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Here is what we were told repeatedly and constantly throughout middle and high school (mid to late 90s):

* You should go to college.

* You should do what you love.

* Sure some jobs pay more that others, but that doesn't matter if you are doing what you love.

What was completely left out of the discussion was that some degrees won't actually enable you to do what you love. They'll just load you with tons of debt, making it harder to even get by let alone do what you love as a side gig. I never once heard a guidance councilor or other adult tell that to me or my peers. The "it is rare to get that sort of job" speech was reserved for people who wanted to play sports or be rock-stars, not those thinking about an academic degree. Maybe it was because I was from an underprivileged community, and any students who showed a desire to go to college were encouraged, not stifled.

Yeah the "you could be an archeologist or a historian" was such obvious bullshit that I can't believe any adult could say this with a straight face."

They always listed the jobs you could have with a degree instead of the jobs you would have with a degree.

My wife got a GIS degree. They told her about all the map making jobs. They didn't say 95% of these jobs were oil and gas.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about... a friend of mine studied archaeology in college and wound up starting her career in the curation department of a major museum. Another studied history and wound up becoming a tenure-track history professor.

Now granted they both worked crazy hard in school, but the idea that it's "obvious bullshit" isn't true at all. Archaeologists and historians are real jobs that exist. I say that with a straight face.

I'm not saying that it's easy to become either, and you're definitely not going to become rich doing either of them, but they're certainly attainable if you're truly driven and love that kind of work. They're not get-lucky fantasies like NBA star or celebrity influencer.

There are 500 NBA players, and another 500 minor league players and 5000 practicing archaeologists. So it's not too far off.

I have 1 friends who is tenure track (stem which is significantly easier) but 14-15 who got PhDs weren't able to find tenure track position. But two friend started an internationally acclaimed bands. And another who is an internationally published author.

So sure these jobs exist but archaeologist and historian are probably closer to rock star or NBA player than they are accountant or developer.

Strong second on this point. It was especially rough on couples since you need to find two jobs and deal with things like what happens if your tenure track job is in a field/area which assumes everyone has family wealth (you’ll see - in 2022 - faculty jobs listed in NYC paying $40k!). Don’t forget there’s often a narrow window: too many years out of your Ph.D program and it gets harder since you’re assumed to be stale/flawed even if the true constraint on the job market was budget cuts.

I’m reminded of a friend who moved - with no prior experience living outside of the U.S. - to Tasmania because that’s the one place in the world where their partner could get a permanent job when they were on the market. That’s worked out well for their family but it’s nothing like the way a software developer can be flexible.

Except there's orders of magnitude more competition for those NBA players though, than there is for archaeology (or historian). Especially when you realize how mind-numberingly tedious it mostly is, so much cataloguing seemingly endless shards... (Or endless 16th-century documents, if you're a historian.)

But if you've really got your heart set on archaeology/history, they're not fantasies. They're just extremely niche. You're right that the parallel isn't "developer", it's more like "database engine developer". Albeit much much lower pay, in most cases. ;)

Conditional on playing college ball, there is maybe 1 order of magnitude difference in terms of competition. If you play in college there's a 1.2% chance you play in the NBA. And probably a 10-15% chance of working as an archaeologist condition on getting a degree same as getting a tenure track professorship conditioned on getting a PhD in History.

One of the biggest differences though, is you figure out whether or not you're getting into the NBA at aged 20, after going to school on an athletic scholarship.

You figure out you're not going to get tenure at 32 after finishing up your 3rd post doc, with 250k in student loans.

I think a lot of people who major in those subjects with very competitive jobs just don't have it in them either skillwise or motivationwise to work that hard. They have a semi interest in them, and the grading is not as harsh as many STEM fields, and they might like the idea of a not too hard job to get in those fields, but they don't have the mettle for graduate work and several underling stints to really make that a career. And college advisors are doing them a shameful disservice not to mention the actual time and intensity commitment needed to do those things.

Not to mention that almost all the jobs go to a handful of elite universities, and if you're not getting your PhD there you're wasting your time.

> They'll just load you with tons of debt, making it harder to even get by let alone do what you love as a side gig

That seems to be a somewhat US-specific problem. In many other countries, university education is much more affordable, in some cases even entirely free. In my country (Australia), the government pays two-thirds of the tuition cost of most undergraduate degrees, and will lend you the remaining third - while that debt is still a burden for some, it is nowhere near as bad as the US. Other countries (such as France or Scotland), the government pays 100% of tuition

> Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me.

I certainly knew people in ~2000 who were going to college to study things like psychology, who felt the abstract skills of 'learning to learn', writing, reasoning with a bit of statistics and spreadsheet operation would help them get jobs like marketing, sales, analysts, strategic consulting, HR etc.

I suspect if you got your degree in psychology from Harvard, that might be true - but if your degree is from a mediocre university, probably not.

I dunno, I studied psychology at a good-but-not-great university and knew many psychology majors. I eventually Learned to Code (TM), but it seems that plenty of my peers leveraged those soft skills you mentioned to get pretty decent career-oriented jobs in the fields you mentioned. I would probably do things differently with the benefit of hindsight, but I have no doubt that the soft skills were a benefit to my peers, and even to me in my tech career.

Yup, and I think they were right -- I know a lot of people in marketing, sales, consulting, and program management who majored in psychology. In my anecdotal experience, it opens more doors than an Econ major, for example.

And you don't need to go to Harvard at all. Certainly the school you go to counts for something, but it's not like psych is an "indulgent" degree that needs a good college to "compensate" for. It's a very normal degree. The social sciences tend to translate very well to the business world, a good blend of quantitative research together with qualitative analysis that mirrors business initiatives well.

>> Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries

Sure but that never stopped anyone from pulling out BLS statistics showing life-time earning potential of an BA in english vs a highschool diploma.

But the point of bringing up "any degree" isn't that any student thought (or any guidance counselor said) that underwater basket weaving and electrical engineering had the same potential it's that we were told to go to college even if we had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives. A degree was the important thing even if it was in something that we didn't want, even if we didn't want a degree at all.

On an adjacent note, I'm really tired of the "underwater basket weaving" short hand being used. There's either a real degree you think is useless (which the above thread notes doesn't look nearly so useless by statistics) or there's not.

There's a fairly long history of people inventing what they think is taught at colleges as a straw man to then criticize them in some way and it doesn't contribute to anything for the usual reasons a fallacy doesn't.

Maybe people want to use something made up rather than offend someone with a Youth and Community Studies degree.

At the college I went to (low-mid tier state uni) the Art History degree was basically a degree in social justice and feminism. I had close friends in that program and some other humanities and was able to observe the curriculum. The stuff you expect to learn was a tiny fraction.

Hell, I audited the main American art course. We spent multiple weeks on indigenous textiles and pottery (not quite baskets I guess), multiple weeks on modernist and feminist painters. We didn't even touch american sculpture and spent less than a week on 'serious' painters. Saint gaudens, Sargent and the Boston painters, not even mentioned.

All of this is a class about an Art History degree. You know what that isn't? A STEM degree.

How many jobs there are which require a knowledge of "American Sculpture"?

It's going to be less then the number which require a knowledge of the history of feminism and social justice.

Which is to say, by making the changes you are implying should be made...you'd probably be more unemployable at the end of it because their ain't that many museums.

I’m an older millennial who went to a not great high school and an ok state university.

Of all the people from high school still working dead end service jobs, I don’t know any with a college degree.

Sure there are people who studied English who aren’t making tons of money, but they also aren’t stuck working at Walmart like some of the people who don’t have degrees are.

An English degree isn’t enough to get you a $100k a year job out of college, but it is enough for just about anyone to get their foot in the door to a career where they can make close to that eventually.

Your sample size and personal experiences are small. I can easily contast your story with my own limited anecdote. I grew up in a poor dysfunctional family in a high school so bad it nearly was state mandated. I dropped out of university two years in. The rich kids in my class and many of my peers got degrees. Yet very few moved away and of those who did they all struggle to be more than entry level office workers or interns making double minimum wage at best Yet somehow I'm making 6 figures.

And my anecdote was in response to the OPs anecdote, which was refuting BLS statistics.

My anecdote is much closer to BLS statistics.

When you say they are all making double minimum wage at best, that’s less than the bottom decile for college graduates. Your not experience is not representative at all.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t09.htm

> are way older than me and I first started college in 1999.

I was told not to major in "underwater basketweaving" in 1983, or otherwise I'd be garbage man--as if that were not one of the most important jobs in a society! It's been the same class-warfare BS for coming up on half a century: demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand.

"demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand."

A lot of the demeaning came from the low wage workers themselves. Both my grandparents were blue collar. One painted houses, one was an elevator mechanic. They essentially forbade their children from going into the trades. "Learn to make a living with your brain, not your back" was what my dad heard constantly from his father while growing up. And so my father went to college and became an engineer.

This rings true for me. Blue collar parents, absolutely no way they'd let me get a trade. Couldn't even join the military - had to be university.

> in 1983, or otherwise I'd be garbage man

In 1983, finishing high school in NYC, we were told to consider being garbage men because the starting pay was higher than most college graduates got!

Same. Early '90s. Nobody was telling us "any degree will do". They were saying "You should go to college, and if you do, major in computer science, engineering, pre-med, biotech, (sometimes) business, and so on." I remember that as a pretty consistent message during high school career guidance talks and through freshman and sophomore years in college.

I'm a bit older, but my whole life teachers pounded into our heads "go to college" and get any degree. My dad was denied a management position purely because he had no degree (any degree at all would have been enough and he would have got it), so what they said wasn't necessarily wrong, but it was reckless and has led to a lot of hindered lives. I was sorely disappointed when I graduated with my marketing degree and it didn't matter to anybody. I went back and got a CS degree, so I'm ok now, but I did miss the first few years of my kids' lives working full time to support them and also doing a CS degree in evenings and weekends for 4 years. It would have been much better to have just done the CS degree. I am a little bitter.

It was common advice for maybe a 5-year span in the 00s. It was born and died pretty quickly, but did more than a little harm in that time. Trouble was, it was kinda true when people started saying it, but wasn't true anymore by the time the people who receive that advice were graduating.

When I went to school for my Associates, I knew the graduation / hire rate of every program near my major. If you asked any professor in my building, they'd say "Go Biomed, every one of them is hired". Students should be smart enough to know the chances they get a job before they go. Ask around, everyone knows your chances to get a job based on your major, and stack that up a little bit.. I always tell kids "ask what the chances are you get hired".

As someone who went to school for English in 2000, I can say that while those jokes existed the context here is misunderstood, they were told by business majors about the liberal arts, or anything academic. Heck in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree, and if you looked at the preceding decade you'd see that was statistically true.

The change for the current generation is that for everyone graduating in underwater basketweaving in say 2000, many would find unrelated careers and, because they had a college degree, do fine. With rising college costs and more expectations that workers in high paying fields have specific degrees, that's no longer true.

What? I'm not sure where you pulled this concept of that English vs computer science were in anyway comparable in terms of overall pay even in the early 2000s but you might want to cite your sources.

I went to school in 2001 and computer science was one of the hottest fields around by that time, significantly more so than a BA in English. The Georgia institute of technology (Gatech), my alma mater, had a highly competitive computer science career path.

In fact the general advice was that if you really wanted to major in English that it was better to pursue a degree in an adjacent field such as communications so you could more easily transition into journalism, etc.

STEM (doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.) has almost always been a safer career path than liberal arts, assuming you're cut out for it.

I remember seeing something in the late 90s / early 2000s (when I was in college) that broke down the incomes of liberal arts majors who went to law school and those who didn't. It should have convinced me to switch to STEM, but all it did was convince me to go to law school.

Yeah, so a CS degree was positioned as more valuable and it was obviously so than English in 2000.

> in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree

Ha! By whom? We had a pretty good idea that it was a solid choice in the early 90s and before. We teased my older brother for going for a bachelor's in business while I went into CS, because we were pretty sure the CS degree would be worth a lot more. He's doing just fine, but mostly because he backfilled the equivalent of a CS education into his work experience.

Right after the dot-com bust, a CS degree was seen as having no future by a lot of people.

The glut of graduates that have come off the pipeline due to the hot tech sector prior to the bust fell off after 2-4 yrs. This actually led to the huge lack of supply of CS graduates in the ensuing decade!

I think it is partially responsible for the high salaries that CS graduates get (of course, it's a small portion of the cause, the bigger factor being huge growth in the sector).

Yeah I'm 10 years older than you and never had any thought that "any degree will do". Although perhaps I'm old enough to see that this was legitimate thinking in my predecessors. There was a time when just completing college was fairly uncommon and acted as a class signifier. I believe having a degree, any degree, would have made you an officer automatically in the military (and still does?) and would have opened the door to all kinds of business professions.

Now it's just too common for any old degree to matter. I think perhaps for Ivy League this strategy still works.

I think the "any degree will do" mindset stems from the fact that so many, especially in non-technical fields, never really use their degree. Even my wife who has an engineering degree has spent more than two decades working and not a single day in a job that directly relates to her field of study.

Sure, she would have never gotten those jobs with an English degree but stressing over whether to study the exactly "correct" degree for your career goals isn't necessarily worth the calories.

Having any bachelor's degree is usually a necessary prerequisite to earn a commission as a military officer, but it's not sufficient. There are many enlisted personnel who have degrees but don't become officers, either because they don't want the hassle or don't meet other criteria.

Same with retail management. Maybe things are different these days, but as of ~2010 the highest position at Target you could work without having a degree was team lead.

I think they realized they weren't going to make as much money, but I don't think they realized they would be poor. Poor people generally have less privacy, less dignity, and a harder life. So, maybe they are frustrated there weren't enough safeguards to prevent them from making a decision that lead to them becoming poor.

People didn't realize they would be poor if they were a barista their entire life?

Is this another way of saying we need to raise the age of majority to something like 25? At some point we have to accept that people are capable of making decisions for themselves and living with the consequences. We don't have to collectively accept blame when they make ill-advised choices. An adult can do research before choosing to go to college, choosing a degree path, choosing to finance it with debt.

I have already had versions of this conversation with my own daughter, who is now 12. We've talked about college, when it makes sense, when it may not, and how to make that decision based on life goals. She's plenty smart enough to understand that she doesn't need a career goal at her age, and that even when she becomes an adult it might change, but what she won't be doing is blindly wandering into college with a random hope of success at the other side.

There's some kind of herd blindness in humans where they'll go on doing something as long as the rest of the herd is doing it - even if they know better.

There are new houses being built on the coast in my country less than a meter above the high water point. At king tides, their sections are already getting lightly flooded.

When sea levels rise, those same people will complain to the council (which is still letting them build there) and seek compensation, even though sea level rise is well understood and anticipated.

People know the risks but carry on because the rest of the herd is doing it.

You’re asking why high school students trusted a guidance counselor over the wisdom found in jokes?

Speaking of jokes. [0]

[regarding weird man examining dozens of eggs]

Customer: They call it "shell shock". It seems to only happen with guidance counselors. They use to make a big deal of it but they let just let it go now 'cuz they always pay for whatever they break and they never bother anybody.

Dante: Well, why guidance counselors?

Customer: Well, if your job was as meaningless as theirs, wouldn't you go crazy too?

Randal: Come to think of it, my guidance counselor was kinda worthless.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a3zXJ7biqI

If you had bad grades or your parents thought you didn't have a lot of potential, you probably got the "any degree would do" talk over "go into this hard STEM degree"

What is so weird is the idea that the majority of people would have gone into plumbing or welding if they hadn’t been steered wrong by the dumb college people. Or if they had all done that, would those trades have been as wealthy as they supposedly are?

I do think this was forgotten a bit in the mid-late '90s. In the UK, at least. Deindustrialization was really hitting, the "service economy" was booming, and the New Labour government realised that "number of people getting a degree" was a metric it could make go up by shoving more and more people into worse and worse courses. Nobody sat down and did an end-to-end analysis of society's needs. They just wanted headlines.

I think some wires are getting crossed here. It has been a long time since you could truly get any degree, and everything would work. That's honestly more of a Boomer and before thing when college graduates were sparse (and off jobs weren't that common).

It is certainly true, and probably still true, if you go to a truly elite school that any degree will do (consulting will hire any young grad from a top school with good grades), but it has been a long time since you could get any degree from any school. People are badly misinformed if they think you can go to a third-tier state school, get poor grades in a random major, and have an easy time making a lot of money.

I started college in 2002 for frame of reference.