I sure hope Kevin doesn’t major in one of these subjects. He’s starting out as a computer sciences major.
The 10 Most Worthless College Majors
College is a great place to learn and have fun. But let’s not kid ourselves, some degrees are as useless as the plot in a Michael Bay film. Here’s a list of 10 degrees that may be interesting, but do jack shit for you in the real world.
10. Art History
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: With an art history degree you could maybe curate an art gallery or work at a museum or .yeah, that’s it. That’s all you can do. And seeing as how every art gallery and museum I’ve ever been to has exactly one dude sitting quietly at a desk reading a New Yorker and eating a food that requires chopsticks, I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s not a lot of positions open in the field. That means you’re going to have to venture out into the corporate world. And let me inform you, when you’re interviewing with Bob from the HR team at Wal-Mart who’s wearing a tie that has the twin towers smoking with writing underneath that says “We Will Never Forget, your art history degree says to him “I’m a commie a-hole who thinks I’m better than guys with 9/11 ties.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After your parents boot your ass from your bedroom to make room for anything that’s not your bedroom, you’ll wander towards the nearest coffee shop and get a job there, which will allow you to meet artists who will thank you for allowing them to put fliers by the cash register that inform people of their upcoming show that touts “the combination of art and flute.
9. Philosophy
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers. I took many philosophy classes and it involved reading and smoking a shit pile of weed. You don’t need to pay 20,000 dollars a year to do that. All you need is twenty dollars and a library card.
What Job You’ll End Up With: Thanks to your extensive knowledge of philosophy, you’re now self-aware enough to know that most jobs out there will make you totally miserable. So most likely you’ll wait tables part time and hope someone starts paying you for the bi-monthly entries on your blog.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If you’re not named Achmed or Bjork or G’Day Mate this isn’t a degree, it’s the last 18 years of your life. If you really want to study us you don’t need to go to some stupid class, you need only to sit back and watch a two-hour block of Must-See TV to understand The American. After doing my own research, it seems that this mysterious creature is a pot-bellied humanoid with a hot wife and bad credit who has a penchant for low-calorie beer, Chilis, Applebees, TGIFridays, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Dave and Busters, Steak and Shake, Chilis (again) and Red Lobster. Oh and he can totally demolish a White Castle Crave Case in, like, 20 seconds. OK, now give me my degree.
What Job You’ll End Up With: To take your American Studies degree one step further, you will be qualified to do 40-50 years of “graduate work cleaning tables and taking orders at a Chilis, Applebees, TGIFridays or Red Lobster. Or possibly Denny’s.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: I didn’t even know this was a major until I found it on the Appalachian State website. According to their actual explanation of this major: “Music therapy is the scientific application of the art of music within a therapeutic relationship to meet the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of individuals. Which is a big, fancy way of saying “We’ll teach you how to make a mix tape. I guess I, too, am a qualified music therapist because my “Summer Jams “95 tape I made in the 10th grade totally rocked my house party. All my friends told me that kicking it off with Wreckz-N-Effects “Rump Shaker followed by Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise totally met their physical, mental and spiritual needs to help them get wasted on my dad’s Schnapps and Drambuie.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After realizing that yoga studios and elderly homes don’t pay people just to come in and set mood music, you’re sadly going to end up putting your degree towards burning a fire to keep warm because you are homeless.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Go into a communications class on any given day and it’ll smell like dried semen and booze. Reason being, communications is the major for anyone who wants to graduate, but doesn’t want to stop getting totally wasted on weekdays. Here’s the bad news, if an employer is going to hire someone to help decipher how human beings communicate, he’s going to hire someone with the letters “Dr. before their name, not the person who first checks to see if a class is offered online, then when they find out it’s not, let’s out a “gaaaaay bro.
What Job You’ll End Up With: You’ll go to several job interviews that turn out to be pyramid schemes, even though at first you won’t realize this and come home and tell your parents, who you still live with, “They said I’ll probably be making six figures in less than a year just by selling these beer cozies.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Despite what “Dancing with the Stars and “High School Musical may tell you, there aren’t a lot of dancing jobs out there,so you better be good because there aren’t any gigs for mediocre dancers. Outside of New York City or some crap in LA there is absolutely nothing you can do with a dance degree that doesn’t involve actually dancing for money. And since the Des Moines interpretive dance movement hasn’t really taken off yet, you have a better chance landing a job as an 8-Track repairman or a member of the Beatles.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After moving to New York and trying out for Hello Dolly! or Damn Yankees or any of the other seven Broadway plays that want dancers and not landing a single one because you got your dance degree from Ball State, you will find ample opportunity to show off your choreographic skills at one of the city’s many strip clubs. You’ll just need to change your name to Crystal or Bambi and you’ll be able finally live out your dream as a dancer. (Mom and Dad will be so proud!)
4. English Lit
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree. Having an English Lit degree is like being a member of the Kansas City Royals: No one cares and the best you can hope for is every once in a while someone buys you a beer because of it.
What Job You’ll End Up With: You can read and comprehend, so that gives you an advantage over 99.5% of the people that peruse Craig’s list job listings. Therefore, you’ll most likely end up landing an entry level position at a random small company, or showing up to your interview and being raped repeatedly by a group of masked men.
3. Latin
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Not only does no one speak this language anymore, but we already have all the Latin that exists in the world. There’s no new Latin that’s hot off the presses that needs immediate translating. I’m no business major, but majoring in a language that doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t sound so good for job security. And I’m sorry to break the news to you, but the world doesn’t need someone to translate The Bible or the inscription on the side of a Post Office or El Loco Latino’s “Latin House Party.
What Job You’ll End Up With: Since you majored in something that doesn’t exist, you’re going to have two jobs. Your first one will be as the annoying pretentious guy who gives everyone the Latin etymology of every big word he hears at every dinner party he attends. Your second, and most lucrative job, will be as a Subway Sandwich Artist.
2. Film
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: No one in hollywood gives a shit that you made a short film about an alcoholic albino that discovers the meaning of life through the help of a retarded child. Unless that retarded child was played by the son of Harvey Weinstein, your film or degree will be as pointless as the last three seasons of Lost
What Job You’ll End Up With: If you’re lucky, you’ll have an uncle who can get you a job as a production assistant on CSI Miami, where your time will be spent making coffee runs and finding whores that will let David Caruso pee on them.
1. Religion
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Sorry God, but a major in Religion is about as worthless as St. Brice (The Patron Saint of Stomach Aches.) Even Duke University can’t put a solid sell on this degree: “A major in religion offers intellectual excitement and can be a pathway to a liberal education. OK, you sold me. So now I get to shell out about a hundred thousand dollars so I can know what to wear to a Shinto ceremony and learn how many virgins Allah will give me if I blow myself up in an Israeli square? If it’s OK with you, I’ll keep my money and stick to my sinning-a-lot-now-and-repenting-on-my-deathbed plan.
What Job You’ll End Up With: This one is tricky. On one hand you’ll probably end up working behind the desk of a Christian Science Reading Room. But on the other, you may end up with everlasting peace and spiritual enlightenment. Let’s call it a draw.
Marsh just graduated with a BS in business and a major in information systems with a certificate in application development. It took her 10 years she did it while raising 2 kids, building (literally) a house and moving a couple of times after we sold the last house we built.
Without a doubt Kevin has picked a super field! I think IT and permaculture will be it.
Heads up: I’m sure Penn is super but I went ballistic on Marsha’s college president over her schooling because I had to teach her how to code – they failed miserably. Some dean lambasted Ford because of the Taurus and I let him know in no uncertain words that their Information Systems program was a Ford Taurus.
Oh, I should do an article titled “The New Economy”. It was the term some moron governor used during the graduation commencement speech he gave. Let me tell you: Faber is right, we are effing doomed. When you hear about Master’s being given in Homeland Security you know that the new economy is comprised of morons going to school to get 100k of debt so they can manage workers they hire off ads on piza boxes to perpetuate the trashing of our 4th Amendment rights while molesting our wive’s and children so a$$holes like Deepak Chopra can sell naked radiation body scanners to his moron buddy Obama.
LMAO! I’ve got a grandson with a BA in art who works as a barista at Starfucks.. Cost about $100K that’ll never be repaid, lives with a totally neurotic witch of indeterminate gender (I do know it’s really small, skinny and cries continuously – especially on Facebook) and plays with a rock music band for nickels and dimes that puts out noises like a scalded cat on steroids. Sigh…. Good kid though.
MA
Actually, Religion is probably a good degree, at least if you get the Reverend title. Holy Men do well during tough economic times, plus a bonus is Churches don’t pay Property tax.
IT will possibly get you a job, except of course you will have to do it for the same wage they pay the Geeks over in Pakistan. Then of course, when the electric grid collapses you will have to return to college to take Abacus101.
Agriculture would seem to be the best major these days, or Police Science. The Gestapo will no doubt be hiring for a while.
RE
@DavosS: I didn’t know you were also an owner/builder! That’s great – there are not very many of us around. Annette and I build four homes (one in N. Idaho, 3 more on Maui) and I never enjoyed a DIY project more. We went to Shelter Institute in Maine back in ’80 and saw what one could do with a bit of work and much less money!
Hired hammer swingers by the hour when the beams were too big to lever into place but we did it all from dirt to roof. Jeez, it takes a long time to get above ground level, doesn’t it?
MA
Where is ‘journalism’? Surely there can be no more worthless degree than a degree that purports to show you how to report on subjects you know nothing about. Yes such amazing positions are still available but unless you look like Lindsay Lohan or performed oral/anal sex on The Rodhamster or her husband you will not be given one. That the entire newspaper/magazine and TV news industries are themselves in terminal decline means your only real chance of ever finding paid employment in the field will be to join a ‘journalism school’ faculty and entice others to spend their money in this academic ponzi scheme.
“We went to Shelter Institute in Maine back in ’80 and saw what one could do with a bit of work and much less money!”- Muck About
Isn’t this about the time you tell us how you made $400/hr by building your own McMansion in Hawaii while Stargazing on Da Goobermint payroll?
RE
@Muck About: After I built this 1800 sqFt home I learned of Earth Rammed. Biggest misstake I ever made. Be interested in hearing about the dirt roof!
It is pathetic that most of the work gets covered up, like it never happened.
Well having a film degree is a little inaccurate. My cousin has a film degree from USC film school. He makes about 200K as a film editor etc. for Dreamworks. In addition my brother works in the film industry as a lighting guy…he averages about 175K a year.
What I don’t understand is how Universities let these kids rack up tens of thousands of dollars in loans when they know that a history degree won’t get you a job paying very much. I guess the parents and the universities are blind douche bags.
Don’t worry about Kevin’s future Admin.
He will be conscripted up into the Army of the Illuminati to lay down his life in order to make the Middle East safe for democracy. God Bless America.
With a used laptop and even a 56K dial-up connection, one can use http://www.gutenberg.org to download virtually any book in the public domain, and if one has an MP3 player, many of these have been recorded by volunteers and posted at http://www.librivox.org. (Used paperback editions of the classics are cheap to giveaway, for those lacking in the technology department.) The cost of obtaining a good, basic education, at least in non-technical subjects, has never been lower. CLEP tests for virtually all lower-division common-core subjects – English, math, natural sciences, humanities, economics, and so forth – cost very little (free to military, VA reimburses vets for the cost) and can be used to get 3 to 6 credits per of semester credit each. An associate’s degree should cost less than $1,000 for someone who is capable of pursuing independent study.
Doing that much on one’s own should help to focus the individual on what they love best, and it ought to be a good selling point for that first prospective boss, too.
For those with an interest in technical subjects, MIT Open Courseware (http.ocw.mit.edu) offers older versions of their classes, free, to anyone who wants to download them. This isn’t for credit, but one could get an MIT education, minus the actual in-class time, if one wanted to. An MIT grad had posted 800+ videos at http://www.khanacademy.org. These are short courses in how to do quadratic equations, the principles of finance, and just anything else you can think of that’s numbers-based. They’re free.
If you need a degree, Governor’s Western University, Thomas Edison State College, Charter Oak State College, Excelsior College and other accredited, legit schools exist to service the distance education market. There should be no reason for the average college student not destined for an elite school (and its’ alumni connections) to have to rack up $100K in debt when a degree – and more importantly, and education – can be had for so little cost, if only the effort is made to obtain it.
You know, even going back to the 70s, you always had pundits making fun of “worthless” College Majors like Art History or French Literature, etc. In the subtext of this argument is the belief that the ONLY worthwhile College Majors revolve around Science and Mathematics in some fashion.
Thing is here, as the Chinese are finding out with Engineering Ph.Ds working in Retail is that you really don’t need that many Scientists and Engineers and Programmers. In fact as we move along in this spin down, its likely we will need a lot fewer than we already have unemployed, so IMHO it is a myth that such majors are really any better than the ones the technophiles make fun of.
In reality, people will need to learn practical skills, which generally are not taught in college anyhow. What College really should do is teach you how to THINK, and while learning science and math is a part of that, its not the whole ball of wax either. You can actually learn quite a bit if you major in Latin. This allows you to go back and read many texts never translated into English which cover many aspects of Economics and Politics we struggle with today. I hate the fact I have to depend on the writings of other people who interpret these texts as a means to understand them, and now I personally wish I had taken Latin instead of some of the advanced math courses I took.
Similarly, while Majors like “Journalism” or “Communications” are watered down versions of the more basic English Major, learning how to write and how to compose logical arguments is extremely important in almost all jobs that have an intellectual component to them. Lawyers have to write briefs, you have company meetings where how well you express yourself verbally can make the difference between whether your proposal is rejected or accepted, etc. The fact many Scientists and IT folks cannot express their ideas either verbally or with the written word often limits their impact and ability to move up the corporate ladder from just a grunt programmer to a Head Honcho position.
Languages in general can be a very good Major in college, if you are adept at learning them. This was not my strong point, but my Illuminati Spawn college girlfriend was very good at it, and although she majored in Spanish, she also learned French, German, Russian and was working on Chinese when we broke up. She went to work in the Diplomatic corps (typical Illuminati profession), but she could easily have gone to work for many Multinational companies where being a polyglot is a very valuable skill. She wasn’t a dummy in math either, I actually met her freshman year in Calculus class. Helping her with Integration by parts is actually how I finally got into her pants. LOL. However, she spent most of her college years learning more languages, while I learned more math. Either choice is a valid one though, or at least it was back then.
I’m not a big fan of majors like Art History, but in fact for many years Artsy types found employment in the field of Advertising. Yes such jobs are likely to be disappearing here rapidly, but as I pointed out in a prior post in this thread, so will IT jobs. So is an IT degree really going to be that much more valuable than an Art History degree? I doubt it. Both of them will be working in some other field likely not all that related to what they majored in college in. That is if they can find a job at all.
Even in the Sciences, I remember all us folks studying Physics and Chemistry tended to look down on Geology majors as being “Rocks for Jocks”. However, Geology majors found work in the Oil Patch and in Mining, which overall has had a better employment outlook over the years than say Aerospace Engineering, which has been hammerred many times over.
Anyhow, having read the sort of article written in the OP many times over since the 70s, I don;t really think there is all that much truth held in it. Precisely what it is you study in College is not as important as refining skills which help you to think, to communicate and to understand the world and the people in it. Far as finding a job goes after college, this is going to be increasingly difficult no matter what you major in, and its not all that clear that AN maor is worth the kind of money you will have to shell out to get a Sheepskin anymore. Taking the $100K or so you have to shell out for a College education and buying a nice little Doomstead Farm out in the Ozarks is probably a better use of the money. However, old ideas die hard, and the idea a College Education with a Science and Math focus will provide you better opportunities in the future is one of them.
RE
The undergraduate education taken from a reputable college was never intended to train a student to “make money” let alone “get a good job”.
The purpose of studying at college was to improve one’s mind to make a better leader. History, religion and foreign (classical) languages were necessary to learn the successes and failures of previous generations. Literature was the means of communicating the humanity of these lessons which facts alone could not.
Graduate and post-graduate degrees were obviously intended to further a professional career. Both levels, undergraduate and post-graduate were still the privilege of the few. And why not? Most men are followers. Why on earth would they even desire to study at college?
It is most unfortunate for us that, thanks to the GI Bill and its explicit validation/affirmation of the egos and expectations of the Huddled Masses of Ellis Island, only recently departed their peonage and serfdom of the “old country”, college study was confused with wealth, class and prosperity.
What the Wretched Refuse did not understand is that Yale, Harvard and even the local cow-college were attended by wealthy families because they were already wealthy and could afford to send Junior away for several years. College study was never intended, designed or expected to transmute poverty into substance.
But the undeniably corrupting influence of free greenbacks ran its predictable course: GI’s flood campus looking to make money (that’s why their parents came here, after all, to “America Where the Streets Are A-Paved with Gold”) and to “make up for lost time” — time fighting the war.
For their part, college administrators were only too happy to accept those greenbacks and indulge their earnest, if vulgar, new students, creating all manner of “product” for them to “consume”.
Voila! You have Earned and are now Awarded an Official Degree of Success, and are hereby Accorded all Rights and Privileges thereunto Pertaining.
If you want to make money, find a need and fill it. If you want to learn to think to be a better man, a better citizen and a better leader, study the liberal arts at a school with good teachers and fellow students of good character — while living off the family fortune.
No offense intended, I’m just sayin it is what it is.
I tried opening a quaint Latin American Studies shop in the French Quarter but it didn’t work out.
I understand his point. He’s being very practical. Kudos for that.
But making fun of the Arts, Literature, Dance, Film, Philosophy, etc. ….. kind of a shame, really.
Wonder what this author does for relaxation? Watch a computer programmer generate code?
ssgconway
A GREAT BIG thank you for the most excellent links you provided. You’re an awesome poster!!
I was aware of the MIT site. Have taken several of their courses. It’s a fantastic site.
But I was not aware of the Khan Academy site. Wow. That looks terrific, too.
RE: Went to Shelter Institute for first qtr of 1980.. Built a home and went back to college in N. Idaho ’80,’81,’82. Moved to Maui in ’83. Took 3 years to find a buy a piece of land there that wasn’t for sale (i.e. look up the owner of the property you want in the tax records, cold contact and cash offer) and build the first home there ’86, ’87, ’88. Next homes were grown in sequence from there through ’94 when we went back to Kwajalein when I got sick of driving up that volcano every day.
‘nuf history? I still stand by the $400/hour after all the dust settled, we retired and sold the various places. It would be at least another 50% ($600/hr) if I had rented them out for a few more years and gotten sucked into the wondrous updraft in real estate from 2003-2006.. Two of the homes have since sold for $1.2 mil and $1.5 mil since we sold them and retired on the perfectly reasonable and honest capital gains back in ’97.
I could be talked into building yet another owner-built home but I like where I am too much to go pioneering again. Beside that, while I know I’m only 40 yrs old (inside), the extra 33 years on the coach is beginning to limit me a bit. You know, shock absorbers stiff, bent frame, windows starting to dull from all the bugs in the face, things like that.
But I could still do it.
MA
RE
Your last post is one of the better ones you’ve written.
I swear — I’ve never seen anyone oscillate as violently between smart and stupid as you.
@Muck About
I am sure you still could. You just wouldn’t get anywhere NEAR $400/hr for doing so, in fact you would LOSE money by doing so. It would cost you more in materials to build the place than you could sell it for in the current market, or for the forseeable future.
Like the idea Science and Math majors will net return on your College Investment, so also the idea that Do-it-Yourself Homebuilding can earn you a net return on the investment is an idea that dies hard in the mind of a Silent. However, I will agree that do-it-yourself Doomstead building, while it won’t return you a monetary reward equivalent to the money you spend to build it is probably a better investment of the money than a College Education is.
If you do want to go into DIY building again, I suggest you start building a nice Sailboat in your backyard, and map out the Navigation to Tristan de Cunha, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. House building is dead for a while here, there are way too many of them already.
RE
You’re welcome, Stuck. without CLEP, I wouldn’t have graduated, and I’m happy to pass the info along. Spirit of ’76, you’re right – an ecucation should teach one how to live (and how to learn and think), not how to make a living. The Humanities were called ‘The Road of Kings” by the French, because they inculculated those traits of thought and habit that a leader would need to govern himself, as well as others, and to take a long view of things.
The GI Bill did provide many with an opportunity which their brains often merited more than their pre-war circumstances, but colleges did sell out to the Almighty Dollar. (Federal ‘defense’ research grants had even more of a corrupting effect, as the best professors went into research and left teaching to grad assistants.) It’s not so much the Ivies that were affected by the expansion of the colege population as it was State U. and the smaller liberal arts colleges, since the Ivies exist as much for networking as for educating. (“I Am Charlotte Simmons,” by Tom Wolfe, is an excellent novelization of what an elite campus is like today.)
I agree that the classics are necessary, and that mere vocationalism creates narrow, technocratic minds to whom the ‘big picture’ is irrelevant or imcomprehensible. (I majored in History & Poitical Science and advised my pre-med daughter to switch to Art – she’s gifted in it – so I’ve put my money where my mouth is on this one.) Training is something that an employer should provide; we mow have accustomed corporations to expect someone else – public schools, jobs training programs, etc. – to train their workers, instead of them selecting and hiring those they’d commit to training themselves.
We have forced the young to think in terms of degrees ionstead of education because they think that they have to have the former to get a job, and the latter is of secondary importance, as ling as they have run-of-the-mill or better skills. They may earn degrees without being educated and they may be able to secure work, but will they be good citizens?
“I swear — I’ve never seen anyone oscillate as violently between smart and stupid as you.”- Stucky
I pride myself on being difficult to pin down in this way 🙂 Thanks Stuck.
RE
RE, your post is excellent in spelling out what value the old-line majors have, and how many of the new ones are just truncated, vocationalized versions of the oldies. You reminded me of something I’d read about Steve Jobs: The Apple font library is partly the result of his having taken, before dropping out, a community college course in calligraphy. It’s hard to know how the acquisition of an education, even a small thing like calligraphy, may play out, but at least it does not have a shelf life, as many of the trendy majors probably do.
Ivan Illich talked about this in his book, “Deschooling Society.” we create passive consumers of ‘education,’ when we should instead strive to teach people to be able to teach themselves. Dorothy Sayers made much the same point in her, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I made this point at work (my day job deals with implementation of job-training programs) and found myself, as expected, a bloc of one, as it runs counter to the current wisdom to challenge the validity of a vocationalist education model. (The Soviets found that abandoning their ‘Gymnasium’ model, a leftover from Czarist times, for a vocational one in the Khruschev era, left them always chasing sunsets, as they would plan and execute programs that were obsolete by the time they produced graduates, and the instrstial skill shortages they intended to address continued, even as they churned out graduates with obsolete skills who had to be re-trained, as they lacked the foundation to teach themselves. (Denis Soltys documents this in “Education For Decline.”)
Thanks for sharing your insights.
ssgconway
You are correct about the Steve Jobs story. He told it at a Commencement Address to Stanford grads in 2005. IMHO, it’s one of the best speeches ever. I even copied it to my hard drive and have reread it several times over the years.
Copy and Paste below. I hope you enjoy it even half as much as I have.
========================================================================
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
ssgconway
If Steve Jobs ever talks about Paragraph Breaks then I’ll send you that as well.
BTW, it looks like this.
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LOL
In college, I double majored in English and Germanic Languages and now I make a good living as an IT Project Manager. I spend 80% of my day writing emails, providing reports to management and solving problems, not necessarily technical ones. I minored in Latin.
Majoring in Computer Science is not the ticket it once was. Those Bangalore programmers are really good and they work their asses off for 20k. Besides, American universities are notorious for emphasizing Java, Visual Basic, and other high-level application environments that are fast becoming commoditized. In India and China, they teach programming, advanced algorithims and data structures and stuff like that. Those people are very good and very cheap. Besides, being a code jockey only works for a few years. Then you burn out. Try getting an interview at Google if you’re pushing 30. Fat chance. Bottom line: you move into management or you go away.
What you really have to do in college is grow up, learn to think, get along with people, meet deadlines, and become a responsible adult. The rest is up to you.
College is overrated. Your work ethic, drive, and ability to build relationships/networks will provide more success than a college degree. A degree is a commodity and we have an abundant supply of college graduates with a very small demand for them. For those looking to attend school for a degree outside of sciences and engineering, they will most likely be strapped with debt and no job when they graduate. The internet is incredible. Many can self educate themselves for free by using sources on the web while getting real world experience. I”m not saying fuck college but rather changing my perspective on college. I think the quality of a college education is declining and I feel like college discourages independent thought and entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately, those who are looking to work for a company will most likely need a degree to even be considered for a job. This is beginning to change but it is sad that so many kids are going to college and getting worthless degress in hope that they might be the lucky one who lands a job in an economy that is deteriorating. If you are going to do the college thing, at least pick a major that will have supply/demand fundamentals in your favor. I graduated college in May 2010 with a degree in finance. Not a good major but I didn’t have the intention of getting a degree to get a job although, I do work for someone currently since I don’t like the economic landcape that I see for our country in the near to medium future. My intention was to get an education that would benefit me as an investor and business owner in the future. I used what I learned from college with what I learned from self education and applied it to my work experiences. I learned some good stuff in school but success is not determined by one’s ability to get a degree. It is fairly easy to get a degree. Success is determined by simple, common sense factors such as being a good listener, working hard and smart, and understanding how to treat people right. I’ve learned over time that one’s ability to build relationships and great networks is far more valuable then any degree. This becomes even more important in our current economy as so many college students graduate continue to add to the supply of grads looking for jobs that are very limited.
I am pretty passionate about education and my outlook on formal education is starting to change. I used to be all about college but now I’m starting to see the ROI go downhill. Times are changing and we need to change how we view education. I’ve learned more from my self education and work experiences than I have from my college classes. As college tuition continue to surpass inflation, one needs to analyze the current ROI for a college education before taking the plunge and enslaving themselves to debt that may take them forever to pay off. My generation is clueless and primarily attend college for the degree rather than the education. This is the core problem.
Even the technology degrees today (IT, engineering, hard sciences…) are no guarantees of success. IBM is one the greatest exporters of American jobs there is. As I’ve said before…a good software engineer in India makes about $11,000 a year…..
Thanks, Stuck. Jmarz, you’re right about the ROI for a typical college degree. It’s declining, fast. I am all for obtaining an education, and if a degree helps, one that’s 100% CLEP ( http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/about.html ) it’s still good enough for any mundane purpose. It’s the education that matters. I like to think of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and how the old man educated Edmond while they were in prison with what a university graduate of that day would’ve been happy to have – several languages among the attainments passed on. It’s not a good use of time or money to spend four years on an extended drunk, just sliding along, majoring in something no one had heard of 40 years ago, or acquiring a skill that, as you point out, can be had by any employer with a T1 line to Bangalore. Well said.
@Stuck: I’d read that Jobs speech once before but thanks for posting it as I enjoyed it just as much this time as last. I’m going to send it along to my oldest daughter who lost her husband (at 53) last year and is dithering and flapping about what she wants to do with the rest of her life.
It might furnish her some good insights, so thanks again.
MA
@ssgconway: Thanks big time for the links you posted. I’d heard about MIT’s course postings but never explored the possibilities.. I’ve bookmarked them both as more superb links to use when I need to stir up my grey matter (happens pretty often too!).
MA
” It’s not a good use of time or money to spend four years on an extended drunk”
Not sure I agree with that. If you can get a loan to Party Hearty for 4 more years here it would be a hell of a lot more fun than standing on Unemployment Lines or getting your nuts blown off by an IED in Afghanistan.
The Bennies of a 4 year extended drunk in College are many. For instance, Arizona State University is currently Ranked as the #1 Party school by Playboy, and here is a photo of the Cheerleading Squad
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4 years of this are memories you can take with you for a Lifetime 🙂 It certainly was the part of College I remember best and value most anyhow. LOL
RE
one more try
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RE
Oh well. Use your imgaination. LOL.
RE
Nothing makes me happier than a Satisified Muck !! So, you’re welcome.
I am sorry and sad to read about your daughter’s loss. I hope the article brings her some insights yet undiscovered. My thoughts go with you and her.
FWIW … Jimmy Valvano’s ESPY speech — when he was dying of brain cancer — is for me one of the very best motivational speeches for dealing with loss, and the attitude one should have …
While I was headhunting, my heart broke for students with useless majors. They came out all bright-eyed, smiley-faced and ready to launch into a 50k-100k management job with no experience and a paper from their college showing them the “entry level starting salaries.”
I was usually the first person to have to tell them the truth (HR people lie their asses off, under the guise of protecting themselves from lawsuits), but because it was the late 90s, and unemployment was less than 3% and a wide open job market, these kids found decent jobs, but they rarely ever found jobs in their majors, nor for over $28k (which was what most 4 yr degrees with no experience started with).
BUT, you left out the new reality. For all those grads with worthless degrees there is hope.
It is called the federal, state and local government – with a few megacorporations thrown in looking for the high-turnover grunts to work seven days a week.
It is unbelievable to me how many government workers I know that were Liberal Arts majors.
So, for a few more years if lucky, these kids should keep their legal records clean and apply all over the government. Great gig while they can get them.
Teresa, Goobermint jobs are going to be eviscerated right along with the private sector ones, at least until as a last ditch effort Da Gooberint tries a WPA style “Workfare” program. The late 90s paradigm of so-called “useless degrees” reminds me oh so much of the kind of thinking Muck About purveys here, it is centered on a pardigm that no longer functions and will never function again. Your whole concept of how Gooobermint works is so thoroughly parochial it sometimes boggles my mind, and I do not often confront you directly on it because mostly you are not the confrontational sort here so I leave you alone. But crap, these kind of posts ust really want to make me PUKE. You do not have a clue what is going on here at all.
RE
You’re welcome, Muck. Tersa, I have to basically agree with RE here. (My day job is is gov’t.) Liberal Arts majors are better suited to write policy issuances, administer contracts, monitor program compliance, etc. It’s all verbal, some number stuff thrown in, and is what the Chinese designed their Civil Service exams around under Wu Ti, what the Prussians based theirs on (they even tested for calligraphy, as it shows attention to detail), what the English strove for when they professionalized their civil service system under Lord Monkton’s direction, and so on. This has That said, government is in recession, budgets are being cut, early retirements and un-fillable vacancies will be followed by layoffs (they happen now at the local level; I coordinate getting unemployment ins. and job search info to laid-off workers, so I know, firsthand that this is so.), and pension funds are, in many cases, in ruins. There are only a few places where the government is expanding, employment-wise, at the sub-Federal level, and they generally involve a uniform. The days of education majors who find that they don’t like teaching finding a steady paycheck in government are over, and they aren’t coming back in the forseeable future.
Where I agree with Theresa is that many grads are unprepared for what their schooling makes them worth. I experienced that after the Army, when I took my new degree and found an $8.00 per hour job, ca. 1989, and since it beat working in steel warehouses and bars, I took it. Colleges do a great job of filling kids with fantasies about making $60K out the door; the reality for those lacking in a hard skill, connections or something else to set them apart from the pack is what you saw and what I lived.
Plastics. “The Graduate” 1967.
True story. We were siting around the dorm first year about two weeks into it. I was flipping through the class directory looking at the various courses being offered. Next to the classes mentioned were the various professors: Professor Woo, Professor Jones, etc. Not thinking I blurted out, “Gee, Professor Staff sure teaches a lot of courses”. I never lived that down the remaining four years. People would ask me if I was taking any of “Professor Staff’s” classes.
A month ago we had two daughters graduate from an Iowa univ. Because it was in the middle of planting corn, we didn’t plan any formal party, so ended up at their favorite watering hole. It was actually a fairly mature crowd, a couple of profs and such.
One of the gentleman we talked to was in the financial office and we kind of laid into him for the huge debt that kids are graduating with and the unrealistic repayment of it in many cases. He made it quite clear to my wife and I that that was none of his concern. His job was to get kids into college and find a way to loan them money. His job was to make the college money, nothing else.
At least he was honest. But we left thinking he was a real skumbag.
EF
Add Black Studies to worthless majors. Also sociology.
I’d have to agree with you on that one, EF. That’s what makes college so much like a racket. Textbooks are another sore spot with me, and I’m sure that your daughters had a lot of $200.00 books that were obsolete before she could re-sell them to the bookstore. I hope that the open-source textbook movement catches on with at least a few schools. It would give them a price advantage over their peers and that might force the others to do the right thing. http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ and http://www.lulu.com are two sources for them.
BTW, one more link: http://www.training.fema.gov/IS/
It’s for FEMA’s Emergency management Institute. you can take free courses online from them on disaster preparation topics ranging from general personal preparation to how to deal with animals in disaster situations. A lot of the courses are intended for emergence managers – how to get grants, manage the state-federal coordination, etc., but a fair number are of use to regular folks. They can be turned into college credit, for a cost, but taking them is at no charge.
Ha Ha Ha…
This is just GREAT and oh so true !
I need a good laugh to break the cycle of unrelenting disaster.
As I always say, Gen-Y is the first human generation without a future…
Colleges should have degree courses in Twittering and Facebooking and Masters degrees in leading pointless empty mallrat-junkie lives. LOL…
Ditto on the textbooks, ssgconway. As much out of control as medical costs.
One of our girls “rented” an organic chem book for $75. Saved her hundreds. But what a crock of crap.
EF
I believe that the problem doesn’t lie with the major chosen, but rather lies with the fact that the overall quality of the education received sucks. For instance, when I went to school we took 33 courses in order to graduate. Only 8 could be from your major area, be it Engineering or Art History. You had to have math through advanced calculus. You had to chose a foreign language and become fluent. You had to complete 4 English classes, two which were compulsary and 2 electives. You had to take 4 science classes. You had to take 2 computer classes and be able to program competently. You had to have some social sciences.
So for every graduate you could say this without hesitation: they could write to a good standard, they were competent in advanced math, they could speak a foreign language fluently, they could program a computer, and they had a good science and social science foundation.
Today, what skills could an “Art History” major demonstrate from most colleges? None would be my answer. So really, to have any hope of getting valuable skills, you need to major in science/engineering/business/accounting/math. But even then the odds are that there will be a lack of many of the basic “skills”.
Colleges no longer seem to focus on providing an education, but rather are more focused on placating the students and in providing them a degree.
What a waste.
I am advising my son/daughter to major in a technical field and augment that with a masters. I am not confident they will be properly educated, but at least they should have some marketable skills at the end. But they may well not listen.
I can’t believe nobody mentioned the most worthless Major of All so far. Economics. A Black Studies Major with a Minor in Twittering knows more than an Economics Ph.D. from Princeton.
RE
@ssgconway
“A GREAT BIG thank you for the most excellent links you provided. You’re an awesome poster!!”
+1 to what Stuck said!! I love learning, taught myself to fly, build homes and program computers I EFFING HATE SCHOOL!
@Stuck: Thanks for the Job’s post. One of my favorite movies is “Pirates of Silicone Valley”— book is good also.
@RE: You can – today – achieve an economics degree at the Doctoral level by reading – twice, front to back – Von Mises’ “Human Action” and Friedrich August Hayek’s books from #1 through #17 (http://hayekcenter.org/?page_id=9), in order of publication, skipping none and repeating as necessary until comprehension is complete.
At that point, you will know as much as is known about how money works, human beings behave and why and why Governments can never manage money.
If you wish, you can go on to advanced learning by reading Henry Hazlitt’s multiple brilliant works and finish up with Harry Browne’s “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World”.
If you still don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground economically after that small effort, you may then admit you’re a dumbass and give it up.
MA