The Official Girl Help/Issue/Talk Thread 2: Re-Entry

going to a good school means everything. the alumni network is what helps you the most

also grif is right, what you major in is extremely important for two reasons. one, it's important because your major be in demand or not and two, it could impact your gpa. i'm pretty sure the school of management's gpa aveage is below a 3, but if you went to the communications school its probably like a 3.5 

A few stray thoughts.

First, having been through the university system and then having worked in it for several years thereafter, I can't help but feel like we were sold on a lie of easy unlimited funding for any major regardless of job prospects (the reason I doubled down and got the MA) in high school. That's why the student loan bubble is going to dwarf the housing fiasco when it finally bursts.

Yes, having a bachelor's degree is still going to to come out in your favor, in the long run, but there are a few caveats:

• if you take out loans, they will follow you until you pay them off, generally
  • if your loan is forgiven (under e.g. the PSLF program), the remainder is considered taxable income for the year this occurs in; this is generally considered A Bad Thing™
• hope the field you devote 4+ years of your life doesn't go into a hiring decline

Like most things in life, college is what you make of it, as is the degree. I say most people shouldn't bother because, frankly, most people aren't going to make anything of it. Most students go because it's the default option, i.e., they are lazy, not hungry, lack the drive and dedication to stick with not only the studies but also the mental and physical effort of doing something with the education along the way.

As far as paying for it, I don't know about how it is now, but when I was in high school (2000-2004), we had student loan officers at the school whose job was basically to convince students to go to college for anything, whatever they want, it doesn't matter, you can afford it with these loans! Those chickens have been coming home to roost for a while now. On one hand, a lot of loans are predatory, unfair, misrepresented and the cost of college is way out of line. On the other hand, we signed the loan document. We said we would pay it back. But we were also 17/18 years old, so. Shitty situation all around, and I think the best outcome of things like this will be maybe it will make incoming college freshman think a bit harder about their loan situation. Another issue is that colleges routinely, blatantly lie to prospective students about their job placement rates and offered programs. There are both ethical and pragmatic reasons not to sentence "educated" people to a lifetime of poverty for believing the lies of multi-million dollar marketing teams. 

A few good essays that will hopefully shed better light on this than I have:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/this_is_why_the_american_dream.html

Where Scott is going wrong is not that he is holding out for a "better" job that isn't there; he's holding out for a job that shouldn't be there.  We don't need more corporate management guys.  The 1980s business schools created a market for those ideas (and graduates) and America quickly became a "management" country, at the expense of everything else.  What we need are more businesses. 

Scott and his friends at the Irish Pub are in the best position imaginable: young, smart, living debt free with their parents.  Four of these guys, each borrowing 10k personally (at 4% -- $400 a year to pursue your dreams?) they will have 40k startup capital to do anything they want.  If they're really serious, they could indeed do anything, from putting out a comic book to starting a high end tutoring/home schooling service (pays the bills at the Washington Post!) to integrating Flash with the iPad to inventing something to whatever etc, etc, what, you need me to hand you ideas as well?  If they are serious, they cannot fail, and if they do fail, we have the most liberal bankruptcy laws on the planet. The point of those laws is to encourage you to try.  All the pieces are in place for success at almost no risk.  And he'll be a better man just for trying.
 

"Well, we can't all become entrepreneurs.  What about all those guys in college who are smart, hard working, but are better suited to working for someone else?"  Then go do it! If you need a job and they're offering, take it!   But if they're not offering a job, what are you going to do instead?  XBox?

I'm not here offering a solution for the 45 year old guy with three kids.  I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV  who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses.  Jobs programs and stimulus packages are debatably good or bad, but assuredly temporary.  Remember "the children are or future?"  How about encouraging them a little?  Maybe someday they'll pay for your social security.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html

Fact: college is a waste, but we haven't yet hit that point in society where we can bypass it.  So we have to pass through another generation of massive college debt.  How to pull in the suckers in?  Answer: these articles.  By getting you to say, "these hipsters should be able to get jobs because they are college graduates!" you are saying, "college is worth something."  It isn't.  But by directing your hate towards hipsters, you are protecting the system against change.   
 

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html

If you want to tell me a 30 year old hipster should be lashed for not trying to better himself, I'll bring the whip, but the 30 year old chose his pointless major when he was 17 and you think the outcome is all his fault?  A 17 year old can kill two people and still be considered too young to be criminally responsible, and anyway in that case you think the problem was video games and bullying.  Of course Gerry The Hipster is made of soy and ennui, but there's plenty of blame to go around.  When he was 17 the systemincentivized him to destroy his life, tempted him with beer, babes, and BS-- and the promise of an upper middle class lifestyle provided he went to "a good school" (read: gave the system $100k of his post tax, pre-interest money), never mind for what.   Like a good American, he did what he was told.

The society that taught people to want a defective college degree is, unfortunately, going to be expected to support those that bought it, it's still under warranty.  At the very minimum, it owes them their money back, and if they don't pay you should sue for breach of contract. "At the conclusion of this course, students will show a proficiency in...."  The plaintiff rests.

"They should have studied more." Agreed.  But then you shouldn't have admitted them, you shouldn't have passed them.  Inflate the grade, Gresham's Law the society. 

All along you've said "you need to go to college so you can get a good job" but the system was not designed to raise producers, it was designed to raise consumers.  Well, here we are.  Why are you surprised that they need consumer stamps?  Why are you surprised they moved back in with you?   "We did the best we could."  No you did not, I was there, I saw it.  You borrowed against their future, and they can't pay it back.  And now you're yelling at them.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/12/product_review_panasonic_pt_ax.html

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/08/grade_inflation.html

The "college is a scam" train is one on which I'm all aboard, but that doesn't mean each individual professor has to be scamming students; there's no reason why he can't do a good job and teach his students something that they aren't going to get simply by reading the text.  If a student can skip class and still ace the class, the kid is either very bright or the professor is utterly useless.  Right?   Either way, the kid's wasting his money.
 

Here's an example. Say your essay question is, "describe the causes of the American Civil War."  Ok, so far everything the kid knows he learned from Prentice Hall, but something inside him thinks the answer is: LABOR COSTS.  Hmmm.  Insightful and unexpected, let's see what he does with it.

But there's not much he can do with it, there aren't many obvious resources to pursue this "feeling" he has.  He does what he can.  It's not that good.  C.  Grade inflation gives him a B.

Meanwhile, Balboa the el ed major searches carefully in his textbook and discovers the cause was... SLAVERY.  He airlifts two sentences each out of five other books, asks for an extension because his grandmother died, adds nine hundred filler words including "for all intensive purposes" and "he could care less", and then waits in the parking lot to threaten you with "but this is a history class.  Why are you grading my writing style?"  He gets an A.

The problem is that the first kid is strongly disincentivized from pursuing his idea, from becoming a better thinker, in very specific ways.  

First, and obviously, since the majority of the students are going to get an A, he just has to do just as well/horrifically as the average student, and if they're all writing about slavery with the enthusiasm of a photocopier then if he wants an A he better buckle down and learn the truly useful skill of masking the words of a Wikipedia page.  

Second, he is very nervous about offering a professor anything that he didn't hear the professor explicitly mention, let alone endorse. What if it's "wrong?"
  
Third, because grading an essay is subjective, all professors try to make it objective by attributing value to measurable quantities which are actually stupid.  For example: in most undergrad classes, the bibliography counts for 5%, maybe even 10%.  How you (that's right, I said "how you") going to pad a bibliography with six sources when you can't even find one to support your thesis?  So the pursuit of an interesting thesis is blocked by the 5% of the grade that comes from something that should count for exactly -20% of your grade, i.e. if you have a bibliography, you're a jerk.(1)  This false value has two consequences: it "pads" the grade (e.g. the student already starts with an easy +5-30%) so it is easier for him to get an A.  But more importantly, it is now easy for the professor to justify giving him an A.  "His content wasn't that great, but the points added up; and besides: what the hell would I tell him to improve?"

I can't emphasize that last part enough-- the cause of the ridiculous grading is not the complaining of students but the convenience of the professor.

This is why if you are in a class and you feel the need to ask, "how many pages does this have to be?" and rather than look at you like you just just sneezed herpes on his face he instead has a ready answer, you are wasting your money.  I get that you need the degree, I understand the system, but you're wasting your money nevertheless.
 

http://partialobjects.com/2012/02/why-are-so-many-20-somethings-unemployed/

I don’t know if this is a fluke, or wrong, or what.  It appears that not only are more people going into the– liberal arts?– instead of fewer of them as one might expect; but a greater proportion of the American students are graduating with liberal arts degrees since the Crash.

It’s easy to criticize, but my intention here is to ask the sociological question: what motivates the decision to go into liberal arts specifically when one knows job prospects are poor?  Of course I understand interest in the major; but why choose to go into debt with nothing on the horizon?

Time will tell whether this trend continues; will the proportion rise or fall in 2012, the first post-Crash class?

Possible explanations include:

1. Many liberal arts majors have a legitimate expectation of alternative income: marriage, family inheritance, etc.  (viz. Jenna Bush majoring in education.)  It would be a remarkable research project to find out what the kids of the 1% are majoring in; or the median income of the parents of the students in each major.

2. Liberal arts majors do not envision entering the job market as liberal arts graduates; from the outset, they plan on going on to more “useful” post-graduate training.  (e.g. philosophy now, med school later.)

3. Parental guidance: their parents are teachers/writers/etc, and they believe the poor job prospects won’t really apply to them.

4. Many jobs only require a degree, and the actual major doesn’t matter (e.g. some management jobs, civil service jobs, etc)  So they choose an “easy” major.

5.  The Ponzi Scheme: government loans mean the school can charge any price, and students will pay any price (they don’t feel it until later) so majors are not, or less, valued for their ROI.

tl;dr: most people don't have a passion in the first place to shape into a career, and passion is bullshit anyway.

srry davo i can't see ur post about calling me stupid for going to college (i'm assuming that's what you said) because u r blocked for saying dumb stuff like that

all i can tell you is that i have dreams that require me to go to college. i think its dumb, but still 100% necessary