As a B.A. holding custodian I resemble that remark!
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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me_irl
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Many moons ago I ran the production floor in a factory. Seasonally we'd hire day laborers to help us clean and do the gross stuff, shoveling waste from behind the machinery, cleaning out sumps etc.
I remember this one guy who was having like, a crisis while cleaning dead seagulls from our ventilation system. He was just like "I have a degree, I went to school!". When I asked what his degree was he said Medieval Art History and I laughed. I felt bad laughing but like, what did he think he was going to be?
The worst part was 6 months later we had the agency send us more people and he came back.
I'm in university now, and I was very very careful about my choice of degree.
Aww...poor guy. I mean, he made a dumb life choice, but I still feel bad for him. Quite frankly I'm not really sure why universities are allowed to sell so many completely useless degrees. I get that at 18 you're legally an adult, but you're essentially still a child. Your brain continues developing into your mind 20s and you don't have many life experiences yet. I don't think we can blame kids for not knowing that they are making unwise decisions like that, especially because the school is the one selling the degree to you, acting like it's a good idea.
I was mad about this for a little while, but I was able to go back to school for an actually useful degree later on once I was out in the world and figured out how to do so.
Because a degree isn't job training. Education and training are very different.
Think of how sex education and sex training are wildly different things. They can compliment each other but they aren't the same. You go to college for the education.
I think that "get a degree so you can get a job" mentality that our parents and parents parents touted is advice from an era gone by. An era when having a degree set you apart from a sea of high school diplomas. It didnt matter if it was in medieval art History. It was a university degree (so you were smarter than the average bear/could learn and be taught).
It got distorted over the years and now we are here. Lots of degrees, people "go to school to get a job", and then can't land one because...well. it just sucks
I'm on the older side of being a millennial. When I was in highschool (late '90s early 2k), guidance counselors were absolutely telling kids to just get any college degree they could and there'd be a job waiting for them when they graduated.
On the other hand if they didn't get a degree they'd be losers working jobs like having to be a garbage man and or would probably end up as homeless drug addicted losers.
My fallback when I decided being a marine mechanic wasn’t for me was a garbage collector. Hard work but paid well compared to the world view I had. The garbage men I knew always seemed hard working, friendly, and took pride in their job. I ended up with many blessings in my life that resulted in a more comfortable life than that would have been. Maybe I glamorized the job because it seems like a respectable career choice to me to go into for folks that higher education isn’t a good fit for. It’s a shame that their isn’t broadly viable ways for differing individuals to positively contribute to society in a functionally effective way to sustain their life and aspirations. As a hiring manager I have to set salaries for positions within my allotted budget and have employees making between $85k and $200k so I understand differences in skills, educations, experience necessitate different salary rates to compel qualified candidates. At the same time we are failing if there are folks that don’t know when their next meal will be or where they are going to be sleeping. It’s inexcusable and the people that should have the most compassion and empathy seem to be so easily swayed to defend the ruling class of degenerate narcissists.
This was true for me too. A big part they left out was that you would need to develop skills for the career you wanted - whether that happened in school or not. If your career interest is in computers, but your education interests are in medieval history, make sure you have some computer skills to offer future employers and let your degree put you at the top of the candidate pool.
But still yeah this whole process was screwed from the start. Everybody has degrees now and most careers use it as a barrier to entry rather than a leg up.