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.
You think twinks are smarter?
My parents actually stressed the liberal arts idea that you go to college to learn how to learn and that it doesn't really matter what you major in. I respect their viewpoint even more now because they paid the absurd tuition at my liberal arts college. In my case, however, it really did cost me professionally. I ended up becoming a computer programmer, and while I was indeed quite capable of learning whatever I needed to learn to do any particular task, I was hamstrung by my lack of a degree in Computer Science proper.
Another thing I think a lot of people forget about is networking. Nepotism and cronyism gets you jobs, not a piece of paper.
Online job hunting is like online dating. It sucks. (And not in the good way) If you want to find the person or the job that's the love of your life you really need to know someone at the company, or who has connections at the company. It's possible to find the right person/job online, but the chance of getting to actually talk to them is almost nothing.
If you don’t understand why universities teach subjects you don’t approve of, then you don’t belong there
Ya the point of uni is for research so you'll get all sorts of random stuff, but they could do a better job explaining the real job prospects of their degrees since that's why most people go to school. I was too dumb at 17-18 to pick a path.
Are you also finding a lot of students just aren't interested in getting involved at Uni anymore? Its just turn up for class (if that), then leave. No discussions, no involvement, no real understanding?
I ask this because I'm also a student, and I think this could be what this person did as well. A degree is just a tick in the yes box for a job interview - its the bare minimum you can get from uni. They likely didn't actually get involved in the topic, talk with fellow students, build their networks and get into it - just passed. Im worried because based on what I see, this is where many current students are going.
I thought it was just my uni. Sometimes class feels like a dialogue between the professor and myself with 20 random strangers in the room.
I get being a little shy, but I'm in second year now and people still aren't offering anything in class, it's weird.
I have 3rd year where I've heard less than 3 people speak all semester, attendance is less than half, and no one does any of the assigned reading - its just pass assessments and get it done.
I think its a hangover from covid teaching, but at the same time I think covid just masked a general indifference from burnout, time constraints and general pressure on existing, to where students can only manage the energy for the bare minimum.
If you don't mind me asking - what country you study in? You called it uni so I assume its not states.
This strikes me more as a result of the push for everyone to attend university, and the perversion of higher education's function to be almost purely vocational at the undergrad level. Now, companies no longer seem to offer any proper internal training for the majority of roles, preferring to just require a college degree, any degree, and say, "Eh, this person got a BA in Medieval Tibetan science fiction, they should be able to figure it out." Positions that my father was hired for in the 80s and 90s that he excelled in offered 3-6 month training periods, and were accepting pretty much any candidate who showed an interest in learning and could pass an interview. These same positions now want a BA, internships and multiple references to be considered, and have eliminated the training programs offered, assuming new hires will either know how to do the role already, or figure it out as they go.
While I think that anyone who in interested in doing so should have the right to pursue higher education, I think the push for everyone to do so is probably misguided, ultimately doing a disservice to most students, and to the idea of tertiary education as a whole. There are many people who don't have any particular interest in pursuing further studies beyond, "I would like to get a job and not die starving in a gutter, please." They aren't really going to benefit from a university education aimed at pursuing knowledge for its own sake, and this sort of curriculum also doesn't necessarily serve the increasing demand of universities to be fancy vocational institutes, so the course work gets dumbed down and everyone gets a subpar experience. Of course, students are going to be disengaged if they didn't really have any interest in rigorous study of a field to begin with, but have arrived at their chosen major by function of either how easy it is to get a degree (and thus, tick another box in HR software), or what the expected return on their investment in tuition will be.
In my opinion, rather than pushing for everyone to attend university, we ought to demand more of our primary and secondary educational institutes (though, in the US, we should probably have them properly functioning at their currently inadequate level first, I suppose), and stop letting companies off load the costs of job training upon applicants. Bring back more paid apprenticeships, in-house training, and stop stigmatizing anything but white-collar employment in an office or high-prestige fields, such as medicine and law. I'd also like to see companies required to list specific degree requirements, rather than simply having an exclusionary requirement for a degree, any degree, in their job postings. If a job requires advanced mathematics, sure, require a BS in Maths, or science fields that have a heavy emphasis on the same. If the degree requirement can be met with a BS in Zoology, a BA in Criminal Justice, or an "Oh, shit, this guy knows this ancient software our business relies on!" without any degree, I think it should be eliminated as a requirement. And that's not a hypothetical situation, but reflects my coworker, my boss and myself respectively, in my previous job at a pharmaceutical plant.
Pipe dreams, I know, but we should hardly be surprised that students are not as engaged when society has fundamentally altered the meaning of obtaining a degree at the university level, obliging many who otherwise had little interest, if any, to sign up for tertiary education as a bare minimum to possibly live somewhat comfortable lives.
I actually strongly disagree. Many younger people are moving directly into trades, apprenticeship or full time employment because, quite simply, they can't afford tertiary education. Many universities are struggling to get student numbers up.
Yes, you used to be able to walk into a role that took anyone who could turn up and learn, but technological and economic demands mean that its no longer viable. You also used to be able to work full time retail as a sole provider, buy a house and raise a family but those days are long gone.
Welcome to late stage capitalism, globalization, game theory and pure human behavior.
Economic demands, sure, but I would argue that is more a result of policy than anything insurmountable. Technologically, not at all. I'm guessing you're in NZ, based on your username, and I won't pretend to be able to speak for conditions there, but I would say a great many of the jobs in the US demanding a degree do not actually require them. I'm not saying that we should completely eliminate degree requirements, but companies should be expected to pay the costs of training. There are so many jobs out there that require little more than basic computer skills, learning to use whatever specialty software they make use of, and the workflows of the particular job site. A university education is overkill to teach basic computer literacy, and the other two often wind up things that you will only learn upon beginning the job. For many others, an associate's or some form of professional certification is probably enough to really get you up to speed on the essential knowledge to work in many industries.
Proper apprenticeships are not terribly common here, and along with trades as career paths, have suffered from decades of anti-union agitation. Outside of areas with strong unions, trades can be shockingly poorly paid. I see more people just not going to university because they don't see much point to it, as degree inflation essentially means they need to get a Masters or PhD to even stand out now, and they don't see themselves doing that. If I wind up working with the same people who got degrees in the fields I have any interest or proficiency in, what's the point of taking on that debt and doing all that work, only to find myself in the same situation I'm in without a degree?
Meanwhile, universities here will implement austerity measures that result in even more tenuous employment and abysmal pay for professors, yet they seem to have no end of money for ballooning administrative costs, sports teams/facilities and insanely overpaid executives. They always have money for everything except education and research, and reveal their priorities in how they spend their money and where they cut back. Making job training and profit the focus of higher education has simply undermined the institution as a whole, here.
Networking is also difficult if you're not neurotypical and/or handicapped...
Disagree.
Networking, as in introducing yourself to people blindly absolutely is. I mean simply talking to the person next to you, discussing questions in small groups, being involved in a workshop. Talking to your group in a group assignment.
And if thats still too hard - many unis have clubs for neurodiverse students.
What field are you in? If you're in computer science then congrats, you're surrounded by them!
Comp Sci students don't do the hiring though; business majors and HR do. So being anything other than neurotypical is still a disadvantage.
Students don't do the hiring, but they can tell the people who are hiring that you're the right choice.
Higher education has been like this for many decades, really the result of the great expansion of colleges and universities beyond the education of a tiny elite, that happened after WWII (at least partially a result of the GI Bill).