This one is on the private sector. Right now they aren't trying to train for the future they are so worried about immediate profits that entry level work has all but died. Seriously if someone asked me right now how do I break into IT/ Telcom I legit have no answer for them. It is that bad. Oh then the work I have seen where you can break into Telcom at least is crazy because where as in the past companies at least supplied the tools, they are asking you to bring your own tools, optics, and various equipment plus get paid barely 20 dollars an hour. Complete insult when you understand the amount of work and travel you are about to do.
In my job they're looking for someone with 4 years of experience and somewhat extensive experience in our field. The job is an associate position. These people just don't want to train and they do not give a fuck, considering the job market, somebody is bound to be desperate enough to take the position
I saw a company in my field recently demand ten years of experience in each of two related fields for a job that only paid $80k in a high COL area, and wanted that to be a contract job.
I figure they had maybe a dozen potential candidates that fit what they wanted within 1000 miles. I also figured none of them would be willing to take that.
i didnt buy windows 11 , i bought a laptop for uni pre covid and then half a decade later i fell asleep, woke up and everything on the laptop was fucked
I've been seeing some big companies leave money on the table and skunk entire avenues of revenue because of this sort of behavior, so I'm also inclined to say that it's not working.
It works until it doesn’t, and then all the companies get outcompeted by other countries that do invest in their workforce.
It’s a double headed thing though, government has to make college cheap so that when companies get their heads out of their asses and start hiring juniors to collectively keep the pool of skilled workers around, they won’t be in a lot of debt and can get by. Meanwhile, the government can restrict it so that companies can’t hire foreign skilled labor leaving locally grown talent the best bet. It’s an investment in humans.
But of course we have shit republicans attacking education and feckless democrats who can’t just stamp out those fuckers and make this country a two-sane-party system, rather than one party of idiot grifters and the other of ineffective well meaning but corrupt incompetents (who nonetheless have the capacity to be competent when in power)
That’s where protectionism comes in. The IS auto industry is a great example. Absolute dogshit products that nobody on earth wants in an open market, but they do fine in the US where it’s illegal to compete against them too well.
Well I think when it comes to the citizens, you want them to be educated so that innovations can happen with home grown talent. You can import it as well but you don’t want your populace to stagnate and leave your colleges empty - you want to produce good people. Then you poach the best from elsewhere and get all the science and tech advances as well as the efficiency improvements. The ideas, as it were
CA requires double minimum wage if you supply all the tools, though not everyone affected knows this. Obviously other states have their own rules, or lack thereof, for this.
That said, nobody expects a new guy, whether lot porter or lube guy, to have much in the way of tools. On the flip side anyone with five figures in tools that they own (not bought last week off the truck on a weekly payment plan) earns much better rate.
Our modern society (service-based B2B america) will crumble entirely in the next thirty years without a full rework of how people view labor, work, and skill most of all in today’s economy.
The pre-modern city had trades in abundance, merchants, artisans, services, etc. too. Technology has grown to give us more things we can do, and more specialized disciplines; but now that we have globalized labor and training/apprenticeship can be outsourced, wealth-hungry oligarchs are sacrificing continuous labor training (i.e. sustainable labor practices) for turn-and-burn, cheap minimum wage roles that see an average tenure of 6 months.
IT has always been a trade within the white collar world, and now it sounds like it's becoming more like a traditional trade. Buy your own tools, don't even think about being in-house for a big company, and hope for the rare steady salary, or be prepared for gig work/going independent.
This is how work has been in Canada (or at least in large cities with the most competition for work) since post 2008. And in most fields, not just STEM. I graduated university in 2012 and I have friends from then who are still on rolling short term contracts (no health benefits - yes we still need private insurance, no pension or retirement savings match, no sick days or pto beyond legal requirements).
For IT you can either join the military or start at a MSP. The MSP will be bad pay with a bad environment but if you get a solid 2 years under your belt and a cert or two you can use that to move on to something better.
No, it’s also on the schooling and the disposition and skills of the graduate coming out. When someone says they have a CS degree and cannot understand what a pointer is, they’re not ready to enter the workforce, no matter how many degrees they have on their wall.
Part of the problem is that we are loathe to admit that these students coming out are not emerging from school, but rather from some kind of expensive day care spa hybrid, where they were treated as high paying consumers and not students. So when they come out, the job, whatever it may be, is now tasked with ACTUAL schooling.
Well, it’s a job, not a school. Some job specific bespoke training is fine but teaching some CS grad c++ from the ground up, or some English grad how to make coherent sentences is not what that time is for. You’re being paid at that point, not paying someone.
Edit: sorry downvoting reddit - if you can’t understand what a signed integer is or explain a pointer after 4 years of computer science, the job isn’t supposed to pay you to learn that skill. You have to go back to an actual school and do the work. Hard to believe, I know.
I hear you on the fundamentals point, and I'll give you that — there's a difference between not knowing vendor-specific tooling and not knowing what a pointer is after four years of CS. That's fair.
But my experience tells a different story about the broader argument. I have a degree in electrical engineering technology. When I started at Cox I had never touched a Cisco phone in a professional setting. When I moved into optical networking I didn't know how to program a Ciena 6500, didn't know TX/RX fundamentals for fiber in a live environment — none of it. And I'm not saying that as a criticism of my education, because college was never going to teach me that. That's vendor and role-specific. What I'm saying is that the expectation of 'plug and play' hiring has never really been realistic, and companies used to understand that.
The real shift is that entry level used to mean you came in with foundational knowledge and the company invested in building the rest. That deal is gone. The private sector decided training was overhead and stopped doing it. Now they want fully formed candidates for roles that didn't exist five years ago, and when they can't find them they act like schools failed everyone.
And honestly the AI thing is making it worse from both ends — companies leaning on it to justify leaner teams while students use it to skip the actual thinking that made a degree worth something in the first place.
Sure but you’re glossing over just how terribly prepared students are coming out of a school that looks at them more like consumers than students. What school doesn’t look at these kids as high spending customers instead of students? Their entire business model is founded on the former - and the customer doesn’t want to feel stressed or have difficulty. It’s supposed to be easy.
The idea that you have to pass everyone or that A’s are easy to get or that students are routinely using chatGPT for their homework is completely antithetical to being prepared when you come out.
Then when they are no longer the customer, it’s jarring because a cost benefit analysis is done. You’re getting paid - and thus that needs to pay off. The juice needs to be worth the squeeze.
I can assure you that if these graduates paid Cisco the hundred K they paid like Purdue for the year they were being taught then Cisco would potentially happily teach them all the skills they ceased to learn in school.
The job isn’t in loco parentis the way people seem to think they should be.
This is the same problem but through the lebs of survivorship bias-- you have hires
who don't know what a pointer is because your hiring practices only admits people who don't know what a pointer is, the people complaining about not being hired are complaining because that person got hired instead.
I genuinely don’t understand what you mean. You’re saying the average is so bad that even worse students are angry because an average student got the job but they’re just as bad?
I’m in San Francisco. 30-40 years ago one could get entry level jobs at banks. The big banks have moved a lot of operational jobs offshore or to low salary States. It’s mostly sales/retail jobs now eg sign up new customers and if not you get fired eventually.
Edit: I was just on youtube and this video about Business Process Outsourcing and how AI might affect the industry e.g. India and Philippines, was really interesting. At the 3:30 mark the guy talks about how his BPO job allowed him to send his 4 kids to private school and buy a home.
I know a guy who got his first full time job after college at a bank and was TRAINED for a few months and was able to launch a fairly good IT career. He had no background in computer/IT at all. Yah, that was like 30 years ago.
It’s hard to blame them. Taking on massive student debt just for a chance at an entry-level job that barely pays rent is a brutal reality. The system really needs to change. 😔
Meanwhile boomers are like : Just give a firm handshake, call them after as a followup to check on things, then take the first paycheck to start investing, saving for retirement, and to make a down payment on a house.
I actually did this recently to see if it still worked. Took a few days to go to every place I knew of that I had the skills for to ask for a job, envelope full of resumes. A handful said “If you look online you can apply” while most just said they weren’t hiring. Back to square one.
The places that would accept this would be so old school and stubborn that you’d probably have to do everything off of a computer anyway (so there’s little potential for transferable skillz for your next job), and anywhere else would require someone to key in your info into a computer anyway.
Might work with jobs that don’t require a degree though.
These jobs in fact did not require a degree. It was almost exclusively automotive jobs. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to work, but I’ve been out of options for a month or so now and I’m just trying anything
I did use the boomer trick of leaving behind physical thank you cards behind with the receptionist, at my last interview for years ago and I got the job.
I mean in the larger business world you're not gonna meet a manager that way. The only field I think you could is possibly retail and even then only at the smaller brick and mortar places. You're not even gonna be able to drop a resume off to a manager at a box store.
Growing up a lot of family friends were doctors that went to the local medical school which is something like top 10 in the country. I also wanted to be a doctor and the common sentiment was it’s relatively luck based if you get in even if you have the stats and I was amazed that so many people I knew went there like it was no big deal.
It only later dawned on me that things were so much simpler 30-40 years ago, if you wanted to be a doctor you simply did good in under grad took the MCAT maybe shadowed a bit and got in. Nowadays even the most brilliant kids have to take gap years and maybe even do a masters to improve their application. The competition isn’t even comparable I can’t even imagine what it’ll be a generation from now
The application process for your first job out of medical school is worse. You need to send out hundreds of applications in a massive wave, nine months before the job actually opens. Each one costs money, like 30 bucks. (Yes, even in states where this is a criminal offense.)
Actually getting an interview is heavily luck based because even the best are sending out masses of applications to the even the least desirable programs, so the programs can't just interview the best.
You would think that hospitals would love cheap physician labor, but the requirements to set up a program to hire new docs is so difficult it doesn't happen without a hundred thousand plus in yearly goverment funding per doc. The entire process has been exempted from antitrust laws too.
P.S. If you are still wondering why we have a primary care shortage, a number of the positions go to foreigners on J1 visas. That means they are only planning on sticking around for a few years to get training before returning home.
It’s a mix of both. There definitely were fewer people getting into it but it was much simpler. Nowadays my friends are taking years off, getting extra degrees, doing unpaid or very low paid labor for research publications, shadowing etc. and this isn’t about going and above and beyond this is just the norm.
I ended up following an uncle and going into the tech industry he told me when he came in if you had a degree or experience there were plenty of jobs. I graduated a couple years back and thankfully was able to land a good role, but in my industry unless you already know how to code by the time you come in as a freshman I would tell someone to find another industry. The barrier to entry is just so much higher now compared to what it was before it’s mind boggling I can’t imagine what it’ll be like for my kids.
I’m not sure why so many of these stories get framed around some boomer-era economy or the imaginary just walk in and get a job advice some imaginary grandpa is giving when the job market has been tough for the better part of two decades. Millennials didn’t graduate, wave a degree around, and get showered with job offers either they struggled too.
Yes, boomers benefited from a very different economic environment, but acting like this level of frustration is something entirely new is crazy.
Also in this particular story, the person majored in art, then another in journalism, and seemed to expect to land something outside PR. What exactly was the expectation that they’d walk straight into an abundance of editor newspaper jobs?
I’m not saying times aren’t tough, but these stories always follow the same pattern of someone chooses a low-paying or declining field, skips internships or relevant experience, overinvests in that path, and then expects a high-paying job simply for having the same degree millions of other people also have.
Jobs are readily available in in demand fields. But if you want a good job, you usually need to do more than just earn the diploma.
I don't think many Gen-Zers are expecting an immediate dream job, they expect it to take a few hundred applications at least.
I guess it's a combination of a lot of factors, inflation hit hard in 2021 and many are feeling the cost of living squeeze, many industries overhired during the pandemic and are hiring less people now as correction. Many companies are trying to use AI to replace entry level workers. I think millenials had it rough too, many millenials entered the workforce in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis where things were also really bad.
In terms of choosing an in demand field, things can change very quickly, many of the fresh grads picked their career in 2020-2021 when tech hirings were at an all time high. Now tech hirings have slowed down and the field is oversaturated with credible fears of AI stealing jobs.
I think you have a lot of fresh grads with tons of tuition debt, trying to find an entry level job that are in low supply and are caught in the brink of lots of AI uncertainty which is leading way to a lot more pessimism than usual. Social media also plays a factor, where algorithms are pushing people who are unemployed towards these doomerism like posts.
I don't think these experiences should take away from struggles that earlier generations experienced, this is not the first economic downturn to have occurred
I don't know about you, but my parents are on the very young end of the boomer generation and their take on finding work has always been "if you're jobless, you accept any job you're offered because you don't know when the next offer will be". That's not the opinion of someone who had it easy.
There was a time in the 80's where jobs weren't easy to come by, and it traumatised the working generations at the time, but we don't consider it because we didn't live through it. It's easy to look at the spoils while dismissing the toil.
As a software developer, I'm painfully aware that the 2010's were a rare time of plentiful jobs that might not reoccur in my lifetime. I'm sure I'll hear my kids pretend us Millennials had it easy on that basis.
> It's easy to look at the spoils while dismissing the toil.
Yeah the 70s were so much better to grow up in.
Unless of course you lived with the anxiety of getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam and dying in a swamp like your brother.
Reddit is an echo chamber of a generation's own plights and problems. And of course, their problems are worse than the prior generation's. Just like the prior generation's problems were worse than their parents, and so on.
Half of the commentary seems to be along the lines of "it was easy for them but it's hard for me!" With the occasional "it was hard for me but it's easy for them!" And of course that's pretty dismissive and people get pretty annoyed when their own work gets minimized like this. It's pretty unproductive, really.
Regarding the subject of the article— My wife and I are both first-generation college/first-generation post college degree folks who are musicians on the side. Our attitudes were always “we can’t possibly work in music, our families aren’t rich enough to support us while building a career”.
The truth seems to be that there are a lot of fields and jobs these days (often in the arts, but not exclusively) where you sort of have to have family money to support you in a way to be able to take the risks to be successful, and people from middle class/working class families who go into these jobs have to be super lucky to be successful or they just end up perpetually underemployed. The arts, journalism, academia (I have a PhD and the folks I know that were really successful getting professorships benefited a ton from family support) are the ones that immediately come to mind.
It’s not imaginary old people at all. My dad is a boomer and we were talking years ago when I had a job making just $8.50 an hour immediately after college. He said, “that’s about what I made when I was your age.” The thing is, he was talking about immediately post-high school, which was 1978 for him, and that $8.50 was the equivalent of $32.54 in 2016 when we had the conversation.
What’s really interesting is talking to silents. They are WAY more likely to tell you that shit is broken now and the American Dream is dead. I had an 80 year-old woman tell me that mostly unprompted (we were talking about her daughter’s recent house purchase) while we waited on a train a week ago. My wife’s 90 year-old grandma has been saying the same for years. Boomers have a distinctly positive outlook on the economy that their elders do NOT share.
I tend to defend boomers because they went through a time of economic turbulence, most of their wealth is concentrated among a few, and many are struggling on Social Security. But it’s absolutely not a figment of online millennials’ and zoomers’ imaginations that Boomers think the world is a lot gentler than it is.
EDIT: Something I was thinking about yesterday was that homeownership is still regularly talked about as a way to build wealth, but that’s actually pretty outdated. It’s now a way to STORE wealth that you have already built on the stock market. The median first-time homeowner is now 40 years old, and trending upward in age still. You don’t get a job at the brass plant like my dad did, then go buy a house. You work the better part of your entire career, then you finally buy a house when you start to ease off the hammer.
That's the point. The diploma used to be the 'doing more' to get a decent job.
Competition is so high that 'just a diploma' is seen as an absolute bare minimum and even then is rarely enough.
Ambitious folks would take those entry-level jobs and leverage opportunities within organizations to build skillsets and climb the ranks.
Now young workers are expected to get into a reputable university, preform very well, optimize your track by strategically selecting your area of study, compete for graduate programs, earn graduate degrees, while doing this have collected an adequate amount of internships/projects/references and then find a job.
Which is fine if you are organized, ambitious, with a clear vision at an early age. Students that are self-financed rely on massive loans, can't invest in much in personal projects or work free internships, and if they need to drop out or something happens they are laden with debt and no degree. It is an incredible amount of work and risk and more importantly it doesn't need to be this way.
The times today are not unique. There were major recessions in 1973 and 1979. GenX went through the same in 1990, 1999, and 2001. Millennials had the same experience in 2008.
Having a degree in liberal arts or any non-marketable degree. never was a guarantee of a job. Yet people keep getting them.
What is different is that immigrants are competing for skilled labor with Americans in the USA, and Canadians in Canada. That is the fault of your Congress/Parliament allowing that to happen, and everyone who voted for them - or didn't vote at all.
Bullshit: The immigrant argument is nonsense. Every time the job market gets tough, idiots look for an easy scapegoat instead of addressing the actual issues.
Immigrants are not why someone cannot get hired. Companies have been outsourcing, automating, demanding more credentials for entry-level roles, suppressing wages, and cutting training pipelines for years. That is a corporate and policy issue, not an immigration issue.
Also, if immigrants were supposedly taking all the skilled jobs, why are there constant shortages in healthcare, trades, engineering, and other technical fields?
I never said all of the jobs. But there are 2 million Indians working in the US, and CS grads can't find jobs. Skilled older workers are training their H1B contract replacements. Connect the dots.
Tech companies wildly overhired, then did mass layoffs while schools kept pushing huge numbers of CS grads into the same field. Entry level jobs got saturated, companies started demanding absurd experience for junior roles, and automation plus outsourcing added more pressure and then AI exploded.
Saying there are millions of Indians in the US proves nothing especially since your numbers are off. Using a population number to imply job theft is the kind of dumbass logic I have come to expect from people who push this view.
If your issue is companies abusing visa programs to suppress wages, then blame the companies and policy but that absolutely doesn’t paint the real picture.
That is exactly the issue - visa abuse. It also applies to other fields, like engineering. Lots of recent engineering graduates - where there is supposedly a 'shortage' - can't find jobs.
My Uncle was the stereotypical Boomer. Retired with an awesome pension and everything, and would always repeat how it's not that hard out there and that it wouldn't be a problem to do well after retirement. Decided to retire, and went and got lawn equipment to side hustle. A month in he started getting a massive list of complaints from other Boomers like "You shouldn't be cutting grass on weekends" as well as parking too close to the neighbors of the houses he was cutting among many other things. Eventually only wound up doing a few close friends houses. Then he decided I'll just go get a part time job somewhere. Gets a gig delivering auto parts or something, and works two days and never goes back in. Didn't even bother to go get his paycheck. Hasn't done anything else since then. Don't know what his thoughts on things are these days as he now doesn't have much to say about how it's actually easy to "make things happen" anymore.
At this point I'm taking the entrepreneurship route (not by choice). I would have been happy with a boring 9-5, but I couldn't get anyone to hire me. I wonder what the economy would look like if all of the new grads who can't find a job just start their own small business.
I have a BSCS and graduated on the 15th with my MSCS. Had a 4.0 during my master's and inducted into the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. I've been working construction for 3 years since finishing my bachelor's.
I'm probably at 1000 applications. I had 1 phone screening last year for a job related to my degree. I've had 1 this year. Both federal positions. Not a single private sector job has called me. The one this year is a year long research fellowship and happened Thursday. They told me I should hear back by 2 weeks. If I get that I'll become an ORISE fellow then try to get into a PhD program cause my goal is to be a scientist at PNNL, CRREL, or I guess FDA.
But anyways, after 3 years since graduating my college degree has been worthless so far.
Just apply and forget. It's a numbers game. The website is nice, because you can literally just hit submit for every job application. You don't have to change your résumé at all.
Was this way for me back in 2008. I didn’t get a decent job aligned with my degree until 2012. Shit sucks.
I’m not saying this to say I had it harder. It fucking sucked and the narrative back then was that everyone in my position was spoiled and entitled, etc. It was bullshit then and it is bullshit now.
Society is shifting faster than institutions can adapt. It isn’t fair to people in your situation.
I already chase construction jobs across the US so yes. I've lived in 4 different states in the past 2 years. I've applied nationwide for jobs in rural states like Wyoming and Alaska to bustling metros like NYC/Boston/etc
This is a little annoying to me. For an entry level job, you should not have to have side projects or internships. It's entry level. I get having interesting things to talk about in an interview, but wouldn't college level work fit that bill? The inflation for just having to get an entry level job these days is insane. You no longer need a bachelors and a masters. You now need experience in the form of internships.
My take on this is yes in theory, for entry level, you probably shouldn’t need side projects or internships.
However entry level positions are literally a competition. Since it’s a competition, people are naturally going to do what they can to get an edge on their competition such as having side projects to show off.
If enough people do this, then having side projects become the minimum.
Regardless of what job you’re trying for or seniority level the hiring manager will want the most qualified, hardest working, smartest, most motivated employee. If one guy hustled his ass off to get internships every summer and the other went home to work at an ice cream stand which would you hire?
Not a single internship responded to me despite applying my sophomore and junior year during undergrad, and the first year of my master's. And I applied nationwide for internships. I have side projects and one even caught the eye of a federal research lab hiring manager until their budget was cut last year. A couple, like the one the Federal lab was interested in, even had papers written for them.
I just chalk it up to companies running Skeleton crews and not wanting to train entry level. I know someone who graduated from Purdue with a CS degree and they can't find anything either. They're at least getting interviews though. My master's is at a top state school that's ranked in the 70s nationwide.
Where are these jobs you’re applying to? What region? Some areas have a lot more work that others. It’s not always ideal to relocate, but being in the right market can make a big difference. I’ve had friends and family who wanted to work in film and television, but they didn’t want to go to LA. I said, you might not always have to live there, but you should start there.
If it popped up on LinkedIn, Handshake, or USAJobs then I applied. I would go through jobs filtered by being posted in the last week and apply to every single one. I didn't focus on a specific region.
Straight to masters with no work experience (and limited to no relevant internships) is often a negative signal to employers, especially if from a lower tier school.
It’s more than “often a negative signal”. It’s a huge red flag. When I see that profile, I question whether they’re willing/able to work full time, and whether they even know the practicalities of working in their chosen industry. Industry != Academia
For younger folks reading this, do whatever you can to obtain internships/work experience. Apply earlier, work in adjacent roles, hell delay graduation if you must.
In stem/stem-adjacent fields, the internship between your junior and senior year is possibly the most important part of college (early-career wise).
And you get a good internship that summer by having a decent internship the prior summer (doesn’t have to be fancy, but should be “real work” ata company or RA for a relevant professor, not an hourly retail job at the mall, camp counselor, etc.). Summer after freshman year you can do whatever.
Edit: I mostly tell people to major in what interests them the most. Take some basic Econ and stats (and maybe get exposed to some programming), but spend your time on a major that excites you. That plus some good internships opens more career options than having the “right” major by itself.
(Obviously doesn’t apply to something like an electrical engineer where you can’t work in the field without the degree, but a million business careers don’t require a specific major…I know history majors at hedge funds and chemistry majors who haven’t seen a lab since they graduated but work good white collar jobs).
I don't necessarily agree with the no work experience part but I 100% agree about internships. It's not enough to just get a degree nowadays. Internships and a portfolio for relevant fields set you above other applicants.
I am thinking more about the BS to MS path with no work in between (In a field like tech where even having a CS BS isn’t mandatory—many good programmers majored in something else and never went to grad school at all).
Going straight into an MS is often a sign that “I couldn’t get a job” (Masters applications skyrocket in recessions) and someone with an MS and no prior work experience is often no more useful than an entry level BS employee…and typically want more pay because of the MS.
They also often get less out of The MS degree. Go straight from a BS into 1-2 more years of school and you don’t have the context to maximize your learning.
Work for a couple of years first before the MS and the masters becomes a tool to focus your personal development on the holes you noticed while working. You can apply that job knowledge to your education and gain a LOT more from it.
I’m a millennial and I went back to school like 8 years ago. Got a job. Worked for 4 years. Burnt out and quit and I can’t find a job now. It’s been almost two years and I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I wasted the last 8 years of my life
Not surprise the old aren’t retiring so no one can move up in the company and Covid cut teams down and between the ai hype and cut of government spending everywhere is downsizing. The markets seems good but it’s beyond delusional this is the markets intended effects. The corps don’t care about jobs just profit the idea they’d provide jobs is a cope that is some make believe version of capitalism. They’re required to put efficiency over humanity
Because there is no prosperity to be had if you don't already have a lot of money that can just passively make you more money. The only path to prosperity for young people is starting an online business with low overhead that somehow takes off (doubtful) or getting hit by a bus and winning a large settlement. Salaried jobs don't offer a middle class life anymore until you move up like 4 rungs to be a department manager of AI integration or some bullshit.
Last year I went to a local university that specializes in computer science and IT administration. I presented stuff about my company and had 2 internships spots available. I received upwards of 500 LinkedIn messages and applications for those spots. Each resume was nearly identical to each other (all good actually). I just don’t think the private sector is really pushing new job openings at ALL for entry level people - and that’s fucked up.
Because they turned changed education from advancing human knowledge to a paywall entry for a job that doesnt pay enough to justify the debt. What sense does it make to get a degree if you start adulthood in such a hole you cant afford an adult life?
Turns out it wasn’t necessarily the college degree which ensured prosperity, it was the fdr-style government which created and enforced rules for the benefit of the country.
> Jes Vesconte graduated from one of California’s most prestigious art schools, did a Fulbright in Germany and got a master’s from Columbia University.
I’m sure new grads have it rough right now. But this is a terrible first example. Arts degrees have never been a guaranteed thing lol, and this mfer got a masters.
In general the article is sort of weak. Worst hiring since COVID? That’s like 4 years ago.
When you can walk in your town and see the main buildings don't need a degree for their good paying jobs, then it will be a fundamental shift. As of now and for the foreseeable future, the school, the hospital, the big government building, the courthouse, etc all need degrees to do well in, and same goes for any non-retail/service job for any fortune 500 company.
By 'cyclical' do you mean 'the unproductive, perverse, and parasitic financial system that erodes incentive to invest in anything but debt, gambling apps, and regulatory capture collapses every 100 years followed by temporary fixes'?
The furthest left our corporate media allows is like 'The stock market is totally how the economy works you guys. The well-being of the working class is measured in children raped by the oligarchs. Just redefine unemployment easy peasy. Yay corporate stock buy backs'
>We had the same talk with millennials and eventually most entered the workforce anyhow.
We had a pretty crazy global financial crisis as many of us were entering the work force.. so yeah, thankfully that eventually ended.
This time seems different, as companies are changing their hiring strategy to not hire entry level people anymore. I've watched this happen slowly over the last 10 years in my field, and AI just made it a whole lot worse.
You can always tell an article is based on nothing but bullshit when it opens up with cute little anecdotes about a random person graduating with an art degree.
We all realize that they’re steering kids away from college because they don’t want people to be able to critically think, right? You need to go to college to become a carpenter, electrician, and many other blue collar jobs. This is divisive garbage.
What? You do not need to go to a 4 year college to become an electrician, plumber, HVAC tech, roofer,or carpenter etc
That being said tons of schools are not worth anything close to their tuition cost - guaranteeing the tuition fully took away the back check of results by lenders. Obviously they were very conservative so it was depriving a lot of deserving people of the chance to go. There should have been some balance - guaranteeing loans up to x for y# of students. The idea that every single person should get a 4 year degree created a lot of requirement inflation for jobs too that was unnecessary.
In most European countries university is free or close to free but it is usually a lot more difficult to get accepted into those schools.
In the US a lot of people that are not ready for a 4 year school go for a year or two and drop out. Or go to lower or mid tier schools and get graduated when they otherwise wouldn't be.
In my state enrollment has dropped like a rock at every public 4 year school except for 3. The schools with low enrollment will literally take almost anyone with a pulse (as long as you got the money or a willing lender to loan you said money)
The US definitely needs this, IMO. It’s similar to how medical school and residency works— the number of residency spots are limited by the ACMGE and the medical school seats do not exceed the number of residency spots. A student wouldn’t want to go through all of medical school for $400k, and not get a residency position at the end of it….
Dude it’s more about how well paying positions were sent overseas to cut labor costs and post pandemic they kept the skeleton crews and didn’t hire back and now with ai they’re trying to cut even more labor cost. This isn’t some conspiracy it’s capitalism working as intended.
Exactly. The number of younger people I’ve hired who repeat this idea without realizing how much harder the market is for people without education or credentials is wild.
No one is saying every degree is equal, but nearly every metric still shows that higher education increases lifetime earnings and employability.
These stories also almost always leave out key context which is what degree did they choose, what internships did they do, and what field were they targeting? Almost always its someone who chose a declining field, did little to make themselves competitive, and then frames the issue as if college itself was the scam.
If you go to school for engineering, nursing, medicine or other in-demand professions, you will have opportunities.
The problem is not education. It is pretending all educational paths have the same market value and the people pushing this idea know this. They want a dumb workforce willing to cheer for less opportunity.
Yep. My son saw a reel by Andrew Tate and decided to pivot his life into trades because some guy in the manosphere did a rant about avoiding working in the matrix.
If you haven't learned "critical thinking skills" by the time you enter college, then your high school failed you. College is not designed to turn students into scholars. It's designed to prepare scholars for the working adult world, be that in engineering, business, medicine, the fine arts, whatever.
Yeah Reddit is wild man. The general consensus seems to be:
“They love the poorly educated and are openly attacking education to keep people dumb”
AND
“College is for suckers who needs education? Learn a trade instead!”
As though trades are easy and the key to riches lol. Millenials in my experience are a generation raised by tradesman who wanted more for their kids than backbreaking labor. And now we’re watching that same labor pitched as the one true answer.
Those trades don’t require ‘degrees’. They need ‘diplomas’. They’re actually now steering people towards the trades because hiring for most white collar jobs which require expensive degrees collapsed.
As if school these days actually promotes critical thinking.
Basically all the deep thinking electives that aren't required for a degree have been reduced as they've been deemed unimportant. At least, at a lot of community and standard 4 year universities.
This is absolutely not how any college course or higher education works. That’s fairly true for grade school but absolutely not college level coursework.
Sadly, it has influenced a lot of colleges into becoming diploma mills because that's easier than failing students who took on debt to pay exorbitant tuition fees.
Back in 2006, I attended community college. For my Eng/Comp 2 class, the instructor was an emeritus prof. Guy must've been in his mid 70s already (I'm sure he's passed by now). But he liked teaching. Plus, he admitted he needed the money lol. But he still had a sharp mind.
Anyway, he would recount some issues he was having with the admin at the college (ie bitch about his bosses, as we all do). Apparently, he was failing too many students. Though having seen some of my peers' papers, I totally understand why he would.
But he was getting in trouble for that. One day he actually said, "We're no longer educators! We're just academic prostitutes!" referencing him and his fellow faculty members.
I knew that grade inflation and no-fail was a thing in K-12. In some ways, I experienced that grade inflation, especially in high school (AP/Honors-type classes contributed GPAs 1 point higher than normal; so an A in the class gave a 5.0 instead of the typical 4.0, so on and so forth).
But I didn't expect it in college. That was genuinely shocking, which is why I still remember him saying all that. And this was just a community college! Imagine my surprise when I found out vaunted schools like the Ivy Leagues were doing the same thing. Terrible.
People are in denial about the decline of higher education, but that also doesn't mean college doesn't also have significant individual and societal value.
Oh 100%. I actually didn't finish a degree until 2018! I ended up going back to that community college to finish my 2yr degree (back in the 00s, I was just planning to transfer out; not get my Associates).
Sure, I was already long into my career (IT) without a degree. But I felt it was important to get some piece of paper. And guess what? The current job I have now? I wouldn't have been able to get this job at this place without a degree. This is the highest paying job I've had by a significant margin. Even just getting the 2yr degree opened up a door that would've been shut to me otherwise, even with experience.
More to the point, a lot of people aren't ready for college straight out of high school but are a few years later in life. There is no one right path for everyone.
If I was advising high schoolers [and their parents] today, I would be encouraging every one of them to be developing job skills in high school including those that translate directly into vocational training. Not all high schools offer these programs ofc so that's part of the problem [and usually means parents need to be more involved in finding a solution which further narrows the funnel].
It absolutely has significant individual and societal value, however the shift to making it all about career education is I feel weaking it.
You have fewer seeking scholarly pursuits for the sake of scholarly pursuits. It is true such things are a privilege, however the constant bashing of it is a problem. The extensive bashing of liberal arts degrees when these degrees can absolutely be extensively rigorous is absurd to me.
Personally, I always see education as something to seek enrichment with. I had discussions with my local college's philosophy professor who told me the type of things I am seeking now are simply meet ups with passionate doctoral and post-doctoral students and alumni and no longer are formal classes.
The irony is, the enrichment I seek is free and is now informal outside of the classroom now. Just, without these people as professors and these subjects being in the classroom, the role of education has just shifted and is I feel it absolutely risks progress on the knowledge that makes us human and not robots. These groups need to be prized, funded, put into positions in the university, and their knowledge should be shared.
Will we have another Noam Chomsky at the current direction we're going?
What is your source for this information? You’re painting with an incredibly broad brush and frankly I don’t believe you have nearly enough information to make this claim about thousands of colleges across the country confidently.
Of course, not all are like this, but increasingly so schools have been eliminating elective classes, especially those deemed controversial, due to budget cuts, government pressure and streamlining and focusing less on "unprofitable" classes and majors that focus on niche subjects, to strictly profitable ones.
We used to take university as a place of scholarly pursuits. Now it's just to get a job. Same goes for secondary school. My old city in Massachusetts still has electives galore and it's still basically science, math, history, English and whatever you want as it was in the past, but most high schools are no longer like this. My local schools are basically the basic subjects, foreign language and a single art or music class. Nothing else. The local community college and the local 4 year colleges are also very similar.
There's been talks of reducing the bachelor's degree to 3 years and cutting electives.
Every single program has to take a workplace communication course of some kind. In that course you learn critical thinking, media literacy, resume and cover letter writing etc. it’s mandatory
My local programs are basically how to write an essay and they read basic literature. There's no requirement of higher leveled thinking at all.
Also, no, not every program requires that. But that doesn't mean you learn critical thinking even if they do seeing one course isn't going to do really much at all.
I taught post secondary for years in general education across many programs including carpentry, welding, business, personal support worker, business admin, and early childhood education. Yes they all have that requirement. Critical thinking is day 2 actually. It goes syllabus, grammar recap, critical thinking, reading and viewing.
You can't teach critical thinking in a single class nevermind on day 2 alone. It requires sufficient work for years, engaging different material, different ways of thinking and regular challenges.
I'm saying that it's like saying that somebody has learned basic math because they took part in a 3 day seminar. You literally can't even touch the surface in a short class, which is the problem.
You are really trying to make this a thing hey? The people wrote the article for purposes of division. Division is then used as an excuse to defund and privatize education. There isn’t anything conspiratorial about it, and this article obviously isn’t the only one being promoted on Reddit, and obviously pages like Reddit are used to propagandize and create more division, as is currently happening here.
Lmao. What a take. No, it’s just not something worth going into debt for. It never really was outside of handful of degree paths. Smart people always looked to keep costs as low as possible. Now the equation has shifted more and people, rightfully and normally, adjusted.
College isn’t to teach critical thinking. College is to get the required paperwork needed for a career path. You should also be working while in college to keep costs low and build experience.
These are common sense things. Maybe you’d call it critical thinking.
Dang you right. There’s definitely a vast conspiracy to convince young people it’s a bad idea to take out loads of debt on liberal arts degrees. The evil THEY.
This whole conversation has been about trade diplomas from colleges, but probably at least a few people should have liberal arts degrees yes, and science degrees, we might even need a few doctors and nurses and teachers, maybe even some engineers. Not everyone can work in the trades, and if everyone did work in trades then the trades would pay like shit. On top of that, people in the trades should also have some level of media literacy and critical thinking education, which is why they are required to have a diploma from a college.
They don’t teach critical thinking in college unless you’re pursuing a STEM or a law degree. Too many kids are graduating with worthless degrees, and very little skills. I’m talking about writing, basic communications, personal interactions.
Engineering and technical schools do it best, which includes developing experience before you graduate and focusing on specific areas.
But in the end, it’s up to you to market yourself and make yourself a success. No one is just going to give you a job.
Yes they do. Communication is a mandatory course that includes critical thinking, media literacy, resume and cover letter writing etc. I taught post secondary for years, many programs also had a mandatory personal finance course
The typical college "Communications" course is a joke that will give any frat bro with a hangover an A if he can Google the answers to a multiple choice online quiz and give a 10 minute presentation without puking.
Writing a cover letter is not real college-level work lol. That is not worth thousands of dollars of tuition.
That’s all things you were supposed to learn in high school! That’s not critical thinking, that’s basic communication skills! Critical thinking is problem solving, performing analysis, strategy, planning and execution.
You have an excellent point, and kudos to you for teaching those things, they are all very important.
But I learned how to write in high school and never had a writing course in college, yet I never got less than a B+ on any paper. But once I started working, I learn me how to improve my writing to an even greater extent.
And every junior engineer I’ve trained has had to improve their writing and communication skills. So it is a skill that requires constant improvement.
But critical thinking is something even more than learning those skills. And it’s just not taught typically during a four year degree, unless it’s STEM. For example, my niece went through four years at a major university, graduated with honors, and entered law school on a scholarship. She admits that it was in law school that she really learned her critical thinking skills.
Im not sure this follows. High school should be sufficient for critical thinking, and any trade involves a certain amount of it that can be developed outside of a college setting.
Thats unrelated to my comment nor the claim I’m addressing. My point is simply the development of critical thinking does not require a university degree.
College is a good place to have your thinking challenged. If one stops their former education after highschool, it is unlikely they will have their thinking regularly challenged (unless they happen to get into a career with a robust culture of innovation and growth) , which can really put the brakes on intellectual development.
Have you ever tried to diagnose a problem with plumbing or electrical work? It will absolutely challenge your thinking. Also if you’re ever around blue collar folks, they argue about new and current event in a way that white collar professionals often don’t. Most white collar workers I know just assume everyone agrees on their political views.
Yes I have, and it’s good for the mind and enjoyable, but I don’t think it’s the same as a college campus or a company that is building new products. College professors challenge their student’s thinking constantly, and I’m not talking about politics, I’m talking about theory and philosophy.
Ideally that would be the case but in practice I don’t think a lot of college students actually gent much rigorous instruction. This feels fruitless. My argument is that the ingredients for critical thinking are present in any standard high school curriculum, whether any individual person avails themselves of that opportunity is a different matter.
Yes I have. My plumber was a Sargent in the army defusing booby traps until he was shot several times in the back. Very intelligent, very impressive young man. When he’s not working he’s fixing up houses for other wounded veterans.
And you have no idea how smart you have to be to become a master plumber.
I’ve seen a lot of idiots with college degrees.
Yes I have. The plumber I use is a pretty sharp guy. Maybe you’re just condescending. Electrician also do a complicated job that requires a lot of thought and planning. I think you’re just painting people a stupid because you perceive them to have bad politics. A carpenter will almost always have better than average spatial reasoning skills, for example. The job simply requires you to understand how objects relate in 3D space under various conditions.
Colleges don’t have a critical thinking class either. However geometry and algebra both teach logic at a high school level. Any decent 11th and 12th grade English classes should also cover critical thinking with respect to discussing books.
Moreover education in trades will cover things like deductive reasoning. How do you think a plumber diagnoses a problem?
If you have met a young adult you know high school age is not enough for critical thinking… your brain isn’t even fully mature until you are almost 30.
That’s not true. Brain structures continue to develop throughout your entire life, but society seems people to be more or less individually competent at 18 because it’s close enough. Trying to use scientism to demean people without college degrees is just ridiculous.
No one is demeaning people without a college degree I’m saying anyone who has met a recent high school graduate knows that level of experience is not generally “sufficient for critical thinking”. The only people who think that are 18 year olds.
That experience doesn’t have to be college but anyone who thinks you exit high school as someone fully ready to contribute to society likely just left high school.
That’s the argument I’m making. A college degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop critical thinking. Secondary education contains all of the necessary ingredients but we both agree mere attendance isn’t sufficient. My point at the top was simply that you don’t need college to think critically.
Your argument was high school should be sufficient. We both know it isn't.
You then shifted your argument to the idea colleges can be shitty. I agree, but colleges are also where critical thinking is developed if you put in the work.
>you don’t need college to think critically
Most people don't become critical thinkers without college education so that argument is flawed. We aren't saying developing your critical thinking outside academia is impossible, we are saying it is statistically less likely [and with a lower upper limit] to a material degree.
edit: the account blocked so they can die on the hill of something being theoretically possible rather than something being widely practical.
Yeah it should be if you pay attention at all, that’s still my argument. College may or may not even require coursework related to critical thinking depending on your degree.
The claim that most people don’t become critical thinkers without a college degree is not one you can back up with evidence, it’s merely your opinion based on your personal animus towards the working class.
The issue is that if you have too many college graduates like the US has now, there won’t be enough white collar jobs to support them. Even once lucrative majors like CS are struggling with a terrible job market. For a lot of prospective students it’s hard to justify going to university and acquire a lot of debt just to potentially be unemployed or underemployed afterward.
Also, I don’t know where you live but the trades absolutely don’t require college.
Honestly my first job in industry was the eye opener. You had multiple people with a PhD having invested 10 years into education being told what to do by a guy with a management degree or no degree at all who was not much older but on 10x the salary, explaining to everyone why education didn't matter. What baffled me was anyone who knew anything knows that company is not going anywhere because the management didn't understand their product required tools which do not currently exist and won't for another 20 years. Honestly they might have been able to make it work but the scientific staff couldn't care less because the wages were stagnant and they were constantly being asked to do more for the company on their own time.
No it absolutely was, america had the best economy in the world under Biden. 2024 Inflation was a global problem due to covid, so blaming that on Biden ain't gonna work as well for the educated.
You gotta disinform them via social media memes and fox news to feed that narrative.
I mean we still have the best economy in the world. Even right now. Our Economy has been propped by AI spending and disconnected from the typical American for years now so that doesn’t really matter. But even under Biden things weren’t really that great although they were definitely improving. Trump has however made things substantially worse with his policies, from tariffs to the Iran war.
Part of the problem in measuring his toll is that the effects aren't limited to just the American economy. Like Trump's war has caused higher energy prices and inflation across the world, but at the end of the day that's a decision American voters chose.
I’m a leftist guy and this just isn’t true. The reality is that the Biden administration, in partnership with the fed, made a lot of changes to essentially nail the soft landing after the insane inflationary policies that the world needed during COVID. Those policies are not Trump’s fault or Biden’s fault - they were necessary measures at the time.
So essentially a soft landing happened and the rate in which inflation was rising finally evened out. The outcome of that? Still insanely high inflation coupled with the tech industry seeing healthy and necessary corrections. The end result to the everyday American was pain - and the argument that it could be way more painful is not one that will resonate with people. So the youth and the struggling poor felt not seen and with little options, so they voted against their perceived status quo - and now things are way worse.
I can’t fault them too much, the left did a horrible job explaining what was happening and the value they were bringing. And quite honestly, the 2024 election cycles all over the world was an incumbency bloodbath for all the same reasons.
Edit - I think I’m just agreeing with you actually. This understanding does require a lot of economic policy and current events know-how to digest.
I have a secret for everyone who needs to hear it:
Four years of any presidency are not enough to "fix" anything.
Everyone wants to just take a pill and all the sudden their ailments are fixed. Nothing works that way. You either commit to longer-term physical therapy or you take your pills until you run out.
It's clear no one here is actually under the age of 25 because everyone we knew who graduated in 2021/22 basically had a free ride to an office job, while by mid-2024 the view of the job market was overwhelmingly negative.
As a millennial with only a HS education, a CDL & in a union. I know many many fellow millennial & Gen Z who have college degrees and struggle to find a job or a job that pays well.
While I'm drowning un work & have mutiple months off during winter while keeping my union health insurance. I am glad I never listening to my HS teachers & did not go to college.
Boomers are actually saying, “Go to a trade school instead of accumulating debt through college now. They pay you to train you, and you make big bucks coming right out of the starting gate, and you start with ZERO DEBT.”
You 100% still have to pay for trade schools and technical colleges… also telling an entire generation to do that is a quick way to tank wages resulting in the same issues as telling everyone they have to go to college.
Skilled trades offer exceptional job security and earning potential due to a retiring workforce and a surge in infrastructure and clean energy projects. The most in-demand trades include electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers, welders, and solar installers.’
A central platform of the Democrats was "go to college" to elevate the wages of the struggling working class, with no thought as as to who would perform the jobs vacated by the new college grads and the idea that jobs that required a college degree would be ever expanding to meet the expanding supply.
When that failed, Democrats pushed for college loan forgiveness as the next waves of college grads could not find jobs that would fund re-payment of the college loans and the jobs they did find were the same essential jobs that Democrats were unable to raise wages on.
Now, with an oversupply of college grads, wages in those areas are stagnant as well and jobs that require a college degree have so many competing for them that wages are stagnant and unable to meet rising housing costs.
Until Democrats (or Republicans?) focus on raising the floor of wages for the American workers, this problem will persist.
Unfortunately humanity is a bit dummer than we are led to believe. We may as well change the name from humanity to "follow the leader."
Sure its real cool to use your own brain and make it work, learn big words and visit the lofty reaches of what is fair and possible... but then you may find yourself all alone and very angry at all the people.
Yeah, you can see that there is not a single person in /r/economics who knows a single thing about the subject or the economy right now. It's remarkable how everyone on this site prefers to wallow in their stupidity than look at reality.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say when these statistics were first true, the types of degrees we more limited and were actually a function of their job.
You can get a bachelors degree in almost anything today if you find the right school or pay enough.
Statistically you might earn more in your life time with a degree, but 4 year degrees have become so saturated it’s the equivalent of a high school diploma 40 years ago.
C'mon before I even started thinking about schools and majors it was well, well established that certain majors were not useful for employment, let alone "ensure prosperity".
Did this person only start consuming media yesterday?
“The idealized life of the Carrie Bradshaw, or the cast of Friends, that we see in these TV shows might have been possible when those shows existed, but now, capitalism has fractured things so much that even having a social life in New York City is really an effort,” Vesconte said.”
It was never possible to have those lifestyles for the average person - even when those shows aired. And the original audience watching those shows in the 90s/00s by and large understood that. There were a ton of jokes made about that.
I know people with college degrees that do dog grooming, landscaping etc. I know one who is now in her 70s and is still paying student loans. She never did anything beyond executive assistant.
It's interesting to contrast this article with another one taking the opposite position: Young people are rich and miserable. Personally I think both are only partly capturing the current economic environment.
To disentangle the two it's worth remembering while unemployment among recent grads has increased somewhat the past few years, youth unemployment actually peaked a few years after the 2007 great recession. So the raw unemployment rate cannot be the primary driver of this discontent. Maybe it's because of down-skilling because of the no-hire no-fire environment. However the vacancy rate is about on par with the unemployment rate. There's some discussion about student loans, but again it might be worse than 2022 when the Biden admin was fighting for student loan relief and a creating like the programs like SAVE, but it doesn't appear to more burdensome as a percent of income than 2008-2015. Same with prices overall, wages across the income spectrum (especially towards the bottom where new grads would start) have outpacedinflation and inflationary environments ought to benefit net borrowers like new graduates (Dube, Inflation inequality meets wage compression).
I'm sympathetic to the claim that's there's a lot of economic uncertainty especially for new graduates. However, similar to the "vibecession" it's hard to quantify the reason for the malaise. The cost of housing is a strong contender, but again it's clear that first order measures of economic health: wages and employment don't capture the current discontent.
My "ivory tower" coworkers are subsidizing their college age kids to the tune of like 80k a year in the Northeast. Think like 100k a year for a kid in NYC or Boston. They are landing internships and everything.
The kids on reddit are wealthy suburbanites who can literally hang out at mom and dad's house indefinitely while they spam job sites.
Actual real ones are already out working whatever they can land, regardless of their degree. They have to pay rent. Mom isn't covering any bills.
Back in the 90s we all used to wonder how the people in Friends afforded their lifestyles. People today shouldn't think that shows everyday college graduates.
You left out that college is actually meant to be some utopian koombaya where everyone sits in circles and the goal should be to improve society somehow not learn useful social and career skills. Comprehensive list otherwise !!
There’s also plenty of new degrees that don’t generate any money, as well as increased number of college students enrolling in majors that already don’t make money traditionally, like philosophy, music, English, social work, etc..
If people want to make money, engineering and medical school really are the main ones. Or more stable ones like accounting or statistics or nursing.
So one big thing that people need to educate young high schooler when they are picking majors is that they need to focus more on future earning potential, and not just based on their ideals like art or philosophy or social work.
Those degrees are University degrees that were meant to be paired with a graduate degree. That's part of the disconnect. E.g. you do History or Philosophy and then go get a MBA or Master of Psych and used those to earn money.
But even then, even a PhD of History or PhD of philosophy still has a lot of difficulties getting a job, and even if they do get a job, it is hard for them to find something that can offer good initial stability or good initial pay, unlike the consistent careers when you do something like nursing or actuarial, you can come out pretty confident with getting a livable wage. Again that’s part of counseling for high schoolers, that if their goal is to find a steady job with steady pay, don’t look into things like history or philosophy or language arts.
Yes for sure, those PhD's sound like your only career path is professor. I purposely used the MBA and Master of Psych degrees b/c I've seen those paths work career-wise in the tech sector.
I enjoy how every article acts like degrees have been purely devalued while rarely addressing the rise of significantly worthless degrees. We've gone from colleges being full of STEM, Business and teaching degrees to lots of "studies", art, and soft sciences that have never lead to well paying degrees. While the cost to earnings has compressed, pretending like the quality of the overall degree hasn't been drastically watered down is disingenuous.
Is your impression that college students used to study humanities etc at a lower rate? It’s actually the opposite—[the share of students studying that sort of thing has fallen](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/how-colleges-are-adapting-to-the-decline-in-liberal-arts-majors). If anything recent grads have been pressured disproportionately into STEM.
Meanwhile, there’s all kind of evidence that employers still value liberal arts skills, that those grads earn more than those without degrees, and even that they’re happier!
This “worthless degree” strain of thought is basically an invention. There’s not really any such thing.
The number of colleges offering said degrees has EXPLODED. Every college and rushed to create easy degrees to vacuum up unlimited federal loan dollars.
I mean hey, whatever makes my barista happy I guess. liberal arts are great complimentary skills to a hard skills degree but by themselves are by and large worthless.
This idea that the only paths are STEM and a lifetime at coffee shops is certifiable nonsense. (In addition to your claim above about liberal arts majors are “exploding”, which you’ll find is also not the case if you’d bother to click one link.)
> What made them think that getting a masters in art was a good idea?
Right, because what is the point of museums, conservatories, orchestras, theatres. When you think about it, what's the point of poetry, theatre itself, literature. Even philosophy, history are pretty useless when you think about it.
Your argument is entirely ignorant and idiotic in its own right, nevermind the blatant ad hominem about someone's gender identity. But even if you only care about true economic value (whatever that is), you should spend a minute or two thinking about the actually great minds that have shaped our history that have been inspired by all these things you don't value, and think about whether you should.
Unironically yes. If you can't appreciate art, culture, philosophy, history, and all the immense benefits, both economic and otherwise, they have contributed to our society over the last few hundreds of thousands of year, that's on you.
off the top of my head you would develop critical thinking, visual communication, portfolio building, ability to work collaboratively, time management, entrepreneurial skills related to self promotion, cultural literacy that can bring people together.
Business and STEM majors tend to go into college viewing it as a job preparation program. You take the narrow range of classes you need to graduate and you come out on the other end with a job in the field you want. From what I've seen, humanities education typically involves a much wider range of disciplines and perspectives. It almost feels like the value from a business degree is that you don't think critically about the world and just do what you're programmed to do. Don't ask questions, we're out here adding economic value!
Most undergrad universities have used master degrees as a way to pass the buck up the ladder, much like high schools did with undergraduate degrees 40 years ago.
The system is functioning properly and has been for the last 30+ years.
Technology keeps improving faster than human beings. Globalization helped speed that up if technology initially failed.
Many physical entry level jobs have been automated over the same time frame.
Do offices exist the same way they did before? Support admin type entry jobs aren't necessary the same way in WFH environment. So many people don't realize fighting RTO is counterproductive to many entry level function jobs.
This argument is so frustrating because the solution is staring everyone in the face but people simply refuse to accept it.
The only answer to big business overreach is big government. The key is to ensure that you put people in office who will do what we ask them to do. Will they make mistakes? Of course they will. They are humans and therefore imperfect. But to sit here and act like we are powerless and have a “woe is me, I am going to self immolate and show the rich” stupidity is self-defeating and low grade narcissistic. As my mother would say, get off your ass and go do something that actually can make a difference. Sending mean tweets and booing multimillionaires won’t do a damn thing. Voting for people who will tax, regulate, and reform will. We need young people with imaginations, who can develop new regulations for a new century. Too many politicians and policy makers are throwing 20th century reforms (and in some cases 19th century reforms) at 21st century problems. Not going to work.
Pitiful_Option_108 | a day ago
This one is on the private sector. Right now they aren't trying to train for the future they are so worried about immediate profits that entry level work has all but died. Seriously if someone asked me right now how do I break into IT/ Telcom I legit have no answer for them. It is that bad. Oh then the work I have seen where you can break into Telcom at least is crazy because where as in the past companies at least supplied the tools, they are asking you to bring your own tools, optics, and various equipment plus get paid barely 20 dollars an hour. Complete insult when you understand the amount of work and travel you are about to do.
Bandejita | a day ago
In my job they're looking for someone with 4 years of experience and somewhat extensive experience in our field. The job is an associate position. These people just don't want to train and they do not give a fuck, considering the job market, somebody is bound to be desperate enough to take the position
DoubleJumps | 16 hours ago
I saw a company in my field recently demand ten years of experience in each of two related fields for a job that only paid $80k in a high COL area, and wanted that to be a contract job.
I figure they had maybe a dozen potential candidates that fit what they wanted within 1000 miles. I also figured none of them would be willing to take that.
Nobody did.
laxnut90 | a day ago
Why would companies operate any differently?
From their perspective, the system is working perfectly.
They keep getting experienced workers at entry level pay and do not need to pay for training.
Until it stops working, the companies have no reason to change practices.
llechug1 | a day ago
I donot think it's working. I would point at the many issues with Windows 11 that have surfaced relatively recently.
NoCoolNameMatt | a day ago
By the time the impact is fully felt, these execs will have moved on
Gamer_Grease | a day ago
All that matters is whether or not people stop buying Win11.
Difficult-Break-8282 | 20 hours ago
i didnt buy windows 11 , i bought a laptop for uni pre covid and then half a decade later i fell asleep, woke up and everything on the laptop was fucked
dukeofgonzo | 21 hours ago
I think the 'it' in 'Until it stops working' is the company's ability to collect revenue, not the quality of their product.
llechug1 | 21 hours ago
Counter argument to that:
Is that why one of the Microsoft spoke person said consumers are the problem, not the forced implementation of AI and subscription services?
It seems to me that some "innovators" are tired of innovation and just want to make a money with minimal effort.
DoubleJumps | 16 hours ago
I've been seeing some big companies leave money on the table and skunk entire avenues of revenue because of this sort of behavior, so I'm also inclined to say that it's not working.
WellHung67 | a day ago
It works until it doesn’t, and then all the companies get outcompeted by other countries that do invest in their workforce.
It’s a double headed thing though, government has to make college cheap so that when companies get their heads out of their asses and start hiring juniors to collectively keep the pool of skilled workers around, they won’t be in a lot of debt and can get by. Meanwhile, the government can restrict it so that companies can’t hire foreign skilled labor leaving locally grown talent the best bet. It’s an investment in humans.
But of course we have shit republicans attacking education and feckless democrats who can’t just stamp out those fuckers and make this country a two-sane-party system, rather than one party of idiot grifters and the other of ineffective well meaning but corrupt incompetents (who nonetheless have the capacity to be competent when in power)
Gamer_Grease | a day ago
That’s where protectionism comes in. The IS auto industry is a great example. Absolute dogshit products that nobody on earth wants in an open market, but they do fine in the US where it’s illegal to compete against them too well.
WellHung67 | 23 hours ago
Well I think when it comes to the citizens, you want them to be educated so that innovations can happen with home grown talent. You can import it as well but you don’t want your populace to stagnate and leave your colleges empty - you want to produce good people. Then you poach the best from elsewhere and get all the science and tech advances as well as the efficiency improvements. The ideas, as it were
Accidental-Genius | 16 hours ago
I think 50% of Ford sales come from outside the US.
Such_Radio_9152 | a day ago
FAFO
peace2calm | a day ago
> they are asking you to bring your own tools, optics, and various equipment plus get paid barely 20 dollars an hour
Looks like they learned from the mechanic shops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyHZcLNSKT4
Pay barely above minimum pay while worker has to provide own tools that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
gimpwiz | 15 hours ago
CA requires double minimum wage if you supply all the tools, though not everyone affected knows this. Obviously other states have their own rules, or lack thereof, for this.
That said, nobody expects a new guy, whether lot porter or lube guy, to have much in the way of tools. On the flip side anyone with five figures in tools that they own (not bought last week off the truck on a weekly payment plan) earns much better rate.
BathroomMaximum1721 | a day ago
Every dog has his day. A few years ago IT/CS was booming unrealistically while other fields were languishing. Now it has invariably turned into bust.
hannabarberaisawhore | a day ago
Entry level work has not died. It was outsourced overseas.
MildlySaltedTaterTot | a day ago
Our modern society (service-based B2B america) will crumble entirely in the next thirty years without a full rework of how people view labor, work, and skill most of all in today’s economy.
The pre-modern city had trades in abundance, merchants, artisans, services, etc. too. Technology has grown to give us more things we can do, and more specialized disciplines; but now that we have globalized labor and training/apprenticeship can be outsourced, wealth-hungry oligarchs are sacrificing continuous labor training (i.e. sustainable labor practices) for turn-and-burn, cheap minimum wage roles that see an average tenure of 6 months.
Tall-Control8992 | 22 hours ago
Unfortunately, it needs to crumble before any sort of reset or rework will ever happen.
jsnbergman | a day ago
IT has always been a trade within the white collar world, and now it sounds like it's becoming more like a traditional trade. Buy your own tools, don't even think about being in-house for a big company, and hope for the rare steady salary, or be prepared for gig work/going independent.
greensandgrains | a day ago
This is how work has been in Canada (or at least in large cities with the most competition for work) since post 2008. And in most fields, not just STEM. I graduated university in 2012 and I have friends from then who are still on rolling short term contracts (no health benefits - yes we still need private insurance, no pension or retirement savings match, no sick days or pto beyond legal requirements).
Sigma_F0x | a day ago
For IT you can either join the military or start at a MSP. The MSP will be bad pay with a bad environment but if you get a solid 2 years under your belt and a cert or two you can use that to move on to something better.
resuwreckoning | a day ago
No, it’s also on the schooling and the disposition and skills of the graduate coming out. When someone says they have a CS degree and cannot understand what a pointer is, they’re not ready to enter the workforce, no matter how many degrees they have on their wall.
Part of the problem is that we are loathe to admit that these students coming out are not emerging from school, but rather from some kind of expensive day care spa hybrid, where they were treated as high paying consumers and not students. So when they come out, the job, whatever it may be, is now tasked with ACTUAL schooling.
Well, it’s a job, not a school. Some job specific bespoke training is fine but teaching some CS grad c++ from the ground up, or some English grad how to make coherent sentences is not what that time is for. You’re being paid at that point, not paying someone.
Edit: sorry downvoting reddit - if you can’t understand what a signed integer is or explain a pointer after 4 years of computer science, the job isn’t supposed to pay you to learn that skill. You have to go back to an actual school and do the work. Hard to believe, I know.
Pitiful_Option_108 | 20 hours ago
I hear you on the fundamentals point, and I'll give you that — there's a difference between not knowing vendor-specific tooling and not knowing what a pointer is after four years of CS. That's fair.
But my experience tells a different story about the broader argument. I have a degree in electrical engineering technology. When I started at Cox I had never touched a Cisco phone in a professional setting. When I moved into optical networking I didn't know how to program a Ciena 6500, didn't know TX/RX fundamentals for fiber in a live environment — none of it. And I'm not saying that as a criticism of my education, because college was never going to teach me that. That's vendor and role-specific. What I'm saying is that the expectation of 'plug and play' hiring has never really been realistic, and companies used to understand that.
The real shift is that entry level used to mean you came in with foundational knowledge and the company invested in building the rest. That deal is gone. The private sector decided training was overhead and stopped doing it. Now they want fully formed candidates for roles that didn't exist five years ago, and when they can't find them they act like schools failed everyone.
And honestly the AI thing is making it worse from both ends — companies leaning on it to justify leaner teams while students use it to skip the actual thinking that made a degree worth something in the first place.
resuwreckoning | 17 hours ago
Sure but you’re glossing over just how terribly prepared students are coming out of a school that looks at them more like consumers than students. What school doesn’t look at these kids as high spending customers instead of students? Their entire business model is founded on the former - and the customer doesn’t want to feel stressed or have difficulty. It’s supposed to be easy.
The idea that you have to pass everyone or that A’s are easy to get or that students are routinely using chatGPT for their homework is completely antithetical to being prepared when you come out.
Then when they are no longer the customer, it’s jarring because a cost benefit analysis is done. You’re getting paid - and thus that needs to pay off. The juice needs to be worth the squeeze.
I can assure you that if these graduates paid Cisco the hundred K they paid like Purdue for the year they were being taught then Cisco would potentially happily teach them all the skills they ceased to learn in school.
The job isn’t in loco parentis the way people seem to think they should be.
Alle_is_offline | 21 hours ago
No, you're right.
The-Magic-Sword | 20 hours ago
This is the same problem but through the lebs of survivorship bias-- you have hires who don't know what a pointer is because your hiring practices only admits people who don't know what a pointer is, the people complaining about not being hired are complaining because that person got hired instead.
resuwreckoning | 17 hours ago
I genuinely don’t understand what you mean. You’re saying the average is so bad that even worse students are angry because an average student got the job but they’re just as bad?
sf94134 | a day ago
I’m in San Francisco. 30-40 years ago one could get entry level jobs at banks. The big banks have moved a lot of operational jobs offshore or to low salary States. It’s mostly sales/retail jobs now eg sign up new customers and if not you get fired eventually.
Edit: I was just on youtube and this video about Business Process Outsourcing and how AI might affect the industry e.g. India and Philippines, was really interesting. At the 3:30 mark the guy talks about how his BPO job allowed him to send his 4 kids to private school and buy a home.
peace2calm | 17 hours ago
I know a guy who got his first full time job after college at a bank and was TRAINED for a few months and was able to launch a fairly good IT career. He had no background in computer/IT at all. Yah, that was like 30 years ago.
KOJI_JP | a day ago
It’s hard to blame them. Taking on massive student debt just for a chance at an entry-level job that barely pays rent is a brutal reality. The system really needs to change. 😔
supercyberlurker | a day ago
Meanwhile boomers are like : Just give a firm handshake, call them after as a followup to check on things, then take the first paycheck to start investing, saving for retirement, and to make a down payment on a house.
YoohooCthulhu | a day ago
Don’t forget: Don’t apply online! Show up in person with your application and look them in the eye!
KartoffelLoeffel | a day ago
I actually did this recently to see if it still worked. Took a few days to go to every place I knew of that I had the skills for to ask for a job, envelope full of resumes. A handful said “If you look online you can apply” while most just said they weren’t hiring. Back to square one.
Opportunityyy | a day ago
The places that would accept this would be so old school and stubborn that you’d probably have to do everything off of a computer anyway (so there’s little potential for transferable skillz for your next job), and anywhere else would require someone to key in your info into a computer anyway.
Might work with jobs that don’t require a degree though.
KartoffelLoeffel | a day ago
These jobs in fact did not require a degree. It was almost exclusively automotive jobs. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to work, but I’ve been out of options for a month or so now and I’m just trying anything
BrogenKlippen | a day ago
It was manufacturing type jobs where you were then expected to bust your ass. These still exist.
pants_mcgee | 22 hours ago
Look to the oilfield.
KartoffelLoeffel | 22 hours ago
I would go to war before I worked at an oil field
pants_mcgee | 22 hours ago
Well ok then, the military is always hiring mechanics too so you’re in luck.
KartoffelLoeffel | 22 hours ago
I give it 6 months before I take the ASVAB
pants_mcgee | 22 hours ago
Why not the oilfield? There’s mechanic jobs of every flavor, need, and schedule, experience, and location.
Momoselfie | 18 hours ago
Yeah you probably wouldn't even get past the front desk to see the hiring manager.
hannabarberaisawhore | a day ago
How did you even get past the receptionist?
KartoffelLoeffel | 22 hours ago
Auto parts suppliers, warehouses, and dealerships rarely have a receptionist
bobandgeorge | a day ago
> A handful said “If you look online you can apply”
"And if you look in your hands right now you will find my resume"
>while most just said they weren’t hiring.
At least they didn't waste your time then.
pleetf7 | a day ago
This guy would put them to shame: https://amp.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article314555855.html
BrogenKlippen | a day ago
I did use the boomer trick of leaving behind physical thank you cards behind with the receptionist, at my last interview for years ago and I got the job.
patthickwong | a day ago
Can’t say for sure but you probably would have gotten the job anyways without the boomer trick lol
manewitz | a day ago
And wear a suit!
thomasrat1 | a day ago
It’s not terrible advice lol.
If a manager can remember your name/face before reading your application online.
You’re probably 5xs as likely to get hired.
Word_to_Bigbird | a day ago
I mean in the larger business world you're not gonna meet a manager that way. The only field I think you could is possibly retail and even then only at the smaller brick and mortar places. You're not even gonna be able to drop a resume off to a manager at a box store.
thomasrat1 | a day ago
Yeah this advice really only works for first beginner jobs lol. Like being a server, food service in general.
The application thing is dumb to be fair. But getting FaceTime with a manager puts you at the top of the pile. Atleast with entry level basic jobs
specnine | a day ago
Growing up a lot of family friends were doctors that went to the local medical school which is something like top 10 in the country. I also wanted to be a doctor and the common sentiment was it’s relatively luck based if you get in even if you have the stats and I was amazed that so many people I knew went there like it was no big deal.
It only later dawned on me that things were so much simpler 30-40 years ago, if you wanted to be a doctor you simply did good in under grad took the MCAT maybe shadowed a bit and got in. Nowadays even the most brilliant kids have to take gap years and maybe even do a masters to improve their application. The competition isn’t even comparable I can’t even imagine what it’ll be a generation from now
HelloImadinosaur | a day ago
Fewer kids being born makes me hope it’ll be less competitive, but who knows.
iVladi | a day ago
the shorterm solution in reduction of cheap labor has been mass migration, the longterm solution is ai.
the farmers living post black death were the last people that had the power you want in the labor market, your labor value will not be increasing
Skatesafe | 18 hours ago
That would likely just lead to economic contraction and worse labour markets… Doesn’t square with our growth obsessed economy
YoohooCthulhu | a day ago
The number of residency spots is growing much more slowly than the population thanks to industry lobbying, this is by design
janethefish | a day ago
The application process for your first job out of medical school is worse. You need to send out hundreds of applications in a massive wave, nine months before the job actually opens. Each one costs money, like 30 bucks. (Yes, even in states where this is a criminal offense.)
Actually getting an interview is heavily luck based because even the best are sending out masses of applications to the even the least desirable programs, so the programs can't just interview the best.
You would think that hospitals would love cheap physician labor, but the requirements to set up a program to hire new docs is so difficult it doesn't happen without a hundred thousand plus in yearly goverment funding per doc. The entire process has been exempted from antitrust laws too.
P.S. If you are still wondering why we have a primary care shortage, a number of the positions go to foreigners on J1 visas. That means they are only planning on sticking around for a few years to get training before returning home.
weatherwar | a day ago
The whole process is incredibly broken and too many people lobby to keep it that way.
weatherwar | a day ago
>It only later dawned on me that things were so much simpler
Simpler? Or had fewer people to compete?
specnine | a day ago
It’s a mix of both. There definitely were fewer people getting into it but it was much simpler. Nowadays my friends are taking years off, getting extra degrees, doing unpaid or very low paid labor for research publications, shadowing etc. and this isn’t about going and above and beyond this is just the norm.
I ended up following an uncle and going into the tech industry he told me when he came in if you had a degree or experience there were plenty of jobs. I graduated a couple years back and thankfully was able to land a good role, but in my industry unless you already know how to code by the time you come in as a freshman I would tell someone to find another industry. The barrier to entry is just so much higher now compared to what it was before it’s mind boggling I can’t imagine what it’ll be like for my kids.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
I’m not sure why so many of these stories get framed around some boomer-era economy or the imaginary just walk in and get a job advice some imaginary grandpa is giving when the job market has been tough for the better part of two decades. Millennials didn’t graduate, wave a degree around, and get showered with job offers either they struggled too.
Yes, boomers benefited from a very different economic environment, but acting like this level of frustration is something entirely new is crazy.
Also in this particular story, the person majored in art, then another in journalism, and seemed to expect to land something outside PR. What exactly was the expectation that they’d walk straight into an abundance of editor newspaper jobs?
I’m not saying times aren’t tough, but these stories always follow the same pattern of someone chooses a low-paying or declining field, skips internships or relevant experience, overinvests in that path, and then expects a high-paying job simply for having the same degree millions of other people also have.
Jobs are readily available in in demand fields. But if you want a good job, you usually need to do more than just earn the diploma.
IcyProfit03 | a day ago
I don't think many Gen-Zers are expecting an immediate dream job, they expect it to take a few hundred applications at least.
I guess it's a combination of a lot of factors, inflation hit hard in 2021 and many are feeling the cost of living squeeze, many industries overhired during the pandemic and are hiring less people now as correction. Many companies are trying to use AI to replace entry level workers. I think millenials had it rough too, many millenials entered the workforce in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis where things were also really bad.
In terms of choosing an in demand field, things can change very quickly, many of the fresh grads picked their career in 2020-2021 when tech hirings were at an all time high. Now tech hirings have slowed down and the field is oversaturated with credible fears of AI stealing jobs.
I think you have a lot of fresh grads with tons of tuition debt, trying to find an entry level job that are in low supply and are caught in the brink of lots of AI uncertainty which is leading way to a lot more pessimism than usual. Social media also plays a factor, where algorithms are pushing people who are unemployed towards these doomerism like posts.
I don't think these experiences should take away from struggles that earlier generations experienced, this is not the first economic downturn to have occurred
Comfortable-Brick271 | a day ago
I don't know about you, but my parents are on the very young end of the boomer generation and their take on finding work has always been "if you're jobless, you accept any job you're offered because you don't know when the next offer will be". That's not the opinion of someone who had it easy.
There was a time in the 80's where jobs weren't easy to come by, and it traumatised the working generations at the time, but we don't consider it because we didn't live through it. It's easy to look at the spoils while dismissing the toil.
As a software developer, I'm painfully aware that the 2010's were a rare time of plentiful jobs that might not reoccur in my lifetime. I'm sure I'll hear my kids pretend us Millennials had it easy on that basis.
weatherwar | a day ago
> It's easy to look at the spoils while dismissing the toil.
Yeah the 70s were so much better to grow up in.
Unless of course you lived with the anxiety of getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam and dying in a swamp like your brother.
Reddit is an echo chamber of a generation's own plights and problems. And of course, their problems are worse than the prior generation's. Just like the prior generation's problems were worse than their parents, and so on.
gimpwiz | 15 hours ago
Half of the commentary seems to be along the lines of "it was easy for them but it's hard for me!" With the occasional "it was hard for me but it's easy for them!" And of course that's pretty dismissive and people get pretty annoyed when their own work gets minimized like this. It's pretty unproductive, really.
YoohooCthulhu | a day ago
Regarding the subject of the article— My wife and I are both first-generation college/first-generation post college degree folks who are musicians on the side. Our attitudes were always “we can’t possibly work in music, our families aren’t rich enough to support us while building a career”.
The truth seems to be that there are a lot of fields and jobs these days (often in the arts, but not exclusively) where you sort of have to have family money to support you in a way to be able to take the risks to be successful, and people from middle class/working class families who go into these jobs have to be super lucky to be successful or they just end up perpetually underemployed. The arts, journalism, academia (I have a PhD and the folks I know that were really successful getting professorships benefited a ton from family support) are the ones that immediately come to mind.
Gamer_Grease | a day ago
It’s not imaginary old people at all. My dad is a boomer and we were talking years ago when I had a job making just $8.50 an hour immediately after college. He said, “that’s about what I made when I was your age.” The thing is, he was talking about immediately post-high school, which was 1978 for him, and that $8.50 was the equivalent of $32.54 in 2016 when we had the conversation.
What’s really interesting is talking to silents. They are WAY more likely to tell you that shit is broken now and the American Dream is dead. I had an 80 year-old woman tell me that mostly unprompted (we were talking about her daughter’s recent house purchase) while we waited on a train a week ago. My wife’s 90 year-old grandma has been saying the same for years. Boomers have a distinctly positive outlook on the economy that their elders do NOT share.
I tend to defend boomers because they went through a time of economic turbulence, most of their wealth is concentrated among a few, and many are struggling on Social Security. But it’s absolutely not a figment of online millennials’ and zoomers’ imaginations that Boomers think the world is a lot gentler than it is.
EDIT: Something I was thinking about yesterday was that homeownership is still regularly talked about as a way to build wealth, but that’s actually pretty outdated. It’s now a way to STORE wealth that you have already built on the stock market. The median first-time homeowner is now 40 years old, and trending upward in age still. You don’t get a job at the brass plant like my dad did, then go buy a house. You work the better part of your entire career, then you finally buy a house when you start to ease off the hammer.
DiverVisible3940 | 18 hours ago
That's the point. The diploma used to be the 'doing more' to get a decent job.
Competition is so high that 'just a diploma' is seen as an absolute bare minimum and even then is rarely enough.
Ambitious folks would take those entry-level jobs and leverage opportunities within organizations to build skillsets and climb the ranks.
Now young workers are expected to get into a reputable university, preform very well, optimize your track by strategically selecting your area of study, compete for graduate programs, earn graduate degrees, while doing this have collected an adequate amount of internships/projects/references and then find a job.
Which is fine if you are organized, ambitious, with a clear vision at an early age. Students that are self-financed rely on massive loans, can't invest in much in personal projects or work free internships, and if they need to drop out or something happens they are laden with debt and no degree. It is an incredible amount of work and risk and more importantly it doesn't need to be this way.
C638 | a day ago
The times today are not unique. There were major recessions in 1973 and 1979. GenX went through the same in 1990, 1999, and 2001. Millennials had the same experience in 2008.
Having a degree in liberal arts or any non-marketable degree. never was a guarantee of a job. Yet people keep getting them.
What is different is that immigrants are competing for skilled labor with Americans in the USA, and Canadians in Canada. That is the fault of your Congress/Parliament allowing that to happen, and everyone who voted for them - or didn't vote at all.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
Bullshit: The immigrant argument is nonsense. Every time the job market gets tough, idiots look for an easy scapegoat instead of addressing the actual issues.
Immigrants are not why someone cannot get hired. Companies have been outsourcing, automating, demanding more credentials for entry-level roles, suppressing wages, and cutting training pipelines for years. That is a corporate and policy issue, not an immigration issue.
Also, if immigrants were supposedly taking all the skilled jobs, why are there constant shortages in healthcare, trades, engineering, and other technical fields?
C638 | a day ago
I never said all of the jobs. But there are 2 million Indians working in the US, and CS grads can't find jobs. Skilled older workers are training their H1B contract replacements. Connect the dots.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
Connect the actual dots.
Tech companies wildly overhired, then did mass layoffs while schools kept pushing huge numbers of CS grads into the same field. Entry level jobs got saturated, companies started demanding absurd experience for junior roles, and automation plus outsourcing added more pressure and then AI exploded.
Saying there are millions of Indians in the US proves nothing especially since your numbers are off. Using a population number to imply job theft is the kind of dumbass logic I have come to expect from people who push this view.
If your issue is companies abusing visa programs to suppress wages, then blame the companies and policy but that absolutely doesn’t paint the real picture.
C638 | a day ago
That is exactly the issue - visa abuse. It also applies to other fields, like engineering. Lots of recent engineering graduates - where there is supposedly a 'shortage' - can't find jobs.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
So no immigrants…shitty companies
C638 | a day ago
Big Ed and Big Gov and Big Business together.
RelativePea8217 | a day ago
Yea everyone knows supply and demand suddenly isn't a thing when it involves importing in millions of brown people.
Us leftists love our scab workers keeping wages nice and low
Commercial_Wind8212 | a day ago
get a grip :)
supercyberlurker | a day ago
Which part of my comment upset you?
Any-Interaction6066 | a day ago
My Uncle was the stereotypical Boomer. Retired with an awesome pension and everything, and would always repeat how it's not that hard out there and that it wouldn't be a problem to do well after retirement. Decided to retire, and went and got lawn equipment to side hustle. A month in he started getting a massive list of complaints from other Boomers like "You shouldn't be cutting grass on weekends" as well as parking too close to the neighbors of the houses he was cutting among many other things. Eventually only wound up doing a few close friends houses. Then he decided I'll just go get a part time job somewhere. Gets a gig delivering auto parts or something, and works two days and never goes back in. Didn't even bother to go get his paycheck. Hasn't done anything else since then. Don't know what his thoughts on things are these days as he now doesn't have much to say about how it's actually easy to "make things happen" anymore.
RegisterNo9240 | a day ago
I think “get a grip” is more like the boomer comment that sums up their ignorance
wrBolt | a day ago
At this point I'm taking the entrepreneurship route (not by choice). I would have been happy with a boring 9-5, but I couldn't get anyone to hire me. I wonder what the economy would look like if all of the new grads who can't find a job just start their own small business.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
All jobs come from someone who decided to be an entrepreneur.
hiddendrugs | 23 hours ago
This is the way in the US at least. Blend in social media and you can carve out a niche pretty easily.
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
I have a BSCS and graduated on the 15th with my MSCS. Had a 4.0 during my master's and inducted into the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. I've been working construction for 3 years since finishing my bachelor's.
I'm probably at 1000 applications. I had 1 phone screening last year for a job related to my degree. I've had 1 this year. Both federal positions. Not a single private sector job has called me. The one this year is a year long research fellowship and happened Thursday. They told me I should hear back by 2 weeks. If I get that I'll become an ORISE fellow then try to get into a PhD program cause my goal is to be a scientist at PNNL, CRREL, or I guess FDA.
But anyways, after 3 years since graduating my college degree has been worthless so far.
Skittlepyscho | a day ago
If you havnt already, head over to r/usajobs.gov
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
I've tried there too like last month. They had like 3 positions for CS. Wasn't selected for 1, the others are still reviewing.
El_Cato_Crande | a day ago
Do you have any experience? Internships or something similar?
Skittlepyscho | a day ago
Just apply and forget. It's a numbers game. The website is nice, because you can literally just hit submit for every job application. You don't have to change your résumé at all.
WindwardSnow | a day ago
Was this way for me back in 2008. I didn’t get a decent job aligned with my degree until 2012. Shit sucks.
I’m not saying this to say I had it harder. It fucking sucked and the narrative back then was that everyone in my position was spoiled and entitled, etc. It was bullshit then and it is bullshit now.
Society is shifting faster than institutions can adapt. It isn’t fair to people in your situation.
I hope things get better for you.
kingkeelay | a day ago
Are you willing to relocate states?
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
I already chase construction jobs across the US so yes. I've lived in 4 different states in the past 2 years. I've applied nationwide for jobs in rural states like Wyoming and Alaska to bustling metros like NYC/Boston/etc
someoneyoudontknow0 | a day ago
From the acronyms I assume this person lives in the states already
kingkeelay | a day ago
Yea I assumed the same, that’s why I said relocate states rather than relocate to the states.
someoneyoudontknow0 | a day ago
Oh lol nvm i’m on vacay mode
Hot_Examination1918 | a day ago
Did you have side projects/ internships?
Chemical-Fault-7331 | a day ago
This is a little annoying to me. For an entry level job, you should not have to have side projects or internships. It's entry level. I get having interesting things to talk about in an interview, but wouldn't college level work fit that bill? The inflation for just having to get an entry level job these days is insane. You no longer need a bachelors and a masters. You now need experience in the form of internships.
patthickwong | a day ago
My take on this is yes in theory, for entry level, you probably shouldn’t need side projects or internships.
However entry level positions are literally a competition. Since it’s a competition, people are naturally going to do what they can to get an edge on their competition such as having side projects to show off.
If enough people do this, then having side projects become the minimum.
El_Cato_Crande | a day ago
Sometimes even actual work experience as well lol
Unfair_Today_511 | 22 hours ago
I've got 1 year of actual work experience as a software engineer, and I've been interviewing for 2 years now with no luck.
El_Cato_Crande | 22 hours ago
I believe it. Had 5.5 years experience and took me almost a year to find something
Ok-Energy2771 | 16 hours ago
Regardless of what job you’re trying for or seniority level the hiring manager will want the most qualified, hardest working, smartest, most motivated employee. If one guy hustled his ass off to get internships every summer and the other went home to work at an ice cream stand which would you hire?
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
Not a single internship responded to me despite applying my sophomore and junior year during undergrad, and the first year of my master's. And I applied nationwide for internships. I have side projects and one even caught the eye of a federal research lab hiring manager until their budget was cut last year. A couple, like the one the Federal lab was interested in, even had papers written for them.
khearan | a day ago
What are your degrees in?
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
Bachelor and Master's of Computer Science with the master's being concentrated in Data Mining and Intelligent Systems (AI/Machine Learning)
rainman_104 | a day ago
If you're willing to relocate we have plenty of work in automotive we can't seem to be able to hire for.
I am having a hard time finding spark people willing to work on the jvm willing to relocate.
khearan | a day ago
I see. Pretty odd you can’t find a job with those degrees.
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
I just chalk it up to companies running Skeleton crews and not wanting to train entry level. I know someone who graduated from Purdue with a CS degree and they can't find anything either. They're at least getting interviews though. My master's is at a top state school that's ranked in the 70s nationwide.
Structure5city | a day ago
Where are these jobs you’re applying to? What region? Some areas have a lot more work that others. It’s not always ideal to relocate, but being in the right market can make a big difference. I’ve had friends and family who wanted to work in film and television, but they didn’t want to go to LA. I said, you might not always have to live there, but you should start there.
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | a day ago
If it popped up on LinkedIn, Handshake, or USAJobs then I applied. I would go through jobs filtered by being posted in the last week and apply to every single one. I didn't focus on a specific region.
Structure5city | a day ago
For some jobs and companies you need to be in the region of the company to be seriously considered. Not saying that’s right, but it’s a reality.
RegulatoryCapture | a day ago
Frankly not really without more info.
Straight to masters with no work experience (and limited to no relevant internships) is often a negative signal to employers, especially if from a lower tier school.
Texascats | a day ago
It’s more than “often a negative signal”. It’s a huge red flag. When I see that profile, I question whether they’re willing/able to work full time, and whether they even know the practicalities of working in their chosen industry. Industry != Academia
For younger folks reading this, do whatever you can to obtain internships/work experience. Apply earlier, work in adjacent roles, hell delay graduation if you must.
RegulatoryCapture | a day ago
In stem/stem-adjacent fields, the internship between your junior and senior year is possibly the most important part of college (early-career wise).
And you get a good internship that summer by having a decent internship the prior summer (doesn’t have to be fancy, but should be “real work” ata company or RA for a relevant professor, not an hourly retail job at the mall, camp counselor, etc.). Summer after freshman year you can do whatever.
Edit: I mostly tell people to major in what interests them the most. Take some basic Econ and stats (and maybe get exposed to some programming), but spend your time on a major that excites you. That plus some good internships opens more career options than having the “right” major by itself.
(Obviously doesn’t apply to something like an electrical engineer where you can’t work in the field without the degree, but a million business careers don’t require a specific major…I know history majors at hedge funds and chemistry majors who haven’t seen a lab since they graduated but work good white collar jobs).
khearan | a day ago
I don't necessarily agree with the no work experience part but I 100% agree about internships. It's not enough to just get a degree nowadays. Internships and a portfolio for relevant fields set you above other applicants.
RegulatoryCapture | a day ago
I am thinking more about the BS to MS path with no work in between (In a field like tech where even having a CS BS isn’t mandatory—many good programmers majored in something else and never went to grad school at all).
Going straight into an MS is often a sign that “I couldn’t get a job” (Masters applications skyrocket in recessions) and someone with an MS and no prior work experience is often no more useful than an entry level BS employee…and typically want more pay because of the MS.
They also often get less out of The MS degree. Go straight from a BS into 1-2 more years of school and you don’t have the context to maximize your learning.
Work for a couple of years first before the MS and the masters becomes a tool to focus your personal development on the holes you noticed while working. You can apply that job knowledge to your education and gain a LOT more from it.
LatiBerg | a day ago
The solution is much higher corporate income taxes. Nearly all of the so called gains of the past 10 years have gone to the capital class.
That’s why Americans are miserable. They see the top 5-10% living high on the hog while everyone else struggles
boldedbowels | a day ago
I’m a millennial and I went back to school like 8 years ago. Got a job. Worked for 4 years. Burnt out and quit and I can’t find a job now. It’s been almost two years and I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I wasted the last 8 years of my life
Old_Value_9157 | a day ago
Whoa.
shadeandshine | a day ago
Not surprise the old aren’t retiring so no one can move up in the company and Covid cut teams down and between the ai hype and cut of government spending everywhere is downsizing. The markets seems good but it’s beyond delusional this is the markets intended effects. The corps don’t care about jobs just profit the idea they’d provide jobs is a cope that is some make believe version of capitalism. They’re required to put efficiency over humanity
thepopdog | a day ago
Another factor is massive outsourcing. Companies pay less for foreign labor but get no long term benefit of workers they can promote.
artbystorms | a day ago
Because there is no prosperity to be had if you don't already have a lot of money that can just passively make you more money. The only path to prosperity for young people is starting an online business with low overhead that somehow takes off (doubtful) or getting hit by a bus and winning a large settlement. Salaried jobs don't offer a middle class life anymore until you move up like 4 rungs to be a department manager of AI integration or some bullshit.
Comet7777 | a day ago
Last year I went to a local university that specializes in computer science and IT administration. I presented stuff about my company and had 2 internships spots available. I received upwards of 500 LinkedIn messages and applications for those spots. Each resume was nearly identical to each other (all good actually). I just don’t think the private sector is really pushing new job openings at ALL for entry level people - and that’s fucked up.
OlympicAnalEater | 19 hours ago
IT and CS have higher unemployment rate than engineers or nurses.
Busterlimes | a day ago
Because they turned changed education from advancing human knowledge to a paywall entry for a job that doesnt pay enough to justify the debt. What sense does it make to get a degree if you start adulthood in such a hole you cant afford an adult life?
Chocolaterationcalls | a day ago
Turns out it wasn’t necessarily the college degree which ensured prosperity, it was the fdr-style government which created and enforced rules for the benefit of the country.
TheBloodyNinety | a day ago
> Jes Vesconte graduated from one of California’s most prestigious art schools, did a Fulbright in Germany and got a master’s from Columbia University.
I’m sure new grads have it rough right now. But this is a terrible first example. Arts degrees have never been a guaranteed thing lol, and this mfer got a masters.
In general the article is sort of weak. Worst hiring since COVID? That’s like 4 years ago.
FellowOfHorses | 22 hours ago
> Arts degrees have never been a guaranteed thing lol, and this mfer got a masters.
There's a dig at art degrees in the Godfather. Those have been shifted on for decades
spinosaurs70 | a day ago
Where is the evidence for fundamental economic shifts that are genuinely just not cyclical?
We had the same talk with millennials and eventually most entered the workforce anyhow.
And the college wage premium hasn’t shifted much.
jsnbergman | a day ago
When you can walk in your town and see the main buildings don't need a degree for their good paying jobs, then it will be a fundamental shift. As of now and for the foreseeable future, the school, the hospital, the big government building, the courthouse, etc all need degrees to do well in, and same goes for any non-retail/service job for any fortune 500 company.
et50292 | a day ago
By 'cyclical' do you mean 'the unproductive, perverse, and parasitic financial system that erodes incentive to invest in anything but debt, gambling apps, and regulatory capture collapses every 100 years followed by temporary fixes'?
et50292 | a day ago
The furthest left our corporate media allows is like 'The stock market is totally how the economy works you guys. The well-being of the working class is measured in children raped by the oligarchs. Just redefine unemployment easy peasy. Yay corporate stock buy backs'
thewimsey | 15 hours ago
> The furthest left our corporate media allows
Oh, bullshit. This is just a word salad to hide the fact that you have nothing coherent to say.
kaji823 | 23 hours ago
>We had the same talk with millennials and eventually most entered the workforce anyhow.
We had a pretty crazy global financial crisis as many of us were entering the work force.. so yeah, thankfully that eventually ended.
This time seems different, as companies are changing their hiring strategy to not hire entry level people anymore. I've watched this happen slowly over the last 10 years in my field, and AI just made it a whole lot worse.
random-meme422 | a day ago
You can always tell an article is based on nothing but bullshit when it opens up with cute little anecdotes about a random person graduating with an art degree.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
We all realize that they’re steering kids away from college because they don’t want people to be able to critically think, right? You need to go to college to become a carpenter, electrician, and many other blue collar jobs. This is divisive garbage.
akmalhot | a day ago
What? You do not need to go to a 4 year college to become an electrician, plumber, HVAC tech, roofer,or carpenter etc
That being said tons of schools are not worth anything close to their tuition cost - guaranteeing the tuition fully took away the back check of results by lenders. Obviously they were very conservative so it was depriving a lot of deserving people of the chance to go. There should have been some balance - guaranteeing loans up to x for y# of students. The idea that every single person should get a 4 year degree created a lot of requirement inflation for jobs too that was unnecessary.
spoilerdudegetrekt | a day ago
>There should have been some balance - guaranteeing loans up to x for y# of students.
That's essentially how Europe's free college works.
Only the top X students get free college for their degree where X is the projected demand for said degree.
morbie5 | a day ago
In most European countries university is free or close to free but it is usually a lot more difficult to get accepted into those schools.
In the US a lot of people that are not ready for a 4 year school go for a year or two and drop out. Or go to lower or mid tier schools and get graduated when they otherwise wouldn't be.
In my state enrollment has dropped like a rock at every public 4 year school except for 3. The schools with low enrollment will literally take almost anyone with a pulse (as long as you got the money or a willing lender to loan you said money)
weatherwar | a day ago
> In most European countries university is free or close to free but it is usually a lot more difficult to get accepted into those schools.
Just wait until you tell Americans they or their kids are too dumb to get their higher education for free.
morbie5 | a day ago
> Just wait until you tell Americans they or their kids are too dumb to get their higher education for free.
I spend my free time doing just that. It is quite fun. /s
But anyway go on the student loans sub, a lot of people don't even understand what a loan or interest is
akmalhot | a day ago
Yes there are tons of scholarships and free seats here too
karina87 | 23 hours ago
The US definitely needs this, IMO. It’s similar to how medical school and residency works— the number of residency spots are limited by the ACMGE and the medical school seats do not exceed the number of residency spots. A student wouldn’t want to go through all of medical school for $400k, and not get a residency position at the end of it….
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Maybe not where you live, and no it’s not 4 years but it is a 2-3 year program to become ticketed in Canada
akmalhot | a day ago
There are requirements , but a bachelor's degree isn't one of them
morbie5 | a day ago
I think they forgot the 'don't' between 'you' and 'need' lol
shadeandshine | a day ago
Dude it’s more about how well paying positions were sent overseas to cut labor costs and post pandemic they kept the skeleton crews and didn’t hire back and now with ai they’re trying to cut even more labor cost. This isn’t some conspiracy it’s capitalism working as intended.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
Exactly. The number of younger people I’ve hired who repeat this idea without realizing how much harder the market is for people without education or credentials is wild.
No one is saying every degree is equal, but nearly every metric still shows that higher education increases lifetime earnings and employability.
These stories also almost always leave out key context which is what degree did they choose, what internships did they do, and what field were they targeting? Almost always its someone who chose a declining field, did little to make themselves competitive, and then frames the issue as if college itself was the scam.
If you go to school for engineering, nursing, medicine or other in-demand professions, you will have opportunities.
The problem is not education. It is pretending all educational paths have the same market value and the people pushing this idea know this. They want a dumb workforce willing to cheer for less opportunity.
rainman_104 | a day ago
Yep. My son saw a reel by Andrew Tate and decided to pivot his life into trades because some guy in the manosphere did a rant about avoiding working in the matrix.
bigtiddyhimbo | a day ago
He’s going to really hate himself in the future when he can’t sit up anymore without all of his joints popping out of place
Green_L3af | a day ago
Yeah I mean the top people in those fields would be structural and electrical engineers
mwatwe01 | a day ago
If you haven't learned "critical thinking skills" by the time you enter college, then your high school failed you. College is not designed to turn students into scholars. It's designed to prepare scholars for the working adult world, be that in engineering, business, medicine, the fine arts, whatever.
DetroitLionsSBChamps | a day ago
Yeah Reddit is wild man. The general consensus seems to be:
“They love the poorly educated and are openly attacking education to keep people dumb”
AND
“College is for suckers who needs education? Learn a trade instead!”
As though trades are easy and the key to riches lol. Millenials in my experience are a generation raised by tradesman who wanted more for their kids than backbreaking labor. And now we’re watching that same labor pitched as the one true answer.
Flyingworld123 | a day ago
Those trades don’t require ‘degrees’. They need ‘diplomas’. They’re actually now steering people towards the trades because hiring for most white collar jobs which require expensive degrees collapsed.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Yeah and where do you get the diploma?
Flyingworld123 | a day ago
Colleges, not universities.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Yeah we are talking about colleges genius
Flyingworld123 | 20 hours ago
Colleges and universities are different types of institutions, Einstein.
PubesMcDuck | 18 hours ago
If you are able, please read the title of the article being discussed.
Cursethewind | a day ago
As if school these days actually promotes critical thinking.
Basically all the deep thinking electives that aren't required for a degree have been reduced as they've been deemed unimportant. At least, at a lot of community and standard 4 year universities.
American_PissAnt | a day ago
Schools teach for the test. If it’s not going to be on the test, then it is unimportant to them.
High_Contact_ | a day ago
This is absolutely not how any college course or higher education works. That’s fairly true for grade school but absolutely not college level coursework.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
Sadly, it has influenced a lot of colleges into becoming diploma mills because that's easier than failing students who took on debt to pay exorbitant tuition fees.
gioraffe32 | a day ago
Back in 2006, I attended community college. For my Eng/Comp 2 class, the instructor was an emeritus prof. Guy must've been in his mid 70s already (I'm sure he's passed by now). But he liked teaching. Plus, he admitted he needed the money lol. But he still had a sharp mind.
Anyway, he would recount some issues he was having with the admin at the college (ie bitch about his bosses, as we all do). Apparently, he was failing too many students. Though having seen some of my peers' papers, I totally understand why he would.
But he was getting in trouble for that. One day he actually said, "We're no longer educators! We're just academic prostitutes!" referencing him and his fellow faculty members.
I knew that grade inflation and no-fail was a thing in K-12. In some ways, I experienced that grade inflation, especially in high school (AP/Honors-type classes contributed GPAs 1 point higher than normal; so an A in the class gave a 5.0 instead of the typical 4.0, so on and so forth).
But I didn't expect it in college. That was genuinely shocking, which is why I still remember him saying all that. And this was just a community college! Imagine my surprise when I found out vaunted schools like the Ivy Leagues were doing the same thing. Terrible.
And that was 20yrs ago it was already happening.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
People are in denial about the decline of higher education, but that also doesn't mean college doesn't also have significant individual and societal value.
gioraffe32 | a day ago
Oh 100%. I actually didn't finish a degree until 2018! I ended up going back to that community college to finish my 2yr degree (back in the 00s, I was just planning to transfer out; not get my Associates).
Sure, I was already long into my career (IT) without a degree. But I felt it was important to get some piece of paper. And guess what? The current job I have now? I wouldn't have been able to get this job at this place without a degree. This is the highest paying job I've had by a significant margin. Even just getting the 2yr degree opened up a door that would've been shut to me otherwise, even with experience.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
I have a similar story in someways as well.
More to the point, a lot of people aren't ready for college straight out of high school but are a few years later in life. There is no one right path for everyone.
If I was advising high schoolers [and their parents] today, I would be encouraging every one of them to be developing job skills in high school including those that translate directly into vocational training. Not all high schools offer these programs ofc so that's part of the problem [and usually means parents need to be more involved in finding a solution which further narrows the funnel].
Cursethewind | a day ago
It absolutely has significant individual and societal value, however the shift to making it all about career education is I feel weaking it.
You have fewer seeking scholarly pursuits for the sake of scholarly pursuits. It is true such things are a privilege, however the constant bashing of it is a problem. The extensive bashing of liberal arts degrees when these degrees can absolutely be extensively rigorous is absurd to me.
Personally, I always see education as something to seek enrichment with. I had discussions with my local college's philosophy professor who told me the type of things I am seeking now are simply meet ups with passionate doctoral and post-doctoral students and alumni and no longer are formal classes.
The irony is, the enrichment I seek is free and is now informal outside of the classroom now. Just, without these people as professors and these subjects being in the classroom, the role of education has just shifted and is I feel it absolutely risks progress on the knowledge that makes us human and not robots. These groups need to be prized, funded, put into positions in the university, and their knowledge should be shared.
Will we have another Noam Chomsky at the current direction we're going?
MildlySaltedTaterTot | a day ago
exorbitant *
the word I think you heard, not sure
Cursethewind | a day ago
Not in university.
But now the degree is for the job, not for scholarly enrichment.
RegulatoryCapture | a day ago
The real test is life, but once you realize you are failing that test, it is too late to ask for a refund.
Such_Radio_9152 | a day ago
Not like you'd get one anyway. They are more than happy to fleece you
khearan | a day ago
What is your source for this information? You’re painting with an incredibly broad brush and frankly I don’t believe you have nearly enough information to make this claim about thousands of colleges across the country confidently.
Cursethewind | a day ago
Of course, not all are like this, but increasingly so schools have been eliminating elective classes, especially those deemed controversial, due to budget cuts, government pressure and streamlining and focusing less on "unprofitable" classes and majors that focus on niche subjects, to strictly profitable ones.
We used to take university as a place of scholarly pursuits. Now it's just to get a job. Same goes for secondary school. My old city in Massachusetts still has electives galore and it's still basically science, math, history, English and whatever you want as it was in the past, but most high schools are no longer like this. My local schools are basically the basic subjects, foreign language and a single art or music class. Nothing else. The local community college and the local 4 year colleges are also very similar.
There's been talks of reducing the bachelor's degree to 3 years and cutting electives.
Source
Source
Source
numba1cyberwarrior | a day ago
>We used to take university as a place of scholarly pursuits. Now it's just to get a job
That's a great change
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Every single program has to take a workplace communication course of some kind. In that course you learn critical thinking, media literacy, resume and cover letter writing etc. it’s mandatory
Cursethewind | a day ago
My local programs are basically how to write an essay and they read basic literature. There's no requirement of higher leveled thinking at all.
Also, no, not every program requires that. But that doesn't mean you learn critical thinking even if they do seeing one course isn't going to do really much at all.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
I taught post secondary for years in general education across many programs including carpentry, welding, business, personal support worker, business admin, and early childhood education. Yes they all have that requirement. Critical thinking is day 2 actually. It goes syllabus, grammar recap, critical thinking, reading and viewing.
Cursethewind | a day ago
You can't teach critical thinking in a single class nevermind on day 2 alone. It requires sufficient work for years, engaging different material, different ways of thinking and regular challenges.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Yeah why bother then hey
Cursethewind | a day ago
I mean, that's not what I said?
I'm saying that it's like saying that somebody has learned basic math because they took part in a 3 day seminar. You literally can't even touch the surface in a short class, which is the problem.
curt_schilli | a day ago
Please define who is “they” if we’re going to start spouting conspiracy theories on an economics subreddit
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Oh I don’t know, maybe the people that wrote the article? You lunatic
curt_schilli | a day ago
Gaya Gupta is executing a grand conspiracy to prevent people from being able to critically think?
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Who said that
curt_schilli | a day ago
Literally you lol
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
I didn’t say anything at all about a grand conspiracy… that’s just where your own head went. I said the point is division, and it is.
curt_schilli | 23 hours ago
Maybe you don’t understand what a conspiracy is?
“ they’re steering kids away from college because they don’t want people to be able to critically think”
You are describing a conspiracy in that quote buddy.
PubesMcDuck | 21 hours ago
You are really trying to make this a thing hey? The people wrote the article for purposes of division. Division is then used as an excuse to defund and privatize education. There isn’t anything conspiratorial about it, and this article obviously isn’t the only one being promoted on Reddit, and obviously pages like Reddit are used to propagandize and create more division, as is currently happening here.
EdLesliesBarber | a day ago
Lmao. What a take. No, it’s just not something worth going into debt for. It never really was outside of handful of degree paths. Smart people always looked to keep costs as low as possible. Now the equation has shifted more and people, rightfully and normally, adjusted.
College isn’t to teach critical thinking. College is to get the required paperwork needed for a career path. You should also be working while in college to keep costs low and build experience.
These are common sense things. Maybe you’d call it critical thinking.
PubesMcDuck | 21 hours ago
Brother it sounds like you don’t even have regular sense, nevermind the common kind
EdLesliesBarber | 21 hours ago
Dang you right. There’s definitely a vast conspiracy to convince young people it’s a bad idea to take out loads of debt on liberal arts degrees. The evil THEY.
PubesMcDuck | 20 hours ago
This whole conversation has been about trade diplomas from colleges, but probably at least a few people should have liberal arts degrees yes, and science degrees, we might even need a few doctors and nurses and teachers, maybe even some engineers. Not everyone can work in the trades, and if everyone did work in trades then the trades would pay like shit. On top of that, people in the trades should also have some level of media literacy and critical thinking education, which is why they are required to have a diploma from a college.
soapbark | a day ago
Wish state education systems would start at the middle school level. Reading Plato and Xenophon has been wonderful for my children’s development.
Super_Mario_Luigi | a day ago
Ironically, college doesn't give critical thinking skills
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Says the dude who probably doesn’t have his grade 10
Various-Salt488 | a day ago
DING DING DING DING!!!!!
Youare-Beautiful3329 | a day ago
They don’t teach critical thinking in college unless you’re pursuing a STEM or a law degree. Too many kids are graduating with worthless degrees, and very little skills. I’m talking about writing, basic communications, personal interactions. Engineering and technical schools do it best, which includes developing experience before you graduate and focusing on specific areas. But in the end, it’s up to you to market yourself and make yourself a success. No one is just going to give you a job.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Yes they do. Communication is a mandatory course that includes critical thinking, media literacy, resume and cover letter writing etc. I taught post secondary for years, many programs also had a mandatory personal finance course
harpers25 | a day ago
The typical college "Communications" course is a joke that will give any frat bro with a hangover an A if he can Google the answers to a multiple choice online quiz and give a 10 minute presentation without puking.
Writing a cover letter is not real college-level work lol. That is not worth thousands of dollars of tuition.
PubesMcDuck | 21 hours ago
Tuition is generally covered for people in the trades in Canada, so yeah it worth it.
Youare-Beautiful3329 | a day ago
That’s all things you were supposed to learn in high school! That’s not critical thinking, that’s basic communication skills! Critical thinking is problem solving, performing analysis, strategy, planning and execution.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Nobody that isn’t streamed to go to university is learning that in high school properly
Youare-Beautiful3329 | a day ago
You have an excellent point, and kudos to you for teaching those things, they are all very important. But I learned how to write in high school and never had a writing course in college, yet I never got less than a B+ on any paper. But once I started working, I learn me how to improve my writing to an even greater extent. And every junior engineer I’ve trained has had to improve their writing and communication skills. So it is a skill that requires constant improvement. But critical thinking is something even more than learning those skills. And it’s just not taught typically during a four year degree, unless it’s STEM. For example, my niece went through four years at a major university, graduated with honors, and entered law school on a scholarship. She admits that it was in law school that she really learned her critical thinking skills.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Im not sure this follows. High school should be sufficient for critical thinking, and any trade involves a certain amount of it that can be developed outside of a college setting.
BiscuitDance | a day ago
Ask most Blue collar types who they voted for, but more importantly why. Not a lot have thought about it, critically.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Thats unrelated to my comment nor the claim I’m addressing. My point is simply the development of critical thinking does not require a university degree.
Structure5city | a day ago
College is a good place to have your thinking challenged. If one stops their former education after highschool, it is unlikely they will have their thinking regularly challenged (unless they happen to get into a career with a robust culture of innovation and growth) , which can really put the brakes on intellectual development.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Have you ever tried to diagnose a problem with plumbing or electrical work? It will absolutely challenge your thinking. Also if you’re ever around blue collar folks, they argue about new and current event in a way that white collar professionals often don’t. Most white collar workers I know just assume everyone agrees on their political views.
Structure5city | a day ago
Yes I have, and it’s good for the mind and enjoyable, but I don’t think it’s the same as a college campus or a company that is building new products. College professors challenge their student’s thinking constantly, and I’m not talking about politics, I’m talking about theory and philosophy.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Ideally that would be the case but in practice I don’t think a lot of college students actually gent much rigorous instruction. This feels fruitless. My argument is that the ingredients for critical thinking are present in any standard high school curriculum, whether any individual person avails themselves of that opportunity is a different matter.
Structure5city | 23 hours ago
When you say “I don’t think a lot of college students actually get much rigorous instruction,” what are you basing that on?
-Ch4s3- | 23 hours ago
You could start with Harvard’s recent internal review of grade inflation if you want something empirical.
JamesLahey08 | a day ago
Lol have you ever tried to discuss anything complex with a plumber?
Youare-Beautiful3329 | a day ago
Yes I have. My plumber was a Sargent in the army defusing booby traps until he was shot several times in the back. Very intelligent, very impressive young man. When he’s not working he’s fixing up houses for other wounded veterans. And you have no idea how smart you have to be to become a master plumber. I’ve seen a lot of idiots with college degrees.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
The people coming to this sub lately are the absolute worst.
JamesLahey08 | a day ago
Knuck if you buck boi
Youare-Beautiful3329 | a day ago
Huh?
JamesLahey08 | a day ago
Look it up of necessary.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Yes I have. The plumber I use is a pretty sharp guy. Maybe you’re just condescending. Electrician also do a complicated job that requires a lot of thought and planning. I think you’re just painting people a stupid because you perceive them to have bad politics. A carpenter will almost always have better than average spatial reasoning skills, for example. The job simply requires you to understand how objects relate in 3D space under various conditions.
JamesLahey08 | a day ago
Wrong.
PubesMcDuck | a day ago
Most high schools don’t have a logic or critical thinking requirement
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Colleges don’t have a critical thinking class either. However geometry and algebra both teach logic at a high school level. Any decent 11th and 12th grade English classes should also cover critical thinking with respect to discussing books.
Moreover education in trades will cover things like deductive reasoning. How do you think a plumber diagnoses a problem?
KEE_Wii | a day ago
If you have met a young adult you know high school age is not enough for critical thinking… your brain isn’t even fully mature until you are almost 30.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
That’s not true. Brain structures continue to develop throughout your entire life, but society seems people to be more or less individually competent at 18 because it’s close enough. Trying to use scientism to demean people without college degrees is just ridiculous.
KEE_Wii | a day ago
No one is demeaning people without a college degree I’m saying anyone who has met a recent high school graduate knows that level of experience is not generally “sufficient for critical thinking”. The only people who think that are 18 year olds.
That experience doesn’t have to be college but anyone who thinks you exit high school as someone fully ready to contribute to society likely just left high school.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
High school teaches to the test. It is absolutely not interested in developing your critical thinking skills. Your rote skills? Sure.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Shitty one’s, sure. But plenty of colleges just churn out degrees.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
Critical thinking would tell you both of these things can be true.
Even so, public high schools are incentivized to teach to the test for funding and those tests don't care about critical thinking.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
That’s the argument I’m making. A college degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop critical thinking. Secondary education contains all of the necessary ingredients but we both agree mere attendance isn’t sufficient. My point at the top was simply that you don’t need college to think critically.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
It isn't the argument you are making.
Your argument was high school should be sufficient. We both know it isn't.
You then shifted your argument to the idea colleges can be shitty. I agree, but colleges are also where critical thinking is developed if you put in the work.
>you don’t need college to think critically
Most people don't become critical thinkers without college education so that argument is flawed. We aren't saying developing your critical thinking outside academia is impossible, we are saying it is statistically less likely [and with a lower upper limit] to a material degree.
edit: the account blocked so they can die on the hill of something being theoretically possible rather than something being widely practical.
-Ch4s3- | a day ago
Yeah it should be if you pay attention at all, that’s still my argument. College may or may not even require coursework related to critical thinking depending on your degree.
The claim that most people don’t become critical thinkers without a college degree is not one you can back up with evidence, it’s merely your opinion based on your personal animus towards the working class.
thenewladhere | a day ago
The issue is that if you have too many college graduates like the US has now, there won’t be enough white collar jobs to support them. Even once lucrative majors like CS are struggling with a terrible job market. For a lot of prospective students it’s hard to justify going to university and acquire a lot of debt just to potentially be unemployed or underemployed afterward.
Also, I don’t know where you live but the trades absolutely don’t require college.
JPK12794 | a day ago
Honestly my first job in industry was the eye opener. You had multiple people with a PhD having invested 10 years into education being told what to do by a guy with a management degree or no degree at all who was not much older but on 10x the salary, explaining to everyone why education didn't matter. What baffled me was anyone who knew anything knows that company is not going anywhere because the management didn't understand their product required tools which do not currently exist and won't for another 20 years. Honestly they might have been able to make it work but the scientific staff couldn't care less because the wages were stagnant and they were constantly being asked to do more for the company on their own time.
YouWereBrained | a day ago
So let’s vote for Trump and see if that fixes everything! (Because a lot of Gen Zers did that.)
🥴🥴🥴
Words words words penis poop vagina dingleberry.
KartoffelLoeffel | a day ago
Believe it or not this is actually why this sub has the word threshold
JaydedXoX | a day ago
It wasn’t working under Biden either, that’s why they voted for Trump.
Petrichordates | a day ago
No it absolutely was, america had the best economy in the world under Biden. 2024 Inflation was a global problem due to covid, so blaming that on Biden ain't gonna work as well for the educated.
You gotta disinform them via social media memes and fox news to feed that narrative.
Training-Context-69 | a day ago
I mean we still have the best economy in the world. Even right now. Our Economy has been propped by AI spending and disconnected from the typical American for years now so that doesn’t really matter. But even under Biden things weren’t really that great although they were definitely improving. Trump has however made things substantially worse with his policies, from tariffs to the Iran war.
Petrichordates | a day ago
Part of the problem in measuring his toll is that the effects aren't limited to just the American economy. Like Trump's war has caused higher energy prices and inflation across the world, but at the end of the day that's a decision American voters chose.
Comet7777 | a day ago
I’m a leftist guy and this just isn’t true. The reality is that the Biden administration, in partnership with the fed, made a lot of changes to essentially nail the soft landing after the insane inflationary policies that the world needed during COVID. Those policies are not Trump’s fault or Biden’s fault - they were necessary measures at the time.
So essentially a soft landing happened and the rate in which inflation was rising finally evened out. The outcome of that? Still insanely high inflation coupled with the tech industry seeing healthy and necessary corrections. The end result to the everyday American was pain - and the argument that it could be way more painful is not one that will resonate with people. So the youth and the struggling poor felt not seen and with little options, so they voted against their perceived status quo - and now things are way worse.
I can’t fault them too much, the left did a horrible job explaining what was happening and the value they were bringing. And quite honestly, the 2024 election cycles all over the world was an incumbency bloodbath for all the same reasons.
Edit - I think I’m just agreeing with you actually. This understanding does require a lot of economic policy and current events know-how to digest.
abigrillo | a day ago
But if it was so good, why do we all almost collectively feel like the economy is shit and no one is gaining ground except the top 10%.
That feeling that so many of us had and still have to this day despite the economy doing "good" is why biden failed.
But i guess its just poor small powerless baby president biden he couldnt do anything to change how we felt because of covid i guess.
Trump needless to say the countless ways hes fucked us six ways to sunday and why we feel like shit aboit the economy.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
>But if it was so good, why do we all almost collectively feel like the economy is shit and no one is gaining ground except the top 10%.
Because inflation was (is) high.
weatherwar | a day ago
I have a secret for everyone who needs to hear it:
Four years of any presidency are not enough to "fix" anything.
Everyone wants to just take a pill and all the sudden their ailments are fixed. Nothing works that way. You either commit to longer-term physical therapy or you take your pills until you run out.
abigrillo | a day ago
💯 based opinion.
Alatarlhun | a day ago
It was improving under Biden and the US recovered from COVID better than any first world nation.
The problem was the working class was convinced by propaganda it wasn't happening fast enough.
PossiblySustained | a day ago
It's clear no one here is actually under the age of 25 because everyone we knew who graduated in 2021/22 basically had a free ride to an office job, while by mid-2024 the view of the job market was overwhelmingly negative.
Appropriate_Shake265 | a day ago
As a millennial with only a HS education, a CDL & in a union. I know many many fellow millennial & Gen Z who have college degrees and struggle to find a job or a job that pays well.
While I'm drowning un work & have mutiple months off during winter while keeping my union health insurance. I am glad I never listening to my HS teachers & did not go to college.
Everyone experience is different
babydoll17448 | a day ago
Boomers are actually saying, “Go to a trade school instead of accumulating debt through college now. They pay you to train you, and you make big bucks coming right out of the starting gate, and you start with ZERO DEBT.”
KEE_Wii | a day ago
You 100% still have to pay for trade schools and technical colleges… also telling an entire generation to do that is a quick way to tank wages resulting in the same issues as telling everyone they have to go to college.
Comfortable_Line_206 | a day ago
The top 10% will be able to keep their homes repaired for cheap so that'll be nice at least.
babydoll17448 | a day ago
I should have specified apprenticeships.
Skilled trades offer exceptional job security and earning potential due to a retiring workforce and a surge in infrastructure and clean energy projects. The most in-demand trades include electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers, welders, and solar installers.’
JockoMayzon | a day ago
A central platform of the Democrats was "go to college" to elevate the wages of the struggling working class, with no thought as as to who would perform the jobs vacated by the new college grads and the idea that jobs that required a college degree would be ever expanding to meet the expanding supply.
When that failed, Democrats pushed for college loan forgiveness as the next waves of college grads could not find jobs that would fund re-payment of the college loans and the jobs they did find were the same essential jobs that Democrats were unable to raise wages on.
Now, with an oversupply of college grads, wages in those areas are stagnant as well and jobs that require a college degree have so many competing for them that wages are stagnant and unable to meet rising housing costs.
Until Democrats (or Republicans?) focus on raising the floor of wages for the American workers, this problem will persist.
thepopdog | a day ago
Neither will, their donors pay them to make sure it won't happen.
postconsumerwat | a day ago
Unfortunately humanity is a bit dummer than we are led to believe. We may as well change the name from humanity to "follow the leader."
Sure its real cool to use your own brain and make it work, learn big words and visit the lofty reaches of what is fair and possible... but then you may find yourself all alone and very angry at all the people.
Desperate-Lemon5815 | a day ago
Yeah, you can see that there is not a single person in /r/economics who knows a single thing about the subject or the economy right now. It's remarkable how everyone on this site prefers to wallow in their stupidity than look at reality.
ThisIsAbuse | 22 hours ago
I knew 40 years ago that “A“ college degree did not guarantee success and a well paid job. It had to be the “ right“ college degree.
It’s harder now, for sure, but you need to do the research before selecting college major and have a plan in place.
However, the one thing I understand completely is those who choose computer science or computer engineering 4 to 6 years ago before the advent of AI.
bill_gonorrhea | 21 hours ago
I’m going to go out on a limb and say when these statistics were first true, the types of degrees we more limited and were actually a function of their job.
You can get a bachelors degree in almost anything today if you find the right school or pay enough.
Statistically you might earn more in your life time with a degree, but 4 year degrees have become so saturated it’s the equivalent of a high school diploma 40 years ago.
gottatrusttheengr | 20 hours ago
"ensured"
C'mon before I even started thinking about schools and majors it was well, well established that certain majors were not useful for employment, let alone "ensure prosperity".
ohhhbooyy | 20 hours ago
This been the case for at least nearly few decades unless you are going into certain types of degrees.
If you haven’t realized it by now before going into college it’s on you. This article was made many times for millennials.
la-fours | 18 hours ago
Did this person only start consuming media yesterday?
“The idealized life of the Carrie Bradshaw, or the cast of Friends, that we see in these TV shows might have been possible when those shows existed, but now, capitalism has fractured things so much that even having a social life in New York City is really an effort,” Vesconte said.”
It was never possible to have those lifestyles for the average person - even when those shows aired. And the original audience watching those shows in the 90s/00s by and large understood that. There were a ton of jokes made about that.
DominantDan24 | 16 hours ago
When college degrees were a big differentiator, yes. Now that more people are getting them, it makes sense that they don’t guarantee success.
corbie | 15 hours ago
I know people with college degrees that do dog grooming, landscaping etc. I know one who is now in her 70s and is still paying student loans. She never did anything beyond executive assistant.
gauchnomics | a day ago
It's interesting to contrast this article with another one taking the opposite position: Young people are rich and miserable. Personally I think both are only partly capturing the current economic environment.
To disentangle the two it's worth remembering while unemployment among recent grads has increased somewhat the past few years, youth unemployment actually peaked a few years after the 2007 great recession. So the raw unemployment rate cannot be the primary driver of this discontent. Maybe it's because of down-skilling because of the no-hire no-fire environment. However the vacancy rate is about on par with the unemployment rate. There's some discussion about student loans, but again it might be worse than 2022 when the Biden admin was fighting for student loan relief and a creating like the programs like SAVE, but it doesn't appear to more burdensome as a percent of income than 2008-2015. Same with prices overall, wages across the income spectrum (especially towards the bottom where new grads would start) have outpacedinflation and inflationary environments ought to benefit net borrowers like new graduates (Dube, Inflation inequality meets wage compression).
I'm sympathetic to the claim that's there's a lot of economic uncertainty especially for new graduates. However, similar to the "vibecession" it's hard to quantify the reason for the malaise. The cost of housing is a strong contender, but again it's clear that first order measures of economic health: wages and employment don't capture the current discontent.
Appropriate-Ad-4148 | a day ago
K shaped economy.
My "ivory tower" coworkers are subsidizing their college age kids to the tune of like 80k a year in the Northeast. Think like 100k a year for a kid in NYC or Boston. They are landing internships and everything.
The kids on reddit are wealthy suburbanites who can literally hang out at mom and dad's house indefinitely while they spam job sites.
Actual real ones are already out working whatever they can land, regardless of their degree. They have to pay rent. Mom isn't covering any bills.
csappenf | a day ago
Back in the 90s we all used to wonder how the people in Friends afforded their lifestyles. People today shouldn't think that shows everyday college graduates.
Old_Value_9157 | a day ago
Well, Monica and Rachael’s apartment was rented controlled, I believe.
Desperate-Lemon5815 | a day ago
College degrees have never ensured prosperity. Obviously. It has also always been hard for recent college grads.
This is typical slop that spreads misinformation and teaches nothing.
mwatwe01 | a day ago
Let me sum up all the comments that usually show up in these posts:
EdLesliesBarber | a day ago
You left out that college is actually meant to be some utopian koombaya where everyone sits in circles and the goal should be to improve society somehow not learn useful social and career skills. Comprehensive list otherwise !!
Important_Debate2808 | a day ago
There’s also plenty of new degrees that don’t generate any money, as well as increased number of college students enrolling in majors that already don’t make money traditionally, like philosophy, music, English, social work, etc..
If people want to make money, engineering and medical school really are the main ones. Or more stable ones like accounting or statistics or nursing.
So one big thing that people need to educate young high schooler when they are picking majors is that they need to focus more on future earning potential, and not just based on their ideals like art or philosophy or social work.
norfizzle | a day ago
Those degrees are University degrees that were meant to be paired with a graduate degree. That's part of the disconnect. E.g. you do History or Philosophy and then go get a MBA or Master of Psych and used those to earn money.
Important_Debate2808 | a day ago
But even then, even a PhD of History or PhD of philosophy still has a lot of difficulties getting a job, and even if they do get a job, it is hard for them to find something that can offer good initial stability or good initial pay, unlike the consistent careers when you do something like nursing or actuarial, you can come out pretty confident with getting a livable wage. Again that’s part of counseling for high schoolers, that if their goal is to find a steady job with steady pay, don’t look into things like history or philosophy or language arts.
norfizzle | a day ago
Yes for sure, those PhD's sound like your only career path is professor. I purposely used the MBA and Master of Psych degrees b/c I've seen those paths work career-wise in the tech sector.
BeyondAddiction | 23 hours ago
It's a bit country dependent, but M.Arch and law were also meant to pair nicely with humanities degrees.
bensquirrel | 23 hours ago
Vastly overstated problem.
BlackTransMaam2 | a day ago
I enjoy how every article acts like degrees have been purely devalued while rarely addressing the rise of significantly worthless degrees. We've gone from colleges being full of STEM, Business and teaching degrees to lots of "studies", art, and soft sciences that have never lead to well paying degrees. While the cost to earnings has compressed, pretending like the quality of the overall degree hasn't been drastically watered down is disingenuous.
carlos_the_dwarf_ | a day ago
This comment feels like two decades out of date.
Is your impression that college students used to study humanities etc at a lower rate? It’s actually the opposite—[the share of students studying that sort of thing has fallen](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/how-colleges-are-adapting-to-the-decline-in-liberal-arts-majors). If anything recent grads have been pressured disproportionately into STEM.
Meanwhile, there’s all kind of evidence that employers still value liberal arts skills, that those grads earn more than those without degrees, and even that they’re happier!
This “worthless degree” strain of thought is basically an invention. There’s not really any such thing.
BlackTransMaam2 | a day ago
The number of colleges offering said degrees has EXPLODED. Every college and rushed to create easy degrees to vacuum up unlimited federal loan dollars.
carlos_the_dwarf_ | a day ago
When you def read the article.
BlackTransMaam2 | 20 hours ago
I mean hey, whatever makes my barista happy I guess. liberal arts are great complimentary skills to a hard skills degree but by themselves are by and large worthless.
carlos_the_dwarf_ | 19 hours ago
This has all the signs of a fruitless conversation, but if you’re actually interested in evidence there’s plenty out there.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-stem-salaries.html
* https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/
* https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/unemployment-rates-for-persons-25-years-and-older-by-educational-attainment.htm
* https://hbr.org/2019/09/yes-employers-do-value-liberal-arts-degrees
This idea that the only paths are STEM and a lifetime at coffee shops is certifiable nonsense. (In addition to your claim above about liberal arts majors are “exploding”, which you’ll find is also not the case if you’d bother to click one link.)
BlackTransMaam2 | 16 hours ago
Kinda like these liberal arts majors, thank you and good night. And don't forget, extra foam on those lattes!
northman46 | a day ago
The poster person leading the article spent big money for a prestigious degree in Art. And apparently their pronouns are they/them
What can they actually do that has actual economic value? What are their skills?
What made them think that getting a masters in art was a good idea?
KartoffelLoeffel | a day ago
What do their pronouns have to do with their degree, or really anything else you just said?
northman46 | a day ago
It was an aside about the jarring effect on the article, introducing additional questions about the situation that never were addressed
RashmaDu | a day ago
> What made them think that getting a masters in art was a good idea?
Right, because what is the point of museums, conservatories, orchestras, theatres. When you think about it, what's the point of poetry, theatre itself, literature. Even philosophy, history are pretty useless when you think about it.
Your argument is entirely ignorant and idiotic in its own right, nevermind the blatant ad hominem about someone's gender identity. But even if you only care about true economic value (whatever that is), you should spend a minute or two thinking about the actually great minds that have shaped our history that have been inspired by all these things you don't value, and think about whether you should.
northman46 | 22 hours ago
So now they are living in near poverty while still owing a large sum on student loans. But we get the privilege of their art and music
RashmaDu | 20 hours ago
Unironically yes. If you can't appreciate art, culture, philosophy, history, and all the immense benefits, both economic and otherwise, they have contributed to our society over the last few hundreds of thousands of year, that's on you.
idgafaboutpopsicles | a day ago
> What are their skills?
off the top of my head you would develop critical thinking, visual communication, portfolio building, ability to work collaboratively, time management, entrepreneurial skills related to self promotion, cultural literacy that can bring people together.
Business and STEM majors tend to go into college viewing it as a job preparation program. You take the narrow range of classes you need to graduate and you come out on the other end with a job in the field you want. From what I've seen, humanities education typically involves a much wider range of disciplines and perspectives. It almost feels like the value from a business degree is that you don't think critically about the world and just do what you're programmed to do. Don't ask questions, we're out here adding economic value!
BlackTransMaam2 | a day ago
Most undergrad universities have used master degrees as a way to pass the buck up the ladder, much like high schools did with undergraduate degrees 40 years ago.
Chuck-Finley69 | a day ago
The system is functioning properly and has been for the last 30+ years.
Technology keeps improving faster than human beings. Globalization helped speed that up if technology initially failed.
Many physical entry level jobs have been automated over the same time frame.
Do offices exist the same way they did before? Support admin type entry jobs aren't necessary the same way in WFH environment. So many people don't realize fighting RTO is counterproductive to many entry level function jobs.
TaxLawKingGA | 20 hours ago
This argument is so frustrating because the solution is staring everyone in the face but people simply refuse to accept it.
The only answer to big business overreach is big government. The key is to ensure that you put people in office who will do what we ask them to do. Will they make mistakes? Of course they will. They are humans and therefore imperfect. But to sit here and act like we are powerless and have a “woe is me, I am going to self immolate and show the rich” stupidity is self-defeating and low grade narcissistic. As my mother would say, get off your ass and go do something that actually can make a difference. Sending mean tweets and booing multimillionaires won’t do a damn thing. Voting for people who will tax, regulate, and reform will. We need young people with imaginations, who can develop new regulations for a new century. Too many politicians and policy makers are throwing 20th century reforms (and in some cases 19th century reforms) at 21st century problems. Not going to work.