“The scarecrow didn’t have a brain so the wizard gave him a degree.”
~Boothe (from EP Autos)~
http://thestrangestbrew.com/
Author: harry p.
A Gen X mechanical engineer who values family, strength, discipline, self-reliance and freedom who is doing what he can to protect his family, belittle morons and be ready for the tough times ahead.
Discipline=Freedom
View all posts by harry p.
A Degree in Scarecrow Technologly and a 40,000 student loan bill.
a liberal arts degree at that
Not a day goes by where I don’t regret my degrees.
During Highschool I completed two years of sysadmin coursework, and was “cisco” certified for networking their equipment. On top of my IT training in high school, I easily could have been making comparable money to what I’m making now.
Only without the debt.
I hated the work, but back then I thought that getting a job in that field at 18 meant I would be in it for life, so I went to college like a good little boy….
Fuck, what a frustrating experience.
A college degree and $30,000 in debt simply isn’t worth it. I had to post this again, because it shows you the reality of our socialist country, after Obama raised welfare spending by 45% since taking office.
$45,473 is the average starting salary in 2014, for those people lucky enough to find jobs.
Yet, you’d have to earn $69,000 a year to get what welfare mommas get a year. Being on welfare is the best paying profession available today, and you don’t even have to work.
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“the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.”
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personally i don’t regret my degree, i went to a “cheap” school and got an engineering degree 10 years ago that involved a lot of hands on work by a teachiing staff that was devoid of foreign profs that couldn’t speak english and the majority were not career members of academia. a lot of classes were in the afternoon or at night bc the profs worked regular jobs. i worked while in school to pay off portions of the tuition, lidrank cheap beer, lived with roommates to keep cost down and had less that $12k in loans upon graduation.
if i had to do it again today? that would be another story.
I used to make fun of poetry and ceramics majors. Now I add finance, marketing, public relations, business management, and many more to the list. I always sat there thinking, ‘am I really attending, and paying, a bureaucracy to teach me independence and entrepreneurship…..wtf?!’, but when I look back – what a colossal waste of fucking time, money, and effort. I fucking hated every day in that place – never understood how so many didn’t want to to out into the real world. Get the alumni updates and so many with hard-ons carry that torch and I just wonder why.
Unless you attending an institution that will teach you, hands on (hmmmm, sorta sounds like a vo-tech) skills like nursing, medicine, engineering, geology, bio-whatever with labs n’shit, and so forth – bail on that clown show otherwise known as 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th grade+….. and learn it yourself with and through others, just my .02 Somebody get me a beer dammit.
AWD, the salary in your chart for Engineering is low. Even a new grad would most likely earn more than that, depending on discipline and an experienced one (PE or not) will earn as an employee a range from $80 to $150k /yr. Independent consultants can often earn much more.
No shortage of STEM workers:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/20/Report-U-S-Has-Surplus-Not-Shortage-of-High-Tech-Workers
A Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report released on Tuesday ahead of a panel on the subject at the National Press Club found that from 2007-2012, STEM employment averaged “averaged only 105,000 jobs annually” while the U.S. admitted about 129,000 immigrants with STEM degrees. That means “the number of new immigrants with STEM degrees admitted each year is by itself higher than the total growth in STEM employment.” During that time period, the number of U.S.-born STEM graduates grew by an average of 115,00 a year.
Authors Steven Camarota, CIS’s director of research, and Karen Ziegler, a CIS demographer, wrote that these numbers are “truly extraordinary” and “it should not be surprising that most STEM graduates (immigrant or native) do not have STEM jobs.”
The report, titled, Is There a STEM Worker Shortage? A look at employment and wages in science, technology, engineering, and math, is consistent with research from Georgetown University, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the Rand Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the National Research Council that have also found no evidence that America has a shortage of high-tech workers. And its findings concluded that America “has more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs.” When combined with slight wage growth in the STEM fields for more than a decade, the authors concluded that “both employment and wage data indicate there is no shortage of STEM workers in the United States.”
@Tommy – I regularly do talks at local high schools/middle schools. I always tell them that they should treat college like a tech school and not a playground. You go there to learn a skill set, not to find yourself, or have fun.
@Dutchman – Luckily for most STEM grads, if they cross trained even a hair into another industry they will be more sought after than those with one focus.
Most employers realize that its more difficult to get a double major in chemistry and business, so they are at least willing to give someone with that much grit a shot at a job, unlike the business only person, which at undergrad levels is a joke and everyone knows it.
Contrary viewpoint here. A lot of people seem to think that the alternative to going to college is starting another Dell Computer or Microsoft. For most people who don’t go to college they spend those years working at Brueggers and spending their meager earnings on tattoos and weed. A degree is less about what you learn (although it helps most people achieve a slightly higher ability to reason, speak and write) than demonstrating that 1) you can do work 2) you’re not an idiot and 3) you can delay gratification. These days that’s not insignificant. In the grand sweep of a life’s earnings, $30-40k in debt isn’t that big a deal. People spend that on a car. Not me, but people. I’m not saying everyone needs to go to college. If you can work your way into eventually taking over your dad’s (or your own) sewer business you could make a good living and never need a degree. But let’s not pretend that skipping college generally means doing something more productive.
“I fucking hated every day in that place – never understood how so many didn’t want to go out into the real world.”
I hear you. I majored in accounting so I could get a job, but two of those four years were spent on electives unrelated to my major. I could have learned everything I needed to know about accounting in a 2-year vocational program and read books about “fun” subjects in my free time. I didn’t want to be there. I was ready to live out in the real world and not spend four more years in high school.
But in order to make it past the trolls in Human Resources, I had to have a piece of paper saying I had a four-year degree. It was just another hoop to jump through, and I resented it.
It makes you wonder about the kinds of places who are looking to hire people who will jump through unnecessary hoops, but that turns out to be pretty much all of corporate America.
Jo, Considering that half of life is jumping through unnecessary hoops, if I’m hiring someone, I give them credit for being willing and able to do it. Again, college shows: 1) you can do work 2) you’re not an idiot and 3) you can delay gratification. It’s possible that other accomplishments could demonstrate the same.
Iska, I get it – I’ve worked for plenty of big companies who go on dysfunctionally, year after year after year. The status quo becomes deeply entrenched, and people who try to change the underlying flaws (remove the unnecessary hoops) come under fire because they pose a threat to bureaucratic jobs. When someone spends four years of their time and thousands of dollars doing something that isn’t necessary, it’s easy to see why corporations and governments like to hire them.
Check out the clip at 1:00, funny shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=OqsBuxC2g1k
JAYZUS, Tommy! I never saw that movie, but I think my tubes just tied themselves. Kevin Bacon sure was a cutie, though.
I never spent a day in college and I make more than all those jobs on AWD’s list and I love my job. Hell, as a lowly concrete finisher I made more than most of those jobs on the list. While in high school I had zero interest in college. By the time I was thirty I found that I did want to go to college but only to increase my knowledge of subjects that interest me, not to build a career.
I was seriously thinking about taking classes but along came the interwebs and between that and my library, I learn just about anything I want and it costs almost nothing.
IS, Nothing lowly about it. You’re a skilled tradesman in a job that can’t be done from Bangalore. Some people skip college because (among other possible reasons) they’re itching to get to working. Other people skip college because it is work and they’re trying to avoid all work. People who aren’t afraid of work generally do OK (with or without college), as long as they don’t spend more than they make.