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I think a lot of people just don’t really know what they want their career to be when they go into university. Or they think they do but are incorrect. That was

I think a lot of people just don’t really know what they want their career to be when they go into university. Or they think they do but are incorrect. That was certainly the case with me. I started in General Studies, then decided I wanted to be a doctor and was in Computer Science for undergrad then flunked out and went into Nursing then flunked out and ended up ten years later with a General Studies degree with a minor in history. Now I do systems integration and love it. When you think about it, how many people can say with certainty that the plans they had as a teenager were what they ended up doing? Not many, I’d suspect. I think that’s how people end up with degrees that don’t relate to their employment.

bluefirebrand 4y ago
There's also sunk cost fallacy at work. People get into something like Education, then spend a semester in a teaching practicum or something and hate it. But they've invested years into it so they forge ahead. Not sure how that would translate into a Master's degree though. Maybe post-secondary inertia. You get the Bachelor's, then still don't know what you want to do so you just forge ahead with more school.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  There's also "degree inflation" to take into account. There are so many people in the labor force with university degrees that it stops being a differentiator in the marketplace so job descriptions update to a new differentiator and start requiring post-grad degrees. Soon after entire school districts require a Masters degree to even start the interview process. Then that becomes enough of a norm that Universities pick up on that and make it a part of their positioning/marketing/"good advice" to students: you need at least a Masters if you want a job, so you should plan for a Masters. Targeted schools start to appear such as 5-year Masters programs designed to build so much inertia (taking Masters courses alongside junior/senior undergrad courses) and indeed sunk cost that the Masters seems like the natural outcome rather than the optional "next step". (Disclaimer: my own graduate degree was probably an expensive mistake that sometimes I regret and sometimes I'm quite proud of even if the job market doesn't care. My experience is not entirely related to the Masters of Education snowball described above, but I can see that snowball having happened from the outside a bit easier knowing what my own experience was.)
UncleEntity 4y ago
> When you think about it, how many people can say with certainty that the plans they had as a teenager were what they ended up doing? Sure, not many. But at some point they have to realize a degree in French Romantic Literature is going to lead to zero job prospects and maybe doubling down with a masters is a really bad decision. Like me, all I knew when I got out of the army at 20 was I didn’t want to live in a hole in the ground getting woken by arty and chemical alarms with the occasional trips to go out hunting fellow humans. Not that I was super successful at that goal as I went back to Iraq two more times during Gulf War II because I got bored and joined the army reserve pre-9/11 but I spent my college years working on not having to do that ever again. I’m sure if that one fateful day when I calculated out the classes I’d have to take to switch my major to fisheries and realize it would be three years instead of three semesters (which turned into four because I failed a class on purpose to stay an extra semester since financial aid was already set up) and the GI Bill would be up by then. So I stayed the course and received a degree no job in the world cared about instead of training for a job I probably would have been good at — or at least not gotten fired like I have a couple times in my current career because I kind of hate the work. There’s probably a point in there between the rambling along the lines of “follow your dreams all the way to a shit job so you can be the poster boy for whatever TFA is selling”.

bluefirebrand 4y ago

There's also sunk cost fallacy at work. People get into something like Education, then spend a semester in a teaching practicum or something and hate it. But they've invested years into it so they forge ahead. Not sure how that would translate into a Master's degree though. Maybe post-secondary inertia. You get the Bachelor's, then still don't know what you want to do so you just forge ahead with more school.

WorldMaker 4y ago
There's also "degree inflation" to take into account. There are so many people in the labor force with university degrees that it stops being a differentiator in the marketplace so job descriptions update to a new differentiator and start requiring post-grad degrees. Soon after entire school districts require a Masters degree to even start the interview process. Then that becomes enough of a norm that Universities pick up on that and make it a part of their positioning/marketing/"good advice" to students: you need at least a Masters if you want a job, so you should plan for a Masters. Targeted schools start to appear such as 5-year Masters programs designed to build so much inertia (taking Masters courses alongside junior/senior undergrad courses) and indeed sunk cost that the Masters seems like the natural outcome rather than the optional "next step". (Disclaimer: my own graduate degree was probably an expensive mistake that sometimes I regret and sometimes I'm quite proud of even if the job market doesn't care. My experience is not entirely related to the Masters of Education snowball described above, but I can see that snowball having happened from the outside a bit easier knowing what my own experience was.)

UncleEntity 4y ago

> When you think about it, how many people can say with certainty that the plans they had as a teenager were what they ended up doing? Sure, not many. But at some point they have to realize a degree in French Romantic Literature is going to lead to zero job prospects and maybe doubling down with a masters is a really bad decision. Like me, all I knew when I got out of the army at 20 was I didn’t want to live in a hole in the ground getting woken by arty and chemical alarms with the occasional trips to go out hunting fellow humans. Not that I was super successful at that goal as I went back to Iraq two more times during Gulf War II because I got bored and joined the army reserve pre-9/11 but I spent my college years working on not having to do that ever again. I’m sure if that one fateful day when I calculated out the classes I’d have to take to switch my major to fisheries and realize it would be three years instead of three semesters (which turned into four because I failed a class on purpose to stay an extra semester since financial aid was already set up) and the GI Bill would be up by then. So I stayed the course and received a degree no job in the world cared about instead of training for a job I probably would have been good at — or at least not gotten fired like I have a couple times in my current career because I kind of hate the work. There’s probably a point in there between the rambling along the lines of “follow your dreams all the way to a shit job so you can be the poster boy for whatever TFA is selling”.