To get my foot in the door of a textile company that allowed me to learn their operation by pushing around bins of wet cloth through the plant along side the high school floor workers- and then become a plant chemist learning about dying and textile printing.
Then when I resigned to take a job in a chemical plant, I am grateful that my ND degree allowed me to start working on shift as a QC analyst.
I am grateful that my ND degree (a actually it gave me a start but the rest was up to me) allowed me to progress over 35 years from QC analyst to process development chemist to QC supervisor to manufacturing shift supervisor to building superintendent to technical manager.
I worked to pay most of my college expenses but did take up a student loan which I repaid as soon as I could. Where are my reparations for that :)? I wish obtaining a useful ND degree today did not cost three or four times the rate of inflation as when I went there.
Am I special? Not at all. I did what my parents taught me to do- get educated, work hard to pay my way, work hard to progress in my career. A college degree opened doors, yes, but I had to proactively take advantage of those doors . Flipping burgers as a life aspiration to earn a living wage- give me a freaking break. I flipped burgers 40 hours a week after school and on weekends my entire senior year in High School to earn some spending money and save some for college.
So in summary I have this to say to Bernie Sanders, AOC and their supporters- go to Hell. Am I bitter? No although it may seem so. Actually I am profoundly sorry for any HS student who pays any attention to these socialist morons or who have been raised by idiots.
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Actually, a couple dogmas:
1. We need more kids in 4-year universities.
2. Going to college is going to improve your financial situation.
Until we can have adult conversations about these two things, it will only get worse. Then it's compounded by university administrators who are addicted to constructing new buildings, funding sports programs that lose money and adding more provosts and deans and other administrators, many in the diversity and inclusion racket. And, of course, no one asks, "What have these additions accomplished or what quantifiable results have we received from these things?"
Lifetime earning of college grads is substantially higher than those with just a high school degree.
For the average person, college pays for itself.
I bet you know this.
possibly not.
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That's true here.
1. The kids who graduated due to being smarter and more diligent would outpace their peers even if they hadn't attained a college degree.
2. The salaries of a minority of students who graduate from prestigious universities and/or from particular majors skews the mean.
3. It leaves out opportunity costs. Where could many of those students been if they hadn't spent 5/6 years in college at non-prestigious universities?
You and I have read a litany of articles on "underemployment" of college graduates. That begs the question: are those graduates actually underemployed? Most students are below-average students. I have the stat somewhere on how little today's college students spend studying. It's remarkably low and there's little evidence that this is because they know more than students in the past and can afford to not study. We have tens of thousands of college grads working non-managerial retail and service sector jobs. Many/most of those jobs could be had without college degrees. And, again, pretend that those smarter, more diligent peers had never graduated college. They would be outpacing the less intelligent, less diligent peers in those service sector jobs, as well.
There also isn't much reason to conclude that the bulk of college students today are emerging much more knowledgeable than when they entered, save for some of the fields that tend to attract the smartest kids, anyways.
Encouraging kids of average to below-average intelligence who aren't particularly good students to go to non-prestigious four year colleges because "they will earn $1 million more over their lifetimes" is usually not a responsible thing to do, knowing the debt most will accumulate and taking into account how many people like them leave college and have to accept jobs they could have gotten without spending five years in college.
job sectors have also bought into the system.
Does the guy who sells insurance need anything that he learned at college? No. But he won’t get hired if he doesn’t have the diploma.
There are still schools - even expensive ones - where a diploma in the right major gives good ROI. But in general, I think that you are right.
(Interestingly, in reference to our previous discussion, a premed degree is no longer one of them).
...for many jobs that a trained motivated high-school grad could do.
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