Many moons ago I ran the production floor in a factory. Seasonally we’d hire day laborers to help us clean and do the gross stuff, shoveling waste from behind the machinery, cleaning out sumps etc.

I remember this one guy who was having like, a crisis while cleaning dead seagulls from our ventilation system. He was just like “I have a degree, I went to school!”. When I asked what his degree was he said Medieval Art History and I laughed. I felt bad laughing but like, what did he think he was going to be?

The worst part was 6 months later we had the agency send us more people and he came back.

I’m in university now, and I was very very careful about my choice of degree.

Aww…poor guy. I mean, he made a dumb life choice, but I still feel bad for him. Quite frankly I’m not really sure why universities are allowed to sell so many completely useless degrees. I get that at 18 you’re legally an adult, but you’re essentially still a child. Your brain continues developing into your mind 20s and you don’t have many life experiences yet. I don’t think we can blame kids for not knowing that they are making unwise decisions like that, especially because the school is the one selling the degree to you, acting like it’s a good idea.

Because a degree isn’t job training. Education and training are very different.

Think of how sex education and sex training are wildly different things. They can compliment each other but they aren’t the same. You go to college for the education.

I think that “get a degree so you can get a job” mentality that our parents and parents parents touted is advice from an era gone by. An era when having a degree set you apart from a sea of high school diplomas. It didnt matter if it was in medieval art History. It was a university degree (so you were smarter than the average bear/could learn and be taught).

It got distorted over the years and now we are here. Lots of degrees, people “go to school to get a job”, and then can’t land one because…well. it just sucks

that “get a degree so you can get a job” mentality that our parents and parents parents touted is advice from an era gone by

My parents actually stressed the liberal arts idea that you go to college to learn how to learn and that it doesn’t really matter what you major in. I respect their viewpoint even more now because they paid the absurd tuition at my liberal arts college. In my case, however, it really did cost me professionally. I ended up becoming a computer programmer, and while I was indeed quite capable of learning whatever I needed to learn to do any particular task, I was hamstrung by my lack of a degree in Computer Science proper.