This is how it went down for me:
My senior year, they herded us into the auditorium for a 45 minute presentation on how you would be a total failure and will be scrubbing toilets for all of your days if you didn’t sign up for college RIGHT NOW. After that, you were put in line for the recruiter where you’d pick your school and your major. When it came my turn, I told them that I wasn’t sure and was thinking of trade school. The recruiter said “oh.” and sent me back to class. The school seemed to care a lot less about my academic well being after that exchange. The Military recruiters were VERY interested in how I was doing though. Being a teen during the 00’s was wild.
Flipping burgers for us. There were only the two options. That or college. And a few minutes spent on talking to creditors if you can’t pay the loan but DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT YET just go to school the bills will take care of themselves.
20 years and 50k in as of yet unpaid student debt later for a piece of paper I never and will never use, I ended up going to trade school and getting it paid for by my employer entirely.
Now I have a better job, union representation, and almost no petty office bullshit. Had I entered the field after high school I’d be one of the most knowledgeable people in my field. But, it was college or burgers, they spent a lot of money to send that message as often as possible.
My school didn’t talk to me at all. They deemed me as having a learning disability, a lost cause and let me rot in the remedial classes. When I tried to get my education back on track, they stonewalled anything that could be considered risky, which was everything.
I was livid when they hand out guides during senior year on what colleges actually look for. Things that you should have been doing since freshman year. At that point, no one in my family had gone to a four year college, so the school was my only source of info on the topic. I should have walked out of the school that day.
I made the mistake of having avocado toast once and now I’ll never be able to financially recover.
sucks to suck, I’ve lived in a shoebox eating dirt for 40 years and I’ll probably own my shoebox one day.
Wow, that’s the dream partner
I actually had avocado toast at a breakfast restaurant once. That shit was amazing. And $18. I finally understand the hype.
Very easy to make. Use good toasted bread, rub one clove of raw garlic on the bread, then use half an avocado per slice, spread liberally. Top with some salt and pepper and serve.
I’m so rarely in the mood for avocado that it usually goes to waste when I buy any. Love putting Tabasco in the cavity left by the pit, and eating with a spoon.
This place served it lightly smashed with diced red onions and sea salt, with tomato slices on top. Would have loved some crushed garlic mixed in but honestly it didn’t need any.
Also:
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- By the way, this rule only applied to people of color. By the age of 30, you supposed to have at least 4 children. Now tell me where are my grandchildren?
Where is my financial stability?
You can have it at a later date darling, maybe you have to share a room with the baby in a single room apartment, or can’t afford to buy an Air Jordan or an iPhone for your children, but children are wonderful. Biological clock is ticking away rapidly, but financial success can wait. With Trump coming, your job likely can finally afford to give you a raise after a few tax cuts.
- boomers
Why don’t you have financial stability yet? Go get some financial stability
How did you get upvotes, you forgot you’re /s. Unless this is a rasict comment.
I love taking my twice graduated college educated ass to job postings for my field and being offered $60k CAD for highly skilled work that requires both a bachelor’s and about 5-10 years of experience to pay for my $40-50k worth of education. It’s great!
I’ve been in the job market for a while and apart from not having a bachelors degree, I have most of the certifications and experience needed. But I did the math, I am unable to afford my bills (excluding things like fuel for my car and food for the table) on anything less than around $65-70k. I don’t ask for much for everything else, but I generally need at least $75k a year to survive without starving or going bankrupt.
Life is expensive and it keeps getting more expensive, but the wages I saw posted over 10 years ago when I graduated, are the same wages I see now for the same or similar work. Since the cost of everything has increased significantly over that time, I just move on to other job postings.
Don’t mention salary in the post? I’m not interested. Don’t have an option for full time remote? No thanks. I don’t want to spend hours of my life every week in traffic, spending hundreds of dollars a month on fuel, just so you can look me in the face and say “you look tired”… Yeah, because I’m forced to be here and I’m not able to do this work from home.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home? I don’t understand.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home?
Control.
Exactly. It’s basically “tell me you don’t trust me as an employee, without telling me you don’t trust me as an employee”.
Americans are the poorest people I know with the most disposable income that seems to buy them nothing.
Come to Europe. You will be poorer and somewhat miserable, instead of regular poor and stressed.
I’m not sure that sounds much better lmao
For us we had a big trade school you could go to for the last two years of high school. Normal school academic classes for one half of the day, the program of your choice for the other.
They had IT stuff, welding, auto repair, culinary etc. I went for EMS/Fire.
I still went to college. It’s a cool social experience but holy fuck it’s a bad financial move for most people. I’m glad I graduated debt free
Don’t forget that most highschools also dropped any trades oriented classes too. So now if you want a decently paying career without a college degree then too fucking bad. They’re trying to eliminate any alternative to the college debt shackle to make their worker drones more easy to manipulate and abuse.
So now if you want a decently paying career without a college degree then too fucking bad.
Go through college, fuck it up.
Go to job center.
“We want this specific blue collar job”
How do I get it
“Know the union guy or pay for a certification course”
Thanks fuckhead
If my school system was typical, and I have no reason to believe it wasn’t, what happened was that individual high schools dropped their trades oriented classes but the school system opened a dedicated vocational/“tech” high school. That means in order to take any such classes you’d have to completely switch schools, or at least drive there halfway through the school day or something. So, on top of having to arrange your own transportation instead of taking the school bus, you’d probably also have schedule conflicts and be forced to choose between the vocational classes and things like gifted/AP academic classes. And finally, you would also be disincentivized against that (at least in my social circle) by the stigma that only the stupid kids who couldn’t hack the normal curriculum, troublemakers, and teen moms would go to an ‘alternative’ school (which was wrong in retrospect, of course, but the key phrase is “in retrospect”).
To add insult to injury, my AP physics class was held in the classroom that used to be for the school’s shop class. In addition to a whole bunch of intriguing CNC equipment and other neat science/engineering doodads scattered around the back and sides of the classroom, there was a huge attached storage room that had all the traditional woodworking power tools. And we never had the opportunity to use fucking any of it!
college debt shackle to make their worker drones more easy to manipulate and abuse.
They have a better one now. H1-Bs. Do what the boss says or you get fucking deported.
Are tech schools still a thing?
The tech schools from my area offered trade focused education paths like plumbing, drafting, auto, hairdressing, and few others.
So you could basically go to them, skip college, and go right into a trade.
I know quite a few people who did that and they seem to be doing okay now.
Not sure, but shop classes, carpentry, electrical/plumbing, mechanic, and those such classes were being cut when I was in highschool back in the mid 2000s. I think classes like that are usually what would open kids up to seeing that they may enjoy those trades.
I went to HS early/mid 00s, and for my school district of 5 highschools, there was one career center. That’s where they put shop and cosmetology and graphic design (and ASL for some reason?) I dropped band in my senior year. I wasn’t that great, hated the marching part especially. I wanted to do graphic design (not that great at it either, come to find out!). A band director literally pulled me aside one day, urging me to rethink my choice. That career center was ‘for kids who weren’t college bound.’ I guess it couldn’t help me as much as he thought band could have? 🤦♀️
Our school cut our web-design and a couple programing courses in 2007 (java included) but kept Radio Broadcasting. Fucking joke of a decision. (Not just one course either, like they wanted to be a “magnet” school for radio broadcasting… so multiple)
Sidenote to bitch: they decided to keep visual basic as a course when chopping java. Not a C class prior or after, just said fuck it to programing 🤷
The extra kick in the teeth is for those that for whatever reason couldn’t/didn’t go to college! All that messaging of “go to college or you’re going to be worthless” just so happens to have the affect of making you feel completely worthless for not having a degree! All those years on online dating I’d pass on people that were educated and/or had good jobs because “why the hell would they be interested in a worthless uneducated factory worker.” It’s fun!
I have no debt, nor a house though, but I do have tons and tons of depression and self loathing!
I too am exactly like you except I own a few homes.
I decided to pretend to go to college in a different country. Seems to be working fine for my career since I started doing that. It didn’t fix the self loathing tho.
The money I spent on my education could have bought the roof, a ton of bootstraps to pull up, but probably not the electricity. :(
I’m just saying if mortgages were treated like student loans we’d actually be in a better place as a society.
Banks would fucking love this. They would be salivating at the idea that home loans can’t be discharged via bankruptcy.
That was made the case because you can’t repossess an education (yet). I don’t necessarily agree with it but I also don’t actually have a problem with banks not being allowed to seize private homes within certain limitations.
Make sure nobody gives them the idea that giving someone a lobotomy or ECT may be the equivalent of repossessing someone’s “knowledge”. The bastard politicians might actually do it!
Students would love this, you’d be able to discharge the debt via bankruptcy!
They talked me out of becoming an electrician because they thought that was a poor person’s job
Same here. I wish the kids that I was in vocational classes with weren’t such meat heads. The smarter kids were all filtered out like I was.
I had no postsecondary interests, but my parents were the embodiment of this, yep yep.
Turns out taking random subjects you have no interest in doesn’t result in success. Crazy. What did I want to do? Nothing. Still don’t. Unioned Plant Operator it is.
Luckily that was in 2010 Canada. Wasn’t much debt, just a waste of 3 years.
Never felt so targeted in my fucking life.
We were sold a false bill of goods and then got blamed for it.
“Go to college” can be good advice. It really depends where you go to school (in state University vs private or out of state for costs) and what you major in (growing fields, salaries of people with that major, etc). Unfortunately, many of us didn’t get any advice on the second bit.
Not only that, but they neutered secondary education to being basically just be college prep. It’s almost impossible to just live comfortably on a HS education from the past ~25 years because of how useless the information is to real life.
I went to trade school after college. Now I get my hands dirty for work and out-earn all my higher educated friends - except the ones who also work in trades. I also don’t need to worry about AI taking my job.
Because mechanization will.
EDIT: don’t you know difference between automation and mechanization?
Nope. Turns out robots are expensive and break down frequently.
A 100k boston dynamic that works from morning until evening without breaks is hell of a lot cheaper than paying a lazy sack of meat 50k year.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this but it isn’t all rainbows and sunshine in the trades either, especially for the self employed.
When you’re young it’s fine but as you get older your body starts to wear out and dragging water heaters out of some crawlspace or running wire in a non air conditioned attic becomes harder.
Still, sitting for 8 hours a day a desk can be bad for you too I guess. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
It’s pretty easy to extrapolate this to the whole concept of a full-time job being bad for you. It’s not whether you’re wearing out your body or your mind more, it’s that modern life requires you to wear yourself out just to survive.
Our ancestors fought hard for the 40 hour workday not realizing we were just deciding the dimensions of our cage.
To be clear I am not mad at them or blame them. But it’s still true.
40 hour workday
Stop giving them ideas.
Lmao I can’t believe I didn’t notice that
Colleges and universities started jacking up their tuition around 1980, when they realized they could charge far more without losing enrollment. So, being the businesses they are, they kept jacking it up. And the beauty of it is that nobody’s blaming them, it’s all boomers’ fault for encouraging education. Win-win!
As if it wasn’t boomers running the colleges.
In the 1980s, boomers were in their 30s/early 40s, so no they were not likely to be senior leadership in colleges at the time.
I was a kid then and people my parent’s aged were converting from hippies to yuppies, making greed good, and elected Regan.
It’s not all their fault, but their generation was the biggest during the era when unions were weakened or eliminated, taxes were cut, and hedge funds and holding companies were invented.
