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Exactly. One of my former best friends did exactly this: graduated with a bachelor's in 2008, took one look at the job market and decided to get a master's degr

Exactly. One of my former best friends did exactly this: graduated with a bachelor's in 2008, took one look at the job market and decided to get a master's degree. In Library Science. At a private university. In NYC. She graduated in 2011 and is still continuously whining about how she can't find a job in her field (which is dying) and no one is hiring (in the areas she wants to live in) and she doesn't understand why people aren't lining up to hire her (despite the case she did zero interning or networking while in graduate school) see in case you didn't notice she got a Master's degree (and has zero soft or social skills) clearly that means she should just have a job handed to her! Education is a good jumping off point for a lot of people and for a lot of jobs. However at some point education stops being an additive process and starts being really self-serving. Additive education is like going to school to be a doctor- you learn and you learn and you learn and you learn and at the end of it you have learned enough in a controlled environment to go off and be a doctor on your own. Self serving education is like getting a PhD in Medieval Literature- the only thing you can do with that degree is either go off and teach Medieval Literature to other students or maybe, MAYBE get a job as a historian in Medieval Literature.

Matachines 11y ago
I go to a private liberal arts school in NYC. This is pretty much everyone I go to school with outside the Comp Sci/Finance/Med School people.
TwiztidK 11y ago
Maybe it doesn't get expressed to college students enough, but internships/co-ops/volunteering are extremely important. It's the difference between getting an awesome job soon after school and 5+ years after school. A few people I know have basically refused to get internships (as in they thought about applying to one, shrugged, and gave up). Meanwhile, I knew a girl who went to an extremely small, private, liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of no where and majored in "Sports Management". Meanwhile, she volunteered for the local ice rink's summer hockey camp and got a part time job working with a university's hockey team. She did two summer internships with different lower level professional hockey teams. Her first job out of school - assisting with an NHL team's youth hockey program. There is almost no way she would have gotten that job without her other experience.
SiVal 11y ago
So how about requiring all (US) federal financial aid be given in the form of a fixed-percentage federal salary deduction for the first decade after graduation? The school has to defer the aided portion of tuition, getting paid AFTER making their student valuable to the market. If the student isn't very valuable in that first decade (when the school's contribution is maximum), the school doesn't recover much money. I imagine schools would howl about how they have no possible way of knowing what might make their students more valuable in the future while at the same time becoming noticeably less likely to steer their lower-income students into a Marxist Film major and more toward something in healthcare, accounting, or engineering (if qualified) or maybe a 2-yr tech or trade specialty if engineering is too much of a stretch.

Matachines 11y ago

I go to a private liberal arts school in NYC. This is pretty much everyone I go to school with outside the Comp Sci/Finance/Med School people.

TwiztidK 11y ago

Maybe it doesn't get expressed to college students enough, but internships/co-ops/volunteering are extremely important. It's the difference between getting an awesome job soon after school and 5+ years after school. A few people I know have basically refused to get internships (as in they thought about applying to one, shrugged, and gave up). Meanwhile, I knew a girl who went to an extremely small, private, liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of no where and majored in "Sports Management". Meanwhile, she volunteered for the local ice rink's summer hockey camp and got a part time job working with a university's hockey team. She did two summer internships with different lower level professional hockey teams. Her first job out of school - assisting with an NHL team's youth hockey program. There is almost no way she would have gotten that job without her other experience.

SiVal 11y ago

So how about requiring all (US) federal financial aid be given in the form of a fixed-percentage federal salary deduction for the first decade after graduation? The school has to defer the aided portion of tuition, getting paid AFTER making their student valuable to the market. If the student isn't very valuable in that first decade (when the school's contribution is maximum), the school doesn't recover much money. I imagine schools would howl about how they have no possible way of knowing what might make their students more valuable in the future while at the same time becoming noticeably less likely to steer their lower-income students into a Marxist Film major and more toward something in healthcare, accounting, or engineering (if qualified) or maybe a 2-yr tech or trade specialty if engineering is too much of a stretch.