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I was the first generation of my family to attend college. Throughout high school (graduated high school in 2006), the idea that college was the answer to every
by rkho 11y ago
I was the first generation of my family to attend college. Throughout high school (graduated high school in 2006), the idea that college was the answer to everything was everywhere. Go to college, get a degree, you'll end up with a job. After seven years of paying high college tuition for a sub par education, I graduated in 2012 with a BA degree that was not in any demand, provided no real skills, and spent several years during and after college working in dead end retail/customer service jobs.
I ended up teaching myself how to code and landed a very well paying career as an engineer with a huge passion for what I'm doing.
Here are the takeaways I have from having gone down this route:
+ Don't go to college just to go to college. If you don't know why you're going, don't go.
+ If you do go to college, don't expect your major of choice to land you a job. If you know what you want to do in life, you should probably just go and do it on your own. College is not synonymous with landing a career.
+ If you go to college and don't end up landing a job, more college is not the answer. A master's/graduate program is not the answer.
- aaronchall 11y agoI would adopt some nuance regarding your third point: If you're successful at college, but are unemployable because of your degree, then if you get a graduate degree that is in demand, you have turned a negative into a positive. But you still have to demonstrate employability to get hired.
- rkho 11y agoRight, but I'm observing a lot of sentiment around "grad school is the answer" as what comes right after "college is the answer" has proven wrong for people without a clear goal. It's just more debt piling up.
- tryitnow 11y agoI have no idea why people still make this mistake. Clearly, way too many "adults" are telling high school kids that "college is the answer!" without providing more detail. It's more like getting a profession is the answer. That can mean going to college (necessary for things like medicine, law, accounting), going to vo tech school, apprenticing (e.g. electricians, carpenters) or teaching yourself and gaining experience (e.g. coding). The last route is a little problematic because there's no real barrier to entry (other than intelligence). We're in the midst of a demand boom for developers now, but eventually companies will start recouping their investments in code and start laying off developers or cutting pay simply because there's so many bright people who figured they can just teach themselves code. Of course, if you really enjoy and are good at software engineering then you're going to have a career regardless. But the people who are doing it just because it's what pays well now will be washed out in the next recession.
- rkho 11y agoThe idea of developers that aren't passionate about the craft who just do it for the money makes me cringe. Writing software isn't just another job you do for your employer or client, it's about creativity and empowerment. I definitely think I'm in the minority when it comes to people who taught themselves to code and ended up legitimately loving it.