9 ms·

Your waitress, your professor

148 points by nvader 12y ago

jetskindo 12y ago
We go to school because it is a tradition. Parents wants to see their kid in the funny hat. You are almost shunned when you drop out. Not to say that school is useless, I loved learning. But I knew that the computer science degree I was working towards wouldn't make much a difference in the field I was hoping to work in. Going to school should be an investment. It is too bad that most of us are too young to understand the risk we take when taking loans or choosing an education path.
- meowface 12y ago
  I wish there were more options for technical "trade schools" in the US. At my university I knew I wanted a career in information security and development, and I had a choice between Computer Science and Information Systems. Computer Science was mostly theory with not that much hands-on programming, while Information Systems had some more hands-on real-world programming but was heavily business/management oriented and essentially assumed only the most rudimentary programming and technical skills even in the highest level classes. I ended up going with Information Systems, which I'm still not sure if I regret or not. I was fortunate enough to be a pretty self-motivated learner and become skilled at the things I was interested in through the Internet and self-teaching, and landed a pretty good job straight out of college, but I can't help but feel I wasted 4 years of time and money. I would've loved to go to a university with practical Information Security/Assurance and Software Engineering programs at the undergraduate level, but sadly 1) none were anywhere near my area and 2) they're considerably more expensive, and college is expensive enough already in the US.
  - rietta 12y ago
    I went through the M.S. Information Security program at Georgia Tech and and glad that I did it. Though at this point in my life I work mostly on building out web applications with Ruby on Rails for startups. Security is a tough sell in most of the industry. Bolting it on after the fact is almost always impossible, which is why I have had to learn so much about startups, their lifecycle, business model development, the customer discovery process, etc, in order to be able to attempt to build more secure software for startups before its too late in the process and bandaids are the only options remaining. Point is, no matter what you do, there is a tremendous amount of learning to do outside of the university curriculum of your choice.
    - meowface 12y ago
      Any particular reason why you aren't taking a job in the infosec industry directly? Compared to being a RoR dev, I think you could be paid much more and have more interesting work. Helping manage secure dev practices for startups is of course very important, but I think that would be much easier to do if you're either in some kind of CISO or appsec management position in the company, or are part of a third party auditing/pentesting firm that deals with startups.
  - marincounty 12y ago
    It's too bad that schools don't prepare graduates for real world jobs. Especially, for what they are charging. Personally, I don't know if most 10 yeared professors could keep up with the pace of change in the real world. I think what a lot of people leave out, when they are espousing their college degree, is the amount of self-learning, or who they know after graduation in order to keep/get their job? We still have a lot of naive Sheep who will judge you whether you finished that degree; so you will probally be glad you stuck it out and graduated? As to the dude above me who automatically put that Sales Person in a different "class" once he found she was a graduate of MIT--I'll give you a break, but repeat a quote I will never forget; "Chubby--you need to stop judging people on they way they look?" by Louis Medlock(Deliverance). When I was in college I knew it was 90% B.S., but society expected me to finish the degree. Would I go today, I'm not sure. You need to be exposed to a few facts in life, so you don't end up believing in things that gave no scientific validity. On the other hand my sister is a multimillionaire, and believes in Psychics? She is also once very attractive, and thinks nothing of taking advantage of people for what they can offer her--she used to call it , "They would make a good contact!" Now--they call it Networking. Personally, I couldn't stomach it, but my sister doing great financially. Now if she could get her family to like, or trust her, or a partner who actually liked her for personality; she would have it all. Happy Holidays!
    - ryanmonroe 12y ago
      Just fyi, the word you're looking for is "tenured professors could keep up..."
  - rtpg 12y ago
    I was in a similar boat as you were (wanting to go to a "trade school" type thing for IT, ended up going to a generalist school with business knowledge), and I feel better for it. Granted, my schooling let me spend some time in Japan on a school exchange, which led to a whole other sequence of events. But I also got some classes on management, economics, and accounting that does help me understand how things are happening around me. Plus having a degree is pretty much mandatory if you want to work abroad (for visa issues). My school prepared me to deal with the human aspect of work, I think. I did do a lot of self-teaching though, so I didn't end up learning much on the programming side of things.
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    I'm not sure trade schools, per se, are the answer. The problem with trade schools is that you're just making a different bet on what jobs are going to be available in the future. Maybe the numbers are better than for some traditional university degrees, but it's fundamentally the same sort of bet: you educate yourself up in some direction, and then go look for jobs. An alternate route, which has been used at different times in different places, is to first get hired at a company based on general competence, and then to get trained up in whichever direction they want you to work. That way, you have a guaranteed job after you finish training. It's a much better system for the workers, but it requires different attitudes on the part of the corporations -- they need to be focused much more on the long term; they need to be willing to pay upfront in time and money to train up their workforce, and be stable enough to employee them long enough to make back their investment. Fly-by-night operations that explode rapidly for a couple of years and then collapse can't really afford that.
    - Genmutant 12y ago
      That's how trade schools work in Germany. About two thirds (up to 3/4) of the time you are at work and learn there, the other you are at a normal school. After you graduate (about 3 years) you most of the time stay at the same place to work.
  - thebiglebrewski 12y ago
    I work at one! New York Code + Design Academy. There are similar schools across the country and world. People graduate having enough skills to land an entry level job as a junior developer without having to go incredibly deep into theory, we focus on implementation and actually building products.
vitno 12y ago
The logic here seems... hypocritical, or at least inconsistent. At the beginning: "In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom are over." At the end: "My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only an academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and “intelligent” work. (also, that diaresis...) It feels to me like the first statement says "I lie to my students and present them with unrealistic expectations of the world" and the second says "If I say something, I'll let them know that they are deriving little value from their education... and thus put my career further behind."
- pcunite 12y ago
  That may be the intent of the article. To lead you into the thinking that the author wrestles with each day.
- deleted 12y ago
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- speeder 12y ago
  As someone that took a degree because the "adults" then forced me to, and spent years of my life just to pay it, totalling 10 years wasted (I am 26 today, and I my assets are the same as they were when I was 16, and soon I will have less than what I had when I was 16 because I am unemployed). My parents, and the academia, school teachers, all lied to me, they told me that getting a degree was a good thing. It is not, it basically fucked up my life so far. If I could go back in time only once to give me a single advice, it would be to tell my 18 year old self to get a job and skip college, or get into a trade school.
rayiner 12y ago
The other day my wife and I were at a baby clothing store. We were chatting with the young woman at the counter, and she was complaining about her student loans. I asked her what her major was, and she said it was physics. I said "oh" with a degree of surprise that made me cringe. I mentioned my brother had majored in physics. She asked me where he went to school, and I told her he went to Yale. She said "oh, my parents went to Yale, but I went to MIT." I felt bad about the encounter, and I couldn't figure out why. Statistically, you're safe in assuming that any random person working at a clothing store isn't an MIT grad making pocket money while working on her PhD. I realized later that I felt bad that it mattered to me. That when she revealed she was smart and educated, in my head I moved her from one class of people into another.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I have a hard time reconciling the idea that we need more STEM graduates with the difficulty that actual STEM graduates have finding work in their fields. Even if it's part time work while pursuing a PhD, if there was anything resembling a real shortage, these things wouldn't happen. And it's not a rare story.
  - melling 12y ago
    I thought the argument for increasing the number of H-1B visas is that we need more technology people? The current limit is 65,000 people every year, and the claim is that's too low.
    - gaius 12y ago
      There is a shortage... Of tech workers willing to indenture themselves, or to work for a fraction of what they're worth. But the real elephant in the corner of the room is ageism.
      - speeder 12y ago
        ageism how? I am 27 (or I will be in some hours... right now 26, in some hours 27). I am jobless for a while, and in my country, industry research showed that the companies are hiring less and less people in their 20s and hiring more people that are 50+ Any position I see with reasonable pay (ie: pay more than my rent + food) requires 20 years of experience+ since I am 27 I cannot have 20 years of experience (I learned to code at 6, but I don't got my first job at 7 :P)
noelwelsh 12y ago
Anyone running an online business will tell you that words are valuable. Text is the primary way we communicate with our customers. Carefully chosen words can have a massive impact on revenue. The author possesses a valuable skill but is not fairly compensated for it. What's going on? Inequality is increasing in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...) and many other countries. Technology is giving capital an increasing advantage over labour. A job as, say, a doctor, lawyer, or University professor, which used to guarantee you a position at the top of the social hierarchy, no longer does. Inequality is generally regarded as a bad thing, both socially and economically (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality) Addressing inequality at a macro scale is beyond my knowledge, but I do know how to address it at the micro scale: own your work. Technology contributes to inequality by allowing successful businesses to scale further with fewer employees. However, you can use the same infrastructure to scale out your microbusiness. Within our community, patio11, Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, Nathan Barry, and others have show how to do this. It is noticeable that many of the above have made a substantial chunk of change from publishing a book. (E.g. http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/ http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/ ~$260K from book sales.) The OP is in a great position to replicate this -- they have all the skills, namely command over the written word, to produce great content and great copy to sell it. On a wider scale, I think we can use technology to redress some of the growth in inequality. Presently it mostly allows relatively few businesses to concentrate wealth. If more people retake ownership over their work, which technology in many cases enables, then perhaps we can do something to address inequality. It's not the whole solution but it might be part of it.
- wbl 12y ago
  There are a lot of writers out there. It hasn't gotten easier to make it big, even if the size of the check once you do is bigger. Google "death of the midlist" for more information about this trend.
  - noelwelsh 12y ago
    Part of the point is that if you own the product you get 100% (well, more like 95%) of the income, rather than the 10% you might get via royalties. 1000 sales for a nonfiction book is a solid year's income.
lolwhat 12y ago
Not surprised when 1% of the country holds 40% of the wealth.
jrells 12y ago
I like this article, but I wish it would do more to point out that high-education low-wage workers, like adjunct university teachers, are usually in their low-wage jobs by choice, and their education gives them a lot more opportunities even if they don't take them. They are in a way very financially secure, since they could easily give up on academics and move into high-wage industry jobs (at least in the applicable fields). There are a lot of people who really want academic jobs anyway, so schools are happy to pay low. Note: I'm an academic and I have a second job to supplement my income. I have often considered moving into industry where I would make 5-10x my teaching income.
- jpindar 12y ago
  But, but, there is no industry left in the US! (Or so the internet tells me. Meanwhile I drive past half a dozen bustling factories every day on my way to work at an electronics manufacturer.)
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morgante 12y ago
I find it hard to sympathize with these articles. She was aware that the academic job market is bleak, especially in English, yet chose to pursue it nonetheless. Thus, her plight is squarely on her shoulders. It also doesn't mean her students will fair worse: some of them might be making rational choices to get degrees in useful, lucrative fields. Especially at a third-rate university, nobody really has the luxury to major in English. Nothing in our economic system entitles you to making a living at something just because you like it and practice it. I could train for decades to be the world's foremost expert on modern cave painting, but that doesn't entitle me to a cent of wages unless the market deems that skill is useful.
- Dewie 12y ago
  It doesn't look like she is looking for sympathy, and it seems to be her opinion that her career was her own choice.
- wfo 12y ago
  Any halfway decent programmer I've ever met or heard of loves programming. They'd do it even if it didn't happen to be hyper-lucrative. We just got lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class happens to currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts and try not to pretend it makes you better than anyone else.
  - meowface 12y ago
    >We just got lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class happens to currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts I imagine programming and related fields (networking, system administration and integration, other IT operations) will still be very lucrative in 100 and 200 years from now. It might be slightly less lucrative (or it could be more lucrative, who knows), but programmers will likely be very important to organizations for at least a few centuries, if not millennia.
    - Chinjut 12y ago
      A few centuries is a long-ass time; far too long for such cocky predictions to be taken seriously. (And millenia? Jesus...)
Mz 12y ago
I dropped out of college when I was 21, in part because I knew two different people with bachelor's degrees who had jobs like delivering newspapers or selling shoes at a department store. Everyone around me seemed to think I needed a degree in order to have a career and that a degree automagically would give me a career. The lives of these two personal acquaintances suggested otherwise. I am currently personally acquainted with two other people who completed college and they thus are saddled with huge student loans. Neither one is making enough money to deal with those loans, much less justify them. One owes $100k the other owes $250k. Even if you successfully declare bankruptcy, you cannot write off student loans. These two people may never manage to get their loans paid off. I cannot imagine how awful that must be and I used to have more than $50k in personal debt, which I have been slowly resolving in recent years. (Part of mine is also student debt, but not all of it. It is one of the reasons that although I have considered declaring bankruptcy, I have never pursued it in earnest. Part of what I owe has to be paid regardless.) There is something very wrong with the system here in the U.S. A college degree should not be a path to permanent poverty because you cannot really afford the student loans you wracked up getting it.
- jrs235 12y ago
  Contrary to popular belief, while it is difficult, it is possible in certain situations to have student loans forgiven, canceled, or discharged. https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati... Edit:https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation#discharge-in https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati...
  - Mz 12y ago
    Thank you.
palimpsests 12y ago
I find it fairly surprising how certain the author seems to feel that getting a doctorate would somehow equate to higher income and job stability -- English Ph.Ds aren't exactly a credential in high demand. In fact, reality indicates the opposite is true.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  I was curious what an English (literature) Ph.D might entail, still am, but Birimingham.ac.uk website had this: >"Over the past five years, over 90% of English Literature postgraduates were in work and/or further study six months after graduation. " // Against an unemployment rate of ~20% for 16-24 year olds, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/unemployment-four-ten-uk-graduates-struggle-find-work-1436812 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/unemployment-four-ten-uk-graduates-..., that seems quite good. I'm sure there are some damn lies in there though. More on stats for UK graduate employment, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29327590 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29327590.
  - richardwhiuk 12y ago
    By the time you've completed a PhD you aren't 16-24. Roughly speaking, Bachelor degree will take 3 years, PhD will take at least 4, so you'll be at least 25. That's also 90% from a relatively reputable university - http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/International/impact/global-rankings.aspx http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/International/impact/global-rank... claims top 100 in the world. The University of Nevada in comparison is apparently the 113th best college in the US for English: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-nevada-las-vegas-182281/overall-rankings http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... - so much further down the rankings.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      I'm not really interested enough to hunt it down but presumably UNLV's employment figures for those who've taken post-graduate degrees are a matter of record too? I'm surprised to some extent that the 113th best college for English offers a postgrad program in English.
jgwest 12y ago
Okay, Brittney Bronson, it is what it is... You teach the young grown-ups / old kids at the college, and then you shuck it in your part-time service job... It is what it is...
transfire 12y ago
Not to worry in 10 to 20 more years robots will take your survival job away too. Then you can teach college and be one of the homeless at the same time!
bsder 12y ago
The real problem is that neither of her jobs affords her a career. Why should her teaching position be just above the poverty line? People should regard that as horrific. Why should her service job not be a career? People should regard the fact that service jobs are so unstable as horrific.
imaginenore 12y ago
I just don't get all the complaints. Since when did we become entitled to a well-paid job? If, let's say, tomorrow they invent an AI that can write great code, putting me out of business - I will say, well, time to switch to something that pays. And there are still TONs of jobs that pay - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction equipment operators, elevator repairmen, illustrators, real estate brokers - they all make good money. For now at least. Why would I even waste my time as a waiter? That time can be spent learning a skill that's in demand, not something literally anybody can do.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Because neither your landlord nor your supermarket proprietor is going to wait around while you learn the skills to become employable in some other field. You don't just decide to take up plumbing and bootstrap yourself from fixing leaky buckets to running your own plumbing company. As well as the skills, you need a pile of equipment, a vehicle, you probably need to be licensed in some fashion, you need to be bonded or insured before people will do business with you, and you need to spend a good bit of time networking. You can of course bootstrap yourself into a lot of jobs, I've done it in more than one field. but it can take quite a while to break even, and it's not like there isn't competition. I was perticularly perplexed by your mention of illustrators - for sure some illustrators can make a lot of money, but I'm pretty sure that like every other branch of the arts, the average illustrator starting out is beset with requrests to work for free or on spec on the grounds that 'this will be great for your portfolio!'
  - imaginenore 12y ago
    I have savings and my credit history is nearly perfect. I'm pretty sure I can take out a loan and start one of the above businesses. It's important to have other skills in life as a backup plan. That, and because it's interesting :) I did wedding photography for fun, so I can tell you for certain - nobody who does it professionally bills less than $2K per wedding (which is 6-8 hours of shooting plus around 20 hours of photo editing). It's mostly $3-6K. If they want a professional looking album, it's another 5-10 hours of laying it out and ordering, and you can bill them another $500+ on top of the album cost. Of course, you need a portfolio, and you need skills, but I billed for my second wedding shoot - the first one was free for a friend. How long will it take me to start a full blown wedding business? I'd say I will land my first one within two-three weeks. I will probably not have many clients at the beginning. In 6 months I will have more than I can handle. It's true of every single good wedding photographer - they are booked months in advance.
zxcvvcxz 12y ago
>English instructor The most important piece of information was at the end of the article! The whole read I kept thinking "what type of professor is being economically valued at a third that of a cocktail hostess?" While this is ridiculous and seems like an example of the free market gone wrong, I think it's very particular to Vegas. Serioisly, I know friends doing the equivalent of 50/hour thanks to tips. However if this were true, in say, Seattle, then I'd be much more worried.

148 points by nvader 12y ago

We go to school because it is a tradition. Parents wants to see their kid in the funny hat. You are almost shunned when you drop out. Not to say that school is useless, I loved learning. But I knew that the computer science degree I was working towards wouldn't make much a difference in the field I was hoping to work in. Going to school should be an investment. It is too bad that most of us are too young to understand the risk we take when taking loans or choosing an education path.

meowface 12y ago
I wish there were more options for technical "trade schools" in the US. At my university I knew I wanted a career in information security and development, and I had a choice between Computer Science and Information Systems. Computer Science was mostly theory with not that much hands-on programming, while Information Systems had some more hands-on real-world programming but was heavily business/management oriented and essentially assumed only the most rudimentary programming and technical skills even in the highest level classes. I ended up going with Information Systems, which I'm still not sure if I regret or not. I was fortunate enough to be a pretty self-motivated learner and become skilled at the things I was interested in through the Internet and self-teaching, and landed a pretty good job straight out of college, but I can't help but feel I wasted 4 years of time and money. I would've loved to go to a university with practical Information Security/Assurance and Software Engineering programs at the undergraduate level, but sadly 1) none were anywhere near my area and 2) they're considerably more expensive, and college is expensive enough already in the US.
- rietta 12y ago
  I went through the M.S. Information Security program at Georgia Tech and and glad that I did it. Though at this point in my life I work mostly on building out web applications with Ruby on Rails for startups. Security is a tough sell in most of the industry. Bolting it on after the fact is almost always impossible, which is why I have had to learn so much about startups, their lifecycle, business model development, the customer discovery process, etc, in order to be able to attempt to build more secure software for startups before its too late in the process and bandaids are the only options remaining. Point is, no matter what you do, there is a tremendous amount of learning to do outside of the university curriculum of your choice.
  - meowface 12y ago
    Any particular reason why you aren't taking a job in the infosec industry directly? Compared to being a RoR dev, I think you could be paid much more and have more interesting work. Helping manage secure dev practices for startups is of course very important, but I think that would be much easier to do if you're either in some kind of CISO or appsec management position in the company, or are part of a third party auditing/pentesting firm that deals with startups.
- marincounty 12y ago
  It's too bad that schools don't prepare graduates for real world jobs. Especially, for what they are charging. Personally, I don't know if most 10 yeared professors could keep up with the pace of change in the real world. I think what a lot of people leave out, when they are espousing their college degree, is the amount of self-learning, or who they know after graduation in order to keep/get their job? We still have a lot of naive Sheep who will judge you whether you finished that degree; so you will probally be glad you stuck it out and graduated? As to the dude above me who automatically put that Sales Person in a different "class" once he found she was a graduate of MIT--I'll give you a break, but repeat a quote I will never forget; "Chubby--you need to stop judging people on they way they look?" by Louis Medlock(Deliverance). When I was in college I knew it was 90% B.S., but society expected me to finish the degree. Would I go today, I'm not sure. You need to be exposed to a few facts in life, so you don't end up believing in things that gave no scientific validity. On the other hand my sister is a multimillionaire, and believes in Psychics? She is also once very attractive, and thinks nothing of taking advantage of people for what they can offer her--she used to call it , "They would make a good contact!" Now--they call it Networking. Personally, I couldn't stomach it, but my sister doing great financially. Now if she could get her family to like, or trust her, or a partner who actually liked her for personality; she would have it all. Happy Holidays!
  - ryanmonroe 12y ago
    Just fyi, the word you're looking for is "tenured professors could keep up..."
- rtpg 12y ago
  I was in a similar boat as you were (wanting to go to a "trade school" type thing for IT, ended up going to a generalist school with business knowledge), and I feel better for it. Granted, my schooling let me spend some time in Japan on a school exchange, which led to a whole other sequence of events. But I also got some classes on management, economics, and accounting that does help me understand how things are happening around me. Plus having a degree is pretty much mandatory if you want to work abroad (for visa issues). My school prepared me to deal with the human aspect of work, I think. I did do a lot of self-teaching though, so I didn't end up learning much on the programming side of things.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  I'm not sure trade schools, per se, are the answer. The problem with trade schools is that you're just making a different bet on what jobs are going to be available in the future. Maybe the numbers are better than for some traditional university degrees, but it's fundamentally the same sort of bet: you educate yourself up in some direction, and then go look for jobs. An alternate route, which has been used at different times in different places, is to first get hired at a company based on general competence, and then to get trained up in whichever direction they want you to work. That way, you have a guaranteed job after you finish training. It's a much better system for the workers, but it requires different attitudes on the part of the corporations -- they need to be focused much more on the long term; they need to be willing to pay upfront in time and money to train up their workforce, and be stable enough to employee them long enough to make back their investment. Fly-by-night operations that explode rapidly for a couple of years and then collapse can't really afford that.
  - Genmutant 12y ago
    That's how trade schools work in Germany. About two thirds (up to 3/4) of the time you are at work and learn there, the other you are at a normal school. After you graduate (about 3 years) you most of the time stay at the same place to work.
- thebiglebrewski 12y ago
  I work at one! New York Code + Design Academy. There are similar schools across the country and world. People graduate having enough skills to land an entry level job as a junior developer without having to go incredibly deep into theory, we focus on implementation and actually building products.

vitno 12y ago

The logic here seems... hypocritical, or at least inconsistent. At the beginning: "In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom are over." At the end: "My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only an academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and “intelligent” work. (also, that diaresis...) It feels to me like the first statement says "I lie to my students and present them with unrealistic expectations of the world" and the second says "If I say something, I'll let them know that they are deriving little value from their education... and thus put my career further behind."

pcunite 12y ago
That may be the intent of the article. To lead you into the thinking that the author wrestles with each day.
deleted 12y ago
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speeder 12y ago
As someone that took a degree because the "adults" then forced me to, and spent years of my life just to pay it, totalling 10 years wasted (I am 26 today, and I my assets are the same as they were when I was 16, and soon I will have less than what I had when I was 16 because I am unemployed). My parents, and the academia, school teachers, all lied to me, they told me that getting a degree was a good thing. It is not, it basically fucked up my life so far. If I could go back in time only once to give me a single advice, it would be to tell my 18 year old self to get a job and skip college, or get into a trade school.

rayiner 12y ago

The other day my wife and I were at a baby clothing store. We were chatting with the young woman at the counter, and she was complaining about her student loans. I asked her what her major was, and she said it was physics. I said "oh" with a degree of surprise that made me cringe. I mentioned my brother had majored in physics. She asked me where he went to school, and I told her he went to Yale. She said "oh, my parents went to Yale, but I went to MIT." I felt bad about the encounter, and I couldn't figure out why. Statistically, you're safe in assuming that any random person working at a clothing store isn't an MIT grad making pocket money while working on her PhD. I realized later that I felt bad that it mattered to me. That when she revealed she was smart and educated, in my head I moved her from one class of people into another.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
I have a hard time reconciling the idea that we need more STEM graduates with the difficulty that actual STEM graduates have finding work in their fields. Even if it's part time work while pursuing a PhD, if there was anything resembling a real shortage, these things wouldn't happen. And it's not a rare story.
- melling 12y ago
  I thought the argument for increasing the number of H-1B visas is that we need more technology people? The current limit is 65,000 people every year, and the claim is that's too low.
  - gaius 12y ago
    There is a shortage... Of tech workers willing to indenture themselves, or to work for a fraction of what they're worth. But the real elephant in the corner of the room is ageism.
    - speeder 12y ago
      ageism how? I am 27 (or I will be in some hours... right now 26, in some hours 27). I am jobless for a while, and in my country, industry research showed that the companies are hiring less and less people in their 20s and hiring more people that are 50+ Any position I see with reasonable pay (ie: pay more than my rent + food) requires 20 years of experience+ since I am 27 I cannot have 20 years of experience (I learned to code at 6, but I don't got my first job at 7 :P)

noelwelsh 12y ago

Anyone running an online business will tell you that words are valuable. Text is the primary way we communicate with our customers. Carefully chosen words can have a massive impact on revenue. The author possesses a valuable skill but is not fairly compensated for it. What's going on? Inequality is increasing in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...) and many other countries. Technology is giving capital an increasing advantage over labour. A job as, say, a doctor, lawyer, or University professor, which used to guarantee you a position at the top of the social hierarchy, no longer does. Inequality is generally regarded as a bad thing, both socially and economically (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality) Addressing inequality at a macro scale is beyond my knowledge, but I do know how to address it at the micro scale: own your work. Technology contributes to inequality by allowing successful businesses to scale further with fewer employees. However, you can use the same infrastructure to scale out your microbusiness. Within our community, patio11, Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, Nathan Barry, and others have show how to do this. It is noticeable that many of the above have made a substantial chunk of change from publishing a book. (E.g. http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/ http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/ ~$260K from book sales.) The OP is in a great position to replicate this -- they have all the skills, namely command over the written word, to produce great content and great copy to sell it. On a wider scale, I think we can use technology to redress some of the growth in inequality. Presently it mostly allows relatively few businesses to concentrate wealth. If more people retake ownership over their work, which technology in many cases enables, then perhaps we can do something to address inequality. It's not the whole solution but it might be part of it.

wbl 12y ago
There are a lot of writers out there. It hasn't gotten easier to make it big, even if the size of the check once you do is bigger. Google "death of the midlist" for more information about this trend.
- noelwelsh 12y ago
  Part of the point is that if you own the product you get 100% (well, more like 95%) of the income, rather than the 10% you might get via royalties. 1000 sales for a nonfiction book is a solid year's income.

lolwhat 12y ago

Not surprised when 1% of the country holds 40% of the wealth.

jrells 12y ago

I like this article, but I wish it would do more to point out that high-education low-wage workers, like adjunct university teachers, are usually in their low-wage jobs by choice, and their education gives them a lot more opportunities even if they don't take them. They are in a way very financially secure, since they could easily give up on academics and move into high-wage industry jobs (at least in the applicable fields). There are a lot of people who really want academic jobs anyway, so schools are happy to pay low. Note: I'm an academic and I have a second job to supplement my income. I have often considered moving into industry where I would make 5-10x my teaching income.

jpindar 12y ago
But, but, there is no industry left in the US! (Or so the internet tells me. Meanwhile I drive past half a dozen bustling factories every day on my way to work at an electronics manufacturer.)

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morgante 12y ago

I find it hard to sympathize with these articles. She was aware that the academic job market is bleak, especially in English, yet chose to pursue it nonetheless. Thus, her plight is squarely on her shoulders. It also doesn't mean her students will fair worse: some of them might be making rational choices to get degrees in useful, lucrative fields. Especially at a third-rate university, nobody really has the luxury to major in English. Nothing in our economic system entitles you to making a living at something just because you like it and practice it. I could train for decades to be the world's foremost expert on modern cave painting, but that doesn't entitle me to a cent of wages unless the market deems that skill is useful.

Dewie 12y ago
It doesn't look like she is looking for sympathy, and it seems to be her opinion that her career was her own choice.
wfo 12y ago
Any halfway decent programmer I've ever met or heard of loves programming. They'd do it even if it didn't happen to be hyper-lucrative. We just got lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class happens to currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts and try not to pretend it makes you better than anyone else.
- meowface 12y ago
  >We just got lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class happens to currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts I imagine programming and related fields (networking, system administration and integration, other IT operations) will still be very lucrative in 100 and 200 years from now. It might be slightly less lucrative (or it could be more lucrative, who knows), but programmers will likely be very important to organizations for at least a few centuries, if not millennia.
  - Chinjut 12y ago
    A few centuries is a long-ass time; far too long for such cocky predictions to be taken seriously. (And millenia? Jesus...)

Mz 12y ago

I dropped out of college when I was 21, in part because I knew two different people with bachelor's degrees who had jobs like delivering newspapers or selling shoes at a department store. Everyone around me seemed to think I needed a degree in order to have a career and that a degree automagically would give me a career. The lives of these two personal acquaintances suggested otherwise. I am currently personally acquainted with two other people who completed college and they thus are saddled with huge student loans. Neither one is making enough money to deal with those loans, much less justify them. One owes $100k the other owes $250k. Even if you successfully declare bankruptcy, you cannot write off student loans. These two people may never manage to get their loans paid off. I cannot imagine how awful that must be and I used to have more than $50k in personal debt, which I have been slowly resolving in recent years. (Part of mine is also student debt, but not all of it. It is one of the reasons that although I have considered declaring bankruptcy, I have never pursued it in earnest. Part of what I owe has to be paid regardless.) There is something very wrong with the system here in the U.S. A college degree should not be a path to permanent poverty because you cannot really afford the student loans you wracked up getting it.

jrs235 12y ago
Contrary to popular belief, while it is difficult, it is possible in certain situations to have student loans forgiven, canceled, or discharged. https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati... Edit:https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation#discharge-in https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati...
- Mz 12y ago
  Thank you.

palimpsests 12y ago

I find it fairly surprising how certain the author seems to feel that getting a doctorate would somehow equate to higher income and job stability -- English Ph.Ds aren't exactly a credential in high demand. In fact, reality indicates the opposite is true.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
I was curious what an English (literature) Ph.D might entail, still am, but Birimingham.ac.uk website had this: >"Over the past five years, over 90% of English Literature postgraduates were in work and/or further study six months after graduation. " // Against an unemployment rate of ~20% for 16-24 year olds, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/unemployment-four-ten-uk-graduates-struggle-find-work-1436812 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/unemployment-four-ten-uk-graduates-..., that seems quite good. I'm sure there are some damn lies in there though. More on stats for UK graduate employment, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29327590 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29327590.
- richardwhiuk 12y ago
  By the time you've completed a PhD you aren't 16-24. Roughly speaking, Bachelor degree will take 3 years, PhD will take at least 4, so you'll be at least 25. That's also 90% from a relatively reputable university - http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/International/impact/global-rankings.aspx http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/International/impact/global-rank... claims top 100 in the world. The University of Nevada in comparison is apparently the 113th best college in the US for English: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-nevada-las-vegas-182281/overall-rankings http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... - so much further down the rankings.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    I'm not really interested enough to hunt it down but presumably UNLV's employment figures for those who've taken post-graduate degrees are a matter of record too? I'm surprised to some extent that the 113th best college for English offers a postgrad program in English.

jgwest 12y ago

Okay, Brittney Bronson, it is what it is... You teach the young grown-ups / old kids at the college, and then you shuck it in your part-time service job... It is what it is...

transfire 12y ago

Not to worry in 10 to 20 more years robots will take your survival job away too. Then you can teach college and be one of the homeless at the same time!

bsder 12y ago

The real problem is that neither of her jobs affords her a career. Why should her teaching position be just above the poverty line? People should regard that as horrific. Why should her service job not be a career? People should regard the fact that service jobs are so unstable as horrific.

imaginenore 12y ago

I just don't get all the complaints. Since when did we become entitled to a well-paid job? If, let's say, tomorrow they invent an AI that can write great code, putting me out of business - I will say, well, time to switch to something that pays. And there are still TONs of jobs that pay - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction equipment operators, elevator repairmen, illustrators, real estate brokers - they all make good money. For now at least. Why would I even waste my time as a waiter? That time can be spent learning a skill that's in demand, not something literally anybody can do.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Because neither your landlord nor your supermarket proprietor is going to wait around while you learn the skills to become employable in some other field. You don't just decide to take up plumbing and bootstrap yourself from fixing leaky buckets to running your own plumbing company. As well as the skills, you need a pile of equipment, a vehicle, you probably need to be licensed in some fashion, you need to be bonded or insured before people will do business with you, and you need to spend a good bit of time networking. You can of course bootstrap yourself into a lot of jobs, I've done it in more than one field. but it can take quite a while to break even, and it's not like there isn't competition. I was perticularly perplexed by your mention of illustrators - for sure some illustrators can make a lot of money, but I'm pretty sure that like every other branch of the arts, the average illustrator starting out is beset with requrests to work for free or on spec on the grounds that 'this will be great for your portfolio!'
- imaginenore 12y ago
  I have savings and my credit history is nearly perfect. I'm pretty sure I can take out a loan and start one of the above businesses. It's important to have other skills in life as a backup plan. That, and because it's interesting :) I did wedding photography for fun, so I can tell you for certain - nobody who does it professionally bills less than $2K per wedding (which is 6-8 hours of shooting plus around 20 hours of photo editing). It's mostly $3-6K. If they want a professional looking album, it's another 5-10 hours of laying it out and ordering, and you can bill them another $500+ on top of the album cost. Of course, you need a portfolio, and you need skills, but I billed for my second wedding shoot - the first one was free for a friend. How long will it take me to start a full blown wedding business? I'd say I will land my first one within two-three weeks. I will probably not have many clients at the beginning. In 6 months I will have more than I can handle. It's true of every single good wedding photographer - they are booked months in advance.

zxcvvcxz 12y ago

>English instructor The most important piece of information was at the end of the article! The whole read I kept thinking "what type of professor is being economically valued at a third that of a cocktail hostess?" While this is ridiculous and seems like an example of the free market gone wrong, I think it's very particular to Vegas. Serioisly, I know friends doing the equivalent of 50/hour thanks to tips. However if this were true, in say, Seattle, then I'd be much more worried.