other hotshot asshole spent those three years busting his balls at mckinsey or got an MBA or something

smoke weed everyday

I'm not talking about a little bit of goofing, though; & anyway Lamp you clearly know what I'm talking about.

eh this is a topic I can get p right-wing tbh, at least wrt meritocracy. I'm inclined to think that "we're" going to get a lot out of students who are driven, & not much out of those who aren't. I favor a big safety net b/c I think it's bullshit for a culture as rich as ours for people to be hungry or lack shelter, & for us to have unequal educational opportunities at the elementary level; but for kids who fuck around...yeah, I oughta keep my trap shut here, b/c I'm pos it won't go over well.

or in other words: I taught Plato's Republic this term & I liked it

euler what do you believe the point of life is

obviously we should send all the poets out to the Great Wasteland beyond the republic's walls

if someone "already" has the skills they'd need w/o college, then I dunno, lie about it, what's it matter to society? (besides Kantian objections against lying blah blah blah)

but o/w if someone can make it through a 4-year degree program with decent grades then they've shown they can handle some amount of grinding & that's a basic req & maybe the only basic req for the kinds of shitty office work that unfocused college grads end up (until now).

the point of life is to know the form of the good, duh

IMO Euler, a lot of what you are describing is related to the deliberate infantilization of western civilization and the blatant immaturity of ppl participating in post-secondary education. I know I was deeply unhappy during large parts of my academic career and that leaked hardcore into how much time I put into my classes. I would have benefited greatly from taking some time to live in "the real world" to acclimate myself to what my skills would be used for and to connect some type of tangible real-world goal to my academic studies, which were basically an extended prep course for grad school (of my college friends, I am literally THE ONLY ONE who didn't get a graduate degree).

Tie a system that better prepares students for what it actually means to be a college student to better, stronger support networks (and it really terrifies me to think that there are schools out there less supportive than Harvard when I was there, as the prevailing sense was that unless you were a professor's pet student or famous, you were thrown to the wolves) and I can't help but assume that graduation rates would increase sharply.

failing that, turn drinking games into a major

I majored in being the Asshole President

a system that better prepares students for what it actually means to be a college student

This seems like a biggie to me xp

it is very hard for me to think about education in america in any serious way, a lot of my friends are teachers now, and it is just still so hard to think about

and I don't even like america, conceptually

here is a random facebook status on my feed:

Taught my kids about how unions work today by having them all say "FUCK YOU" to me at once.

xp how can you not like the concept of America? it's got the American revolution and presidents with sideburns and Intrepidity and Innovation and Railroads!

another thing - outside of grad school what jobs ask for your transcript? almost none! even fairly official jobs usually believe you. as long as that's the case it really is more logical for someone at euler's school to just fuck around and then put a 3.9 on their resume.

― iatee, Wednesday, November 9, 2011 2:18 PM (2 minutes ago) [IP: 64.61.128.66: New York, United States]

not true. every public school teaching job asks for a transcript.