@musicamusica, that phrase was on t-shirts when I was at Purdue!
@preamble1776 as crazy as student debt has gotten, there are measures in place to ensure that students cannot possibly rack up $250K in debt for a studio art path of study through graduate work. Federal and private loans all have limitations based upon course of study and school. Maybe you can rack up that kind of debt going into medicine, but not studio art. No student has good enough credit for that. Now if parents have good income and borrow that much, that is their problem, but not the student’s. And if parents are responsible, they would not over leverage their kids’ or their own future (not that it doesn’t happen).
Perhaps there is a cultural bias, but I know that in my own case and that of my friends, if my parents financed my education through loans, even if I wasn’t legally on the hook for repayment, so to speak, I’d still feel morally obligated to assist in paying them off.
I’m unsure of the actual structural limits, but can’t parents cosign private loans for students? In that both the parent and the student are required to repay the loans - and the amounts of these loans can exceed the amount allotted just to the student by the government? Because even though it’s rare, I’ve definitely read “horror stories” about student debt on various websites like CNN Money and Time that detailed students struggling with six figure debt right out of undergrad - it was to my understanding that someone with decent/good credit cosigned for them.
I apologize in advance for my potential ignorance. @Cameron121
No need to apologize, you are correct that some irresponsible families burden themselves unnecessarily. And when it happens, it does unfortunately affect the kids’ credit rating as well (unless it’s a ParentPlus loan, which is all on the parent).
Sure, but that’s not a “liberal arts” thing that’s a “debt” thing. If your parents borrow $50 grand to get their 16-year old a sports car and they total it, that’s a bad financial decision too. But no one would go around saying that “sports cars are stupid”.
I see the same here in the Great White North.
Most of the wanted ads I come across ask for engineering, computer science, business, and to a lesser extent, math and statistics. Request for other majors is quite rare.
I think the employer is making a big mistaken. In our system, any business program worthy of the name would require calculus for admission. Business students with only pre-calc are found in community colleges. That said, I still don’t think many of our business grad can go head-to-head with physics or math majors; the difference in candle power is too great.
This is caused either by keyword scanning of resumes, or by stupidity/ignorance on the part of HR, or both.
I’ve said here before that in the technical writing field I was always astounded by ads that specified that the writer had to know one particular word processing or page makeup application. I would NEVER hire someone who was too dumb to pick up a different word processing package quickly. If they can’t do that, how on earth are they going to learn the company’s software packages and be able to explain them to others? Yet you see it all the time. There are skills that are very important to the job. Knowing WordPerfect instead of Word, to use a very dated example, is not one of them.
There are entry-level positions for people with business degree that do not need a lot of brain power. HR probably rightly assumed that your son will be bored to death.
In the case of the Physics major not getting the interview, we do not know that the major is what kept him from getting the interview, right?
The CC student may have had a “hook” the employer was looking for or had demonstrated an interest in the industry during college through ECs or internships.
Also, if the physics major went to a Top school, some employers actually have preconceived notions about those students that hurt them in the job hunting process.
I can also imagine an employer thinking he was taking this job to bide his time until he found something in Physics while the business major has demonstrated an interest in the field.
Not sure that we should assume entry level jobs in business jobs don’t require brain power any more than we should assume that about entry level Physics jobs.
“I can also imagine an employer thinking he was taking this job to bide his time until he found something in Physics while the business major has demonstrated an interest in the field.”
And we cannot assume that he was not doing that. D1 works in finance in NYC and one of her coworkers is a physics major from Princeton. He is not waiting for a job to open in physics.
To not even interview a more than obviously capable person based on some assumptions seems very ill conceived.
Let’s be real here - nobody knows why that kid didn’t get the interview. Any of us who have ever hired people know that while you’re always looking for the best fit, sometimes if you knew a snotty person from a given college, someone from the same school may not get an interview b/c you’ve made a snottiness presumption. Employment and hiring is not a science it’s an art, and there are many shades of gray (see what I did there??).
@morrismm I did not assume he was. I said very clearly (which you quoted) that I could imagine an employer assuming that.
There is no way for any of us to know who was obviously more qualified. It is a lot like the threads where people say their friend with worse stats got in to a school and they did not. We do not know the whole story.
Don’t top schools have very good Career Services and a lot of companies interview kids on campus so they do not have to compete with lowly public schools graduates (at least in the first round)?
Even my public school graduate did all his job search and initial interviewing on campus. Majority of interviews came from a Job Fair closed to outsiders.
A “top school” will certainly have a career center.
But some employers might not think “top schools” are worth the bother to recruit at. They may think that they are too small, and that Wall Street and consulting companies take up so many of the students that there are too few left to recruit.
Although I find most humanities unfulfilling to my interests, and would not advise someone to major in them, it’s not like all STEM majors are surrounded completely by sunshine, roses, wealth, and opportunities galore. This was rude, insulting, and over the top.
It depends on what you are looking for. I have read lots of want ads that ask for someone with a major in psychology or a related field - user experience research, marketing, advertising, social science research positions at think tanks or NGOs or government agencies, market research, human resources…I’ve also seen want ads that ask for people with majors in kinesiology or exercise science/physiology (when helping my sister, an exercise science major, look for jobs), and for nursing, and for economics…
It really all depends on where you are looking and what kinds of jobs you are looking for. If you’re looking for tech sector jobs you’ll see tech sector requests. If you’re looking at hospitals you’ll see asks for nursing majors.
A car loan is a SECURED loan. The car is collateral. And while the bank holds the title to the car, the bank will require that the car be insured for collision. If the car buyer has buyer’s remorse, then the car can be sold to repay the loan.
A student loan in UNsecured. There’s no collateral. If the borrower has buyer’s remorse, there’s no collateral to liquidate. There’s no insurance policy to payout a financial trainwreck from being under-employed with an anthropology degree.
If you guys think that employers interview EVERY qualified candidate whose resume crosses their desk, I have a reality check for you- thousands of resumes per opening. Do you really think someone is going to interview 500 new college grads for one job?
It’s not an algorithm- it’s common sense. If I’m hiring for an entry level role in a sales training program (think engineered products- maybe aerospace) then I’m not pouring through thousands of resumes and selecting every single kid who has the chops to do the job. I know from past experience- my best source schools are Cornell, Michigan, U Conn, (depending on location and other variables) etc. My best candidates have degrees in 5-8 different disciplines (based on past experience). The best “fit” and strongest performers from the last 5 years of new hires for these roles had the following EC’s or internship or volunteer experiences-- whatever those are.
Then I pluck those resumes from the pile.
I don’t need to sit around wondering “hey, maybe we should test the waters at U Montana to see how many of those kids want to move to Hartford, CT to work at UTC”. Similarly, if I’m hiring for a huge ad agency which has openings in Chicago, NY, LA and Dallas, I don’t need to recreate the wheel-- I pull up the stats of our most successful hires over the last decade for our media buying roles, or our market research roles, or whatever the discipline is- and I go from there. I don’t get paid to spend as much money as possible by casting a net to 2500 colleges and interviewing every conceivable plausible candidate. I get paid to hire the best possible “class” which is within budget, which doesn’t violate federal law, which gets the job done in the window that I have, AND which increases the likelihood that our next generation of leaders will get hired at age 22 (i.e. will perform well, get promoted, and stick around for a while to justify our investment in them).
Do you really think I’m going to interview every physics major in America for a job that likely only requires a pre-calc/trig level of math knowledge??? Even if (of course) those physics majors have clearly taken pre-calc???
You can help your kids-- but bemoaning every interview they didn’t get isn’t helpful. Better research and targeting of “who is hiring people like me” is a better way to get the job done than a scattershot approach.
Student debt now makes up nearly half of federally owned financial assets. The student debt bubble edges on with many more unable to pay their debt.
http://www.mybudget360.com/student-debt-half-of-federally-owned-financial-assets/
When I was hiring, it was people who were going to work directly for me. HR did not do my hiring. Eventually, I had a couple of head hunters who specialized in the field who knew the kind of people I wanted. We never advertised. They advertised, and people who were interested in the field went through them. (As it happened, just after I got my first management job, our need exploded, and I ended up hiring about 12 people in the course of a year plus. This was unusual, but that was why I rapidly developed a relationship with a few head hunters. Which continued into my next job.)
That was how it worked at that time in the NYC area, in my field and in others. There was one NYC head hunter who specialized in corporate PR, for example. If you wanted that kind of job you sent your resume to her and if she thought you were a good candidate she could eventually place you.
None of this recruiting was done on campus, although we did hire new grads.
This was not the kind of large-scale, big corporation hiring where HR is feeding people into a training program and thousands of resumes are submitted. But it was, at the time, the 20th largest software company in the US.
Oh, and when I was just out of college I was passed over for a job in which the major requirement was that one liked to read, had good reading comprehension, and read quickly. I was an English Major from Wellesley with Honors in the major and an 800 in the verbal section of the GRE. They gave to job to someone’s niece.