4 ms·

The difficulty is in landing in a decent career out of college. People have this fantasy that all you have to do is get X degree and go apply at X Y and Z corpo

The difficulty is in landing in a decent career out of college. People have this fantasy that all you have to do is get X degree and go apply at X Y and Z corporation to land a job getting paid 6 figures for the rest of your life. And that's probably true if your X is from an Ivy League school or a massive state school with hyper-competitive admission to the program. And what you're paying for at that point is access to the elite so that you can hopefully ride their coattails into a good job. If you end up going to a 2nd or 3rd tier school it's basically a wash whether you end up anywhere good. And it's even worse if you don't get X degree, but instead have a degree that doesn't make it through the word filters. And you can't fuck anything up or make any mistakes in your entire academic career. You have to network aggressively. Many of my cohort ended up working as electricians, and one of them manages the line at a brewery. College was pretty useless for nearly all of us, and our lives probably would have been improved by not getting the degree, because at least that way we wouldn't be under the tens of thousands of dollars in debt. We were mostly mediocre. But we were smart and we knew how to figure things out. That doesn't really matter to most employers, who just want you to know a specific field right out of the gate so they don't have to bother training you. I lucked out, by the way. I managed to find a job in 2009 clerking in a warehouse at a technology sales company, and it was only because I knew someone who worked there as a service technician. His moving up created openings that I would be able to use to move into increasingly technical roles. And after 4 years there I was making about $44,000/yr., doubling my starting salary as a clerk. The real benefit for me was networking with my current boss. Because if I hadn't met him then I'd probably still be working long hours for little pay. So I would strongly urge anyone who isn't in the top 10% to strongly reconsider taking your advice. $100,000 is a huge amount of money and would have been a crippling amount of debt for me. As it was, the $20,000 I graduated with after working two and sometimes three jobs was hard to cope with until I lucked out.

m11a 7y ago
I think my comment took it as a given that if you're spending $100k you'll use every single real opportunity you can get in college and make the most out of your $100k. There's plenty of people that 'made it' from a local not-so-competitive state school. America remains the land of opportunity. But, unless you go to an Ivy or your parents are rich, you shouldn't expect it to come to you. You can do things in America that you simply cannot in Europe. You mentioned a few way of doing college right in your own response. Wouldn't the correct response be to use your time in college wisely and not slack or "just make it through" but to make the most of it, rather than to skip college altogether just because it's going to be harder than having your life handed to you on a platter if you went to an Ivy? ---- 2nd point I'd make is if you're in Europe student debt doesn't matter. Tuition is almost always free/cheap, government pays for tuition and living for your time as a student, and gives very favourable terms to repay (e.g. in the UK you don't pay anything if you earn under £25k/yr, then you pay 7% of amount earned above that, debt is wiped clean after 30 yrs if any remains). It doesn't show up on your credit record or affect mortgages etc. I'd describe America more as a country that rewards the ambitious (with perhaps some drops of luck) and the rich. If you're neither then the system is made to entrap you. Europe is easily better for general life, but it isn't great for ambitious people.

m11a 7y ago

I think my comment took it as a given that if you're spending $100k you'll use every single real opportunity you can get in college and make the most out of your $100k. There's plenty of people that 'made it' from a local not-so-competitive state school. America remains the land of opportunity. But, unless you go to an Ivy or your parents are rich, you shouldn't expect it to come to you. You can do things in America that you simply cannot in Europe. You mentioned a few way of doing college right in your own response. Wouldn't the correct response be to use your time in college wisely and not slack or "just make it through" but to make the most of it, rather than to skip college altogether just because it's going to be harder than having your life handed to you on a platter if you went to an Ivy? ---- 2nd point I'd make is if you're in Europe student debt doesn't matter. Tuition is almost always free/cheap, government pays for tuition and living for your time as a student, and gives very favourable terms to repay (e.g. in the UK you don't pay anything if you earn under £25k/yr, then you pay 7% of amount earned above that, debt is wiped clean after 30 yrs if any remains). It doesn't show up on your credit record or affect mortgages etc. I'd describe America more as a country that rewards the ambitious (with perhaps some drops of luck) and the rich. If you're neither then the system is made to entrap you. Europe is easily better for general life, but it isn't great for ambitious people.