A FB friend of mine says,
I feel so stuck right now. I have a useless college degree & very little work experience. I can’t seem to find a job because I’m almost 25 with no experience. I can’t afford a car because I can’t find a job. I’m automatically disqualified from a lot of jobs because I don’t have a car. Bills just keep piling up & I can’t seem to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
She’s got a degree from a state university, majoring in General Studies. She’s got student loan debt of about $35K. She lives in the Midwest.
What part of the Midwest?
My daughters are going to college in the DSM IA area. They applied for several different jobs, and were offered more than one of them.
One is doing daycare, one is working checkout at a grocery store.
My point is that there seems to be a lot of jobs available in the central IA area.
I just heard the other day that DSM area was one of the ten best economic climates in the US.
Forbes
I know for a fact that Wells Fargo and Principle were both looking for employees.
Missouri
Plenty of jobs here. Of course, none of them require college degrees in General Studies. And they are the sort of jobs that people with degrees think are beneath them.
It’s a shame that there were no parents or guidance counselors to tell her what to study in college but just left it up to her.
It’s a shame that the banker who signed off on her student loans didn’t do any sort of ROI calculation and the potential financial merit her degree would provide. But with government backed loans, there is no need for rational financial decisions WRT Student cash. She would have been far better off if she had been forced to change majors as a freshman to qualify for the loan, or been forced to drop out and get a retail job (the same one she is qualified for now).
BTW, I also have a General Studies degree, but it came with a guaranteed job and a five year contract, with an option to renew.
But don’t come here. We have enough people already.
I was thinking exactly those things when I read her post. I was thinking, “What on earth did she think she was going to get with that kind of degree?”
And the lenders didn’t bother to ask. Of course, why should they? After all, the gubmint is backstopping it all…
probably because she was probably brain-washed by people who still believe in college more than they believe in death … and they believe any degree is better than no degree.
and, apparently, today i like the word ‘probably’
No question about it. THAT is what the postsecondary education racket promotes. I can speak to the fact that lots of state and federal dollars are spent to push teens–from middle school on up–to “gear up” for college, and they will allude to statistics that show more lifetime income for college grads than for non-grads.
There are tons of problems with those studies, and folks like Vox Day, Karl Denninger, Professor Hale, Cubbie, and myself have pointed some of those out over the years. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education is starting to take notice of the problem.
The paradigm shift is underway. When the defecation hits the circulation I cannot predict, but I can say with absolute certainty that it will. And when it does, the mess is going to be catastrophic.
my kids have been bombarded with that since kindergarten.
But still..back when we went to college, it was a time when just about ANY 4-year degree would result in being able to land a job with a good income and very little student loan debt.
These days, it requires a lot more scrutiny up-front.
I graduated from college during the recession of the early 1980’s. Friends of mine with law and engineering degrees were having trouble finding work, much less a liberal arts major like me.
My first full-time job after college was at a convenience store, and we may well have had one of the most well-educated convenience store staffs in history – three college graduates and a part-timer who was a college student. But at least I was working.
When I got laid off from my previous full-time job I attended job networking meetings with a lot of fellow unemployed folks who had master’s degrees and doctorates. That was both humbling and scary. The job I now have doesn’t require a college degree at all. Again, though, at least I’m working and paying my bills.
I went to West Point. Almost everyone got a General degree. And we all got guaranteed 5 year jobs in the US Army.
Yeah, but a General degree from West Point is going to carry more gravitas than a General degree from Timbuktu College.
During my EDS days, I had systems engineers in the same cohort who were West Point grads. None of them had trouble holding their own.
Surprisingly, it was often the technically-oriented folks who washed out. I remember many computer science majors–otherwise skilled programmers–who washed out whereas one of the best systems engineers we had was a Bible major.
It wasn’t always foolproof to predict success based on the college major.
But none of the West Pointers I knew were washouts.