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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never felt so targeted in my fucking life.
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.
As a corollary, go to college for something commercially viable. If your degree is in medieval Estonian poetry, you are going to have a hard time getting a job with that that pays off the debt. Recent history aside, there were very few people who went into things like electrical engineering or medical science that could not find employment.
The global economy has terrible, antisocial priorities as far as humanity goes.
You say that as if humanity is better off having more MBAs and accountants maximizing productivity and economic metasisis, that thing that is ending the temperate, predictable global climate we once enjoyed, and less artists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and teachers, the professions that propagate what makes life worth living at all, learning and experiencing, and passing down those lessons and experiences to others. Without that, we should just go extinct, there’s no point to us without valuing that.
Those with your mindset of, “well, are they dedicating their life to increasinging GDP?” are winning to be sure, and it’s making a terrible, desperate, disaffected world few want to bring children into because they know how horrible it is, cold and greed worshipping, a hell of Neverending competition.
Congratulations.
Meanwhile, nepos of people destroying their own species for private profit can and do get degrees in the humanities you describe, to sit on “charity” boards drawing six figure+ salaries due to their nepo connections and those like you have nothing to say about them getting a degree in culture they care about because their parents cut down a rainforest, strip mined nature, fracked mountains, or murdered customers in a healthcare con.
Those with your mindset of, “well, are they dedicating their life to increasinging GDP?” are winning to be sure, and it’s making a terrible, desperate, disaffected world few want to bring children into because they know how horrible it is, cold and greed worshipping, a hell of Neverending competition.
Whoa whoa whoa, I’m not arguing that the world is better off if people avoid the social sciences… actually, I think if we as a society prioritized that more, we’d be better off overall. I’m just saying purely from the standpoint of if one looks at college as an investment in one’s own career/employ-ability then you are better off in a more rigorous and conventional field.
I am not saying the humanities has no value.
recent history aside
Man this would be great advice if I could just stop taking part in recent history
There is an ebb and flow to the employment market. If you are lucky enough to have walked this wonderful planet for decades, you will have survived through a few of these all ready. All this will pass. I am confident in saying over the time of a lifespan an engineering degree will make more money than it costs. I do not think that is a controversial take, but you can feel differently.
That was good advice 40 years ago. Now your costly degree will just exclude you from service jobs and mean nothing in the field you studied.
If you want to get into a trade, find someone to apprentice with. Your degree will get you an unpaid internship at best.
That is so out of touch that I feel like I am having a stroke.
There is a lot of qualified people with “commercially viable” degrees that can’t find a job, or the job they find pay like shit.
Companies want over qualified people for shit pay, and they want you to go through 5 interviews because that’s what the cool companies do, and get offended when their ridiculous offer gets rightly rejected.
There is a lot of qualified people with “commercially viable” degrees that can’t find a job, or the job they find pay like shit.
Sure, but the point is, however bad this problem is for the more ‘viable’ degrees, it’s 50x worse for the social sciences, arts, etc. I have a belief EVENTUALLY the job market will turn around for engineers, but I do not ever think it will turn around for history majors.
The over-gay is sadly true 😢
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!
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.
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 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”.
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.
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
over-gay
Aka extra big ass gay
