During the Occupy Toronto movement, I met with a lot of young adults, who did not meet the typical stereotype of the left-leaning protester. Many told stories of having always followed the best advice of people they trusted — parents, teachers, guidance counsellors — only to find themselves overeducated, underexperienced, with no job prospects and mounting bills. They felt betrayed, and that was driving their anger.
If your guidance counsellor was so smart, how come he was just a guidance counsellor?
Ditto most teachers.
Didn’t listen to my teachers: they couldn’t believe I didn’t want to get a degree.
Didn’t listen to my parents: if they knew so much about money, why didn’t they have any?
Getting paid to be a writer is many people’s dream job. I did it by not listening to anybody except _other (real) writers_ and my gut.
No degree, no student debt. Don’t live in my parent’s basement (they never had one anyway.)
So who’s the “smart” one again?
As the man said: Pity.
Maybe Captain Capitalism should be required reading?
But most university degrees are not related to any job skills. It’s only the ‘material’ degrees such as medicine, biochemistry, biology, engineering etc that are related to jobs. The ‘conceptual’ degrees in the humanities and social sciences have no particular job connection.
The problem with the ‘conceptual degrees’ is their utter alienation from the real world. Debating what ‘ought to be’ rather than examining what ‘is’ is fine in the safe, secure, unaccountable walls of the seminar room but useless in the real world. And so, we get the ideologues raised in these heady irrelevancies of ‘hope and change’ (Obama is one such example although he’s got some serious psychological flaws in addition).
So, these young people have been removed from the job market for a number of years – whew – that’s actually a requirement in this economy for there are no jobs for the thousands and thousands in our universities…but, when they graduate, there’s nothing for them to do. Other than become activists and protesters, or, dash for a govt bureaucratic job, those bloated jobs-for-life.
And, these type of degrees and types of jobs don’t enhance and increase the economic wealth of a society; they drain it.
These disgruntled young “adults” should spend their time warning high school students to not follow in their footsteps.
Trades! The money is in the trades. Too many of us old coots want to retire soon. A trades person is gonna be worht their weight in gold in 10 years.
As to uni education, if you aint at the top of your class by the second year, quit and look for something else. Not to many “Burrows” out there that can become elite type players after never getting drafted!
Whoa. You mean to tell me that a post-graduate degree in Feminist History with a minor in French Poetry won’t have employers beating down your door? I’m shocked, shocked I say.
Another dimension to this story is the role played by legions of state-run and/or funded universities which have done little or nothing to adapt to the changing needs of the economy. Faculties of Arts had a heyday in the 1960’s and 70’s when there was brisk demand for civil servants driven by the massive expansion of government. Despite the fact that demand has now evaporated these faculties continue to consume resources in much the same quantities as before, thanks to use-it-or-lose-it budgeting, union work rules and tenure.
Yeah, a buch of left leaning people in academia upset that they aren’t getting what they want. How unlike the usual protestor. Totally different.
if we could only teach those educated fools how to do something, they don’t even know how to think after they get ALL that useless edumakation
Could be worse. I have a degree in journalism but have ended up in IT. I love the technical aspect of the job, but absolutely hate the drag-ass no-talent slack-jawed mouth-dragging knuckle-breathers who always seem to settle into management. These people grind me down. Every day I wish I had learned a trade. I probably would have enjoyed being a mechanic or an electrician, but my parents looked down on such things and instilled in me a misguided disdain for “manual labour”. I so regret that now and am ashamed for having ever thought that such work was beneath me. Truly, it is me who is not worthy of the work.
Anyway, a line from this item linked yesterday —
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/28194.html#more-28194
— is just absolutely beautiful:
For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle.
The author must know my meddling scrunt of a manager.
#1…no body should be allowed to even apply for secondary edumacation until they have a minimum of 3 years of working and paying taxes under their belts(teaches reality).
#2…none of the above jobs will consist of government,humanities,arts,hopey-changey,pixie dust/unicorn farts,etc. jobs(teaches empathy for Joe Blow & Jane Sixpack).
What is really to bad is that all these people these higher educated people listened to are certainly leftards(teachers,guidance counsellors & and probably their parents).
And as NME666 mentioned,after all this “teaching” and debt,they still don’t get it that Feminist studies and basket weaving Muzzie style degrees aren’t even worth the paper to wipe their butts with.Sad comment on our “education” system.
They should have invested in their future with som of these fine courses.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/08/29/living/bizarre-college-courses-mf/index.html?hpt=hp_bn8
A sign of the times and a long road back to reality.
Lickmuffin. I don’t know how old you are but I didn’t start my apprenticeship as an electrician until I was 35. I got my license before I was 40 and now at 48 I work for a major electricity generation company as an instrumentation and control technician. I’ll make 130 to 140 k this year. My point is you can start all over again.
IT *is* a trade, unless you’re doing original software engineering. The problem isn’t that it’s not a trade, it’s that it’s undervalued by the management and overvalued by the people in it, and stuffed full of people with no relevant education or experience. IT suffers from an industry-wide competence problem borne of a lack of any real corpus of widely accepted best practices.
Kathy,i couldn’t agree with you more.I heard the same bs when i was in school.The teachers taught the ABC’s [Anything But Construction.}how did that work out.!!! I ignorned there stupidity,learned a trade and is now making more money than they ever dreamed of.
Ministry
minuteman: I’m 44, with wife and kids. I suspect that I do not have the resources — cash — to carry us through 4 or 5 years of apprenticeship. Would love to look into it, though.
No, we need a publicly funded North American Spankological Program for our wayward youth! I’m talking bare bummers too!!!
It makes me want to spit. My own idiot daughter phones me up one day and says ‘Dad, I dumped sciences at university! I am going into Fine Arts’
Before I could explode my in-laws gagged me and put me in a straight jacket and shot me full of tranks. ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ they crowed, ‘follow your dreams!’ They told her she was special and wonderful and gave her all that warm fuzzy love and support.
Following those dreams cost her a pile of student debt and now she can’t find work outside Sobey’s or Starbucks. I am looking at my idiot in-laws and all those morons can do is shrug. My heart broke for good when my daughter told me she was gay. Your kids are tradesmen, cops, doctors…and my kid is a gay hipster that thinks she is smarter than the lot of them – and bags groceries and slings coffee for a living. Gah!
Screw you millenial kids and Gen Y slobs! Most of us DID give you good advice, but you wanted to listen to your moronic teachers, the politically correct liberals and other lickspittles! You copped out and went for a mickey mouse degree and now you’re stuck with it. Gee, who woulda seen that one coming???
What are your retirement plans again Kate? Something about sandbags, machine guns, water tablets and ammo/supply stockpiles…? Perhaps we should not joke….
I have noticed that trucking industry dispatchers frequently hold arts/history degrees.
Remember the yarn about engineers brains costing $1/lb while dispatchers brains are costing $50/lb.?
I makes sense when ya figure how many dispatchers ya have to kill to get a lb of brains………
Thanks burton … now there’s an irony …
Go where is GROWTH.
And yes that means leaving home.
I don’t suppose any of those young “adults” coiuld put two and two together and come up with … it was liberals who were the cause of this situation.
Trust liberals and pay ……………
A quick look at the job boards before deciding on a major would be helpful. If you are in school, get into a co-op program. Look at it as a 4 month interview. Most of our company new hires were former co-op students.
“…a group of university students who will soon be graduating. They are realizing now that their arts degrees might not be enough to land a job…”
Four years to realize the obvious says it all to me, as in “No sh*t Sherlock.”
Minuteman and Lickmuffin,
I went back to school at 39 to get an engineering diploma after a soul destroying ‘career’ in hospitality.
Married with two kids and not a lot of money.
We did it.
The alternative was never starting again.
You only have one life.
These kids have to learn to be flexible. My son with a computer education is a truck driver and the one with a fine arts diploma is a commercial pilot (with a lot higher debt getting there than a degree). I left home with Grade XIII and didn’t get a degree until I was in my 50s. You don’t have to go straight from high school to university and that too often gets forgotten. Life experience teaches what should be important to study, not a guidance cousellor.
Lickmuffin, you need to find a job as a pre-sales engineer. You can make more than any of these management types. You do demos and stuff for the sales guys. The money blows away anything those idiot managers make.
Daniel Ream said: “IT suffers from an industry-wide competence problem borne of a lack of any real corpus of widely accepted best practices.”
Widely accepted best practices? Nothing that couldn’t be solved by some more certification and regulation, eh?
IT is an industry where pretty much -all- knowledge becomes obsolete every five years. Example, “The Cloud” didn’t exist five years ago, and now if you don’t have a degree in Cloud nobody wants to talk to you.
Right now the super hot deal is iPad apps. Everybody wants them for their little niche application. That’ll last for another couple of years, then the Next Big Thing will come along and everything you know about writing for the iPad will be ancient history, never to be used again.
One of the coming Next Big Things IMHO is going to be small scale manufacturing. CNC, CAD, and 3D printing. There is no body of “best practices” for it, because most of the stuff we’re going to be doing in ten years hasn’t even been invented yet. But here’s Daniel already worried there’s no Certified 3D Printer Engineer “best practices” written up.
Jeeze. And we wonder why the poverty struck peasant farmer Chicoms are eating our lunch.