Posted on 04/17/2019 6:28:45 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Most people go to college to get a job.
Recreation is an added benefit on top of getting a job. Education comes second to recreation in terms of hours spent studying.
That is the great secret of a college education. Its the secret everybody within the walls of the university knows but isnt allowed to really say. Its the topic thats covered over drinks at the campus bar, and its what the cool professor tells students in class.
Whether or not university marketers and employees want to believe this secret is irrelevant. Maybe universities should be a place for liberal enlightenment, bright civic discussion, and a robust environment for becoming a better citizen.
But the reality is that students see college differently. Its a career-enhancement tool first and foremost, a status tool second, and a recreation tool third. And if education is gained along the way, great.
Even when we look at realistic measures for college graduate employment, universities do a poor job. Just this past week, I sat down with an Ivy League computer science grad who was struggling to find a job. The school doesnt teach you how to get a job. Everything youre talking about networking, talking to people, searching out companies thats something nobody on campus taught, they said.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
I would not actually recommend a job in a startup for a recent grad. It would be better to get a few years of experience at a big company - just don’t stay too long, or you’ll never leave!
22 year Corp vet here. I rarely hire new college grads. They’re too flighty. They’re not willing to take a foot-in-the-door position, and they haven’t a clue as to what work ethic is. There’s a rare gem among them, but overall it hasn’t panned out well hiring fresh grads.
Unless your major is a good one that involves hands-on LAB TIME, it’s best to NOT go to college.
“If the US University system were a stock, I would SHORT it.”
—Peter Thiel, famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist
”The school doesnt teach you how to get a job. Everything youre talking about networking, talking to people, searching out companies thats something nobody on campus taught, they said.”
My wife made a proposal about 3 years back to train college seniors on this. She has an entire program where students learn how to function in the real world after college graduation. Only one school out of the 100 she gave her proposal accepted it.
Colleges do not want to do this because they are textbook driven, inside the box institutions and stuck on ancient administration processes where anything outside of that paradigm is unacceptable.
I got my engineering degree at a college with a coop program. I learned what type of company I wouldn’t want to work for and where I’d be happy. Spent 4 years with the best company that I’d worked for in college and then moved up to another company and a better position.
As an IT hiring Mgr for 25+ years, I started steering clear of College Grads about 10-15 years ago. First they thought they were worth more than I was willing to pay, but they did not have the skills (Microsoft, Unix, Oracle, SAP, etc) that I needed to hit the ground running. The 2 year Tech schools did a much better job at that (especially in Microsoft area) then add 2-3 years of experience and they provided a lot of value.
I do not think a college degree is worth it anymore from a cost benefit perspective. Accounting, Finance, Engineering, Medical/Nursing, and software development are they only areas that I would say maybe worth it.
Plus the publics have very good financing despite their poor job of preparing the grads for real life.
Do they have chicken wire? You might want to apply with Kramerica! :-)
Many students who go to Ivy League (read big bucks) school expect to make big bucks on the 1st job after school. So when someone from an Ivy League school says he can't find a job, he means he can't find someone willing to pay $100K+ to hire a recent college grad.
When I was in college (EE major) I was told to treat it as a 40 your a week job - 8 hours a day. My reply was, “no way”. But it was amazing. When I tried this it really worked! (With exceptions for certain exams). And this really prepared me for my first “real job” when the time came.
It really does not take any more than that.
When I was getting my EE Degree at the UW-Madison in the late 60s, they had the Engineering Placement Office, where we were taught and coached in resume development, researched potential employers, and then had initial screening interviews with them when their recruiters came to the campus. I ended up with three offers. Took the wrong one, in aerospace, six months before the government killed 100k jobs...to spend the money on...unemployment!
The problem for a lot of college grads is that their skills are absolutely useless! The fallback used to be the MBA, but SJWs have destroyed that one as well!
Its funny how simple advice like that is the key to success in most things.
Well, many corporations do have programs to hire them.
Back when I worked at a large bank, nearly every employee in information technology was a baby boomer, and we were all getting oldish. The bank set up a program to bring in recent Comp Sci grads and train them in the ways of the corporate world. Most were successful, and some even stuck around and advanced.
I’m very proud of my 2 kids. The oldest finished college last December with a biochemistry degree and very quickly landed a job with a major pharmaceutical manufacturer. The youngest will finish college in May with a major in finance/economics. He just received an offer from IBM as a financial analyst.
They both went to a medium sized state school. University of Minnesota - Duluth.
You can’t imagine the relief.
I taught myself more IT than most Computer Science majors receive after 4 years of college. When I lost my job as a college administrator in 2008 I applied for more than 600 jobs, most IT related and no one showed any interest until one was looking for someone who could teach computer skills (at the college I worked for I offered free computer classes as a marketing gimmick and trained over 5,000 people in Microsoft Office apps). I’ve been here 9.25 years now and the IT guys are pretty knowledgeable, they couldn’t learn to do what I know how to do very quickly. But I could learn what they know how to do very quickly.
One of my kids just got his Astronautical Engineering degree. He went to a very small, private geek school with no nonsense classes of politically correct indoctrination.
He got his college job at NASA with a contractor when the mission director told another student he had an opening and wanted a student from my son’s school. She went to a professor, he suggested my son and another student and my son won the position.
Nice thing was, it wasn’t just co-op or internship. it was an actual long term, benefits paying college job. He earned enough to cover his last 18 months of college and parlayed it into a better job on a different mission. The mission Director put in a good word for him.
One of my daughters had a dream career mapped out with a particular organization in an extremely limited field. She was blessed to get a short term internship with that organization, loved what she did but realized it wasn’t for her long term. That’s the beauty of good internships.
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