The hint here is that he left after getting his bachelor’s degree...got a job...worked for two years to pay off debts. Then he came back to graduate school. If you go back to the 1950s and 1960s....that was typically the way that most people did the degree programs.
It is completely irrational to me that parents are allowing their kids to enroll in often mediocre large out of state schools, racking up $30-40,000 in debt per YEAR. Beyond the fact,they are earning degrees in majors that without a post graduate degree will only garner them a job at home depot.
Unfortunately the era of social media esp facebook, makes it seem like college is a four year camp with some classes thrown in. It’s become a right of passage for many middle class kids... to go away to school.
The universities are making the most of the easy flow of student loan money, by enticing the students with ever larger and pricier freshman celebration weeks featuring top billed pop stars.
I lived in a1966 VW camper van for a few months in college. I parked it free in a state park that was closed and unstaffed after Labor Day. The showers in the gym at school were fine. One of the three part time jobs I had was in a bakery so I ate pretty well. I had a fine sleeping bag so I really wasn’t cold much. Who knew it was a newsworthy story?
“He had majored in the least marketable fields of study possible — English and History”
Unless your considering being a teacher I guess.....
Graduate degrees can often make someone less employable.
This is the typical unobservant young and our current society. You can only learn from ‘education people’, and too much emphasis on a formal degree (of any kind).
The person never observed the parents paying their bills, even if personal finance was not a talked about topic at home?
Someone needs to sit kids down before they enroll in useless degree programs and spell out the consequences for them, in start, numerical terms.
There needs to be an explanation that getting Yet Another Bogus Liberal Arts Degree doesn’t make the child a More Special Snowflake. It simply makes for another unemployed kid sleeping on mom’s couch in four years.
I screwed up. I sent my son to college when I should have just bought him a McDonald’s franchise.
There simply aren’t enough teaching jobs out there for the number of English/History/ graduates who also have to compete with the Education majors. Very few want to teach in the lion’s den of public schools.
Most want to teach at college level and don’t realize it will take a Master’s at a minimum and even then the $10 per hour as temporary ‘adjunct faculty’, doing the teaching work that professors won’t do.
Then they find that the gates to permanent employment at a decent wage are guarded fiercely by administrators and full professors.
They find themselves out in the real world with a useless degree and have to come to terms with working in [gasp!] business—which they have been taught is the root of all evil in our society.