Take it from a criminal justice major who ended up going into student loan debt because I felt like I just downright “needed” to get it from a university. NOTE, I’m not saying don’t go to college, I’m saying unless you are majoring in one of the fields I named, you’d be better off enrolling at a JUCO or Community College. Now if you have a scholarship then that’s a different story. I was originally in a community college but ended up transferring because that school only offered associate degrees (my other excuse for leaving lol). College as a whole is way too fucking expensive to begin with but I feel as though it would be more worth it if you were in the majors I mentioned. I do realize that there are many graduates who have majored in other fields and feel content and that’s great.
I went to school for clowning.
I graduated and toured a clown show.
I’ve won a bunch of awards and had a career in clowning.
I also learned a bunch of transferable skills and took a day job in marketing after successfully marketing a bunch of tours. Now I earn good money, am on the path to directorship and am well respected in the artistic and business communities.
Maybe one person’s experience is not universal and there is no right or wrong answer about how to approach education, training or certification.
I’ve won a bunch of awards and had a career in clowning.
I also learned a bunch of transferable skills
Did you become a Reddit moderator?
I wasn’t pathetic enough
Fairly common opinion. It is worth noting that it’s actually a way worse world to live in if the only people who should get to go to college are the people who expect to earn a lot of money. This is coming from someone who went to an expensive culinary school which is objectively a trash investment. Now I’m getting a scholarship for tech, but all I see is that people in this program are even less deserving
Upvoted for actually being unpopular
I would argue that there is intrinsic value in education and that you can’t measure it purely in terms of dollars in vs dollars out. Perhaps that means that education in a country where it is very expensive is a luxury. But I would also say that if you go to a four year college and feel like you got nothing out of it than a piece of paper, that’s on you.
The education is only a small part of the benefit. While you’re there probably the most important thing you can do is network. Make friends, make acquaintances. Let them know what you’re studying and what you want to do. Sooner or later someone will be hiring and hopefully through their connections they can get to you, and now you’ve got a cushy well paying job.
You don’t need college to meet new people. But condensing a large group of people who want to do something with their lives is a great place to be.
I graduated from an elite university in my country within the STEM field, being the second best in the year or so. I can’t find a job because I never networked or did internships. I studied for the exams (which was easy) and otherwise got drunk with students and people from absolutely not my field. It feels like I wasted 6 years of my life.
People, for real, network. No one cares for your grades once you look for a job. They care whether you have experience, and you get both experience and the chance to talk about it when you network.
I’ve heard Philosophy is a great pre-Law major.
Soft sciences in general need to be covered more in the fields OP mentioned! Psych and philosophy should be taught in high school, too. The amount of arrogant asshole STEM majors I’ve met that think experts in sociology and psychology are just making shit up is too damn high. Ironically I did a deep dive on delusions recently and it’s wild realizing that’s what some of these folks are suffering from.
To be clear - delusions are not a character flaw. We all probably have had a few in our lifetime. The fucks I’m thinking of just push their delusions onto others and become emotionally abusive by weaponizing the term against people for shit like preferring neutral pronouns. They don’t bother to ask why someone (like me) might have the preference.
/tangent
To be fair to the soc/psych skeptics, there has been quite a number of scandals where famous TED talk researchers had their big theories discredited due to failure to replicate. “Power posing” was the big meme one but there are many others including ego depletion, social priming, and the facial feedback hypothesis.
The replication crisis is extremely embarrassing for the field.
The replication is actually evidence to me of moral reasoning. There are limits to the types of experiments we can or should be willing to perform. Power posing was never considered an entire scientific model like the sex/gender distinction.
You mean the lack of replication? Yes, it’s evidence that humans are sophisticated reasoners and that simplistic “life hacks” like smiling at yourself in a mirror are not effective. But then these are among the most widely known “findings” of psychology, so the field’s reputation suffers.
Where are you getting the idea that’s one of the most widely known findings? I’m genuinely asking, I hadn’t heard about it in years.
These are all the findings that make the TED talk circuits.
And you use Ted talks to see what’s most popular??
It unironically is. It teaches you argumentation, symbolic logic, critical thinking, drafting bullshit long form essays, arguing about the precision or imprecision of language, disagreeing about what words mean (postmodernism), disagreeing about disagreeing, and so forth.
Philosophy is a great foundation for almost any field but if applied to Pre-Law, it gives you a leg up.
Should cross post this under “boring dystopia”.
A better take in my opinion is university and college should be for the pursuit of knowledge and anything you’re doing to make money should be a trade school.
There is good reason for people should study all sorts of fields in university, it’s just been corrupted by capitalism/greed.
Agree except that uni is for networking. If you go to uni and don’t network and dont get a degree you listed then you could have accomplished the same without going to a uni.
It’s a catch-22.
Go and get debt for a degree you’ll never actually use or don’t and people who did get jobs that don’t need a diploma over you because they have it.
The solution was expanding public education again. Used to be normal to stop going around sixth grade because you could get a career with just that, only white collar required a HS diploma. Then everything required HS and white collar needed Bachelor’s degree.
Some places do t require a degree, but still use it as deciding factor.
We need to just do at least 2 years of community along with Highschool, if not full on bachelor’s. Lots of other countries do it, hell, the school I went to in Hawaii was full of Nordic students because part of their free college included a semester abroad to learn about other cultures.
Really made sociology awkward tho when we kept talking about how shit America was and all our problems when the majority of the class came from countries who sorted it out long ago.
(in the US)
Don’t go to school for STEM either. Same reasons.
STEM degrees might be the most devalued now anyway. Most STEM employers (STEMployers?) are flooded with applications from kids who got a 4 year degree with no other relevant experience. At least non-STEM education focuses more on soft skills
Not sure which part of STEM you’re talking about. Me and all my classmates who graduated with various engineering degrees (civil, mechanical, petroleum, and aerospace) are having to practically beat recruiters away with a stick.
Most people equate stem with comp sci and forget that’s just the newest addition to the group although arguably the lowest barrier to entry with some of the highest top ends.
Thing is, you learn a hell of a lot more than just science in those majors. Shit, i have a degree in biochem and i make a good salary in money and people management. And I definitely rely on the analytical/math/programming capabilities I developed in science.
I’m saying this as a STEM major who can’t find work, and most of my colleagues in my major (electrical engineering) can’t find work either. I guess it was a good idea whenever you went to school, but that ship has sailed.
I withdrew from college and was able to enter the workforce directly, but a few years later I’ve decided to go back and knock out the rest of my 4 year degree.
I’ll probably end up with ~20k+ in debt by the time I’m out, but I’ll be re-entering the workforce with a degree AND nearly a decade of relevant career experience, which I’m hoping will help considerably.
Worst case scenario I figure it will make it easier for me to move somewhere abroad, should the US continue to decline the way it has been.
PPE was worth it. 10/10. Would go into debt again.
Personal protective equipment?
Interesting. I think I would agree with you that going straight to a university is more expensive, than doing a CC first. It may add additional time to your schooling, but I think its worth it, depending on the costs for the university. I think I would still say even if going through the majors you mentioned, a CC is a better way to go as well unless you have a lot of money, whether from family, or grants, or scholarships.
I’d add economics with a heavy dose of math (econometrics) to your list of useful majors. Ditto accounting.
