quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

everyone i know who has a job in NYC had to work for free for 6 mo & gambled that they'd be offered a FT job at the end. they had to work for a year waiting tables or doing similar work at home in rural/suburban/midwestern [wherever] so they could afford this. many were basically out of money when offered the job

im guessing friends who 'didnt make it' dont advertise that

whoops the last claim is def wrong xp to myself

i went to college but i was always late to my first job, lol

mostly bcuz i was still living like a college student though

To get my teacher's license (2010-2011), I had to do an unpaid internship for 12 months. To the university granting my degree/license, I had pay a full 9-credit class-fee to register for the internship. Net cost for volunteering as a teacher for the year? -$7200.

yeah, i had an internship that was unpaid except for $5 for lunch if i worked 4 hours or more, but i took it because the company was in practice of hiring their interns.

http://www.quickanded.com/2011/05/is-higher-education-a-bubble-fraud-conspiracy-ponzi-scheme-part-ii.html

I love this url so much

Oh, wait, there's more. I paid 150*6 for state exams, $130 for licensing (still hasn't arrived) , a $700 affiliation fee, $100 for CORI/background checks, and provided all of the materials for my classroom that the school wouldn't cover because, as an intern, I couldn't really access the school budget for supplies.

most white collar jobs do not require a direct skill that you learned in college, but they still want a competent, generally skilled worker who's gonna show up on time.

sure, i think the point is that there is probably a better, more efficient way for the economy as a whole to manage this selection process

like i get that employers like having another institution managing the work of pre-selecting 'competent, generally skilled workers' but as is its a p terrible process for the actual employees

not really sure being admitted to college/graduating from college has anything to do with being a competent, generally skilled worker

particularly since these days the hardest part abt a good school is getting in, colleges should perhaps just scrap everything save the admission process

I'm not defending it! I think overall it's terrible when combined w/ the neverending rise in the cost of college. but people do sorta miss how things are working (or supposed to work) when they view college purely as a trade school rather than a weird signaling system. xp

i read one blogg post by a guy who runs a software company and he says he relies on gpa above everything for hiring young people cause relative to other mesures it represents what the largest number of people think abt the applicants work

i read one blogg post

(sorry that was too snarky)

http://www.quickanded.com/2011/05/is-higher-education-a-bubble-fraud-conspiracy-ponzi-scheme-part-ii.html

― iatee, Thursday, September 1, 2011 8:32 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

this was actually a really good article/one blogg post btw

i liked that article you linked iatee although i think hes way underestimating the role #4 plays even w/ elite college degrees e.g. your job/earning prospects look a lot different if you graduate stanford w/ an english degree than they do if you graduate w/ an engineering one

not sure what to say about the responsibilities of universities in 20somethings having shitty jobs when only 30% of Americans have college degrees anyway.

universities have a lot of responsibility when *that's why almost everyone is going*

This is all interesting –- the idea of the degree (and major) as an absolute signifier to a mushy signified

i read one blogg post

― dayo, Thursday, September 1, 2011 8:44 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

(sorry that was too snarky)

― dayo, Thursday, September 1, 2011 8:45 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wutt

The grade-inflating argument is key here, too, in that earning a 3.85 from Harvard Business in 2011 looks better than a 3.4 in 1995.

also MBAs are expensive but bachelors for a state school aren't really. My state university (which admittedly isn't CA but state research universities are all p much the same for undergrad education) in-state tuition is like $700 per 3 hour class. So I think there are a few different issues here.

I'm not even sure what we're arguing about anymore

and it pretty much all goes back to the fact that the economy is unprecedentedly shitty atm. like would it really make a difference if all the unemployed 20 somethings were holding engineering degrees instead?

if all of them did? then, no. but if some of them did? than, yeah, probably.

all i was arguing is that its unfair to lay the blame on the individual people in these situations, like horseshoe i hate the "you should be happy to be working at all" meme, thats what They want u to think maaan

for sure. i think i meant that you can be as unhappy as you'd like working at your job but

1) recognize there are people who would like to have it, even if u hate it.
2) if your job involves customer service/interacting with the public, don't take it out on them - they're not the enemy
3) take pride in what you do, as much as you can

i know that is all moralizing 'n' shit, but as a guy who spent 12 months working as a minimum wage security guard/junkie-catcher/puke-cleaner-upper/ guy who mopped hobo piss off the floor and wasn't allowed to sit down for 8 hours at a stretch, nor wander more than 20 feet from my "station" or talk to coworkers, i feel i've got a right to say that i know what it's like to have a shitty job.

my boss used to make me clean chewing gum out of the carpet, and offer me quarters at me as 'incentive'

This said I still think the louis bit is funny

so basically you're all just saying "don't hate the player, hate the game"

bizackly

for the record i think it's okay to hate being a dockworker and to tell the nyt that you hate being a dockworker

eh its not the moralizing that bugs me! i get it, ppl shd be thankful for what theyve got. but only to the extent that "what theyve got" isnt being determined for them by horrible policy/institutions/structures. *takes off blindfold of false consciousness, sees ideology for first time*

but yeah "dont hate the player, he doesnt even realize which game he is playing, because the refs lied to him, and so did his opponents" - friedrich engels

i must have skipped that one

But I agree entirely, Max. I'm just thinking out loud that when you're, say, 23 and working as a stock clerk at Home Depot with a 4.0 average from Columbia and you complain about how you deserve better, can do better, and were lead to expect better, and should get the next promotion, it's gonna rub your 40 year old LEP coworker with 4 years of seniority the wrong way, and actually makes you into a colossal cock.

Wait, somehow I glossed over the key part of this passage the first time:

Likewise, Amy Klein, who graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in English literature, couldn’t find a job in publishing. At one point, she had applied for an editorial-assistant job at Gourmet magazine. Less than two weeks later, Condé Nast shut down that 68- year-old magazine. “So much for that job application,” said Ms. Klein, now 26.

Wow, isn't that just like rain on your wedding day.

Some days you eat the truffle fries and some days the truffle fries eat you

http://www.benopipari.com/.a/6a00e553f11fb38833013488d6c6b0970c-320wi
"So much for that job application"

working as a stock clerk at Home Depot with a 4.0 average from Columbia and you complain about how you deserve better, can do better, and were lead to expect better, and should get the next promotion,

I don't think the last part comes up much

i'm so glad this conversation happened while i was teaching people at a college

I was the DJ at Amy's sister's wedding. I'm pretty sure they didn't all get great jobs out of Harvard. Lots of shitty jobs and switching around jobs and the usual spending your 20s trying to figure out what to do with your life situations.

If anything I think, and maybe hope, that people today have less patience for shitty jobs. Maybe at some point it was assumed your only hope was to just get a job and have some security and eventually go farther and make more money, but that dream died a long time ago. It just hung on and maybe now kids aren't just not getting good jobs, they don't have the patience for the shitty jobs that are supposed to lead to good jobs because they have the sense that they don't any more. So why not do something cool? Of course for everyone who drops out of the rat race to do something "cool" and "interesting" another ex-indie-rocker gets bored of that lifestyle (or can't afford it) and goes to law school.

It came up a lot when I worked at Borders... and I'm nit entirely innocent of it myself.

In my experience in retail, Business types are especially guilty of vying for position in places where the have notionally more supervisory power because they have taken courses in "management" and "communications" and are thus qualified to leap to the front of the line, get the codes to the safe and a key to the front door even though they're relatively lacking in the front line experience that would make fir better working conditions all around

I think there's a huge difference between Harvard (or whatever) grads bumming around in the early 2000s and their equivalent today - there was a lot of flexibility that just doesn't exist anymore. that affects the 'I wanna do something cool' people too...the risk that comes w/ leaving a boring job (or any job) is really high today.

like, I don't know how accurate this one stat is but Amy's sister's friends weren't living in this world: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/10/survey-85-of-new-college-grads-moving-back-in-with-mom-and-dad/

i just hired two interns.
at one point during the summer i had seven interns and two assistants. it's an odd fucking work environment.
I do long last-day sessions with everyone to explain how they can make the internship work for them.

i would never ever send a kid to college unless they were trying to learn specific skills toward a vocation: law, medicine, whatever. If they wanted to do anything, they'd be better off going out and doing it unpaid and learning in the field rather than going into debt learning what Joseph Conrad had in mind.
If someone asks if you have a degree, lie. No one checks degrees. They check work history.

i've realized that, barring an insane stroke of luck, i will be "working below" my education for a while. i've tried to put a premium less on what i'm doing and more on what it pays and the people that i may be working with/working under. thankfully i haven't had to slum it on a dock or at a home depot or as a vomit wiper. i've gotten hooked up w/ a few secretarial (more or less) jobs with decent hourly wages, which is in itself a pretty nice stroke of luck and/or the fruits of relative privilege. the work isn't the greatest, but it isn't the worst, either. and i've had an agreeable amount of time to pursue ~other career interests~