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We just can’t win with you, can we, American education system?
First you make us sit through government-mandated schooling for 13 years, which you force our parents to pay taxes for, and hand us a piece of paper. Then they tell us “that’s not good enough.” Okay, fair, reasonable, we’re 18, not ready to run a Fortune 500 yet, I get it.
But then they force us to take ridiculous exams that make absolutely no sense and are not a good judge of intelligence whatsoever, all so we can get into colleges, both private and public, that either cost our parents an arm or a leg, or force us to take out loans that will haunt us through the rest of our lives and beyond the grave.
Now can we have jobs? No no, in order to make it in this job market, you need a Master’s degree. So you spend the next 2-5 years in Business, Law or Medical School, causing us to take out loans for whatever meager stock we have left in the world.
And NOW they tell us that the process actually sets you back according to “Time Magazine”, that being overeducated in a first job like bartending or retail can lead to lower salaries for the rest of your career. So just like your mother told you about your first girlfriend or boyfriend in high school, settling will only harm you later in life.
According to researchers from Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill, who were somehow able to work together without murdering each other during ACC Basketball season, “people with some post-secondary education who were overeducated for their first jobs were making less than their peers of a similar education level, even ten years after they entered the workforce, according to a new report published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.”
They followed around 13,000 people since 1979 to determine how their initial jobs affected their later careers, and found that while they started out at a higher salary than their peers, a decade later, they were making far less.
Unfortunately, they don’t offer any kind of solution, but they’re basically saying “If you have a college degree or higher and you’re working as a bartender, or at Starbucks, or are waiting tables, you’re screwed forever.”
So the job they’re doing to cover their finances to get the proverbial monkey of student loan payments off of their backs is, in reality, hurting them. Is that what you’re trying to tell us?
We can’t win anymore between the government and their insane student loans, and colleges jacking up tuition every year to astronomic levels. It’s an impossible situation and a no-win scenario. We’re just the poor saps caught in the middle. Sucks to suck, right?
[via Time]
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Lesson here- major in something with an actual job market so you can start in a good job right off the bat. Sorry, gender studies majors.
Nice to see a fellow Hawkeye on here, Nile
“ridiculous exams that make absolutely no sense and are not a good judge of intelligence whatsoever” Show me someone who’s dumb and scored in the top 5% and someone who’s intelligent and scored in the bottom 50%. Classic resentment from someone not capable of scoring high
Well fuck
Just do engineering… you may not get lucky and pull bank and your undergrad experience may kind of suck if you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed but your options for a solid 100k++ job are endless out of the box or once your grades are irrelevant.
Revolt. It’s the only viable option.
Tl;dr: lots of people make shitty decisions despite having been “well-educated.”
Thanks for not reading it, yet commenting. It’s people like you that make my job such a pleasure.
Believe it or not, I actually enjoy your articles. This one just strikes me as a little sensationalist?
Awwww this is actually the nicest thing I’ve heard all day. Thank you.
I just thought it was worth a write-up and certainly says a lot about the state of our education system. I dunno. That issue just sticks in my craw.
I agree that our education system is pretty messed up, but I don’t think the problem is as simple as this. Society basically says “graduate HS, get a degree” but fails to mention that not all degrees are created equal. Even the Time article doesn’t say what types of degrees were obtained, what professions people went into, what they were later making, etc., so the report itself seems sort of arbitrary.
Sounds like by settling, you might be pigeonholing your career path/options.
If you read the fine print on your student loan statements, it actually says if you die, the loans are all forgiven. A SUNY piece of Info on this sunny Friday.