If you're going to school and majoring in something without a career path, don't whine there aren't businesses lining up at your door with 6-figure salaries just dying to hire you.
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.
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.
I knew many people in college that seemed to still have this idea in their senior year. They had given absolutely no thought to the employment process and how the degree in their chosen major was going to help or hinder.
Even though it should have been very obvious to me that I should do something with computers, in high school I decided I wanted to be a physicist because it "sounded fun". It took me 2 years of college to realize I was terrible at it, and there were absolutely zero career prospects on the other end of that degree. It seemed I was destined to make coffee for a PHd for the rest of my life for maybe $20k a year. Then one day I was writing some code after school like I'd done every day of my life, and the lightbulb turned on and I felt pretty stupid about it. Luckily 2 years into a physics major is a good time to switch to comp sci.
But who is handing out the correct advice to young people today? Is it getting to them? Are they processing it?
Is this actually true, though? This kind of makes it sound like everyone who went to college in the 70s and 80s was on easy street, but I don't know if that's reality or nostalgia.
Every other person had interned/worked, and had a full-time position.
But this was engineering, and I think I was lucky to go to school with a bunch of really bright people, because I learned a lot from them. I have no doubt it's different in other areas.
We should probably stop looking down on people who do this (by choice or by necessity) and just embrace the fact that much of HN's readership is extraordinarily lucky that their job is their passion. Maybe if we taught that it's okay to have a job you dislike so long as it affords the things you do like, people would stop complaining that they didn't pull a winning lottery ticket like they were "supposed" to do.
We should stop pushing the myth, yes, but we should not fall into the opposite extreme. The situation is in reality quite complicated and there are far more choices than "do what you love and be bankrupt" and "do what you hate and make money", and, for once, the complication works out in your favor.
Job seekers: Make a list of your interests and talents. If you don't have a list, either think harder, or start trying some new things, stat. Order them vaguely by how much you like them. Now, go down the list, look out in the world, and ask what kind of living you can expect to make with that skill/talent/interest. Be realistic; for example, some musicians may make millions upon millions, but the median outcome is fairly poor. And be realistic about your level of talent/interest/dedication.
Most people really ought to be able to find something that is both at least sort of interesting and at least sort of economically viable. After all, in the US, even "median" income is a pretty good outcome, especially if you don't hate your job.
I practice what I preach. Technically, in a perfectly-aligned-for-jerf world, computer programmer is my second choice of job. My first-place job would be a music composer, preferably for games. (That's not just because "games are cool", but I actually like the idea of trying to create soundtracks that match up with the desired moods, and especially at the time games had much more interesting soundtracks than movies.) However, a sober and realistic examination of my skills, interests, and talents, matched up with my assessment of a rather high likelihood of total failure as a musician, along with the incredibly small number of slots available even under the best of circumstances, led me to discard that option, no matter how passionate about it I was. Everything in the 15 years since I graduated with my computer science degree has only reinforced my belief that I would have been a miserable economic failure as a composer. (It isn't necessarily "lack of talent", but that my talents led in a not-very-lucrative direction.)
In the basement studio I can afford to have because I make a good living, I have a framed dollar on the wall. I call it "The last dollar I made as a musician".
If I had just done what I loved out of high school, I would have watched TV between efforts to get together with girls and alcohol.
Really? You don't see anything wrong with that?
People drop the art major line constantly, but it's whole swathes of the sciences, engineering etc. that are out of work now.
It was either that, or bump the Chemistry over to Chemical Engineering, and that seemed like too much extra work on top of CompSci.
One of the factors that will contribute to the collapse of higher education in the US is the disconnect between the degrees granted and the available jobs that require that specific degree. The universities are offering a gross disservice by blithely allowing students into a degree program before sitting their naive asses down in front of someone who will tell them in great detail how difficult it will be for them to actually get a job in their chosen field.
If they're fine with working retail and food service, fine, let the students in. If they want to pay off their loans, perhaps suggest a related but more remunerative field of study. Instead of Chemistry, why not try Chemical Engineering? Instead of Library Science, perhaps Computer Science with an emphasis on databases? Instead of Art History, maybe look into conservation and restoration, or perhaps try the business school for help managing galleries and museums? Otherwise, they're doing no better than offering expensive classes in buggy-whip manufacture. That field can now support maybe one whole person, who would probably also need to be Amish. A university does not need to teach that one guy. He can apprentice himself to the previous buggy-whip maker.
Chemical engineering is a booming field (although maybe a bit less with oil prices down lately, I've been out of the loop for a couple years). Chemistry isn't.
This is happening all over the sciences. Drug companies routinely have jobs open (while they're laying off senior research staff elsewhere...), but good luck getting one of those jobs as a new PhD grad. It's almost as hard -- perhaps harder -- to get a "scientist" position at a drug company as it is to get a faculty position in academia. Think about that.
The math field is being cannibalized by tech and finance, and the only sciences doing at all well are those with direct applications to healthcare or war materiel.
So if you throw the existing 'M' in with the 'T', and replace it with an 'H' for Healthcare, then fold the remaining part of the 'S' into 'M' for Military, we might have a "METH shortage".
My freshman year, I couldn't decide if I should major in something that 'made sense' or if I should dive into film. I decided to talk to the school guidance counselors. They encouraged me to get into film, spouted off statistics ("85% of people don't hold jobs in their major!"), and encouraged me to follow that passion.
Well, I didn't realize at the time that, yeah, maybe 85% of the population didn't get their job because of their degree, but it's because the jobs they got were service-industry.
It's definitely my fault for trusting them with that kind of decision, but I believed they were authorities on the subject. Anyway, I'm back to programming now, so I guess I'm part of the 85%.
Who's telling high schoolers this? I don't think it's ever been true in recent history. Unless they're applying lowest-common-denominator logic?
College is an easy choice—especially the stigma around those that don't go to college. There's also that ridiculous fact about how much college-educated people earn over their lifetime. What that doesn't take into account is the entire world changed after 2007.
EDIT: Wrote a bit more about why people think they need to go to college a couple years ago. http://solomon.io/experience-deficiency/
People have always, and will always, complain about terrible jobs. That doesn't mean they made a stupid mistake which had an obviously better path. It just means they have a bad job.
It took me two years of rambling around and finally I went back towards what I was always good with, computers. Flash forward 6 years later and I'm a developer who is making a comfortable living. I'm glad I have my degree in econ, I love the field, but I do feel like there is window of us who did get screwed as we made choices on the current economy, not the future economy 4 years later.
Your stats background could prob make you a lot of money if you could shift into data science. The stats + programming would be a good fit.
not exactly. One of the key points in this article is that certain "meta-skills" are as important, or moreso, than field-specific skills. You don't need a degree or formal education for most fields (outside of medicine, law, and engineering.) You can make a pretty decent living doing all sorts of things, if you can solve other peoples' problems, get stuff done, and handle pressure.
You probably don't learn those things majoring in art history. But you might learn those things working as a janitor while you're paying your way through an art history degree.
And most of the people that make the decision to go to college do it before being old enough to vote, drink, and a bunch of other things that as a society they are deemed to be unfit to do.
Of course people should be more aware of this,but instead of blaming people,finding ways to improve the system helps everyone. I strongly think colleges should have a legal requirement to disclose employment data to anyone picking any major.
Just because 'developer' as a job seems to be a good match for people who graduated from computer science or software engineering programs (and honestly, in some cases I'd dispute whether that's the case, too) doesn't mean every job should have a four year degree program that feeds directly into it, or that if your four year degree doesn't slot you directly into a workplace role it has no value.
Contrast that with a string of recent CS graduates I've interviewed this year. 80% or more have been woefully unprepared for work in the field. I'm not sure what they're being taught, but it certainly isn't anything remotely like computer science in the business world.
Point being, if you're a mediocre student, your job prospects aren't that great, regardless of major. And if you're actually smart, the jobs are out there.
I fully agree with the mediocrity part though.
A few have been unable to discuss basic CS concepts to the point they should get refunds from their colleges. These were mostly smaller liberal arts schools.
Most are unable to work through basic design problems on the whiteboard (not programming and don't require couplex algorithms). I'm not looking for perfect answers - I just want them to talk through their thought process and ask intelligent questions.
So I think it is not the choice of major, but the associated expectations. They would still require some creative thinking to create their jobs.
What I saw several times, for example, was people studying to become journalists. This was a couple of years ago when I was still a student myself. When I asked them about their goals, they mentioned writing for some popular newspaper.
It boggled my mind that they would be studying journalism and not have their own blog and be unaware of the developments in media...
What we need is more trade schools, without the stigma that they are somehow a lesser choice than a university. Rather than being judged on how many prestigious scholars and elite businessmen graduated, their main criteria is typically job placement after graduation. That's good news; it aligns their interest to properly prepare you to have a professional career after graduation.