i copied this from an online discussion. it is by me.
My Dad just retired from teaching at Cornell and I have been surrounded by higher education all my life and the people I know with skills have jobs and so many with MAs do not. The ones with MAs have a lot of debt though which the ones who know how to fix a car or take care of broken air conditioners don't. Higher education is a strange thing, there are those who go to learn about the world (useless degree) and those who go to get a career (possibly helpful, who know?). I have so many peers who got their degrees and now want to work at nonrpfots and save the world and I am explaining "No cares that you know women's studies, history of the labor movement, ecophilosophy, and diversity training. Nonprofits - I worked that world - want accountants, website designers, plumbers and IT people. All the things we scorned to be "well educated.'" Then my friends with their MAs and no work cry a lot and are mad at me for saying the truth - we have nothing to offer but nice dinner party talk in the right circles. I was lucky that in my first semester I went to college I had an honest teacher who helped me decide to drop out. Ditto for when I got accepted to OSU's MSW. all that debt for the lowest paying masters working for the government telling people no i cannot help you all day? meanwhile exboyfriends who dropped out of 5 months at devry have great retirement and union coverage.
PhDs are a minus now in hiring. a grade school teacher with their masters won't be hired because she or he will have to be paid more. we have a glut of educated people. m,y dad taught me that most college degrees are only good for TEACHING college. you just end up in the world of academia for ever because no one anywhere else has use for you. He's a middle ages art historian! and it applies to friends and family with any arts or writing or that useless degree "communications" that was only offered for two years then disappeared since it had no practical application. i don't know anyone who cannot build a webpage, proof read, etc now. however, everyone i know who was a computer geek who dropped out of an IT school is working. working like crazy 70 hours a week for a company that mistreats them and is ethically against everything they stand for, but they are working.
as someone who spent half her childhood staying at various campus as dad did NEH grants work and the rest of the time hanging out around students who only went to college to 1. find a husband (1970s) and 2. kill time because of not wanting to work or there being no work and having all these overeducated friends in bankruptcy and yet the guys i know who fix motorcycles are doing fine,i think college is overrated as far as work goes. at least for anyone creative and artsy - become a plumber and make money for the art supplies you need, don;t go in debt for art school. if you are overeducated you cannot get hired because it is assumed you will leave once that geology job markjet starts boomong again.
in canada (i am canadian) there are a very small number of openings at universities and colleges, decided by the unions in part. so the competition is fierce. people in school have to really want that degree, not be wasting time findng themselves. in the US anyone can buy a degree, in canada you have to earn it. when higher education is nothing but a business, the standards lower drastically. having a magna cum laude degree from a US school was in their eyes like maybe grade ten. so an american degree and an canadian one have different value on the job market.
but my generation X were told to get degrees in things we loved and not think about money as the outcome for college. ha ha ha ha, we were screwed. but half the degrees for jobs back then are obsolete - i mean i could have a communications degree. if i did graphic design then i'd know nothing about computer generated art. being in a changing world is weird. i was in the generation that learned metric in the US, then the US dropped metric and we are lost. i think my generation was the first where we were told learning french was useless, take spanish to get ahead in business. maybe now it would be cantonese? the point being that college doesn't really reflect the future job market. here in VT in winter if you sell firewood you are rich and if you have a MA in journalism you are servng coffee to tourists.
i would ask anyone thinking of attending college WHY what do you hope to gain from this? for the baby boomer generation it was the way to a better life, for my generation it has not proven to be the same. in the 1980s i was taught you HAD to have a degree to have a career, and i see very few examples of that being true today. having a snowplough would have been a much better career investment than 6 years at college.
