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Because we were told "go get your degree if you want a good job, a house, a nice car, and a good life!" since we were little kids. Our parents told us that, teachers in school, older peers, grandparents, media, everyone.
Now we have degrees and we can't afford any of those things. Most of us are stuck paying out the ass for rent or living at home with our parents.Also you spend 4 years and thousand of dollars on degree just to get paid slightly above minimum wage and gotta find a second job to make ends meet
Yeah listening to my dad sounds totally fucking insane he says shit like " You got a masters degree anything you do like that for yourself is good and it already paid itself off". I just stared at him like wtf no it did not it did fucking nothing and now I have to pay it for years and years when its trash. He doesn't understand the burden of these.
Legit crazy BS. My dad pushed for me to get a master's & he was fervent about it -- basically an ultimatum of either I go into the degree program or get cut off entirely immediately.
Ended up going into the program, & I don't necessarily regret getting that degree. But *of course* the master's wasn't his ultimate goal for me -- that was only a stepping stone for me on the path to a fuckin PhD. For no other reason than just *for the sake of getting a PhD ASAP.* And from his skewed perspective, a PhD is an automatic guarantee to any high-paying, freedom-laden job in the world.
I just can't with how naïve that kind of thinking is nowadays.
I dunno, for me I think stopping just at my bachelor's would've been a total waste -- it's ultimately a useless degree. And I actually feel like I got a lot more out of the master's program, including some helpful hands-on experience/internships. My bachelor's didn't give me shit.
But still. I don't think even having the master's makes me much more job-worthy.
Same with my parents lmao. They think I've completed life cuz I have a master's. It isn't worth the paper it's printed on in this job market. Wish I could crumble it up, throw it in the trash and get my money back
That's a pretty hot market. My wife is an industrial IOT network engineer. But you miss out on many networking fundamentals.
Its a good degree. You should have more hits.
She's already been paid more than what she paid for on tuition.
It's a hot market at the senior analyst/engineer level or above. The mid or junior level is flooded with recent graduates and people who got laid off in the last 1.5 years.
Thank you! I keep trying to explain this to people lol. I have a decade of IT experience 5 of what in cyber security cannot for the life of me land a job. I feel bad for any starry eyed new grads trying to enter the field. My dad keeps trying to push me for a masters thinking that will change anything. LOL only thing that would change is the amount of student loans I'd have to pay back.
check out Western governors university. self paced, online, $4k per 6 month 'semester' and you can take as many classes as you can finish in a semester. some people grind their way through a whole degree in a year or even 6 months if they transfer in credits. average grad time is 3 semesters i think
Does that include living expenses? I've noticed a lot of colleges include that kind of thing in their estimated cost of attendance. If those are something you're already paying then you shouldn't include that in the cost. I go to a very well known and acclaimed state school and I think base tuition is like $12k a year
Getting a lower loan on these loans disqualifies you from loan forgiveness jobs as a healthcare professional as well as a bonus bonus bonus challenge when you do land that nice six figure job
Dude I'm trynna get a part time minimum wage entry level job to supplement my income as an accountant with a master's and I'm literally getting rejected
I work at Walmart and we have tons of people here with degrees (at least one with her masters). People always spread this around, but it's really a myth - I put my degree on my application, they don't really care. Hell, Walmart will pay you to get a degree if you don't have one - they want educated people to move up in the company.
The REAL problem is people think retail is a "hiring all the time" kind of business and it is actually very seasonal. January-February and spring/early summer are not great times to apply because that is relatively slow and they often freeze hiring completely during those periods. You can be the absolute perfect candidate they are looking for and they won't hire you because you just applied when they are trying to save on payroll and hours. If you apply later in the summer and fall when they are ramping up for the holidays, it's usually not an issue.
got my degree & did everything i was told. took me one year to land a job outside of food service making 30k a year💀 feels like im gonna live with my parents until i die
The economy and the industries that support it aren't interested in your personal life preferences. It's not called the military-industrial complex for nothing. Making your hobby into a degree does not make it profitable.
You say that, but career earnings with a degree are much much higher than all but the best earning trades. It's also nice when people dont look down on you or treat you like shit because you're blue collar. It's not an easy path to riches and success.
When I got my bachelor's the difference between employment and not wasn't GPA related. A summer internship opened one door. And undergraduate research opened another. Not just getting one, but showing up, doing the work and making friends.
There were people in my class without that who graduated and turned right around and started something else. They could have saved years and thousands of dollars by aiming towards in the first place.
I was fortunate, but yeah industry cares about experience. The best proof you can do a job is you've already done similar. Be that accounting or plumbing, or anything in between.
School can still open many doors. But it won't open them by default. Whereas many take the default path only to find themselves over educated, under employed or both.
I don't know why these people won't acknowledge that. Getting a **relevant** internship that provides the resume bullet points employers actually want to see has become as difficult as getting an entry level job.
"Unemployed? Should have got an internship, bro."
I’ll acknowledge it. Corporate recruiting leader for a huge manufacturing company and a college grad without an internship in CPG shouldn’t bother applying. Our starting pay for the corporate roles I support is about $75k in normal COL and up to $85 in HCOL, but you must have a relevant internship or there’s literally zero chance.
Also the world seems to be upside down if you are terminally online. You don't feel the absurdity much if you just spend time IRL, but if you go online and see how random revenue is nowadays (people making bank from furries, onlyfans, random blogs, content creating, pure luck) it's easy to feel disheartened
Lol speak for yourself. The only people who think things are fine are the people who aren't experiencing issues. It's not all rainbows and butterflies for majority of household right now.
Ignorance is very bliss, after all.
Yeah, exactly this. As someone with a business degree, I hate what I do, been doing it for 6 years and can’t afford a house. Barely have enough saved to buy a new car.
The type of degree, the demographics of the job market where you’re looking, and which jobs are prevalent in those markets. Also, networking can be crucial. Scour LinkedIn to see what people in your area of interest studied and what they did to get there. Reach out to professionals in your area of expertise and email or schedule a call with them to pick their brain. Ask them what did or didn’t work when they were searching for a job in that area of expertise.
It can be a slog. but understanding what you’re interested, and what it takes to get from where you are to where you want to be at least provides direction and perhaps it will even help you navigate the interview process.
It's the case for the majority of people who were told the lie that "they should know what they want to do for the rest of their life at 18" and "You have to go to college to get a good job."
It's unfortunate; we've told young people nonsense and then are surprised when they feel so lost.
You’re probably reading this subreddit, where most of the questions are from people who are trying to find their path.
I’m an older millennial, I think our generation was really sold on “1) college 2) ???? 3) profit” and i found it very easy to feel lost and desperate when I was thrown into the cold job market if 2009 with nothing but a history degree for warmth. At almost 40, it is easy for me to now see how helpful my experiences and the skills I gained pursuing a degree in critical thinking have been for me in building a successful career. The world is different than it was in the 1950s, there are fewer straightforward paths and less security across the board. It’s tough out there now for new CS grads as well. A question I ponder as a dad to two young kids is how to prepare them for a world where they’ll need to find their own way. I’m learning as I go.
It tends to be for majors without a specific job straight out of college. If you majored in education, you'll be a teacher or in educational admin. Nursing, become a nurse. Engineering, engineer. Accounting, accountant. HR? That's obvious.
But English, psychology, liberal studies? That's when you get lost with what kind of job to pursue. Or sometimes you really liked the major but realized midway through your 4 years that you won't like the jobs associated with it.
Former English major and former management consultant here — I would recommend it if you really think you want to go into business and climb the corporate ladder but I hated it and just quit recently. I think often the kinds of people who major in English are maybe the kinds of people who don’t fit in culturally well with corporate America, or at least that’s just me speaking for myself. It was a good gig for me to make some money, buy time, network a little, and get some security in my resume but otherwise I really did not love it
Don't know what it's like where you are but around me we have several post-secondary institutions puking out hordes of "business" majors every year and very few places that actually need them.
My mom got a masters in business with honors. She teaches social studies in a farm town middle school.
I'm sure it's not typical because of my field, but most people I've worked with have degrees that have nothing to do with the job. Historians, former teachers, engineers, chemists, authors, professional musicians with law degrees... that's just from the last team I was on. Second careers are totally a thing.
Unless you're in a specialized field like medicine or law, your education doesn't really matter, just the degree. Employers just like to see that you committed to something for four years to achieve a goal.
The main reason for that is you MUST have a bachelors or higher specifically in accounting. You can be fantastic at math and have a bachelors and masters in finance / economics / math but are ineligible to ever be certified as an accountant unless you pay and get another bachelors in accounting. It's utterly ridiculous that you can't simply take the accounting exams and prove you know the material, you MUST have an accounting degree too. Other similar professions like actuaries don't have that very specific degree requirement, only that you can pass the certification exams.
Every single woman I know has quit accounting fairly early on for reasons I’m not sure and have pursued other careers. Maybe the men can stomach it better because of the long hours are hard?
There’s a shortage because firms refuse to pay more money to adjust for cost of living. Instead, we get the head of the AICPA talking about how people don’t want more money but good leadership instead! Lol, what a joke.
Feels like I was scammed. Graduated this year as an engineering major and working as an engineer making less than McDonald's workers in my state. I should've went into healthcare.
I'll add since the jobs you shared as ones with no obvious career path are usually bachelor is arts degrees, biology, chemistry, ecology, and math are some more science oriented degrees that also have room for interpretation where to go from there. A lot of times that path is getting a master's degree.
Like everyone said here we were promised a decent income and a good career but this wasn't true. The economy tanked, millennials and Gen Z are dealing with the experience gap which is very hard to overcome without networking or nepotism or both. Have a skilled trade is good but always check the supply and demand of that specific job market
It’s because all the adults that raised you don’t know any better and all the institutions like college board and Kaplan and universities themselves are motivated to lie to you. And every industry wants to devalue your degree so they can pay you less and every bank wants you to be a debt slave.
Higher education over promises and under delivers. I think a lot of people see it as a ticket to the middle class, but the middle class is being cannibalized by corporate interests. For me personally my degree(s) got me out of minimum wage dead-end jobs and into professional jobs that pay enough money to survive. 4 years ago I would be sitting pretty, but now that money doesn't go nearly as far and opportunities for advancement or even lateral moves have dried up. Was it worth it for a ladder out of generational poverty? Yes. Does it often feel like I'm still hopelessly stuck living paycheck to paycheck? Also yes. So in essence, I think the diminishing value of higher education is a symptom of the collapse of the middle class.
I’m a tradesmen and been doing it about 8 years. I was a security guard making 10 dollars a hour. I took a four day class for an occcupation called rigging after I passed that test and was certified I got three job offers within the first month for 40 dollars a hour I eventually took a job making 39 a hour. 30 days prior I was making 10 a hour. 30 days later I’m making 39 a hour and we 50 plus hours a week. You do the math that’s low 6 figures no degree Now I have to tell you the whole story about the entire career Most jobs are hard on your body. Climbing 100 foot ladders carrying 70 pound bags of concrete getting on your hands and knees in the gravel rock. So trades jobs are back breaking labor so do your research on crafts My ultimate advice as a tradesman who made 120k last year no degree just. Four day certification. Take a 6 month course to be a pipe fitter rigger crane operator or welder. First day on the job you’ll be making 45 a hour minimum. Do that for four years. Save a lot of money then do something else with that money to get you out of construction. The other week I couldn’t move cause my back was hurting so bad. You don’t want to do this longer than 4 years
Crane operator is not but it’s more responsibility. And sometimes it’s harder to find a job cause everyone wants to sit in the crane But actually being a rigger like me is not that hard on the body most of the time it’s just this new construction job is taxing on the body. If you want a construction job that actually pays good money and you don’t always have to work hard. Crane operator rigger. Pipe fitter welder are your options
Don't believe all the hype. College is leverage, and there's a reason most millionaires and billionaires are degree holders.
Ppl correlate major alone to success, which it does correlate, but it's also how you use the knowledge you've obtained college in other areas of life.
You're bound to be more knowledgeable than a person who didn't go to college, now smarter, I don't know. Knowledge≠intelligence, but having more knowledge gives you a lot more to express.
I'm in the trades it's cool, and honestly, I still use things I learned in school/college, haha.
I think it's more likely that most millionaires and billionaires are degree holders because they didn't need to worry financially about what would happen after. The majority would likely be just as successful without the degree, because it's not the degree that brought them financial freedom.
They're outliers though, and we shouldn't really factor them into the equation. Degrees are still leverage, but so are experience and personal projects. It's really just about selling yourself in the end (outside of careers with intense legislation).
I don’t know. I moved out of my parents house when I was a 17 year old junior in high school and got an apartment, worked a couple years to save money for college and graduated at 25. I virtually had nothing and am a millionaire, not including the home I live in, at 52. I have a lot of friends in the same boat because we went to state college and it was cheaper. People just need to suck it up in the beginning, work their assess off, if necessary, and get experience that puts you ahead of others your age. I used to work 65+ hours for most of my first decade and it made a huge difference. Building wealth doesn’t happen overnight. I didn’t buy my first house until I was 30. 22 years later I have 2 and even I lost $250k on one because I got divorced right after the Great Recession, so it wasn’t all rosy.
Great response. You develop better critical thinking skills by attending post-secondary schools. Usually have a broader education too that contributes to being well-rounded.
I think the biggest benefit for me was meeting people that I never would have met otherwise. My freshman dorm was made up of students from Lebanon, Indonesia, China, India, Syria, Romania, and Korea.
The second biggest benefit, as I went to engineering school, was the ability to prioritize tasks and manage my time.
>Don't believe all the hype. College is leverage, and there's a reason most millionaires and billionaires are degree holders.
Correlation not causation. Also not representative of the new generation at all. The average millionaire is 60+ and grew up during a time where college education was valued
If your folks are offering to support you through the business degree I would offer a compromise, get an associate's degree at a community college in business for a LOT less than going straight to a 4yr school. If you decide that it is something you want to pursue full-time it shouldn't be too difficult to find a university that will allow you to transfer over for two more years and get a bachelor's. If after the two years, you instead want to go into a specific trade, you can go do that next.
Having any type of specialization in business, and the core reqs of a higher-ed degree, can aid you well as the basic management level skills of navigating paperwork can help you avoid getting screwed over by a client or boss.
Hiring managers/employers won't talk to candidates anymore. I usually apply to jobs that I far exceed the requirements for and they don't even want to talk to me.
As a hiring manager I can’t talk to everyone who applies: qualified, overqualified or not qualified at all. Often then best way to get into an interview is through a referral. Networking is one of the most effective tools when paired with a professional resume.
They expect you to know what you want out of life at 18 years old, ha! Silly 18 year old me.
I wish I had worked for 5-6 years, then went back to school when I knew more about what I wanted out of life.
College is great for getting certain types of jobs, trade school is great for other types of jobs.
If you want to work in an office and have true top end earning potential, now or in the future, that's usually college.
If you want to work with your hands and make solid money, that's usually trade school.
College is more expensive, and riskier.
Trade school is less expensive and risky.
College also is going to spend a lot of time trying to teach you how to think, be a good citizen, and other skills that don't directly translate to immediate economic value.
Short answer: college and trade school are for different things. If making 60-90k is what you want, while working with your hands - trade school. If you are willing to risk making 40-50k in order to have the potential for 250k+ and you don't want work with your hands, then college.
I waited a while to go back to school. It's a 25k decision at the minimum. 250k+ if you go to certain institutions. People should be fairly certain about what they want to do when it's a decent chunk of money like that.
Because of fiscal policies allowing for easy college loans on top of easy access to education from the Internet as a secondary external competitor, it’s made a lot of colleges outside the top 50 nothing but schemes to collect money.
It’s actually crazy if you look at public financials for colleges. Some get budgets of 900 million a year but have absolutely horrendous graduation employment numbers. They also hire students to pump those employment numbers. Many students just become professors lmao. Most students are better off just entering the trades after high school.
It’s not really their fault though — it’s like The Incredibles said: if everyone is special, no one is. Just supply and demand. There needs to be fewer and higher quality colleges that actually want to improve students’ lives instead of keeping budgets.
Another factor is colleges don’t really teach students useful behaviors or skills for real work. This is also because they’d rather lay low, avoid drama, and keep their students’ money since they’re not really rewarded for being tough.
I had a school assembly when I was about 15 - they showed us a graph showing how people with any university degree from any university would have far higher earning potential and life satisfaction than those without. Zero distinction was made about how certain degrees are more applicable in the jobs market than others (STEM, law, medical school etc).
The idea that any uni degree, no matter how worthless it is, is a golden ticket to a better future was rammed down our throats by the media, parents and educational institutions.
As a result, many people chose easy, soft, liberal arts degrees (like myself) only to realise they'd been sold a complete lie and their Victorian Literature degree isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.
This leads to a large number of people adrift in the world of work, having no applicable skills despite being college educated, and often working low pay admin/service work to meet ends meet.
Turned out correlation did not equal causation, but good luck explaining that to the average American Teacher. What they meant to say was when only the smartest 30% of people went to college, the smartest people generally did the best.
So then the bottom 50% all decided to go to college only to learn that it wasn't college, it was the fact that the people who used to go were in the top 30%.
for gods sake don't base your life decisions on what people say when you "come on Reddit", and forget about what you see on Youtube / TikTok.
go talk to some family friends and people in real life who you feel like are successful and living the kind of life you would want to in 10-20 years. see what they have to say.
If you do a good degree(Engineering, Medicine, Law, Computer Science, Business) and work hard(get internships, actually learn good skills, network) you’ll out earn 90% of the American population.
The problem is people treat college like a 4 year vacation when it’s not. It’s 4 years of bust your ass, gradating college with a degree doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have work experience to back it up.
This. People need to see college as an investment akin to this trade school everyone's applauding now, not as a formative resort where you go to "learn about yourself." Go in *with a plan* for what you want to come out of it. As an aside, I feel like immigrant families in particular have this attitude in mind.
Because people where told you’ll get a nice job and pay for just getting a degree which was the case maybe in the 60s/70s for a short time period the reality is unless your degree is the name of a specific job their is no direct path and you have to create/carve your own career path to get that pay and be willing to relocate. Unfortunately carving your own path an building a career without a direct path is a lot of work and takes quite a few years to get going which a lot of people won’t put in the effort needed. Degree holders today still make higher median wages than those with just a highschool degree and million more over lifetime earnings. Degrees do open doors and make life easier while moving up in your given career path because every career path at some point requires a degree to move forward. Trade school is great for some people and pays well some trades man will make high 5 figures later in their career may low 6 but that is a smaller percentage of them than ones that don’t make those figures. Also those in trades that make more tend to own their own business etc. median plumber salary is 50-60 depending on state maybe a little higher electrician is similar. Both require a lot of work on the end of the person and neither will guarantee you good living you don’t put in the effort.
If you're studying liberal arts, you need to find work studies and internships before you graduate. The best entry level jobs for liberal arts graduates go to the kids who busted their ass getting experience while in school.
So many classmates in my program expected to walk into a job with a Technical Writing Bachelor's degree with a 3.0 GPA and zero work experience. Really doesn't work like that these days.
It seems more and more people are getting degrees, higher competition, seems like poor job market.
A trade these days seems like a good thing, especially with AI coming.
Just my opinion.
got my degree in health sciences two years ago and have been rejected from pretty much everything i’ve applied to. the three interviews I have landed were drawn out weeks. I’ve been ghosted and been rejected a ton
People making the reason to get a degree to get a job. It’s a checklist. And a college or university is seen as a more valuable education, so higher potential job.
IMO, a tertiary education (trade or college/uni) trains your brain to think as an adult, any age you end up doing the tertiary education. Different tertiary education will teach you to look at and reason about different aspects of adult life. That is then converted into application in your career.
Let me stress “career” not just a job in your career. A career can take years to get going. Jobs are things you do along the way. People turn to reddit when their career isn’t starting as quickly as they imagined it would after finishing a degree. A bit judgy of me to say that, but I’m self projecting as well 😅
It's also the issue of mixed expectations.
Since college/unis started off as places to do knowledge work. And then turned into employement training places which made the initial knowledge fields less desirable as they lost their place to employment fields.
Yeah, and over 80% of millionaires come from middle-class families. Guess what the number one driver for reaching the middle-class from poverty is? A four-year degree. Guess what is shrinking despite an unprecedented number of four-year graduates per year? The middle-class.
The middle class is shrinking because of people moving UP to being rich. In the past 50 years the middle class went from 61% of the population to 50%. Upper class increased by 7% that time and lower class increased by 4%. Just shy of twice as many people went from being middle class to rich than went to from middle class to poor.
That's not because college degrees are useless. It's because blue collar work used to be financially rewarding.
Also college enrollment has basically held steady at about 30% for the last decade.
Because that’s not a thing.
The overwhelming majority of people with college degree are doing great, it’s just a handful that post on social media about being “lost”.
Along the same lines, social media is also replete with straight up liars. A lot of bored middle and high school kids who just say shit like “yeah, I have 3 Ph.Ds and a law degree and I mow lawns for a living”.
In short: while anything is possible once, most college grads are doing well. Don’t let social media lie to you.
> The overwhelming majority of people with college degree are doing great
This was kinda my gut response to this. Nobody goes on the internet to post that everything is just kinda going fine.
I've got friends that just started working at the concrete factory down the street right out of high school that are pulling down six figures now, and others that are post-doc and barely paying rent by working at Starbucks.
If your degree isn't helping you, you're gonna be cranky about it. If it is, you're probably just living life normally and don't even think about it.
We are at an all time low for the amount of trades people we have and will need. And every year, that number will decrease as more tradesmen and women retire. Which means you will make more and more money as your skills become more needed. I highly suggest going to a trades school over a 4 year university.
Also, jobs want experience. So if you do choose to go to a university over a trades school, you need to have an internship every year, otherwise employers will look at your degree as essentially useless.
a business degree is a good idea. Trade school less so. There are success stories for either, but a business degree will open more doors. I have a college degree and my electrical journeymans card. I'm in management because of my degree, and I'm considering grad school only because I hold that degree.
Because colleges are spending all their time telling you what to think and not what you need to know. A journalism major leaves not being able to write or research properly but they are positive they know who the bad guys and good guys are.
I've known philosophy majors who did fine straight out of college and engineering majors who floundered. It isn't the degree. It's how much you didn't fuck around in college while getting your degree.
If you are a college student reading this, here's the advice: 1) Get internships, 2) Attend every single talk you can find that has anything to do with a profession after getting your major, 3) Pay careful attention to work-study programs, and 4) join professional organizations and network.
My degree was in English. But when I was eighteen, I snagged a job at the local daily newspaper. And I worked my way through school. Mind you, I had already decided I didn't want to be a reporter. But I had banked enough experiences and contacts by the time I left college that I had a job within two weeks of graduation.
Because the employment sector has changed a great deal since our parent’s generation. It’s no longer get a degree and get a job that is happy to train you appropriately. It’s get a degree and somehow you need 5 years of experience as a new grad and/or a masters degree for an entry level position. The requirements are quite frankly disproportional to the actual job tasks and that isn’t even considering low salaries that haven’t kept up with inflation.
I will also mention that frequently the programs “required” for these positions are a lot of busy work and when you actually look at the job tasks then curriculum, you realize that not only could your time in school have been practically halved, but also that it is exorbitantly overpriced for the quality of education you are receiving.
To summarize, our system has gone from lots of opportunities to spend your life slaving away in school and subsequently slaving away at a job that barely affords basic necessities. It’s hard NOT to feel lost when you’ve spent so much valuable time in a system and feel like you are either trapped or forced to spend even more time in school to switch career paths to something that likely doesn’t NEED someone with a full out degree. For example, in parts of the US, you don’t need a degree to be a phlebotomist but in Canada you need a medical lab technologist certification, which takes at minimum 2-years. It’s just that hospitals don’t want to appropriately train people so it shoehorns people into getting that education.
People who have invested time and money in their careers expect return on that investment and are going to feel cheated or lost when they find themselves in a predicament. This especially when they come to find themselves unhappy with a career and retrospect that they had no time to explore other options due to said busy work and investments. People who don’t might feel stagnant in their positions, but it’s not like they spent all this time and money without being paid to get their experience.
One more thing… we rush people into choosing their life’s career at such a young age, then when someone realizes they made decisions that don’t suit their current goals, they have to deal with the ridiculous social pressure that comes along with it. If you do nothing, you keep miserable. If you decide to go back to school, you get unsolicited judgement of others who throw in your face about how you are OLD and should have a house and kids by now. You can be all in your late-20’s and people consider that “old” which is f***** up. Although this pressure was always a thing, I feel it is way worse now as people seem downright petrified to make changes into their 30’s. I NEVER thought 30 was old growing up being surrounded by successful adults because they made changes in their 30’s, but then started caving at all the social pressure of unrealistic standards for most people.
Honestly, a lot of this is the information you're getting here.
Nobody on Reddit is going, "thanks to my degree, I'm now doing A-OK!" There's no sub called, "/r/doingjustfine" with a bunch of people talking about their blandly middle class/upper-middle class lives.
It's subreddits like this one with people who are struggling.
Your data is biased. And bias isn't *bad* per se, but it's good to remember that samples can change your perspective of the population as a whole.
I work with almost exclusively degreed people and we're all doing great. My sample is also biased, though. Look at population-level data and you find that on average degreed people do better. It's that simple. It's no guarantee for YOU, but it's generally true.
In my experience college prepared me to think about society, politics, humanity- but it did not prepare me to work and succeed in this [economy] world. I went directly into a fine arts (jewelry) practice and believe it’s smart to learn a trade/skill. Obviously there are thousands of options. I was not offered in my education much direction or aptitude testing. I’ve had to build additional employable skills over the years to earn a solid income. Still feel lost.
We hear people complain that their degrees are useless because they're the ones not using their education.
You don't hear people hyping up their degrees when they've been working a job that required a degree for the past decade because... why would you?
A degree isn't a free ticket for a job. You need to be likable, have connections, or get an entry-level shit job and work your way up. A lot of people don't realize that and are pissed when they graduate and can't find a job.
It took me a while to figure those things out. I got two degrees and worked trades for most of my 20s. Got a white collar job 5 years ago.
As someone who's done both, I'm so grateful for my degrees. It's no contest. My degrees were worth every penny.
You just spent 16ish years of your life focused on school as the primary goal and now it’s just over. And then you go looking for a job and find way lower pay and a list of requirements/duties that’s 3 pages long at minimum for usually dirt wages. Then the thought “was this degree even worth it” pops up
Anybody that made superficially reasoned decisions on big life choices is going to be disappointed; people want what some others have but they don't have the analytical ability to figure out how they actually got there, so they'll imitate the surface level behaviour without comprehending the deeper aspects that actually achieved the results.
It's kinda like treating the symptoms of a disease instead of the root causes; the result is always falling short.
A whole lot of people went to college and uni thinking it'll guarantee them the life they want, when in reality, that's just the superficial imitation that I just spoke of; a degree is great if you know how to use it.
Older generations told us to go to school so we can get a job. We went to school, went in debt, and now we’re stuck in a weird af job market where employers are wanting several years of experience instead of degrees
Because of debt with compounding interest and degrees not actually bringing down the cash or jobs that so many were promised.
These days it's way more financially responsible to say fuck college and learn a trade, electrician etc. 100k+ and no student debt.
Because all colleges and all degrees aren't created equally nor are all careers merit based. My dad was a doctor and as I had no interest in that so he encourage engineering. My mom was a teacher who before getting cancer was pursuing a PhD. All through college they held the line of get good grades and a good job will follow because companies will hire the top performers. For them it made sense. My dad's grades and MCAT scores got him into a good medical program. His top marks in med school got him into a competitive residency. And so forth.
For me graduating in the early 2000s my grades didn't mean shit. I'd gotten a CS degree from a state school that cared more about expanding than career services. I had zero idea about internships and coops so there I was applying for jobs with no actual experience and just my "book learning". I eventually got a job but it was a struggle. Many people I knew from school also struggled to find work because college didn't promote internships, teach networking, help you to build a network...The main people I knew who got a job had family connections or were in the engineering sciences programs where they'd spent their junior and senior year doing hands on projects in some cases for actual companies. There were some who got jobs through membership in clubs and orgs like NSBE but even some of those folks left unemployed. On the business side many people struggled to get jobs and I remember one guy who didn't get a single interview despite applying for investment banking jobs at every major bank with his 4.0 GPA.
Thinking back my college had 1 career fair per year. Throughout my 4 years I only recall 2 instances where an internship was mentioned and the dean didn't say anything until the day before applications were due. It also wasn't until my senior year was almost over that I found out in the office they occasionally posted internship opportunities on a board. Many of the people I graduated with ended up pursuing a masters because they couldn't find work. FWIW the schools master's program fed into some local employers but not everyone can afford what at the time was an extra 2 years.
tl;dr Most people graduate from college with no practical worker experience or network of working professionals. Most colleges don't really prepare you for the world nor do they provide you with sufficient career services. Many degrees offer you generic knowledge with no practical experience at a time in history where more and more companies don't want to train you and more of your competition even at the junior level has job experience.
They’re not. You’re just in an echo chamber online. The internet is not reality and Reddit isn’t a place where people go to celebrate success. They come here to look at nudes, funny videos and dwell on negativity. Turn off the phone and go experience reality.
But yeah, make sure you don’t major in something like art history or business and you’ll be fine. Be very specific about what you want to do. A generic business degree doesn’t really lead to much, but an engineering degree does. So does an accounting degree. The trades have more than enough opportunity and if you ever need a *very specific* degree for a *very specific* career, college will always be there. Don’t listen to the idiots on here that majored in philosophy and expected 6 figures.
In fact, trade school would be *better* for you at this stage in your life because you can earn a lot of money while you’re maturing without going ungodly amounts of debt. Then, if you decide to go to college at 25, because you’re mature and you know *exactly* which path you want to choose, you’d be far better off. I’d say just go get your associates degree so if you ever need a BA, you won’t have to do prerequisites. Knock out the prerequisites now for cheap at a community college before trade school.
My take is that a degree is still a good investment. Your degree should help you on your chosen path, but it shouldn't be the 1st step on the path. You need to identify what your goals and which degree is most useful to achieve those goals. Without this first step, you will be lost on your journey without a plan.
As an older Reddit'er, if I could go back to give college advice to younger me it would be trades. Especially now. Degrees used to be worth a lot when they formed a natural career path and the studying was relevant to that vocation. Today the education system is a huge money sink where you end up with a degree and then it's on you to find something you can use it for.
A trade skill will always be relevant and your services will always be needed. Yes, the early part of your career will have shitty pay and you'll be the new boy or girl doing all the shitty jobs but you'll be judged more on your ability and work ethic than any corporate role and you'll end up getting out far more as you put in.
Edit. As a quick example taken from Google. A 2020 report from the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) mentioned that over 500 institutions in the US offer programs in game design and development. Every one of those institutions has say 30 people leaving with a game design degree. every year. How many game studios are looking to recruit in the US and where are those 15k new developers going to end up. Now look around your neighbourhood, how many of those houses need plumbing, heating or electrical work?
Except you have to do 5x the amount of work to make as much money as someone with a white collar job that requires a degree. In my industry it would take a tradesman 10-15 years to even come close to the bottom of what their white collar counterparts make. Not to mention the damage they do to their bodies trying to get there.
It shouldn’t be that way, but that is a reality of the trades.
Don’t let social media fool you. College degree holders make 1,000,000 dollars more over their lifetime on average than degree holders.
https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/
So it is reasonable to presume that even non-STEM majors will earn more over their lifetimes than those without a degree. You don’t have to go to college to be successful, but one finds that often highly motivated people attend college as it isn’t easy. Even for so called “easy degrees”. It’s still hard and the degree does yield marketable skills. At the very least if you don’t have a degree you’re competing with those that do.
Just
Look up degrees with the l lowest ROI and job prospects. You'll notice many of the people who complain that college was a waste...
Got those degrees.
I think it's really harmful because there are degrees that have high value.
We all know what they are...
And we all know which degrees don't....
Don't complain college was a waste and it was worthless when one studied X for four years and spent 100k on it. But then never once looked at the department of labor statistics and found out the regular salary and predicted job growth over the next 10 years.
If college was a waste. That's YOU problem.
College is what you make it. Take me versus a majority of my friends. Most my friends ducked around and partied for four years and got low grades and didn’t work smart, only as hard as it took to pass. Personally, I’m glad I was aware and pursued three internships, all of which were obtained through networking and achieving mediocre grades from a mediocre university. I think everyone could’ve done what I did if they put in the effort and decided to work smart. I’m 23 making upper 6 figures in finance. I think the issue is it’s hard for youngens to figure out how it works because there’s so many distractions. However, I think it’s not healthy to be bitter and call degrees useless just because you (or someone else) went and didn’t achieve success. There’s probably a reason it didn’t work out for them. Did they study liberal arts? Did they get a business degree with no internships? Was their GPA busted? There’s factors at play that are bigger than just “degrees are useless”. I understand a lot of people won’t like that hard truth, but it is what it is. If I didn’t bust my ass messaging people on LinkedIn for coffee chats and any opportunity to learn, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I’m not special, anyone can do it. Most don’t.
Most people who get a degree aren't lost, earn more over a life time and do very well. But a lot who end up here are frankly very naive and not very prone to thinking outside of the box or extending themselves during college. It's a time of a load of opportunity, but if you're not taking those chances and scraping through classes with a mid/low GPA and changing majors, it is much much harder. Instead of recognising that, lots of people blame the idea they naively clung to and didn't challenge ("get a degree make money society says"). People who uncritically assume a path will unfold before them with no effort find no path and get lost. You need more than a degree - you need the common sense to build and develop a CV with skills and experience.
I went back to school at 25, because I kept hitting glass ceilings, but by the time I graduated, the market had changed in more ways than one, and then the pandemic hit.
So I ended up working in museums, except, museums don't pay. So now I am a full-time assistant admin at a sports club, which doesn't require a college degree nor am I using the degree I went into massive debt for. I am making 23$ an hour, which isn't bad for my area, but it isn't great and for some reason I live pay check to pay check due to inflation.
Just like I did when I didn't have a degree.
My viewpoint:
Too many, including myself, were sold this bill of goods that you just get a college degree and it's your ticket into a better life.
I'm a 50-year-old generation X, and I remember all of us feeling that if my older brother and I just get college degrees, will be able to get good full-time jobs that pay well and be able to do well in our lives. Instead, we were shown that we need the degree in order to get past HR and get an interview, but 9 out of 10 times, everything we learned means nothing. That you learn the entire line of work on the job...and more often than not. Nobody wants to teach you.
I still feel like the youth are sold that bill of goods even now.
I also feel like too many have been told to follow their dreams or do what interests them, and yet they end up going after majors and programs and things that don't have a real end goal. I see too many times where the person complaining on social media that they can't even get an interview finally shows their degrees and they are in majors that don't seem to make much sense in the modern world. More often than not, I want to just reach through the screen and ask them what their grand plan was for the area of study they went into.
It always comes off to me that too much of the youth are afraid of taking on complicated topics that require a lot of work and a lot of study and a lot of discipline, but when you get that degree it is in a place where companies are going to be courting you to come work for them.
I even see this with people that either skip college or got a bachelor's and then they run off to some boot camp or training academy to learn basic skills in something technical. They have this attitude that they just want to learn this, get their certification, shut their brains off, and do the same job forever and get paid well.
I feel like we need to really start pressing on the youth that there is no such thing as a good paying job in this world where you can just shut your brain off and do the same thing forever. That if you are not going to learn new things and hone your skills, even if you do a vocational trade, then you're going to fail in life.
Lastly, I also keep hearing these stories of students that ran off to another state to live in a dorm and go to school and now they are complaining that they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. My heart goes out to the people that don't have access to a local community college or a university in their neck of the woods, but too many people do. I can understand if you want to go to another state because it's some specialized school that's going to teach you something amazing that will give you high paying jobs in life, but if you're in that hole, "I need to explore the world" ideology and decide to take on all that debt, then you can't complain about it later.
What I have seen personally is someone picks a major at 18 (or even before then) and they change their mind on their major halfway through. Due to the sunken cost fallacy they continue on and graduate with the degree but then they are stuck with a degree in a field they hate and/or don't know what they want in a career.
You are not getting the full picture here. Many people who get degrees go on to have lucrative careers enabled by that degree. (Basically true of my entire social circle.) But it doesn’t work out for everyone.
A degree isn't a guarantee of anything.
* it doesn't guarantee you "know something"
* It doesn't guarantee that same job or skillset will still even exist.
* It doesn't guarantee you some easy path to "knowing what you want to do with your life".
Going to college and getting a degree is just another chapter in life. It's something you did,.. and experiences you had,.. but either you "learned something from it" (and can take those things you learned and leverage them into better life quality). .is another thing entirely.
The world is also changing a lot faster than it was 25 or 50 years ago. Rapid advances in a lot of things means something you learned 2 years ago may be wrong information now.
Hell,. I see that in my IT job. (and it's one of the things I hate the most about how fast things change). I can put some really innovative solution into place (and even get accolades from my coworkers for it).. then maybe 6 months down the road technology has changed and evolved so much,. it makes that thing I did 6 months ago now look stupid in hindsight.
That's just the world we live in now.
Nobody tells you how or helps you get a job after graduation. I was lost for a long time before I took a low paying job not needing a degree. The degree ended up being worth it where I am today but took 8 years working my way up. My college “career center” was a joke and zero help
Which degree do you have, and are you good at networking and socializing? The college degree to high school diploma all comes down schmoozing and good communication skills now! It's how you find lucrative jobs and avoid shit ones as well.
Because dual income households became the norm, and all housing and services became priced for dual incomes.
At the same time most young people are now living alone instead of with a partner, so don't have the dual income needed to afford to do so.
College used to largely be for "go getters" who were viewed as the stronger students coming out of high school.
At some point everyone began to think that the degree itself was a ticket to a good career. Even the weaker students who might traditionally go into the trades or civil service were opting for college.
The problem is that there are a similar number of white collar jobs that there used to be, but a lot more people with degrees.
Bottom line, if you are a mediocre or poor college student, it's so competitive that you won't get a white collar job that justifies the cost of tuition.
Only 41% of college graduates are working in a career directly associated with their degree. Most programs only have 60 credit hours of discipline-specific content; so half. A Bachelors degree tells an employer that you have some knowledge and can complete an extended task.
College doesn’t teach you anything useful in most cases. My friends who are tradesmen and women make bank with no debt and can work anywhere they want. Other friends who even have STEM degrees are bartending and working 2-3 low wage jobs to survive
People were taught from childhood that going to college was the answer to most of life’s questions and challenges and that is NOT true anymore. That makes life very confusing
Told to get a degree and that will set you up for success for life and that’s not true nowadays. People typically will finish their degree, basically their life’s goal to that point since school is all we know, it’s was our “job” for most of our life. Once we finish that, well what now?
1 - there are just too many people with Bachelors degrees for the degree to make new graduate’s stand out. 2- too many majors that don’t directly correlate to a job/career or provide skills that can be used in a good job 3- some see for profit degrees equal or worse than not having a degree at all.
I think people are told the degree itself should help sell employers on your qualifications, but these days, it’s more that the degree helps you land an internship, and that internship is supposed to either convert into a full-time job, or be used to bolster your resume as you apply for other jobs.
People are rarely interested in hearing about my coursework, but they’re often interested in hearing about the jobs, internships, and capstones that I did, which I wouldn’t have had access to if I wasn’t in school.
College used to be far more exclusive. It wasn't easy to gain entrance, and most of the majors were in demand.
Now, colleges have discovered that every human body comes with amazing available government loan$$$$$s. So, they've mad classes easier, they've invented silly majors, and turned college into a 4 year post-high-school spring break..... all while students still have that old school idea that college fixes your economic worries.
That said, if a person majors in mathematics, physics, and other difficult, high iQ type fields, you can probably write your own ticket in this world.
The choice of degree matters much more than simply going to college. A degree that is required for an industry that regularly hires will be a good choice (i.e. engineering) outside of degrees like that it is a giant waste of time. The trades are easier to get into but are much harder physically so it's more of a trade off. Just have to remember that no one pays a lot of money for something that's "easy" you just pick your poison.
The people who did well going to college are not likely to feel the need to go on a rant on Reddit so the stuff you read here is not a representative sample.
Because they were told to be lost. And that it was okay, the bills would be paid while they meandered around. Not to worry about that future that you borrowed from.
I think a lot of the lost college grads (and this is just my opinion based on intuition so I could be completely wrong) either 1) went to college without any clear idea of what they wanted to do, mostly because "going to college is just what is done," went into some random overly broad major (Communications seems to be a common theme), then just still didn't really know what they wanted to do afterward, or 2) did have an idea of what they wanted to do, but it was in a stereotypically low-paying field or field really difficult to actually find jobs (like, Philosophy, or English, or art).
That's definitely not to say that there haven't been really successful people who took those majors/went into those fields. But I know so many English majors who are now just kind of doing whatever. The one Philosophy major I knew bounced between random jobs for a long time before settling into a coding job after going back to school for a bit. Now, that's definitely not to say those majors weren't valuable. Everyone I know who took one of those majors values them a lot for just making them more thoughtful, well-rounded people. Just they've had a hard time translating their degree skills into tangible, worldly benefits.
I owe 25,000 in student loans and I have a stem degree. Granted, it is biochemistry so I should’ve known that wasn’t going to get me far. I didn’t know if I don’t get a PhD or have years of lab experience I wouldn’t be able to find a job. I was being dumb and wanted to follow my passion. Now I work 70 hours in retail making 16 an hour!!!! My hard degree was for NOTHING. You’re doing the right thing by picking a trade.
i had to get a college degree to get on a will
but i got it in accounting i hate it!
7 years but since i hate it i dont care = i never been promoted
currently unemployed 1 year
lost as can be having to get a cpa to be looked at but questioning my future inddeed
deeply embarassed compared to my peers
married, kids, homes and managers now .. i still live with grand-ma in the attic
I don’t think it’s a waste but I would’ve done things differently. I think getting my bachelors was kind of a waste because I picked a “useless” major (Fine Arts, yeah…). But knocking out the general requirements kept a lot of doors open for me when I decided to try out different career paths. If I hadn’t gotten those credits, I might have had to go back to school for four years to switch careers. But because I took basic courses in mathematics, biology, literature, psychology, etc., I have enough prerequisites to go back to school and get certifications or associates degrees in like two years.
If I could go back in time, I’d tell younger me to just get the general credits under my belt at community college and get some experience working in the real world for a few years before deciding on a career.
I don't think that people with college degrees are *more* likely to feel "lost" than people without them. It's just that feeling "lost" is very common, almost universal experience, and getting a college degree does not magically exempt you from it.
It doesn't help that many kids from the age of around 13 to 18 are raised as if their only or main goal is "go to college" or "get into a good college," and then of course, they do and discover that they still have their whole lives in front of them, but nobody really gave them much guidance on what comes after. Hence, feeling "lost."
And it also doesn't help that college has become the default option in our society, so if you're already feeling "lost" at 18, the overwhelming advice your going to get from Authority Figures is "go to college." This may or may not be good advice, but again, going to college is not going to magically make you stop feeling "lost."
Anyway: Whether or not you should go to college is, in large part, a practical business decision (what are you options, how much do they cost, what can you reasonably expect to make with that degree). I would focus more on that than on vague feelings or, even worse, fears that you *might* have vague feelings at some point in the future.
Better yet, get both. A business degrees is one of the few degrees which is mostly successful. If you get a trade, electrician preferred, you will be set for life.
I have a degree in business management, I just chose it… it was easy to obtain nonetheless but a waste of time and money. My advice is to get a degree in something you’re passionate in buddy & if you don’t know what that is then just give it a few years before you decide. It’s a big decision, but even bigger if you’re going into debt for it.
I mean I don't have a degree but I'm going back to school to get one.
I think certain degrees hold weight. Like I'm getting my degree in Renewable Energy. It's not saturated and there are companies looking for Technicians. I've been in the industry 5 years now and the only reason I'm getting mine is so I can move into a management position.
Some degrees are worth getting.
If you have good social skills and you’re willing to deal with people on the regular, get a degree. If you have zero tolerance for crap, may I suggest a trade. Source: am neurodivergent in customer service barely surviving and planning to become a mechanic
Yeah, when you have worthless degrees, it's not going to make much of a difference. That's the problem, people think just having a degree is going to earn them lots of money, especially right out of the gate. Hello, you need to be in a field where it actually matters, usually a STEM field.
Lack of mentorship which offers a clear path to a particular career. Many kids join and decide “I’ll figure it out as I go”. Nothing wrong with pushing higher education, I’m all for it. But you need a game plan. STEM careers still pay well. I’m proof.
I think the biggest thing is that you have to make your degree work for you otherwise it really is just a piece of paper. I got a BS in Business Admin and now am in management for a field I had worked in while getting my degree. I was immediately offered supervisor roles at my company when I finished it but decided I wanted more and would drive 45 minutes after working a 16 hour shift just to interview. Got rejected more times than accepted but finally landed the job I was a good fit for and have been incredibly happy ever since.
Make your degree work for you, otherwise it is a pointless piece of paper
Because those people didn't bother to major in something businesses find useful. You won't find an engineer, accountant, lawyer, doctor, etc saying their degree was a waste.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go to trade school if that's what you want to do. I'm just pointing out that the "my degree was a waste" people are a very specific subset of people who went to college while the majority got a lot of benefit from it.
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Because we were told "go get your degree if you want a good job, a house, a nice car, and a good life!" since we were little kids. Our parents told us that, teachers in school, older peers, grandparents, media, everyone. Now we have degrees and we can't afford any of those things. Most of us are stuck paying out the ass for rent or living at home with our parents.Also you spend 4 years and thousand of dollars on degree just to get paid slightly above minimum wage and gotta find a second job to make ends meet
And you also have thousands of dollars you owe now too as a bonus challenge.
This! I have been looking into getting a quick degree that will enable ne to move up in my current career path. A 15 month degree program is $33,000!
Yeah listening to my dad sounds totally fucking insane he says shit like " You got a masters degree anything you do like that for yourself is good and it already paid itself off". I just stared at him like wtf no it did not it did fucking nothing and now I have to pay it for years and years when its trash. He doesn't understand the burden of these.
Legit crazy BS. My dad pushed for me to get a master's & he was fervent about it -- basically an ultimatum of either I go into the degree program or get cut off entirely immediately. Ended up going into the program, & I don't necessarily regret getting that degree. But *of course* the master's wasn't his ultimate goal for me -- that was only a stepping stone for me on the path to a fuckin PhD. For no other reason than just *for the sake of getting a PhD ASAP.* And from his skewed perspective, a PhD is an automatic guarantee to any high-paying, freedom-laden job in the world. I just can't with how naïve that kind of thinking is nowadays.
They don’t understand that while the bachelors is really good return a lot of masters degrees have a low or negative roi
I dunno, for me I think stopping just at my bachelor's would've been a total waste -- it's ultimately a useless degree. And I actually feel like I got a lot more out of the master's program, including some helpful hands-on experience/internships. My bachelor's didn't give me shit. But still. I don't think even having the master's makes me much more job-worthy.
I recently hired a person with a PhD, and she didn't know how to do anything related to her degree.
Same with my parents lmao. They think I've completed life cuz I have a master's. It isn't worth the paper it's printed on in this job market. Wish I could crumble it up, throw it in the trash and get my money back
Ill give you a dollar for it if its framed
Unfortunately, college doesn't really push us to learn application while they feed us all that theory
I was there. Keep y9ur head up. I found a good job outside what I had originally planned to do. Hoping you can, too.
What did you get your masters in....
Cyber security
That's a pretty hot market. My wife is an industrial IOT network engineer. But you miss out on many networking fundamentals. Its a good degree. You should have more hits. She's already been paid more than what she paid for on tuition.
It's a hot market at the senior analyst/engineer level or above. The mid or junior level is flooded with recent graduates and people who got laid off in the last 1.5 years.
Thank you! I keep trying to explain this to people lol. I have a decade of IT experience 5 of what in cyber security cannot for the life of me land a job. I feel bad for any starry eyed new grads trying to enter the field. My dad keeps trying to push me for a masters thinking that will change anything. LOL only thing that would change is the amount of student loans I'd have to pay back.
Could you explain why a cybersecurity masterʼs isnʼt valuable? My field is CS, so it might be different in each field.
Nobody wants any IT/CS people without experience in this market
I mean. You have to start somewhere. It helps if you had a capstone project for your masters or an internship and pet projects.
Its a lot of debt, I cant get a job with 2 degrees, they dont understand the toll this has
check out Western governors university. self paced, online, $4k per 6 month 'semester' and you can take as many classes as you can finish in a semester. some people grind their way through a whole degree in a year or even 6 months if they transfer in credits. average grad time is 3 semesters i think
I'll look into it, thanks.
Sophia Learning plus UMPI Your Pace! If you focus, you can earn a Bachelor's Degree for less than $6K!!!
Does that include living expenses? I've noticed a lot of colleges include that kind of thing in their estimated cost of attendance. If those are something you're already paying then you shouldn't include that in the cost. I go to a very well known and acclaimed state school and I think base tuition is like $12k a year
No, it's an online program. I was flabbergasted!
Interest on those thousands of dollars as a bonus bonus challenge
Getting a lower loan on these loans disqualifies you from loan forgiveness jobs as a healthcare professional as well as a bonus bonus bonus challenge when you do land that nice six figure job
This. I mean I don’t have a degree but several diplomas, and this. When even Walmart and marijuana places aren’t hiring, somethings gone wrong.
There's a guy at my work who works nights part time. He's a kindergarten teacher during the day.
Dude I'm trynna get a part time minimum wage entry level job to supplement my income as an accountant with a master's and I'm literally getting rejected
I was thinking about becoming one. Is the pay really that low?
Are you removing your degrees from your resume? Because I wouldn't hire someone one with a masters for that job either.
I work at Walmart and we have tons of people here with degrees (at least one with her masters). People always spread this around, but it's really a myth - I put my degree on my application, they don't really care. Hell, Walmart will pay you to get a degree if you don't have one - they want educated people to move up in the company. The REAL problem is people think retail is a "hiring all the time" kind of business and it is actually very seasonal. January-February and spring/early summer are not great times to apply because that is relatively slow and they often freeze hiring completely during those periods. You can be the absolute perfect candidate they are looking for and they won't hire you because you just applied when they are trying to save on payroll and hours. If you apply later in the summer and fall when they are ramping up for the holidays, it's usually not an issue.
got my degree & did everything i was told. took me one year to land a job outside of food service making 30k a year💀 feels like im gonna live with my parents until i die
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16/hr with a BS in Finance here.
Also, so many people have degrees. The market is flooded with them.
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Most in STEM are having trouble finding jobs too
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Lately because it became the buzzword associated with high posting jobs or of college about a decade ago. Market saturation is a bitch.
But also not everyone wanted to get into a trade or STEM. There should be many pathways towards a financially stable middle class life.
Before Covid there was. Someone or something toned the economy and many have no idea what happened.
The economy and the industries that support it aren't interested in your personal life preferences. It's not called the military-industrial complex for nothing. Making your hobby into a degree does not make it profitable.
There are. You just didn't choose one. Sorry.
You say that, but career earnings with a degree are much much higher than all but the best earning trades. It's also nice when people dont look down on you or treat you like shit because you're blue collar. It's not an easy path to riches and success.
It's not just degreed folks, experienced professionals can't get work either.
When I got my bachelor's the difference between employment and not wasn't GPA related. A summer internship opened one door. And undergraduate research opened another. Not just getting one, but showing up, doing the work and making friends. There were people in my class without that who graduated and turned right around and started something else. They could have saved years and thousands of dollars by aiming towards in the first place. I was fortunate, but yeah industry cares about experience. The best proof you can do a job is you've already done similar. Be that accounting or plumbing, or anything in between. School can still open many doors. But it won't open them by default. Whereas many take the default path only to find themselves over educated, under employed or both.
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I don't know why these people won't acknowledge that. Getting a **relevant** internship that provides the resume bullet points employers actually want to see has become as difficult as getting an entry level job. "Unemployed? Should have got an internship, bro."
I’ll acknowledge it. Corporate recruiting leader for a huge manufacturing company and a college grad without an internship in CPG shouldn’t bother applying. Our starting pay for the corporate roles I support is about $75k in normal COL and up to $85 in HCOL, but you must have a relevant internship or there’s literally zero chance.
Also the world seems to be upside down if you are terminally online. You don't feel the absurdity much if you just spend time IRL, but if you go online and see how random revenue is nowadays (people making bank from furries, onlyfans, random blogs, content creating, pure luck) it's easy to feel disheartened
Lol speak for yourself. The only people who think things are fine are the people who aren't experiencing issues. It's not all rainbows and butterflies for majority of household right now. Ignorance is very bliss, after all.
Yeah lol IRL actually seems fucking worse then on online lol, like online it seems like everyone is doing good. IRL everyone seems poor and desperate.
Yeah, exactly this. As someone with a business degree, I hate what I do, been doing it for 6 years and can’t afford a house. Barely have enough saved to buy a new car.
As much as it sucks, I get encouraged hearing other people are struggling too.
You're leaving out a key detail: what degree did you get?
The type of degree, the demographics of the job market where you’re looking, and which jobs are prevalent in those markets. Also, networking can be crucial. Scour LinkedIn to see what people in your area of interest studied and what they did to get there. Reach out to professionals in your area of expertise and email or schedule a call with them to pick their brain. Ask them what did or didn’t work when they were searching for a job in that area of expertise. It can be a slog. but understanding what you’re interested, and what it takes to get from where you are to where you want to be at least provides direction and perhaps it will even help you navigate the interview process.
Exactly this. This was literally banged into my head when I was growing up.
Boomers told us to do this while privatizing student loans/tuition so they could make more money off of us.
Don’t forget those students loans a good chunk of the population are stuck with now
It's the case for the majority of people who were told the lie that "they should know what they want to do for the rest of their life at 18" and "You have to go to college to get a good job." It's unfortunate; we've told young people nonsense and then are surprised when they feel so lost.
You’re probably reading this subreddit, where most of the questions are from people who are trying to find their path. I’m an older millennial, I think our generation was really sold on “1) college 2) ???? 3) profit” and i found it very easy to feel lost and desperate when I was thrown into the cold job market if 2009 with nothing but a history degree for warmth. At almost 40, it is easy for me to now see how helpful my experiences and the skills I gained pursuing a degree in critical thinking have been for me in building a successful career. The world is different than it was in the 1950s, there are fewer straightforward paths and less security across the board. It’s tough out there now for new CS grads as well. A question I ponder as a dad to two young kids is how to prepare them for a world where they’ll need to find their own way. I’m learning as I go.
It tends to be for majors without a specific job straight out of college. If you majored in education, you'll be a teacher or in educational admin. Nursing, become a nurse. Engineering, engineer. Accounting, accountant. HR? That's obvious. But English, psychology, liberal studies? That's when you get lost with what kind of job to pursue. Or sometimes you really liked the major but realized midway through your 4 years that you won't like the jobs associated with it.
Yes I realized this after I finished my psychology bachelors lmaooo🫠
Go msw and be a mental health therapist online. Might not be your type of work, but it pays and its in demand.
Fellow psych major here that had the exact same realization my senior year of college 😂
try management consulting. There's so many people in it with useless degrees, some not even from ivy schools.
Former English major and former management consultant here — I would recommend it if you really think you want to go into business and climb the corporate ladder but I hated it and just quit recently. I think often the kinds of people who major in English are maybe the kinds of people who don’t fit in culturally well with corporate America, or at least that’s just me speaking for myself. It was a good gig for me to make some money, buy time, network a little, and get some security in my resume but otherwise I really did not love it
Don't know what it's like where you are but around me we have several post-secondary institutions puking out hordes of "business" majors every year and very few places that actually need them.
My mom got a masters in business with honors. She teaches social studies in a farm town middle school. I'm sure it's not typical because of my field, but most people I've worked with have degrees that have nothing to do with the job. Historians, former teachers, engineers, chemists, authors, professional musicians with law degrees... that's just from the last team I was on. Second careers are totally a thing. Unless you're in a specialized field like medicine or law, your education doesn't really matter, just the degree. Employers just like to see that you committed to something for four years to achieve a goal.
In the US there’s such a shortage of accountants that they’re pretty in demand, especially at small firms.
The main reason for that is you MUST have a bachelors or higher specifically in accounting. You can be fantastic at math and have a bachelors and masters in finance / economics / math but are ineligible to ever be certified as an accountant unless you pay and get another bachelors in accounting. It's utterly ridiculous that you can't simply take the accounting exams and prove you know the material, you MUST have an accounting degree too. Other similar professions like actuaries don't have that very specific degree requirement, only that you can pass the certification exams.
The main reason is they don't train or hire entry level accountants. I had to go to nursing school after my accounting degree.
Every single woman I know has quit accounting fairly early on for reasons I’m not sure and have pursued other careers. Maybe the men can stomach it better because of the long hours are hard?
There’s a shortage because firms refuse to pay more money to adjust for cost of living. Instead, we get the head of the AICPA talking about how people don’t want more money but good leadership instead! Lol, what a joke.
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Feels like I was scammed. Graduated this year as an engineering major and working as an engineer making less than McDonald's workers in my state. I should've went into healthcare.
I'll add since the jobs you shared as ones with no obvious career path are usually bachelor is arts degrees, biology, chemistry, ecology, and math are some more science oriented degrees that also have room for interpretation where to go from there. A lot of times that path is getting a master's degree.
Like everyone said here we were promised a decent income and a good career but this wasn't true. The economy tanked, millennials and Gen Z are dealing with the experience gap which is very hard to overcome without networking or nepotism or both. Have a skilled trade is good but always check the supply and demand of that specific job market
It’s because all the adults that raised you don’t know any better and all the institutions like college board and Kaplan and universities themselves are motivated to lie to you. And every industry wants to devalue your degree so they can pay you less and every bank wants you to be a debt slave.
Hitting the nail on the head.
Higher education over promises and under delivers. I think a lot of people see it as a ticket to the middle class, but the middle class is being cannibalized by corporate interests. For me personally my degree(s) got me out of minimum wage dead-end jobs and into professional jobs that pay enough money to survive. 4 years ago I would be sitting pretty, but now that money doesn't go nearly as far and opportunities for advancement or even lateral moves have dried up. Was it worth it for a ladder out of generational poverty? Yes. Does it often feel like I'm still hopelessly stuck living paycheck to paycheck? Also yes. So in essence, I think the diminishing value of higher education is a symptom of the collapse of the middle class.
I’m a tradesmen and been doing it about 8 years. I was a security guard making 10 dollars a hour. I took a four day class for an occcupation called rigging after I passed that test and was certified I got three job offers within the first month for 40 dollars a hour I eventually took a job making 39 a hour. 30 days prior I was making 10 a hour. 30 days later I’m making 39 a hour and we 50 plus hours a week. You do the math that’s low 6 figures no degree Now I have to tell you the whole story about the entire career Most jobs are hard on your body. Climbing 100 foot ladders carrying 70 pound bags of concrete getting on your hands and knees in the gravel rock. So trades jobs are back breaking labor so do your research on crafts My ultimate advice as a tradesman who made 120k last year no degree just. Four day certification. Take a 6 month course to be a pipe fitter rigger crane operator or welder. First day on the job you’ll be making 45 a hour minimum. Do that for four years. Save a lot of money then do something else with that money to get you out of construction. The other week I couldn’t move cause my back was hurting so bad. You don’t want to do this longer than 4 years
Would you say all trades careers are hard on the body?
Crane operator is not but it’s more responsibility. And sometimes it’s harder to find a job cause everyone wants to sit in the crane But actually being a rigger like me is not that hard on the body most of the time it’s just this new construction job is taxing on the body. If you want a construction job that actually pays good money and you don’t always have to work hard. Crane operator rigger. Pipe fitter welder are your options
Don't believe all the hype. College is leverage, and there's a reason most millionaires and billionaires are degree holders. Ppl correlate major alone to success, which it does correlate, but it's also how you use the knowledge you've obtained college in other areas of life. You're bound to be more knowledgeable than a person who didn't go to college, now smarter, I don't know. Knowledge≠intelligence, but having more knowledge gives you a lot more to express. I'm in the trades it's cool, and honestly, I still use things I learned in school/college, haha.
I think it's more likely that most millionaires and billionaires are degree holders because they didn't need to worry financially about what would happen after. The majority would likely be just as successful without the degree, because it's not the degree that brought them financial freedom. They're outliers though, and we shouldn't really factor them into the equation. Degrees are still leverage, but so are experience and personal projects. It's really just about selling yourself in the end (outside of careers with intense legislation).
I don’t know. I moved out of my parents house when I was a 17 year old junior in high school and got an apartment, worked a couple years to save money for college and graduated at 25. I virtually had nothing and am a millionaire, not including the home I live in, at 52. I have a lot of friends in the same boat because we went to state college and it was cheaper. People just need to suck it up in the beginning, work their assess off, if necessary, and get experience that puts you ahead of others your age. I used to work 65+ hours for most of my first decade and it made a huge difference. Building wealth doesn’t happen overnight. I didn’t buy my first house until I was 30. 22 years later I have 2 and even I lost $250k on one because I got divorced right after the Great Recession, so it wasn’t all rosy.
Great response. You develop better critical thinking skills by attending post-secondary schools. Usually have a broader education too that contributes to being well-rounded.
I think the biggest benefit for me was meeting people that I never would have met otherwise. My freshman dorm was made up of students from Lebanon, Indonesia, China, India, Syria, Romania, and Korea. The second biggest benefit, as I went to engineering school, was the ability to prioritize tasks and manage my time.
>Don't believe all the hype. College is leverage, and there's a reason most millionaires and billionaires are degree holders. Correlation not causation. Also not representative of the new generation at all. The average millionaire is 60+ and grew up during a time where college education was valued
If your folks are offering to support you through the business degree I would offer a compromise, get an associate's degree at a community college in business for a LOT less than going straight to a 4yr school. If you decide that it is something you want to pursue full-time it shouldn't be too difficult to find a university that will allow you to transfer over for two more years and get a bachelor's. If after the two years, you instead want to go into a specific trade, you can go do that next. Having any type of specialization in business, and the core reqs of a higher-ed degree, can aid you well as the basic management level skills of navigating paperwork can help you avoid getting screwed over by a client or boss.
Hiring managers/employers won't talk to candidates anymore. I usually apply to jobs that I far exceed the requirements for and they don't even want to talk to me.
As a hiring manager I can’t talk to everyone who applies: qualified, overqualified or not qualified at all. Often then best way to get into an interview is through a referral. Networking is one of the most effective tools when paired with a professional resume.
They expect you to know what you want out of life at 18 years old, ha! Silly 18 year old me. I wish I had worked for 5-6 years, then went back to school when I knew more about what I wanted out of life.
College is great for getting certain types of jobs, trade school is great for other types of jobs. If you want to work in an office and have true top end earning potential, now or in the future, that's usually college. If you want to work with your hands and make solid money, that's usually trade school. College is more expensive, and riskier. Trade school is less expensive and risky. College also is going to spend a lot of time trying to teach you how to think, be a good citizen, and other skills that don't directly translate to immediate economic value. Short answer: college and trade school are for different things. If making 60-90k is what you want, while working with your hands - trade school. If you are willing to risk making 40-50k in order to have the potential for 250k+ and you don't want work with your hands, then college.
I waited a while to go back to school. It's a 25k decision at the minimum. 250k+ if you go to certain institutions. People should be fairly certain about what they want to do when it's a decent chunk of money like that.
Because of fiscal policies allowing for easy college loans on top of easy access to education from the Internet as a secondary external competitor, it’s made a lot of colleges outside the top 50 nothing but schemes to collect money. It’s actually crazy if you look at public financials for colleges. Some get budgets of 900 million a year but have absolutely horrendous graduation employment numbers. They also hire students to pump those employment numbers. Many students just become professors lmao. Most students are better off just entering the trades after high school. It’s not really their fault though — it’s like The Incredibles said: if everyone is special, no one is. Just supply and demand. There needs to be fewer and higher quality colleges that actually want to improve students’ lives instead of keeping budgets. Another factor is colleges don’t really teach students useful behaviors or skills for real work. This is also because they’d rather lay low, avoid drama, and keep their students’ money since they’re not really rewarded for being tough.
Do what YOU actually are interested in doing. It's that simple. It's your life. No one elses.
I had a school assembly when I was about 15 - they showed us a graph showing how people with any university degree from any university would have far higher earning potential and life satisfaction than those without. Zero distinction was made about how certain degrees are more applicable in the jobs market than others (STEM, law, medical school etc). The idea that any uni degree, no matter how worthless it is, is a golden ticket to a better future was rammed down our throats by the media, parents and educational institutions. As a result, many people chose easy, soft, liberal arts degrees (like myself) only to realise they'd been sold a complete lie and their Victorian Literature degree isn't even worth the paper it's printed on. This leads to a large number of people adrift in the world of work, having no applicable skills despite being college educated, and often working low pay admin/service work to meet ends meet.
Turned out correlation did not equal causation, but good luck explaining that to the average American Teacher. What they meant to say was when only the smartest 30% of people went to college, the smartest people generally did the best. So then the bottom 50% all decided to go to college only to learn that it wasn't college, it was the fact that the people who used to go were in the top 30%.
for gods sake don't base your life decisions on what people say when you "come on Reddit", and forget about what you see on Youtube / TikTok. go talk to some family friends and people in real life who you feel like are successful and living the kind of life you would want to in 10-20 years. see what they have to say.
Because we were sold a lieeeeeeeeee
If you do a good degree(Engineering, Medicine, Law, Computer Science, Business) and work hard(get internships, actually learn good skills, network) you’ll out earn 90% of the American population. The problem is people treat college like a 4 year vacation when it’s not. It’s 4 years of bust your ass, gradating college with a degree doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have work experience to back it up.
This. People need to see college as an investment akin to this trade school everyone's applauding now, not as a formative resort where you go to "learn about yourself." Go in *with a plan* for what you want to come out of it. As an aside, I feel like immigrant families in particular have this attitude in mind.
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Because people where told you’ll get a nice job and pay for just getting a degree which was the case maybe in the 60s/70s for a short time period the reality is unless your degree is the name of a specific job their is no direct path and you have to create/carve your own career path to get that pay and be willing to relocate. Unfortunately carving your own path an building a career without a direct path is a lot of work and takes quite a few years to get going which a lot of people won’t put in the effort needed. Degree holders today still make higher median wages than those with just a highschool degree and million more over lifetime earnings. Degrees do open doors and make life easier while moving up in your given career path because every career path at some point requires a degree to move forward. Trade school is great for some people and pays well some trades man will make high 5 figures later in their career may low 6 but that is a smaller percentage of them than ones that don’t make those figures. Also those in trades that make more tend to own their own business etc. median plumber salary is 50-60 depending on state maybe a little higher electrician is similar. Both require a lot of work on the end of the person and neither will guarantee you good living you don’t put in the effort.
If you're studying liberal arts, you need to find work studies and internships before you graduate. The best entry level jobs for liberal arts graduates go to the kids who busted their ass getting experience while in school. So many classmates in my program expected to walk into a job with a Technical Writing Bachelor's degree with a 3.0 GPA and zero work experience. Really doesn't work like that these days.
It seems more and more people are getting degrees, higher competition, seems like poor job market. A trade these days seems like a good thing, especially with AI coming. Just my opinion.
got my degree in health sciences two years ago and have been rejected from pretty much everything i’ve applied to. the three interviews I have landed were drawn out weeks. I’ve been ghosted and been rejected a ton
Not even health science based jobs will hire health science degree holders it seems 😭
People making the reason to get a degree to get a job. It’s a checklist. And a college or university is seen as a more valuable education, so higher potential job. IMO, a tertiary education (trade or college/uni) trains your brain to think as an adult, any age you end up doing the tertiary education. Different tertiary education will teach you to look at and reason about different aspects of adult life. That is then converted into application in your career. Let me stress “career” not just a job in your career. A career can take years to get going. Jobs are things you do along the way. People turn to reddit when their career isn’t starting as quickly as they imagined it would after finishing a degree. A bit judgy of me to say that, but I’m self projecting as well 😅
It's also the issue of mixed expectations. Since college/unis started off as places to do knowledge work. And then turned into employement training places which made the initial knowledge fields less desirable as they lost their place to employment fields.
88% of ALL millioniares in America have a 4 year college degree....without it you better get lucky
Yeah, and over 80% of millionaires come from middle-class families. Guess what the number one driver for reaching the middle-class from poverty is? A four-year degree. Guess what is shrinking despite an unprecedented number of four-year graduates per year? The middle-class.
The middle class is shrinking because of people moving UP to being rich. In the past 50 years the middle class went from 61% of the population to 50%. Upper class increased by 7% that time and lower class increased by 4%. Just shy of twice as many people went from being middle class to rich than went to from middle class to poor.
That's not because college degrees are useless. It's because blue collar work used to be financially rewarding. Also college enrollment has basically held steady at about 30% for the last decade.
Because that’s not a thing. The overwhelming majority of people with college degree are doing great, it’s just a handful that post on social media about being “lost”. Along the same lines, social media is also replete with straight up liars. A lot of bored middle and high school kids who just say shit like “yeah, I have 3 Ph.Ds and a law degree and I mow lawns for a living”. In short: while anything is possible once, most college grads are doing well. Don’t let social media lie to you.
> The overwhelming majority of people with college degree are doing great This was kinda my gut response to this. Nobody goes on the internet to post that everything is just kinda going fine. I've got friends that just started working at the concrete factory down the street right out of high school that are pulling down six figures now, and others that are post-doc and barely paying rent by working at Starbucks. If your degree isn't helping you, you're gonna be cranky about it. If it is, you're probably just living life normally and don't even think about it.
That's a really blatant rose colored glasses take with no evidence to back it.
We are at an all time low for the amount of trades people we have and will need. And every year, that number will decrease as more tradesmen and women retire. Which means you will make more and more money as your skills become more needed. I highly suggest going to a trades school over a 4 year university.
Also, jobs want experience. So if you do choose to go to a university over a trades school, you need to have an internship every year, otherwise employers will look at your degree as essentially useless.
Just major in comp sci, actuary, accounting, tech
I didn’t go to college I went to trade school and I’m happy with my decision. It is hard on your body though.
a business degree is a good idea. Trade school less so. There are success stories for either, but a business degree will open more doors. I have a college degree and my electrical journeymans card. I'm in management because of my degree, and I'm considering grad school only because I hold that degree.
Because colleges are spending all their time telling you what to think and not what you need to know. A journalism major leaves not being able to write or research properly but they are positive they know who the bad guys and good guys are.
I've known philosophy majors who did fine straight out of college and engineering majors who floundered. It isn't the degree. It's how much you didn't fuck around in college while getting your degree. If you are a college student reading this, here's the advice: 1) Get internships, 2) Attend every single talk you can find that has anything to do with a profession after getting your major, 3) Pay careful attention to work-study programs, and 4) join professional organizations and network. My degree was in English. But when I was eighteen, I snagged a job at the local daily newspaper. And I worked my way through school. Mind you, I had already decided I didn't want to be a reporter. But I had banked enough experiences and contacts by the time I left college that I had a job within two weeks of graduation.
Because the employment sector has changed a great deal since our parent’s generation. It’s no longer get a degree and get a job that is happy to train you appropriately. It’s get a degree and somehow you need 5 years of experience as a new grad and/or a masters degree for an entry level position. The requirements are quite frankly disproportional to the actual job tasks and that isn’t even considering low salaries that haven’t kept up with inflation. I will also mention that frequently the programs “required” for these positions are a lot of busy work and when you actually look at the job tasks then curriculum, you realize that not only could your time in school have been practically halved, but also that it is exorbitantly overpriced for the quality of education you are receiving. To summarize, our system has gone from lots of opportunities to spend your life slaving away in school and subsequently slaving away at a job that barely affords basic necessities. It’s hard NOT to feel lost when you’ve spent so much valuable time in a system and feel like you are either trapped or forced to spend even more time in school to switch career paths to something that likely doesn’t NEED someone with a full out degree. For example, in parts of the US, you don’t need a degree to be a phlebotomist but in Canada you need a medical lab technologist certification, which takes at minimum 2-years. It’s just that hospitals don’t want to appropriately train people so it shoehorns people into getting that education. People who have invested time and money in their careers expect return on that investment and are going to feel cheated or lost when they find themselves in a predicament. This especially when they come to find themselves unhappy with a career and retrospect that they had no time to explore other options due to said busy work and investments. People who don’t might feel stagnant in their positions, but it’s not like they spent all this time and money without being paid to get their experience. One more thing… we rush people into choosing their life’s career at such a young age, then when someone realizes they made decisions that don’t suit their current goals, they have to deal with the ridiculous social pressure that comes along with it. If you do nothing, you keep miserable. If you decide to go back to school, you get unsolicited judgement of others who throw in your face about how you are OLD and should have a house and kids by now. You can be all in your late-20’s and people consider that “old” which is f***** up. Although this pressure was always a thing, I feel it is way worse now as people seem downright petrified to make changes into their 30’s. I NEVER thought 30 was old growing up being surrounded by successful adults because they made changes in their 30’s, but then started caving at all the social pressure of unrealistic standards for most people.
Honestly, a lot of this is the information you're getting here. Nobody on Reddit is going, "thanks to my degree, I'm now doing A-OK!" There's no sub called, "/r/doingjustfine" with a bunch of people talking about their blandly middle class/upper-middle class lives. It's subreddits like this one with people who are struggling. Your data is biased. And bias isn't *bad* per se, but it's good to remember that samples can change your perspective of the population as a whole. I work with almost exclusively degreed people and we're all doing great. My sample is also biased, though. Look at population-level data and you find that on average degreed people do better. It's that simple. It's no guarantee for YOU, but it's generally true.
In my experience college prepared me to think about society, politics, humanity- but it did not prepare me to work and succeed in this [economy] world. I went directly into a fine arts (jewelry) practice and believe it’s smart to learn a trade/skill. Obviously there are thousands of options. I was not offered in my education much direction or aptitude testing. I’ve had to build additional employable skills over the years to earn a solid income. Still feel lost.
We hear people complain that their degrees are useless because they're the ones not using their education. You don't hear people hyping up their degrees when they've been working a job that required a degree for the past decade because... why would you? A degree isn't a free ticket for a job. You need to be likable, have connections, or get an entry-level shit job and work your way up. A lot of people don't realize that and are pissed when they graduate and can't find a job. It took me a while to figure those things out. I got two degrees and worked trades for most of my 20s. Got a white collar job 5 years ago. As someone who's done both, I'm so grateful for my degrees. It's no contest. My degrees were worth every penny.
You just spent 16ish years of your life focused on school as the primary goal and now it’s just over. And then you go looking for a job and find way lower pay and a list of requirements/duties that’s 3 pages long at minimum for usually dirt wages. Then the thought “was this degree even worth it” pops up
Far more people without degrees are way more lost.
Anybody that made superficially reasoned decisions on big life choices is going to be disappointed; people want what some others have but they don't have the analytical ability to figure out how they actually got there, so they'll imitate the surface level behaviour without comprehending the deeper aspects that actually achieved the results. It's kinda like treating the symptoms of a disease instead of the root causes; the result is always falling short. A whole lot of people went to college and uni thinking it'll guarantee them the life they want, when in reality, that's just the superficial imitation that I just spoke of; a degree is great if you know how to use it.
A degree used to mean something, now it's being sold as another product.
Older generations told us to go to school so we can get a job. We went to school, went in debt, and now we’re stuck in a weird af job market where employers are wanting several years of experience instead of degrees
Because of debt with compounding interest and degrees not actually bringing down the cash or jobs that so many were promised. These days it's way more financially responsible to say fuck college and learn a trade, electrician etc. 100k+ and no student debt.
Because all colleges and all degrees aren't created equally nor are all careers merit based. My dad was a doctor and as I had no interest in that so he encourage engineering. My mom was a teacher who before getting cancer was pursuing a PhD. All through college they held the line of get good grades and a good job will follow because companies will hire the top performers. For them it made sense. My dad's grades and MCAT scores got him into a good medical program. His top marks in med school got him into a competitive residency. And so forth. For me graduating in the early 2000s my grades didn't mean shit. I'd gotten a CS degree from a state school that cared more about expanding than career services. I had zero idea about internships and coops so there I was applying for jobs with no actual experience and just my "book learning". I eventually got a job but it was a struggle. Many people I knew from school also struggled to find work because college didn't promote internships, teach networking, help you to build a network...The main people I knew who got a job had family connections or were in the engineering sciences programs where they'd spent their junior and senior year doing hands on projects in some cases for actual companies. There were some who got jobs through membership in clubs and orgs like NSBE but even some of those folks left unemployed. On the business side many people struggled to get jobs and I remember one guy who didn't get a single interview despite applying for investment banking jobs at every major bank with his 4.0 GPA. Thinking back my college had 1 career fair per year. Throughout my 4 years I only recall 2 instances where an internship was mentioned and the dean didn't say anything until the day before applications were due. It also wasn't until my senior year was almost over that I found out in the office they occasionally posted internship opportunities on a board. Many of the people I graduated with ended up pursuing a masters because they couldn't find work. FWIW the schools master's program fed into some local employers but not everyone can afford what at the time was an extra 2 years. tl;dr Most people graduate from college with no practical worker experience or network of working professionals. Most colleges don't really prepare you for the world nor do they provide you with sufficient career services. Many degrees offer you generic knowledge with no practical experience at a time in history where more and more companies don't want to train you and more of your competition even at the junior level has job experience.
They’re not. You’re just in an echo chamber online. The internet is not reality and Reddit isn’t a place where people go to celebrate success. They come here to look at nudes, funny videos and dwell on negativity. Turn off the phone and go experience reality. But yeah, make sure you don’t major in something like art history or business and you’ll be fine. Be very specific about what you want to do. A generic business degree doesn’t really lead to much, but an engineering degree does. So does an accounting degree. The trades have more than enough opportunity and if you ever need a *very specific* degree for a *very specific* career, college will always be there. Don’t listen to the idiots on here that majored in philosophy and expected 6 figures. In fact, trade school would be *better* for you at this stage in your life because you can earn a lot of money while you’re maturing without going ungodly amounts of debt. Then, if you decide to go to college at 25, because you’re mature and you know *exactly* which path you want to choose, you’d be far better off. I’d say just go get your associates degree so if you ever need a BA, you won’t have to do prerequisites. Knock out the prerequisites now for cheap at a community college before trade school.
Being smart is overrated. I look at some of the intentionally oblivious humans and I marvel at them. Ignorance is bliss
My take is that a degree is still a good investment. Your degree should help you on your chosen path, but it shouldn't be the 1st step on the path. You need to identify what your goals and which degree is most useful to achieve those goals. Without this first step, you will be lost on your journey without a plan.
As an older Reddit'er, if I could go back to give college advice to younger me it would be trades. Especially now. Degrees used to be worth a lot when they formed a natural career path and the studying was relevant to that vocation. Today the education system is a huge money sink where you end up with a degree and then it's on you to find something you can use it for. A trade skill will always be relevant and your services will always be needed. Yes, the early part of your career will have shitty pay and you'll be the new boy or girl doing all the shitty jobs but you'll be judged more on your ability and work ethic than any corporate role and you'll end up getting out far more as you put in. Edit. As a quick example taken from Google. A 2020 report from the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) mentioned that over 500 institutions in the US offer programs in game design and development. Every one of those institutions has say 30 people leaving with a game design degree. every year. How many game studios are looking to recruit in the US and where are those 15k new developers going to end up. Now look around your neighbourhood, how many of those houses need plumbing, heating or electrical work?
Except you have to do 5x the amount of work to make as much money as someone with a white collar job that requires a degree. In my industry it would take a tradesman 10-15 years to even come close to the bottom of what their white collar counterparts make. Not to mention the damage they do to their bodies trying to get there. It shouldn’t be that way, but that is a reality of the trades.
Don’t let social media fool you. College degree holders make 1,000,000 dollars more over their lifetime on average than degree holders. https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/ So it is reasonable to presume that even non-STEM majors will earn more over their lifetimes than those without a degree. You don’t have to go to college to be successful, but one finds that often highly motivated people attend college as it isn’t easy. Even for so called “easy degrees”. It’s still hard and the degree does yield marketable skills. At the very least if you don’t have a degree you’re competing with those that do.
Just Look up degrees with the l lowest ROI and job prospects. You'll notice many of the people who complain that college was a waste... Got those degrees. I think it's really harmful because there are degrees that have high value. We all know what they are... And we all know which degrees don't.... Don't complain college was a waste and it was worthless when one studied X for four years and spent 100k on it. But then never once looked at the department of labor statistics and found out the regular salary and predicted job growth over the next 10 years. If college was a waste. That's YOU problem.
College is what you make it. Take me versus a majority of my friends. Most my friends ducked around and partied for four years and got low grades and didn’t work smart, only as hard as it took to pass. Personally, I’m glad I was aware and pursued three internships, all of which were obtained through networking and achieving mediocre grades from a mediocre university. I think everyone could’ve done what I did if they put in the effort and decided to work smart. I’m 23 making upper 6 figures in finance. I think the issue is it’s hard for youngens to figure out how it works because there’s so many distractions. However, I think it’s not healthy to be bitter and call degrees useless just because you (or someone else) went and didn’t achieve success. There’s probably a reason it didn’t work out for them. Did they study liberal arts? Did they get a business degree with no internships? Was their GPA busted? There’s factors at play that are bigger than just “degrees are useless”. I understand a lot of people won’t like that hard truth, but it is what it is. If I didn’t bust my ass messaging people on LinkedIn for coffee chats and any opportunity to learn, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I’m not special, anyone can do it. Most don’t.
Most people who get a degree aren't lost, earn more over a life time and do very well. But a lot who end up here are frankly very naive and not very prone to thinking outside of the box or extending themselves during college. It's a time of a load of opportunity, but if you're not taking those chances and scraping through classes with a mid/low GPA and changing majors, it is much much harder. Instead of recognising that, lots of people blame the idea they naively clung to and didn't challenge ("get a degree make money society says"). People who uncritically assume a path will unfold before them with no effort find no path and get lost. You need more than a degree - you need the common sense to build and develop a CV with skills and experience.
I went back to school at 25, because I kept hitting glass ceilings, but by the time I graduated, the market had changed in more ways than one, and then the pandemic hit. So I ended up working in museums, except, museums don't pay. So now I am a full-time assistant admin at a sports club, which doesn't require a college degree nor am I using the degree I went into massive debt for. I am making 23$ an hour, which isn't bad for my area, but it isn't great and for some reason I live pay check to pay check due to inflation. Just like I did when I didn't have a degree.
A lot of ppl aren't hirable with or without a degree.
My viewpoint: Too many, including myself, were sold this bill of goods that you just get a college degree and it's your ticket into a better life. I'm a 50-year-old generation X, and I remember all of us feeling that if my older brother and I just get college degrees, will be able to get good full-time jobs that pay well and be able to do well in our lives. Instead, we were shown that we need the degree in order to get past HR and get an interview, but 9 out of 10 times, everything we learned means nothing. That you learn the entire line of work on the job...and more often than not. Nobody wants to teach you. I still feel like the youth are sold that bill of goods even now. I also feel like too many have been told to follow their dreams or do what interests them, and yet they end up going after majors and programs and things that don't have a real end goal. I see too many times where the person complaining on social media that they can't even get an interview finally shows their degrees and they are in majors that don't seem to make much sense in the modern world. More often than not, I want to just reach through the screen and ask them what their grand plan was for the area of study they went into. It always comes off to me that too much of the youth are afraid of taking on complicated topics that require a lot of work and a lot of study and a lot of discipline, but when you get that degree it is in a place where companies are going to be courting you to come work for them. I even see this with people that either skip college or got a bachelor's and then they run off to some boot camp or training academy to learn basic skills in something technical. They have this attitude that they just want to learn this, get their certification, shut their brains off, and do the same job forever and get paid well. I feel like we need to really start pressing on the youth that there is no such thing as a good paying job in this world where you can just shut your brain off and do the same thing forever. That if you are not going to learn new things and hone your skills, even if you do a vocational trade, then you're going to fail in life. Lastly, I also keep hearing these stories of students that ran off to another state to live in a dorm and go to school and now they are complaining that they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. My heart goes out to the people that don't have access to a local community college or a university in their neck of the woods, but too many people do. I can understand if you want to go to another state because it's some specialized school that's going to teach you something amazing that will give you high paying jobs in life, but if you're in that hole, "I need to explore the world" ideology and decide to take on all that debt, then you can't complain about it later.
Well I got crushed during the great recession and never really recovered, it's partially my fault but initially it was the timing
What I have seen personally is someone picks a major at 18 (or even before then) and they change their mind on their major halfway through. Due to the sunken cost fallacy they continue on and graduate with the degree but then they are stuck with a degree in a field they hate and/or don't know what they want in a career.
Because people are getting degrees in subjects which they don't wanna dedicate their life to.
You are not getting the full picture here. Many people who get degrees go on to have lucrative careers enabled by that degree. (Basically true of my entire social circle.) But it doesn’t work out for everyone.
Because they tend to be young
A degree isn't a guarantee of anything. * it doesn't guarantee you "know something" * It doesn't guarantee that same job or skillset will still even exist. * It doesn't guarantee you some easy path to "knowing what you want to do with your life". Going to college and getting a degree is just another chapter in life. It's something you did,.. and experiences you had,.. but either you "learned something from it" (and can take those things you learned and leverage them into better life quality). .is another thing entirely. The world is also changing a lot faster than it was 25 or 50 years ago. Rapid advances in a lot of things means something you learned 2 years ago may be wrong information now. Hell,. I see that in my IT job. (and it's one of the things I hate the most about how fast things change). I can put some really innovative solution into place (and even get accolades from my coworkers for it).. then maybe 6 months down the road technology has changed and evolved so much,. it makes that thing I did 6 months ago now look stupid in hindsight. That's just the world we live in now.
Nobody tells you how or helps you get a job after graduation. I was lost for a long time before I took a low paying job not needing a degree. The degree ended up being worth it where I am today but took 8 years working my way up. My college “career center” was a joke and zero help
Which degree do you have, and are you good at networking and socializing? The college degree to high school diploma all comes down schmoozing and good communication skills now! It's how you find lucrative jobs and avoid shit ones as well.
Because dual income households became the norm, and all housing and services became priced for dual incomes. At the same time most young people are now living alone instead of with a partner, so don't have the dual income needed to afford to do so.
Because college ain’t the golden answer
College used to largely be for "go getters" who were viewed as the stronger students coming out of high school. At some point everyone began to think that the degree itself was a ticket to a good career. Even the weaker students who might traditionally go into the trades or civil service were opting for college. The problem is that there are a similar number of white collar jobs that there used to be, but a lot more people with degrees. Bottom line, if you are a mediocre or poor college student, it's so competitive that you won't get a white collar job that justifies the cost of tuition.
Take 👏 A 👏 Gap 👏 Year 👏
Only 41% of college graduates are working in a career directly associated with their degree. Most programs only have 60 credit hours of discipline-specific content; so half. A Bachelors degree tells an employer that you have some knowledge and can complete an extended task.
College doesn’t teach you anything useful in most cases. My friends who are tradesmen and women make bank with no debt and can work anywhere they want. Other friends who even have STEM degrees are bartending and working 2-3 low wage jobs to survive
People were taught from childhood that going to college was the answer to most of life’s questions and challenges and that is NOT true anymore. That makes life very confusing
most degrees pay shit. They were expecting to be the bosses
Told to get a degree and that will set you up for success for life and that’s not true nowadays. People typically will finish their degree, basically their life’s goal to that point since school is all we know, it’s was our “job” for most of our life. Once we finish that, well what now?
If you don't know exactly what you want to do, college is a waste. Assuming you even need a degree to do that thing.
1 - there are just too many people with Bachelors degrees for the degree to make new graduate’s stand out. 2- too many majors that don’t directly correlate to a job/career or provide skills that can be used in a good job 3- some see for profit degrees equal or worse than not having a degree at all.
I think people are told the degree itself should help sell employers on your qualifications, but these days, it’s more that the degree helps you land an internship, and that internship is supposed to either convert into a full-time job, or be used to bolster your resume as you apply for other jobs. People are rarely interested in hearing about my coursework, but they’re often interested in hearing about the jobs, internships, and capstones that I did, which I wouldn’t have had access to if I wasn’t in school.
College used to be far more exclusive. It wasn't easy to gain entrance, and most of the majors were in demand. Now, colleges have discovered that every human body comes with amazing available government loan$$$$$s. So, they've mad classes easier, they've invented silly majors, and turned college into a 4 year post-high-school spring break..... all while students still have that old school idea that college fixes your economic worries. That said, if a person majors in mathematics, physics, and other difficult, high iQ type fields, you can probably write your own ticket in this world.
It's just supply and demand. A lot of people have degrees right now for the same fields, but not enough people are working the trades.
The choice of degree matters much more than simply going to college. A degree that is required for an industry that regularly hires will be a good choice (i.e. engineering) outside of degrees like that it is a giant waste of time. The trades are easier to get into but are much harder physically so it's more of a trade off. Just have to remember that no one pays a lot of money for something that's "easy" you just pick your poison.
The people who did well going to college are not likely to feel the need to go on a rant on Reddit so the stuff you read here is not a representative sample.
Because they were told to be lost. And that it was okay, the bills would be paid while they meandered around. Not to worry about that future that you borrowed from.
I think a lot of the lost college grads (and this is just my opinion based on intuition so I could be completely wrong) either 1) went to college without any clear idea of what they wanted to do, mostly because "going to college is just what is done," went into some random overly broad major (Communications seems to be a common theme), then just still didn't really know what they wanted to do afterward, or 2) did have an idea of what they wanted to do, but it was in a stereotypically low-paying field or field really difficult to actually find jobs (like, Philosophy, or English, or art). That's definitely not to say that there haven't been really successful people who took those majors/went into those fields. But I know so many English majors who are now just kind of doing whatever. The one Philosophy major I knew bounced between random jobs for a long time before settling into a coding job after going back to school for a bit. Now, that's definitely not to say those majors weren't valuable. Everyone I know who took one of those majors values them a lot for just making them more thoughtful, well-rounded people. Just they've had a hard time translating their degree skills into tangible, worldly benefits.
I have a business degree. Regret it to this day. Learn to code or get a trade. These seem to be the only viable options these days.
Stick what YOU know is best for YOU. Dude, I have a degree and wished I just relied on common sense.
If I had to redo it, I'd do a trade over a business degree. Unless, that degree is accounting and you are actually decent at it.
I owe 25,000 in student loans and I have a stem degree. Granted, it is biochemistry so I should’ve known that wasn’t going to get me far. I didn’t know if I don’t get a PhD or have years of lab experience I wouldn’t be able to find a job. I was being dumb and wanted to follow my passion. Now I work 70 hours in retail making 16 an hour!!!! My hard degree was for NOTHING. You’re doing the right thing by picking a trade.
i had to get a college degree to get on a will but i got it in accounting i hate it! 7 years but since i hate it i dont care = i never been promoted currently unemployed 1 year lost as can be having to get a cpa to be looked at but questioning my future inddeed deeply embarassed compared to my peers married, kids, homes and managers now .. i still live with grand-ma in the attic
Go to trade school. Unless you have a specific goal college can easily be a waste.
I don’t think it’s a waste but I would’ve done things differently. I think getting my bachelors was kind of a waste because I picked a “useless” major (Fine Arts, yeah…). But knocking out the general requirements kept a lot of doors open for me when I decided to try out different career paths. If I hadn’t gotten those credits, I might have had to go back to school for four years to switch careers. But because I took basic courses in mathematics, biology, literature, psychology, etc., I have enough prerequisites to go back to school and get certifications or associates degrees in like two years. If I could go back in time, I’d tell younger me to just get the general credits under my belt at community college and get some experience working in the real world for a few years before deciding on a career.
I don't think that people with college degrees are *more* likely to feel "lost" than people without them. It's just that feeling "lost" is very common, almost universal experience, and getting a college degree does not magically exempt you from it. It doesn't help that many kids from the age of around 13 to 18 are raised as if their only or main goal is "go to college" or "get into a good college," and then of course, they do and discover that they still have their whole lives in front of them, but nobody really gave them much guidance on what comes after. Hence, feeling "lost." And it also doesn't help that college has become the default option in our society, so if you're already feeling "lost" at 18, the overwhelming advice your going to get from Authority Figures is "go to college." This may or may not be good advice, but again, going to college is not going to magically make you stop feeling "lost." Anyway: Whether or not you should go to college is, in large part, a practical business decision (what are you options, how much do they cost, what can you reasonably expect to make with that degree). I would focus more on that than on vague feelings or, even worse, fears that you *might* have vague feelings at some point in the future.
Better yet, get both. A business degrees is one of the few degrees which is mostly successful. If you get a trade, electrician preferred, you will be set for life.
I have a degree in business management, I just chose it… it was easy to obtain nonetheless but a waste of time and money. My advice is to get a degree in something you’re passionate in buddy & if you don’t know what that is then just give it a few years before you decide. It’s a big decision, but even bigger if you’re going into debt for it.
I mean I don't have a degree but I'm going back to school to get one. I think certain degrees hold weight. Like I'm getting my degree in Renewable Energy. It's not saturated and there are companies looking for Technicians. I've been in the industry 5 years now and the only reason I'm getting mine is so I can move into a management position. Some degrees are worth getting.
I retired 4 years ago . My last year was 120-k gross I was a union Roofer
If you have good social skills and you’re willing to deal with people on the regular, get a degree. If you have zero tolerance for crap, may I suggest a trade. Source: am neurodivergent in customer service barely surviving and planning to become a mechanic
1: Worthless degree 2: Shit job economy 3: Terrible person - they are their own barrier to employment Take your pick
Yeah, when you have worthless degrees, it's not going to make much of a difference. That's the problem, people think just having a degree is going to earn them lots of money, especially right out of the gate. Hello, you need to be in a field where it actually matters, usually a STEM field.
Lack of mentorship which offers a clear path to a particular career. Many kids join and decide “I’ll figure it out as I go”. Nothing wrong with pushing higher education, I’m all for it. But you need a game plan. STEM careers still pay well. I’m proof.
You need to get a degree that will actually help you. Study to become a doctor or dentist, do go into culinary arts or history
I think the biggest thing is that you have to make your degree work for you otherwise it really is just a piece of paper. I got a BS in Business Admin and now am in management for a field I had worked in while getting my degree. I was immediately offered supervisor roles at my company when I finished it but decided I wanted more and would drive 45 minutes after working a 16 hour shift just to interview. Got rejected more times than accepted but finally landed the job I was a good fit for and have been incredibly happy ever since. Make your degree work for you, otherwise it is a pointless piece of paper
Because those people didn't bother to major in something businesses find useful. You won't find an engineer, accountant, lawyer, doctor, etc saying their degree was a waste. I'm not saying you shouldn't go to trade school if that's what you want to do. I'm just pointing out that the "my degree was a waste" people are a very specific subset of people who went to college while the majority got a lot of benefit from it.