<p>Yeah I should of said State of California.</p>
<p>“So, if you are Bill Gates or Michael Dell, feel free to bail out early or skip college altogether; otherwise, get that degree!”</p>
<p>While I believe this is often true, one thing a college degree should teach you is that these stats don’t prove that at all. </p>
<p>The kind of people who go to college are more intelligent, more ambitious, from wealthier/better-connected families, have better high school records etc. - all factors that also make them more likely to get a job. Any given individual who possesses all these attributes might theoretically be just as likely to succeed even if they choose not to attend college.</p>
<p>Obtaining a 4-year degree is by far more important than attending a trade school…for me.</p>
<p>Trade schools are a vital part of our society and their graduates provide a lot of good services for people.</p>
<p>But don’t be mistaken. Pretty much anyone can learn how to cut hair, change an alternator, and operate a machine.</p>
<p>Finding meaning in derivatives, understanding thermodynamics, learning to apply logic to decision making, knowing how to analyze problems, and having a skill such as accounting/medical/law is much harder to obtain.</p>
<p>There are some majors & focuses in 4-year programs which are not very employable.
Some trade school grads may even make more per year than say a english major from a state university.</p>
<p>I don’t know an englihs major out there that doesn’t know this…
They are studying it because they enjoy it.
That is fine by me, there comes a point in most peoples lives where they have to choose between what they enjoy and what pays the bills.</p>
<p>If you work hard enough and good at what you do…you can be one of those lucky people who can do what they want and can still pay the bills.</p>
<p>OR you can be one of those lucky people who enjoy accounting, engineering, medicine, law, or IT(cs, mis, is etc).</p>
<p>The economy will always have its ups an downs…</p>
<p>When it was hard for us to find jobs that we actually wanted, WillmingtonWave and I decided that we wanted to do our own thing. </p>
<p>We started a website and a Q+A community for Fantasy Baseball. It’s called [url=<a href=“http://www.rotoquery.com%5DRotoQuery%5B/url”>http://www.rotoquery.com]RotoQuery[/url</a>]. We’re planning such communities for all other fantasy sports too. I encourage all of yall to take a look and support us.</p>
<p>So how come I know a kid with good grades from a top 30 school with a masters in electrical engineering who can’t find a job this spring? So much for engineering being a sure thing. So much for top ranked schools. He had internships and research with a professor as well. His internship company liked him a lot, but had no openings. In fact, I know several other kids who are underemployed or employed in contract positions with no long term prospects or benefits. Times are tough, even for new college grads.</p>
<p>On the other hand, my cousin who partied his way out of freshman year in college, joined the navy and was trained in Arabic for free and now has a job for 4 years translating Arabic for the navy. He will be based in the US, too, not overseas. After 4 years of working as a translator, he will be highly marketable in the civilian world. Sometimes, it’s the path less traveled that leads to a good job.</p>
<p>Please don’t anyone say that people with nursing degrees are getting jobs. They are not. And don’t count those who are taking jobs in long term care doing LPN work or CNA work. That’s not what someone with a BSN went to school for.</p>
<p>The problem is that hospitals are not really hiring new college grads to shadow their nursing and them absorb them into the system. Externships are few and far between. A regular doctor’s office is not going to hire a BSN and pay them what they are worth when they can get an LPN or an RN with an AA degree and pay them alot less.</p>
<p>Are we going to have a shortage of nurses in the future? Yes, that was a given even years ago when they were starting to worry about nursing back then in their late 40s or 50s when they retired. Now since NEW grads are not getting jobs, the medical field is going to get screwed at both ends.</p>
<p>Can’t someone up there in the stratosphere that makes medical decisions OPEN their eyes and realize this? Open up programs in hosptials for these young graduates. We are going to be a country totally at the mercey of , I don’t even know what, in a few years.</p>
<p>Yes, the job market is tough, but I don’t feel sorry for the bottom 5% or even the underemployed as much as I probably should. Getting a degree is by no means an automatic pass to free job land, if you want a job you have to have a marketable skill, simple as that. I would honestly be quite upset if most of the kids in my classes got great software development jobs because half of them can’t code their way out of a box. If anything, I think the problem is that college has become so watered down that almost anyone can graduate, with very little effort. When college was difficult (back in the day…), a college degree close to guaranteed competency and responsibility. However, in this day and age only the top 20% of students is of the same caliber as the average college student of years past. America is not getting smarter or harder working, we are just allowing the weaker students to waste their time and money getting a college degree that they aren’t competent enough to use.</p>
<p>Even back in the day, not everyone who got their degree had all the skills one might have hoped or thought. I know folks who went into elementary education, for example, because it required the least math. Fast forward decades & they are tutoring MATH and English.</p>
<p>Most folks back in my day could at least write well enough to convey ideas, but I still recall as a sophomore teaching assistant trying to encourage a senior who wrote gibberish that he might want to take a writing course. He astounded me by saying that his writing teachers talked about how WELL he wrote! I guess it takes all kinds, but it was scary to me that he honestly believed he was a good writer!</p>