I'd advise thinking twice before shelling out for a diploma. Colleges and universities want your money. They shroud their avarice in flowing gowns and ivory towers, but they are not cradling knowledge so much as they are selling sheepskin. I began my college career in a different time. It was the late '90s, and the economy was booming. I started at a junior college in California, not knowing what I wanted to do. This, coupled with the fact that I was young and restless and was paying a total of about $600 a semester, did not impel me to any sort of urgency about completing my education. I had grave doubts. I excelled in the humanities and soft sciences, but could not really justify buying a piece of paper with the governor's signature on it when I could read Shakespeare and learn Latin in my spare time. After meeting with more than one counselor at that junior college and making clear that I would not make a good high school teacher, I was sold on the idea that I could do anything with a degree in the liberal arts. "Corporations need good writers and thinkers," I was told. "Just get a degree ... in anything." I transferred to the University of Minnesota after meeting the Minnesota woman of my dreams and studied history and Latin for three years. I did well enough at the U to gain entry to the University of Chicago's Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences. On my visit to Chicago to learn more about this seemingly pointless degree, the director made a comment that has stuck with me. He said that the master's is the new bachelor's. With this in mind, and with the assurance that a master's from one of the best universities in the world would make me more competitive than the average college graduate, I bit the bullet and filled out another aid application. The idea that a "new bachelor's" would make me more attractive to those corporations looking for good writers and thinkers was important, as it was by then the depths of the so-called Great Recession. Now, here I sit, two years after graduating from the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota, working a menial job in the service industry (luckily, I had contacts, otherwise I fear I would have been seen as an overqualified, underexperienced risk to most human-resources departments). While I am grateful every day for my job, about half of what I bring in per month goes out in student loan remittance alone. Luckily, that Minnesotan I moved to Minnesota for makes up the difference. The irony of her making as much as me, working a white-collar job with more immediate potential for advancement, and without a college diploma to hang on the wall, is not lost on me. However, I don't think that the irony of my screening calls to avoid not creditors but my two former universities' continual fundraising efforts registers with those on the other end of the line. In today's university-industrial complex, colleges are graded as well, and I have been told by many of these telemarketers (assumedly students at their respective universities) that the more alumni who donate, the better they look to the sellers of stature (U.S. News and World Reports and the like). The easiest way to impact the scores handed out by the ranking pimps is to increase the percentage of alumni who donate; the hardest is to up the percentage of recent graduates with jobs. I have yet to ask one of these callers how much I would have to donate for my degrees to gain enough stature to be worth more than the paper on which they are printed. My advice to a student thinking about shelling out $40,000 to $80,000 on a diploma? Perhaps you should invest in a luxury car. They hold their worth better than diplomas and, if you ever had the need, you can live in them. more-- http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/136977123.html
And so would I, as would any reasonable person - but not so fast... The author had "grave doubts" but took the word of a couple of counselors at a junior college at face value and didn’t do any independent research to investigate the validity of their claims? Some thinker. Then, he compounds his initial errors in judgment by immediately pursuing a post-grad degree without first obtaining any practical work experience in the real world -- or at the least, having some tangible career goals in place. How can you get anywhere if you don't even know where you are going?
Hear about those lawyers suing their law schools? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/law-graduates-unable-to-f_n_944058.html Law grads take their job frustrations to court August 31, 2011: 5:00 AM ET As more law school graduates facing six-figure debt loads are either unable to find a legal job or taking low-paying legal drone jobs, some are opting to sue their alma maters for fraudulent advertising. By Elizabeth G. Olson, contributor FORTUNE -- Budding law school students are still coming in droves, tuition coffers are plentiful, and faculty still receive generous six-figure salaries. And some top-performing graduates continue to land the golden $160,000 first-year law firm job. But law schools are no longer the pathway to a secure, tony professional future they once were. The legal job market is undergoing shifts that could upend the way law schools do business and even how the public thinks about a legal diploma. Anger has been building as more law school graduates are facing five or six-figure debt loads from their legal education but are either unable to find a legal job, or any work for that matter, or taking low-paying legal drone jobs. Fed up, several groups of graduates are going to court to stop law schools from engaging in what they argue is fraudulent advertising. Job placement figures are misleading or are outright wrong, claim some of the newly degreed students who have struggled to latch on to jobs as the traditional legal hiring structure erodes. Alexandra Gomez-Jimenez, 30, was so frustrated with her job search after earning her law degree in 2007 that she decided this summer to sue her alma mater, New York Law School, for fraudulent advertising. She and other graduates of the Manhattan-based law school filed a lawsuit claiming they were duped by exaggerated job placement stats that law schools publish to attract students. "When I was applying, New York Law School said employment right out of school was high," says Gomez-Jimenez, who worked as a paralegal after graduating from college. New York Law's school literature, she says, claimed that alumni would find jobs with $70,000 to $80,000 salaries, and that 90% found jobs within six months of graduating. "I looked at it as their having a network of connections that would get me a job. But I never got help, or even an interview." 5 bright spots in a dim jobs picture New York Law School's dean, Richard Matasar, has publicly defended the school's practices but did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Matasar also happens to be the head of the American Law Deans Association, which was formed to change law school accreditation practices and policies. Gomez-Jimenez says that she still had no job six months after earning her law degree and was facing her first payment on $190,000 in loans for tuition, books, and living expenses. She found a temporary job reviewing legal documents. Eventually, she hung a shingle as an immigration lawyer but decided to join the class action suit after seeing a Craigslist ad looking for plaintiffs. Other Frustrated American law school graduates also have filed lawsuits against Thomas M. Cooley Law School, which has four campuses in Michigan and is opening another near Tampa, Fla., and Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. These schools turn out large numbers of graduates, but it's not just diploma-mill law schools that are in this particular game, says David Anziska, a lawyer for Kurzon Strauss, the New York law firm that represents the plaintiffs in the New York Law School and Cooley law school cases. "Law schools all make it a secret, but it's not just the recession. This has been going on for a long time," Anziska says, noting that many law schools are portraying the dearth of jobs as a blip due to the poor economy. "Law schools need to adopt rigorous methods that tell you the extent of full-time legal employment." Moving to shed some sunlight on law grad job market Even as the legal job market tumbles, law schools have been moving at a glacial pace to adjust to the new economic reality. But after a 2010 commission studied the economy's impact on legal employment, and regulators asked questions, the American Bar Association took a major step last month toward requiring law schools to be more specific about the actual employment outlook of their graduates. At the same time, federal lawmakers have begun to question the accrediting body, formally called the ABA Section of Legal Education & Admissions to the Bar, about how its process accounts for rising default rates on federally backed student loans. A law student today accrues an average of $98,000 in debt for three years of legal education, up more than 200% from the 1987 average. A panel of accreditation experts from the U.S. Department of Education fanned the flames of this debate in June when it publicly questioned whether law schools -- 200 of which are accredited by the ABA -- were taking adequate steps to collect job placement information from their graduates. This was welcome news to Kyle McEntee, co-founder of nonprofit organization Law School Transparency, which has been trying for several years to pry open the doors of the law school establishment and bring greater openness to what law students can expect when they graduate. "There is a culturally embedded belief that a law degree brings financial success," says McEntee, who started Law School Transparency with fellow Vanderbilt Law School alum Patrick Lynch. "So far, there has been a lot of talk in the legal profession, but we want law schools to lay out the specifics so students can have the necessary information to make a decision." It took the ABA well over a year to agree to tighten employment-reporting requirements for the law schools it accredits. It will hold schools responsible for the completeness and accuracy of the data. Prospective law students will have to wait some time before they can benefit from any of these new requirements, as the first such questionnaire won't go out until in February of next year, and the questions themselves are still up for debate. But McEntee concedes that "systemic reforms to legal education will not occur by simply opening up the window and letting in a little sunlight," and that academics and practicing lawyers need to step up and argue for reform. All quiet on campus? Overhauling law school job reporting has drawn a blizzard of support from jobless law grads, but few academics have been outspoken about upending the currently cozy situation for law schools and their parent universities. Paul Campos, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado law school at Boulder, happens to be one notable exception to the rule. Campos claims that the National Association of Law Placement already collects adequate employment data, and it doesn't look too pretty. NALP figures show a 51% employment rate for 2010 law school graduates, and figures may well be as low as 45% of those who have full-time, permanent legal jobs, according to Campos's calculations. "It's really striking what an enormous gap there is between actual employment and what law schools say," he says. "It might be called puffery, or more unkind things. "None of them wants to be any more honest than they have to be," he says. And students hesitate to tell the truth about their employment, because it could tarnish the law school's reputation and diminish the value of their degree, he adds. Rankings published by U.S. News and World Report -- fuel law schools' fear of scaring off applicants, whose choices are heavily influenced by the annual listings. A reliance on these rankings has driven schools to distort their data, and students seldom report their actual salaries, critics argue. Campos, who started looking into the issue after many of his students struggled to find work, says he estimates that only 63% of grads nationally find jobs a year after graduation, when excluding those holding non-legal jobs or doing part-time or temporary work. The NALP figure is 88%. Although applications are slowing -- 10% fewer people applied than last year -- a substantial number, nearly 80,000 people, still applied to law school for this upcoming fall, according to the Law School Admissions Council's latest figures. At the same time, grads like Gomez-Jimenez say they are determined to reform the process by pursuing their class action suits in court. "I don't expect to get any money out of this lawsuit," she says. "But I want to change the process. They get so much money from us, but the law school didn't even try to help me or my classmates."
If you get a useless college degree, what do you expect? Companies complain about the lack of Engineers cuz all the stupid kids think that a Humanities degree is gonna get them a 70K a year job ROFL. Study the maths, kids. We don't need anymore Lawyers or TV personalities. We need more chemists, engineers and advanced Information Technology workers. People in America are just intellectually lazy is all.
. Untill quite recently, those companies that hire temps to twirl advertising signs on street corners were demanding college degrees for the "positions" - in this way they were screening out all but whites, since Asians have too much self-respect to take such a "job". .
True, but why bust your ass for years in hard courses when they'll either not hire American in the first place or force you to train a wog replacement first chance they get?
There actually is an economic basis for that, as well as persons with college degrees taking unpaid internships. The theory is that workers are selected without knowing their true value. However, a willingness to engage in a useless activity (such as college, or unpaid work) signals, not any 'delta' of better quality, but more sincerity in the quality being estimated. That is, 'signaling' reduces the variation or error bar in the putative assessment being offered as a credential. This is similar to Yap Islanders mining large stones and putting them in front of their hut, as a sing of a good potential husband. 'Well, if nothing else, he's serious about mating, and capable of some hard, if pointless, work.' The investment in pointless activity, such as 'education', lowers the probability of a simple bluff. The need for 'signaling' is that the employer cannot tell, on the basis of an existing high school diploma or even college degree, what he's getting. It might be a useful worker, or it might be a dud. The point is that even if college degrees had no other function than wasting four years they do 'signal' that you are serious about something. (The point about legalising otherwise illegal discrimination is well taken, however, since Blacks have less incentive to 'signal' -- in reality, their skin already vetoes most of the signal they could buy anyway, since you don't need a college degree to profile them).
I just landed a job as a sous chef at a local German restaurant yesterday. The owners took me on because they knew me, as well as because they had interviewed me prior for an on-call waiting job. I have never been to culinary school, I have no degree or certificate in culinary arts, and I only have non-professional experience in volunteer work and at home. Yet again, more proof that it's not about the credentials - it's about who you know, and where you happen to be.
True enough, but at times, it also depends on if you're in the right place at the right time. I was in a Blockbuster a few years back, and the manager who rung me up was upset because an employee had abruptly quit. She was willing to offer me a job there on the spot if I needed it (but I didn't at the time). Of course, another thing college graduates aren't factoring in is that they are going to have to sacrifice looking for work that uses their degree in place of menial work. A friend of my boss's was talking to her the other day, and he has been unemployed over a year all because he is only looking for work in his particular field. On top of this, the youngsters need to realize that if you're unemployed, you need to make looking for work a full-time job. During my periods of unemployment, I would submit applications and stop into businesses to introduce myself to the management 8 hours per day. Of course, almost everyone (especially if corporate) redirected me to the website to apply there, but regardless, initiative must be taken. Of course, that's irrelevant when you're a product of the generation that expects everything to be spoon-fed to them over a silver platter.