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Actually, It's true. A BA/BA from anywhere will get the grad many jobs. Fairly well paying ones at that.
Oh, really? I went to good university and I'd say that half of my colleagues couldn't find a job for nearly a year and had to eventually settle for one that paid $25,000-$30,000.
I declared my major on the last day possible, towards the end of my sophomore year. I only went to college because my deceased father left a bunch of money for me for my education and I really desperately wanted to stop living at home and meet new people after being a social outcast in high school.
My Art History degree has not helped me out one bit, and a year after graduating I deliver pizza part time. I think I'm an (un)exceptional case, but plenty of people I graduated with are similarly dead in the water. I'm in the process of playing catch up, having limited work experience due to years of focusing on my education, but I still don't know what I want to do.
People are trying to move on to other stages of life. As someone who wants a family, I didn't have time to work at McDonalds or Walmart for 5 years while I figured out what I wanted to do. I went to college and found a major that would get me a job, nursing, so that I could graduate and get a job that would allow me to start preparing for a family.
People are trying to move on to other stages of life. As someone who wants a family, I didn't have time to work at McDonalds or Walmart for 5 years while I figured out what I wanted to do. I went to college and found a major that would get me a job, nursing, so that I could graduate and get a job that would allow me to start preparing for a family.
Exactly! For all this talk about "gap years" (which can turn into gap decades!), etc there is a time for everything. I don't mean there's only one time for education, but constantly postponing college is not the way to go either, if one has any inclination whatsoever to go.
1.) social life
2.) to figure out what they might like doing
3.) because they feel they have to get a college degree to please society
4.) because many jobs require a college degree today, they do not even care what the degree is in, they just want to make sure you have a degree.
5. Because when you graduate from high school, if you are fairly smart, everyone you know is going to college. And the alternative, working at a horrible minimum wage job, appeals to almost nobody.
5. Because when you graduate from high school, if you are fairly smart, everyone you know is going to college. And the alternative, working at a horrible minimum wage job, appeals to almost nobody.
Yep, and making minimum wage hurts your lifetime earnings quite a bit, too.
You're not taking years off of the beginning of your career; you're taking years off the end. Spending time working retail and "finding yourself" before college probably keeps you out of most of the best schools, anyway. They have many more applicants than they have spots available, so the motivated kids with spotless transcripts and no two-year gaps where they worked at McDonald's are going to get in first.
It's still true that anyone in this country can, through hard enough work, get to the upper class. One of the most direct roads is to work extremely hard in high school to get into one of the best universities. That's the only way to guarantee admission to a top business school or law school or any medical school. Grad school works, too, but that'll probably put you in an upper-middle class life.
There aren't any shortcuts, and being lazy at any one step of the process ruins the whole thing. Still, for those who are motivated enough, the path is there. Be the best at your high school (not hard), go to a Top 25 university, then go to med school. Then you're set.
Waiting around for a couple of years or going to community college probably means struggling to get into a mid-tier UC or a CSU; you'll never get into Stanford from a community college (unless you play baseball). From a CSU, making the jump to med school is much harder, and your margin for error is much slimmer -- a 3.5 GPA isn't going to cut it, whereas a 3.5 GPA from Stanford gets you in anywhere you want to go.
The system is brutal an unforgiving.
The alternative system, as supported by so many people on internet message boards about these kinds of things, involves setting students on tracks much earlier. In Germany, for example, you can get knocked off the professional track before you even get to high school.
Of course, you can effectively be knocked off that track in the U.S., too, since you're never going to Stanford if you don't fill your high school schedule with honors courses and get an A in almost every class.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
41,936 posts, read 37,016,353 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tofur
kids go to college without knowing what they want to do (and lets be honest, who REALLY knows what they want to do at 18 years old?) because you have so many closed doors if you don't get the degree. Employers are getting ridiculous nowadays, they are requiring bachelors degrees for jobs that an above-average monkey could do.
Yep, and making minimum wage hurts your lifetime earnings quite a bit, too.
You're not taking years off of the beginning of your career; you're taking years off the end. Spending time working retail and "finding yourself" before college probably keeps you out of most of the best schools, anyway. They have many more applicants than they have spots available, so the motivated kids with spotless transcripts and no two-year gaps where they worked at McDonald's are going to get in first.
It's still true that anyone in this country can, through hard enough work, get to the upper class. One of the most direct roads is to work extremely hard in high school to get into one of the best universities. That's the only way to guarantee admission to a top business school or law school or any medical school. Grad school works, too, but that'll probably put you in an upper-middle class life.
There aren't any shortcuts, and being lazy at any one step of the process ruins the whole thing. Still, for those who are motivated enough, the path is there. Be the best at your high school (not hard), go to a Top 25 university, then go to med school. Then you're set.
Waiting around for a couple of years or going to community college probably means struggling to get into a mid-tier UC or a CSU; you'll never get into Stanford from a community college (unless you play baseball). From a CSU, making the jump to med school is much harder, and your margin for error is much slimmer -- a 3.5 GPA isn't going to cut it, whereas a 3.5 GPA from Stanford gets you in anywhere you want to go.
The system is brutal an unforgiving.
The alternative system, as supported by so many people on internet message boards about these kinds of things, involves setting students on tracks much earlier. In Germany, for example, you can get knocked off the professional track before you even get to high school.
Of course, you can effectively be knocked off that track in the U.S., too, since you're never going to Stanford if you don't fill your high school schedule with honors courses and get an A in almost every class.
You may never be on that track to begin with. Modern scholarship on the holes in the American Dream is pretty substantive and intriguing. No way is it paradigm changing, but I think many of them will disagree with what you said.
Gone are the days where college, enthusiasm, and a strong work-ethic were enough. There is a reason many collegiate programs spend so much money and time emphasizing networking above all else. We have entered into an age where knowing someone will likely be your greatest strength. Those connections may be born of academic excellence, sure, or they may be born from simply who your parents know.
I myself am a product of a lower middle class family that worked hard to teach me that opportunity is what you make of it. I graduated as salutatorian in a class of about six hundred and got in to some schools many dream of. Our Valedictorian was accepted into Harvard and last I heard has gone on to do great things as a clinical MD (It is worth mentioning that her family was quite wealthy and her father, himself, was an anesthesiologist.) Many of our classmates who were equally able woke up to a nightmarish reality: they had been fed a myth. All of their hardwork had simply earned them a waitlisting at universities they had aspired to attend their entire lives. SAT scores in the 1500s, perfect GPAs, and boatloads of extracurriculars in athletics and academics were met with, "We regret to inform you"s. As they sat on the kitchen floor crying over their rejection letter, students who had 2.5 GPAs, 900s on SATS, and extracurriculars amounting to third string on the football team for two seasons were casually tossing aside their acceptance letters, knowing that it had all been a formality.
And there I was...I picked dinky 'ol Appalachian State and a major in dinky 'ol history. I picked ASU because it felt right, and history because I loved it. Teachers, parents, and students alike rebuked me for wasting my potential. Some were openly bitter that the salutatorian had chosen Appalachian State over Cornell, a school from which they had been rejected, and a worthless major to boot! Yet, my entire education was paid for by the state, which was a much better deal than any of the prestigious private schools offered me. This was not for lack of ambition, I simply stayed true to myself, and to this day I am but a lowly high school social studies teacher. My academic glory has long since been forgotten by all save myself, my parents, and my wife (who I had the good fortune of meeting at dinky 'ol Appalachian State).
I get the macabre responsibility of preparing these kids for a world I know they could never be prepared for. I get to see the scenarios above played out year after year. I get to see a brilliant mind who overcame the death of his father and concomitant introversion be denied one of the more prestigious scholarships in the state and thus be forced to go to a back-up school, yet an entitled debutante who seemed to be making a career out of failing classes was accepted into numerous prestigious universities (public and private) without a care as how to pay for it.
All of the above might look like non-sequitur BS that has nothing to do with the quoted post, but it does. Sometimes you may put in all the hardwork in the world only to be shoved to the ground. If you live your life thinking, "I will get that promotion because I worked hard and deserve it!" you will be bitterly disappointed. The system rewards the system, not the individual. You don't win this game of life by climbing into the upper class. You don't win by being the debutante who got into the best school or the clown who turned the best school down. You win at life by living. Not living to make money, not living to get into an ivy league school, not living to be what everyone else thinks your supposed to be. You live for the opportunities presented before you. You make the best of them that you can and you enjoy those fleeting moments that come along in which you get to experience true joy.
College won't open any doors for you. It just adds another door from which to choose. I hate the direction my job is going, and sometimes I have moments of despair like anyone else, but I love my life. I made that, not college.
Yep, and making minimum wage hurts your lifetime earnings quite a bit, too.
You're not taking years off of the beginning of your career; you're taking years off the end. Spending time working retail and "finding yourself" before college probably keeps you out of most of the best schools, anyway. They have many more applicants than they have spots available, so the motivated kids with spotless transcripts and no two-year gaps where they worked at McDonald's are going to get in first….
All (or mostly - I snipped the post) good points, but you'll get better grades if you start college at 19 than at 18.
Making minimum wage for a year probably helps your lifetime earnings if it motivates you to do well in school.
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