Posted on 01/16/2021 9:17:45 PM PST by SeekAndFind
You can’t be serious, Dude.
There was a time in the US when you could get a great job if you earned a bachelor’s degree in “anything.”
The catch is that JFK was president at the time.
Most parents (and their students) are oblivious to how college really works today.
In some ways it is hard to blame them. Colleges and universities have a powerful public relations team, pushing the message 24/7 that "college is for all."
The team is made up of educators, guidance counselors, financial aid officers, politicians, pop culture, special interest groups--like the College Board, and college administrators—who are the biggest beneficiaries. Their influence is everywhere.
Many, many years ago, my “anything” degree, Philosophy, was from a state university in fly-over country, better known for its football team than scholarship. (As I vaguely remember, my GPA wasn’t that robust either.)
However, I had a successful career in IT, and retired as an executive from a Fortune 100 company.
The bad news is that college doesn’t work that way anymore.
Years ago very few high school grads (7%) went on to college. (They tended to be the “smart kids.”) If you graduated with a degree in anything, i.e. English, Gender Studies, Comp-lit, Philosophy, etc., you could get a good job.
Over the years a greater and greater portion of high school grads answered the call,
“You have to go to college!”
We are now at 45%. Probably half these teenagers don’t have the “academic firepower” to handle a serious, marketable major.
Back in the day having a college degree was a big deal. By the year 2000, the quality of a college education had deteriorated significantly, and college grads were a-dime-a-dozen. There were too many graduates, but not enough suitable jobs.
Then we got hit with the Great Recession of 2008.
In the US almost anyone can find a college or university that will accept them and their parent’s money.
You might even manage to graduate with some degree or another.
The problem comes when you try to find a real job. Employers aren’t stupid. They are going to sort through that gigantic stack of resumes and find the smart kids.
Today college is a competition for a relatively few (1,100,000) well-paying, professional jobs. Every year colleges and universities churn out 1,900,000 graduates with shiny new bachelor’s degrees. We don’t know the exact number, but a heck of a lot of minimum wage jobs are held by young people with college degrees in stuff like English, Gender Studies, Comp-lit, Philosophy, etc.
Given the high cost of college, that just doesn’t make any economic sense.
PS
The “Anything” Degree
Two decades ago in his book, Another Way To Win, Dr. Kenneth Gray coined the term “one way to win.” He described the OWTW strategy widely followed in the US as:
* Graduate from high school.
* Matriculate at a four-year college.
* Graduate with a degree in anything.
* Become employed in a professional job.”
Dr. Gray’s message to the then “academic middle” was that this was unlikely to be a successful strategy in the future. The succeeding twenty years have proven him inordinately prescient and not just for the “academic middle.”
The simple explanation is that it comes down to “supply” (graduates) and “demand” (suitable jobs).
Fifty years ago only seven percent of high school graduates went on to college. In post-WW II America our economy was booming while the economies of many European and Asian countries were--only slowly--being rebuilt. The “Law of Supply and Demand” strongly favored the freshly minted college graduate.
Parents and students noticed how college really paid off, and the “great gold rush” to the halls of higher learning began.
Today my local, Midwest run-of-the-mill high school sends eighty percent of their graduates on to college.
Most of them are going to be very disappointed.
I don’t share the sentiment of some posters that blame the teenagers for getting into debt because they took bad advice and went to college when they probably shouldn’t have. Lots of people did that in prior generations. The millennials were the first generation for bad decisions in college to really follow them for a career, even if they did “everything right.”
Jobs, good paying ones that need a degree are also much more selective because they are applied for en masse via the internet. So, the selection criteria becomes much more selective. You have to rewrite your resume, tailor it for each application, then log on to the company’s website and rephrase everything you just spent an hour rearranging... Just to get a shot at speaking to a human about the job. And that first person you talk with is almost always an HR person who never worked a day in the department that you’re applying for and is only picking your resume out of a pile because you used some key words that she was searching for.
That is going to get worse as well, especially in the jobs where people can work remotely. Now you’re competing against not just other candidates in driving distance, but people all around the nation, and some of them are willing to take a step down career wise if they can work from their lake house in some lower cost of living state than you.
I would say they are stupid. They signed up for an expensive college course not knowing if it was worth getting.
A Philosophy Degree is a notch below Basket Weaving in employment demand. People would be better off going to a trade school. Things like mechanics, plumbers, a/c repair, etc. will always be in demand. Colleges prepare students for very little these days, like being community agitators or anything that requires no physical labor or rational thought. If I were a parent paying for a child’s college now I would demand they attend a conservative college with an established record of graduating student who are in demand in the private sector and has professors who actually teach subject rather than preach left wing ideology.
Good summary. The reason that many boomers with degrees in “anything” were able to get hired and have successful careers is that college taught us how to learn. The degree was the price of entry, it earned you an interview. But all the qualities that are so desperately lacking in today’s graduates, such as intellectual curiosity, a basic understanding of the scientific method, solid English written and verbal skills, the ability to research and rationally and logically advance an argument or defend a point with facts and data regardless of whether we personally agreed with it, and most of all, humility, were learned in college regardless of major.
Demand being filled by illegal immigrants
You nailed it. Learning to think, apply the scientific method to problems and write and speak good English can get you far.
Some years ago I was working for a company that required a bacherlor’s degree even for entry level positions. Some were good, others not.The college degree was already in decline.
I convinved the boss to let me hire the assistant analysts. I looked at their education of course, but more important was their ability to think and communicate. Some were not college grads. I didn’t care one damn bit.
I acquired my first copy of Adobe Photoshop (6!) In high school from my graphic design teacher, and have used it every since. I’ve upgraded to CS2, and the newer versions are unfamiliar to me, but only in layout. My former workplace has a brand new copy, and I used it recently to touch up something of mine. So, so different.
But really, graphic design is easy to learn as long as you have a good eye. That’s more natural talent than anything else.
I need an education to do what I want to do (nursing —> physician assistant), but I have no money left, and I need to get out of IL first.
Because most people have college degrees in basket weaving, most have not a lick of common sense, most think they are entitled and don’t want to work hard to work their way up, many are taught this way of thinking IN college!! Colleges are destroying our society and foundation of this nation!!
You know MOST community colleges have 2 year nursing degrees AND community colleges are very inexpensive!!
I’m 64. Still putting in 55 to 80 hour weeks. 40 years in software engineering with a broad skill set. I get moved to projects that need to be rescued. On completion, it’s on to the next fire drill. My employer runs me hard. I got really close to a countdown to termination for want of work last week. Another rescue popped up. I still need a longer term engagement. A stable 40 hour tasking would be nice.
Most college propaganda solicitation is focused on achieving 4 goals...
1) To get your money!
2) To convince you an education will guarantee you the American dream. A 6 figure income. A complete lie.
3) Deliberately sets you up with unrealistic expectations for failure. Charges you $100k-250k that you must borrow when the school knows perfectly well you will never get a job with a useless liberal arts degree that will pay you enough to pay-off your school loans. Which sows discontent and desperation. You want government bail-outs and have convinced yourself Capitalism doesn’t work and ebrace socialism.
4) “And this is the most important”...
... to indoctrinate you by exposing you to a hostile campus/faculty culture of victim-hood, hate, division, intolerance; critical race theory, anti-white, anti-America, SJW activism, and anything under the doctrine/agenda of the far left Marxist counter-culture mantra of the DNC and Democracy. The campus culture is a 24/7 propaganda campaign that Republicans/Conservatives are evil... they are the enemy! They are racists, Nazi’s, fascists, greedy capitalists, white supremacists, and kill black people for sport. You are not to listen to their toxic rhetoric or you will be expelled from the campus and fail your degree! No dissidents, opinions! No outside truths, ideas or questioning. You must listen, comply, obey.
Indeed, all this brainwashing accomplished without a SHRED of proof/evidence. Only that students are a captured audience led to believe that their teachers are infallible in giving you truth and information, not realizing you are slowly being brainwashed by communists.
It’s all a production line. An ‘Academia Indoctrination Industrial Complex’ meant to produce proletariat useful-idiots for the Bolshevik Revolution High Command.
LEGAL immigration and work visas like H-1B are killing our kids opportunities....
I know many fellow millennials with advanced degrees that don’t know or care about ANYTHING and can’t reason or write worth a damn. They’re also arrogant as hell and convinced that we are the best generation ever, so they’ll never do anything to improve themselves. And, of course, they vote D.
Always was been true, ever hear of H-1B????
Bingo. Molecular Biologist by degree. Software engineer by profession. EE capable in design to the component level.
I wonder how many foreign nationals on H-1B visas he hired over Americans?
My oldest daughter got an expensive art degree, the kind where you say, “Do you want fries with that?” and actually spent a number of years as a waitress at a neighborhood pub. She got tired of that, went back to school and became a boat mechanic. She loves her work and was recently honored with a national award from the American Boat and Yacht Council.
In the old days, most students couldn’t afford college, even when they had the academic skills.
Then gov’t began subsidizing tuition, and more people went to college and graduated.
Now degrees are like high school diplomas: Employers expect employees to have one, even for jobs that probably could be learned in a business school, for example.
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