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

yeah as far as I can tell In This Economy™ what used to be entry-level jobs all advertise as requiring 3 years experience. I somehow have gotten a few interviews anyway but every time one peters out I just get less interested in applying for more programming jobs and more interested in killing time until grad school.

I'm a phil-ah-soh-pher

which btw shouldn't be conflated with "the liberal arts" b/c our students aren't usually the dreamy-wanna-write-a-story types, rather they're the mass debater types & go on to do analytic work & typically get pretty well paid (unless they go to grad school obv)

you mean @ your school or philosophy majors in general

Not really involved in the discussion but here's a link that might be of interest - http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/08/31/historical-trends-in-college-tuition/

The linked post about the retained value of a college degree is also worth a look.

both xp unless we're talking continental philosophers w/ all that crit theory bullshit & that's just dreamy-wanna-write-a-story stuff that isn't gonna get you anywhere

obv I am a pawn of the status quo

I dunno I think their prospects aren't much different from english majors or whatever, they just have a higher tendency to go to law school

if I owned 'generic business' I would totally hire a bunch of philosophy majors tho, seems like an undervalued asset (as long as I didn't have to talk to them)

what if 'generic business' was a 'medicinal marijuana shop'

fwiw philosophy majors rank in the top three nationally on the LSAT, GMAT and GRE pretty much yearly; our only competition is physics & math iirc

xp lol

Got turned down for a job I had two interviews for today. FUCK THIS SHIT.

xps to Euler: see I don't like the idea of denigrating "the liberal arts" as a thing, I legitimately believe that the liberal arts (including liberal study of the sciences) are the foundation of a democratic society; this is why high school is at least in part a weird mini liberal arts education. College as a job-training-and-credentialing exercise is just going to become a worse and worse value proposition (though it honestly isn't now, as college grads are still outperforming non-college-grads in the job market, modulo debt I guess), especially because the academy moves so slowly that by the time it has figured out how to prepare students for the economy of 2011 it'll be 2038.

a hoy hoy: YEAH NO KIDDIN

this is why high school is at least in part a weird mini liberal arts education it's becoming less of this all the time

yeah I would like to see more discussion of the value of a liberal arts education itt. think a lot of ppl (though not all) who post to ILX prob have a degree in the liberal arts and went to liberal arts colleges?

did anybody actually have 'shop class' in high school?

my hs had it, I didn't take it

^^^we did and I managed to studiously avoid all of them

we also had an auto-repair type class, I think

the stuff I learned in my hs journalism class - particularly how to write, use a computer, and lay things out - came in much handier professionally than anything I learned in college, really. but liberal arts degrees/colleges are not really about learning a specific subject matter imho, they're about training your mind to think critically and work in different contexts.

I would definitely be making more money in the same industry I'm in now if I'd gotten an engineering degree, but I always hated math.

school is awful - full of false promises and useless work
memorization and paper achievements
any kind of real sense of desires to learn or create are put to the side

yeah 'critical thinking' is the rote response to people who question the value of a liberal arts education

I'm still trying to think through the true value of the ability to 'think critically' in the job market

dayo it was called the vocational wing in my hs

also folks, this is my line of work and i have a lot of relevant things to say, but i would really rather not discuss it publicly for a variety of reasons

xp - critical thinking is REALLY IMPORTANT esp if you don't have very good critical thinking skills

did anybody actually have 'shop class' in high school?

Was v sad when I had to give up woodshop b/c there was no room for it in the college-prep curriculum. It was down to shop or band, and marching band won.

Just think, I could have grown up to be a stoner!

I tend to take Dewey's line about the value of a liberal-arts-education in creating & nourishing a populace able to handle democracy

+ DFW's take in his Kenyon graduation address

oh I totally agree that critical thinking is implicitly and in and of itself a valuable skill, LL - but that's not how all employers see it

ps - i had shop class in middle school

it's an important skill to have as a human being, not as an employee

I think that the american liberal arts education actually contributes substantial economic value to this country - overall we had a much more adaptable job market in the late 20th century than most of the world. more engineers would be good too, but an economy can't be 50% engineers (and really would anyone want to live in a dystopia like that?) most contemporary jobs don't require specific training and in better economic times can be learned on-the-job.

said it in the other thread but the bigger problems are:
a. jobs! (I know underemployed engineers from good schools!)
b. cost

i do not work at a liberal arts school btw

liberal arts school can't really be blamed for 0 net job growth this month

last month, rather

schools

gonna put that one on the Ivies, as usual

wanna get some class resentment going on this thread also

ime the critical thinking tends to be "i wish i hadn't done a useless humanities degree"

The public university at which I work has increased tuition and enrollment geometrically in the last two years to compensate for evaporating state funding, with no commensurate strengthening of infrastructure.

The quality of students haven't changed much except I'm seeing more examples of mediocrities: girls getting psych degrees as a time killer before marriage because their parents press on them the importance of a college education, guys getting business degrees because, well, they want to start their own franchises, and journalism majors who don't realize how useless that degree is and always was.

true everywhere

an economy can't be 50% engineers (and really would anyone want to live in a dystopia like that?)

Would it be like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

working nights did not come in handy today. someone called me about an hour into my sleep (10? 11am?) and I gave off the just the most generic dozed pitch, can't even remember what company they were calling from.

lol @ 50% engineer economy; welcome to China :(

gonna put that one on the Ivies, as usual

wanna get some class resentment going on this thread also

― Euler, Friday, September 2, 2011 1:22 PM

ultimately we're being fucked by people in dc and wall street, lots of them went to ivies, all of them are rich, it's not completely hors-sujet

all we needs are farmers and abstract artists

problem with america is not enough grant woods

"school is awful - full of false promises and useless work
memorization and paper achievements
any kind of real sense of desires to learn or create are put to the side"

i really view this as a positive when applied to the evil ambitions of... a lot of people frankly. what other civilizing institutions do we have other than compulsory education? I agree with Thiel in the sense that a lot of motivated people would be personally, selfishly better off not pursuing advanced degrees and doing startups straight from high school, but I disagree that it's a net positive for society.

it seems weird that so mnay people spend so much money on rent/mortgage - seems like just money going to rich banker types instead of food, healthfcare etc

food and health care $ is also mostly going to evil rich people

Nunez - that was just my individual experience - I did however enjoy doodling in the margins of notebooks and dyadreamin

we all dreamed of dyao in school

really Mr Spock, cant we have a spciaety where people dont have to pay fuckin mortgages!

otm xp

btw just so you guys know -- the hammer is coming down on higher ed w/r/t assessment and accountability for their claims. the HLC has issued a whole new system of criteria for accreditation that is designed to force institutions to account for how their time and money is being spent.

fyi

that's mostly w/r/t for-profit schools, which isn't what this thread is really about (tho it is a pretty important subject)

What was his internet speeds like

those are very good points ShariVari, thanks

The ratio of Millennials to $120k salaries in Seattle is heavily influenced by the proliferation of software developers working for Amazon et alia. Which is to say there’s a sizable supply of kids willing to rent a studio for $2000.

every generation has seemed to rationalize selling out their potential and playing dumb in exchange for hypothetical material security, not just millenials, the poor kids

When you say something like that

Do you ever I mean ask

Assuming it even makes any sense as a statement never mind that it's accurate let's just assume in your head this is a coherent sentence and also a fact

Assuming that and don't forget you just made an ass out of u and ming then do you ever ask yourself why each generation does this thing you think they do

U ok hun

I feel like that highline article dilutes its own argument by ultimately turning out to be about every bunch of Americans who ever graduated college during a major recession.

eh i'll take it, all that damn "milleniums are the worst" clickbait trash needs to be countered a little bit

U ok hun

― But doctor, I am Camille Paglia (Bananaman Begins), Monday, 18 December 2017 01:21 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Read it aloud babes it might make more sense if it doesn't that's cool too x

yeah average rent is like 2 K in vancouver now, it's fucking bunk. also same as jim i'm in a decent rent sitch but it's easy to put half the cheque towards rent

I live in a pretty small basement apt in Toronto and I spend about 40% of my take-home on rent.

ah, here, this is the thread

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admissions-cheating-scandal.html

Ray Liotta [V/O]: https://t.co/LR71RqUMIx

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 12, 2019