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There are soooooooo many business owners (formally educated and otherwise), too, though, who financially struggle, have businesses fail, never rise above the same middle class background of non-business owners, etc.
I know this thread is about people who feel that they were sold a myth in the form of the concept that a college degree will help you attain upward mobility in comparison to not having one. But, to tell the truth, I find the "Who needs school? Become an entrepreneur and have it MADE!" line to be just as disingenuous, in and of itself. "Start your own business," can be such a get-rich-quick scheme, and is sold as some type of panacea, with people slyly winking that they certainly have one over on these foolish college grads, when there's all this money to be made by anybody who styles themselves an enterprising type. Eh. Businesses fail. All the time. Businesses struggle. All the time.
The high school-educated, self-made millionaire type is as much a fictional archetype that few people actually emulate as anything else. Loads and loads and loads of business owners squeak by, mom n' pop style. I grew up with small business owner parents, and having grown up with that, never, EVER, had any desire to go the entrepreneurship route. This whole, "Who needs college? Be the next Bill Gates" conceit is far more of a load of BS than the idea that if you continue with formal education, you'll probably be better off than if you didn't. I know, I know, everyone thinks they are the brilliant person who, without the benefit of post-secondary schooling, will become the next rich guy. But 99.9% of the time? They're not.
I have a bachelors and a masters. I probably have more college education than most people on this thread. So stop acting like I don't know what I'm talking about.
I've consistently made two observations.
1) All the people that I kept in touch with from EE college were employed within 3 months of graduation. Most had multiple job offers even before graduating. All are well paid.
2) Most people with BA degrees ended up working office jobs or retail jobs. Most of them don't even use the degree they obtained. None that I know of make much more than the average single income. Many of them are still unemployed last I checked.
Yes, they HAVE used the degree they obtained. They got the job. I got my last job specifically because of my 'worthless' major.
My college actually did require attendance at various sessions each year you were enrolled that were overviews of student loan financing. They were mandatory for anyone with federal loans. Not a bad thing at all.
You don't have to be a STEM major or a basic course in finance to figure out that a $100k Women's Studies undergrad major is a bad idea.
Though to rehash a tired defense, there's nothing wrong with "worthless degrees."
For any degree you need hard work, connections and a little bit of common sense; i.e. don't take out $100k loans.
But it's all relative isn't it? If you want to be the next "bell hooks" then by all means take that loan out at Wellesley and go to town.
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There's almost no point in trying to defend my degree as the choices before and after are much more important than what is finally printed on that piece of paper.
The degree gave me some great experiences and I learned a lot, however it was I who chose the degree and it is I who defines myself; not my college experience. And I think this gets lost in these conversations.
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Unless you make it "big" in any field; don't kid yourselves STEM majors, you're still going to be working for about 30 years after you graduate, maybe shorter, maybe longer. And if this is any indication then it shows we're better off doing what we love than doing what we were told was best for us. That we should work less, and spend more time with family; the things that aren't worthless.
You really need to Know Thyself. And to know that in the West and specifically the USA, that we all have the choice to choose our own path, starting with what we choose to study. That the liberal arts were only reserved for the elites and the well-to-do. But whatever you do, don't think you have to settle or major in a STEM field; just because it is more difficult for you doesn't make it any more "right."
The difficulty in life is there regardless of what we choose for something as insignificant as our major.
I'm still trying to understand what is wrong with working in a field that is unrelated to your major? I too have a "worthless degree" and work in an (awesome) unrelated professional field that is growing. I think people who are able to translate what they learned into different professions show a high level of intelligence, adaptability and drive.
Nothing is wrong with what you are doing. You are clearly much better than the typical person who gets a "worthless" degree.
Okay. This is really uninformed. The average starting salary of a liberal arts major is over $40,000. I mean, yeah, the occasional philosophy major is stuck as a barrista or the like, but the large majority go on to career paths that are well-paying and satisfied. Then again, I've encountered engineers who spent their careers wallowing in a glorified make-work slot in civil service. In fact, over time, liberal arts grads reported higher levels of personal satisfaction after leaving school than those who have more career-driven majors. Go figure.
The average starting salary you quote is for those that get a job. It fails to consider how many do NOT have a job, or how many take a non-professional job just to work.
We do not need to do anything to encourage people to earn these degrees. A highly motivated person who wants to study history or religion will do fine. The person who chooses history because they can't do chemistry on the other hand is going to college because their parents (and society) expects them to.
You seem to confused a degree with intelligence or wisdom. All you have are the observations you've made are as a youngster. It's a pretty limited perspective on life, certainly not enough to justify such arrogance.
Engineering, just the same as other career-driven professions, do indeed mean better employment prospects straight out of college. Yet the gap isn't that large at all. As an example, humanities majors have roughly the same unemployment rate as computer science majors. What's more, as your career progresses, it is actually the humanities majors who tend to move into strategic positions after paying their dues. That's because the entire point of those degree programs is learning to take abstract, disconnected information and turn it into a workable thesis.
What's more, as someone who has worked with a lot of technical people, I have found that they tend to have huge gaps in their education. Sure, they can solve the immediate problem at hand. But concepts such as strategic planning, interpersonal skills, or the ability to learn something utterly new seems to elude them. For the most part, they run their careers through a preordained channel because that was what they were taught in school.
One example? Last week, I wrapped up a large, year-long strategic planning process for a billion-dollar manufacturing operation. My clients are, to a man, engineers. Beginning last April, I was charged with learning their business and really coming up with a way to reconstitute their operations in order to create a more nimble organization. There was some initial resistance but when, two months into the project, I presented my initial findings and was told, "Man. We didn't think you would learn our business this fast." That is what a liberal arts education really teaches: The ability to learn, distill, and think beyond the tactical level. So, today, I'm going over the final details in a contract that lets me implement the strategic vision I have in mind for this client. Yet, thirty years ago, there were guys like you who -- through manifest insecurity or a need to knock others -- were all too willing to crap on my degree in English.
Tell you what. Spend another 10-15 years on your career path and then revisit this thread. I'm pretty sure you'll be embarrassed by what you've written.
This is my thought as well. Most STEM graduates find jobs quicker right out of college and at higher pay than your typical English, History or Government major. STEM majors become well paid individual contributors fairly early on.
BUT- Look at earnings over time and look at the educational background of upper level management. They aren't the STEM folks. They are the people who know how to lead, how to think, how to write, how to influence others, how to think out of the box and how to bring knowledge from many disciplines together. They appreciate knowledge from many disciplines not just the narrow corner that is STEM. And that is not to say that STEM grads can't be all of these things too, but you're going to need way more than the ability to excel in math/science to rise up in the ranks, and that is where these supposed "worthless" subjects come in.
It takes all kinds of expertise. Some pay off in the short run, some pay off in the long run.
We do not need to do anything to encourage people to earn these degrees. A highly motivated person who wants to study history or religion will do fine.
In all honesty, highly motivated people are the only ones who should be getting into college, to begin with...the bar gets lowered, though, to fill the coffers at many, many institutions. In that regard, you do end up with an awful lot of unmotivated graduates who may not have worked all that hard to get their churned-out, reduced-standard diplomas, accustomed to doing the bare minimum required to get by, and then are upset if they are passed over for jobs in favor of far more motivated individuals up for the same jobs. These are often the people who want to cry that they were sold a bill of goods.
Part of that is the huge number of musicians who never had a formal education. People who actually graduate with advanced degrees in music (and admittedly, it is a field where you have to keep going through an advanced degree for most people) do quite well with a wide range of opportunities. But it is hardly winning the lottery to get an advanced degree in music. At the same time, those people coming out with a BA in music who do have the skills to be recruited professional musicians immediately are doing much much better than your average engineer.
Music majors are near the bottom of the pay scale, at a starting salary of only $34,600 and mid-career salary of $51,100. That's even worse than the pay for majors like theater or art history, if you can believe it. And these are supposed to be professional musicians.
That is way below what the average engineer makes starting as well as over the course of their careers. Trying to make a career out of music is an almost guaranteed recipe for financial failure.
O/T, but did you ever notice how in movies, every enviable male professional leading man is "an architect," and it's always suuuuuuuuuper glamorous and ideal? Kind of like every sweet young thing out to make it in the big city in similar movies "works for a magazine," and it's always very glamorous...not tedious copy editing or the other menial, mindnumbing tasks, along with the constant threat of layoffs that make up real print journalism work.
I guess not so off-topic, because so many people seem influenced to go into various fields simply by how the lines of work are viewed through a pop culture lens, anyway. Unless you have firsthand knowledge...grew up with family in a given field of your choice, or go and do internships, etc., it's easy to get a not-very-realistic view about what the actual WORK will entail in any number of fields. I think, often, student have very unrealistic expectations about what the working world will be like in their field of choice. I guess that's pretty normal.
I don't think people come into architecture because of the media portrayal, most people I know simply fall in love with the subject. BUT you will be told what it entails as soon as you apply for your degree (long hours, low pay, a lifetime of work before you get anywhere, periods of unemployment etc.) Student life pretty much sets you up rather well for office life, I'd say half of first year students drop out. I think some people are just born to be designers, and if so then you're pretty much stuck. Like anything it has it's good and bad points.
"Personal enlightenment" can be obtained at a library. Or they can even audit college courses for free if they want to learn from a college professor. What's sad is people going into debt for tens of thousands of dollars for a degree that is going to do nothing for them.
I can't rep this one enough! I get so sick of people getting philosophical about going to college and saying it's for learning. You go to college to make more money. You can be personally enlightened for free.
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I get so sick of people getting philosophical about going to college and saying it's for learning. You go to college to make more money. You can be personally enlightened for free.
