<p>I actually wouldn’t mind being a teacher at the high school I went to. For some reason quite a few teachers there used to be lawyers… guess they got bored or something.</p>
<p>I just graduated with an English degree, and, no, it is not useless. Far from it, actually. I have quite a number of solid job prospects that are actually related to what I am interested in and have studied. We need all kinds of people in this world, and there are jobs for <em>almost</em> every set of skills and interests. Some are less obvious than others, though (including my own). </p>
<p>In regard to a Bachelor’s being somehow not special, I just read that barely 25% of adults hold bachelor’s degrees, which is a lot less than I would have expected from the way people talk about it, esp on these forums. And more education is still tied, statistically, to a higher income, though with more and more students taking out thousands in loans, I’m not sure how much it will even out to…</p>
<p>^^Lawyers end up hating their jobs or don’t do as well as they originally thought they would. It’s a tough field and has one of the highest suicide rates. IE it’s really stressful.</p>
<p>And for those who say a BA/BS is enough for teaching, you also have to complete the teacher certification process if you want to teach in a public school… that, depending on the state, could be another year of college.</p>
<p>I don’t think BA/BS degrees are useless. I also don’t think that high school degrees are useless. My dad has tons of education (BS in History, MA in Political Science, JD in Law)… I think it equates to like 21 years total in education from k-law school. But anyways, if you want to be a lawyer, you have to have a Bachelor’s Degree to even get into a law school. So, in my opinion, that renders the degree completely necessary and not useless in the least. In my dad’s case, the MA was extremely important, because his undergrad degree GPA was a little too low for law school, but he ended up with a 4.0 in his Masters, so that helped him get into law school.</p>
<p>In my mom’s case, she ended up just being a paralegal. The only degree she has is her high school degree. A Bachelors would have been a total waste of time and money for her, because her field just simply didn’t require it. Plenty of lawyers want to hire people with paralegal experience over people with degrees. At least, around here they do.</p>
<p>My cousin, on the other hand, is going straight from a high school degree to a Doctorate. He did the required courses at a community college for entrance into a Pharmacy School and will be graduating from their next year. For him, a Bachelors or a Masters would have been useless and just added more debt to his already large pharmacy school debt.</p>
<p>So, in my opinion, it completely depends on the person and what field they would like to enter. From a money and time standpoint, some degrees would be useless (such as for my mother and cousin). That being said, if you want to become a doctor or a lawyer, the undergrad degree is not useless with time and money, because it’s required, so it’s a necessity.</p>
<p>And, in my opinion, knowledge and learning is extremely important, so I wouldn’t say that a degree is useless from that standpoint ever.</p>
<p>Hopefully double majoring in political science and business with a JD following that will get me somewhere. But at the moment it doesn’t matter, just the plans of a high school student(:</p>
<p>I plan to major in computer engineering so no way!</p>
<p>I think my degree will prove very valuable. I think you need three conditions for a degree to be close to worthless: disreputable(not top 100) college, <3.0 gpa, fluff major. If you graduate from Podunk State with a 2.7 in sociology, then yeah, you most likely won’t end up doing work for which a college degree is necessary. If you have a 3.8 in computer science from Stanford, then your degree is an incredible asset.</p>
<p>I think a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering will be very worthwhile for me.</p>
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<p>Samesies. And not necessarily even in getting engineering jobs- I have an internship in the fall with a Tennessee Titan (doing charity PR stuff), and they said that my difficult major proves my work ethic.</p>
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<p>The vast majority of folks who finish their BS aren’t anywhere near 200K in debt. The vast majority of people getting their MS have most of it paid through other sources (company, fellowships, funding from government bodies like NSF, etc…) So the actual debt numbers there have to be much more closely examined.</p>
<p>Anyway, the term “worthless” isn’t appropriate. Maybe you mean to say, not sufficient. IE, a bachelor’s degree used to be sufficient (but not necessary) to acquiring a good job, but now it’s necessary, but not sufficient. Still, there’s no one BS, just like all the other people bringing up majors, there’s just too much variation to make a general case.</p>
<p>These media reports on a BS/BA degree are popular because they are a sort of “man bites dog” phenomenon. People expect those without a degree to be jobless, but not those who actually have one. In other words, you may or may not be able to find a job with a college degree, but good luck finding one without it.</p>
<p>Wiscongene, a “man bites dog” event is an amusing fluke. The state of college grads is not a fluke. It’s a real socioeconomic problem. It’s an asymmetry of information(people thinking degree always leads to plumb job) as well as a structural problem(not enough jobs in popular fields). Basically, everyone wants to be a knowledge worker dispensing expert information, but the economy can accommodate only a limited number of experts(and frankly not everyone has the ability to be an expert), so the bottom half of college grads in terms of ability/credentials are ending up with menial jobs and lots of debt.</p>
<p>“Samesies. And not necessarily even in getting engineering jobs- I have an internship in the fall with a Tennessee Titan (doing charity PR stuff), and they said that my difficult major proves my work ethic.”</p>
<p>That’s very cool.</p>