I went to college/university so I can be a Janitor!

Focus: I have a B.S. in Geography, and I am currently working a job that is somewhat related to my major. I work as an independent contractor for a firm that does geospatial services. I am part of a project where we use ArcGIS to edit the electric data in Alabama Power's backlog.

My focus in my Geography classes was in GIS and cartography. I had been told that it was a good route to go if you wanted to have a job right out of school, and I knew that Geography is a useless major if you focus on the human or physical side of it. Still, I haven't had much luck finding work. I did an internship while I was in school, but it was doing grunt GIS work in our Geography department. It only lasted for 3 months and I didn't do anything that I didn't already know how to do from classes. I live in metro Atlanta, and while this isn't the best city for someone who is looking for work in my field I also don't think it's a bad one, but there is a lot of competition.

I like the company I am with now but I don't know if I will get hired on full time, and even if I do there won't be very much, if any opportunity for advancement. The work that I am doing is easy and probably won't make much of a difference on a resume. I am looking at grad school and am thinking about trying to get a Masters in either applied statistics or information systems, or going back and trying to complete a few classes to get GIS certificate.

alt-focus: Being that I majored in Geography, I did take a lot of useless classes: physical geography, climatology, European Geography, Geography of Latin America, Geography of Food, etc. If I had to pick the most useless class I took in college it would be Latin. I only had to take 3 semesters of a foreign language but it still would have been better to take Spanish. I chose Latin because I took 2 years of it in high school and loved it, but after 3 semesters of it I never wanted to hear or see the language again.

 

For the most part, I don't think the skill it takes to be successful in a creative field can be taught (which is why grad school for these industries is extra silly), but there is still value in the experience. Everyone I know who majored in something creative improved drastically throughout college just from being forced to practice and learning from the community around you. For my school in particular, many of my courses were focused on the more business-related aspect of the industry and technical skills like computer software (which is why I went there versus getting an English degree).

But the other huge factor in this that hasn't been mentioned yet is that even with creative industries you still need a degree to prove your worth if you plan on making it your career as opposed to something you pursue on the side of your day job. I'm aware that people have become successful artists (in every sense of the word) without a degree, but it's that much more difficult, especially if you're coming at it from any more practical angle than wanting to be, say, a painter or a novelist. Once you've already established yourself in the industry, I'm sure future employers are barely going to glance at the education section of your resume after seeing the rest of your credentials, but in the first, I don't know, five years or so you're not going to be taken seriously even for internships if it looks like something you're doing on a whim based on having a degree in something entirely unrelated that you did because it could be practical. It would be a hundred times more likely for these types of people to spend their days stocking shelves if they didn't "waste" their college education by simply not going and trying to start their career without a degree. Isn't getting a degree in something you're uninterested in and don't plan on pursuing just to take a couple of classes in what you do love even more of a waste of time and money? Or is there another option I'm overlooking?

Between this thread and any Occupy Wall Street discussion ever, I'm getting fucking tired of people whose main contribution is "Well why didn't you just get into finance or engineering or IT or become an electrician?" I think it's pretty obvious that there is no degree or career path that absolutely completely without-a-doubt guarantees you a job straight out of college and you'll never ever be unemployed again until you die. And if there was one, not every person would be interested in it or qualified to do it. And if that were the case, then there wouldn't be enough jobs to supply all of these genius people who took this obvious route with employment.

Also, I can get the sass about English and sculpture degrees - that's pretty standard - but political science and education degrees are getting shit on now too? What?

 

Really? While I think getting a degree in Latin is laughably stupid, taking a course in it was the best thing to happen to grammatical skills in English. It was like a ground up way to learn how a language operates, my grammar improved much more from Latin than when I took Spanish. Maybe you had shitty teachers? Or possibly you don't think grammar is an important thing to learn... and sadly outside of this place you're probably right.

There was a time when poli sci majors didn't get shit on?

 

I don't know, if there was a poli sci major at my school I would probably have been like "Look at those dweebs who want jobs after school's over." I never considered it anywhere near a useless major.

 

At the risk of being that guy again, what kind of school did you go to if political science majors would have been considered the epitome of job-getters?

 

You're right that it did help me with grammar and my SAT scores when I was in high school and took it at the introductory level, but my first two semesters of it in college were just a review of that (I didn't have to take a foreign language at my first school but I did when I transferred), and my third semester consisted of translating Ovid's poetry. I feel like relearning some Spanish would have been a better use of those three semesters.

 

Maybe I'm just oblivious to how difficult it is to get jobs in politics. I always grouped it in with the right brain industries that everyone claims are fail-proof job markets and/or are more practical and useful to pursue.

 

It's more properly grouped with sociology and psychology by discipline, results, and job prospects.

 

I want to back this one up, because I have also noticed how frequently people on this board boost the trades as something that should be pursued by more people. I work in real estate development in a major NE city, and know the unemployment levels across all the major building trades here is pretty fucking high. There are a lot of guys sitting on the bench, so to speak, because the financing for new construction still isn't out there. Some of them could move to different parts of the country where there's more construction, but for a guy who is interested in paying his union dues, eventually collecting union benefits, and actually maintaining a normal family life, that isn't a great option. If even more people tried to get into the trades, it would only exacerbate the situation.

 

So you can't understand a world where people are intelligent and informed about more than just hard sciences? It sounds like you want a world of technical schools, not a world of higher education.

My trouble is that this whole debate needs to decide what college is: is it a trade school where you get trained in the skills you need for a future job, or is it a place where you expose yourself to knowledge, learn critical thinking skills and round yourself out as a human being? Higher education used to be considered the latter, but I think that's rapidly on the decline now, which is unfortunate.

FOCUS: I always wanted to be a rancher, but my parents refused to let me get a degree in Animal Husbandry, so I recently finished a Political Theory/Middle East Politics degree. The next logical step is grad school, but I think I will follow my dream of being a farmhand instead.

 

A lot of people have shared anecdotes about how they or a friend or a friend of a friend majored in their passion and are super happy with the outcome. That's great. I don't object to that, nor do I look down on them for pursuing what they love. I happen to have loved science since I was a child, and developed a taste for stats in high school, so I pursued it in college. But for every person you know that did what makes them happy purely for the joy of it, I can show you dozens that are miserable because they chose what they thought would be the path of least resistance towards that piece of paper and *gasp* aren't being rewarded. They're stuck in jobs they don't particularly like with wages lower than they think they deserve and debts they don't know how they'll pay back. As lust4life pointed out, the question was what useless courses or majors have you come across - being that I evaluate that according to likelihood of employment (and general financial stability) post-graduation, my opinion stands.

To audrey's question: I've never met a political science major that wasn't at a service academy (and thus guaranteed a job after school) or planning to go to law school (which doesn't require any particular degree for admission). And not all education majors are a joke, but I challenge you not to laugh at the early childhood (elementary grades) education curriculum. Some of my biotech lectures were held in the education building, and it seemed that they spent most of their class time writing lesson plans on the color wheel or drawing self portraits on paper plates (if the classroom decorations were any indication).

 

This position used to hold ground back when college was cheap. Think about it this way, if colleges stopped issuing degrees, or you were not allowed to put college education on your resume, how many people who weren't filthy rich would actually go?

 

Hasn't it always been wealthy white people who go to college, because they can afford higher education?

The problem more stems from college degrees being a requirement for jobs now. A lot of people don't need a degree in psychology to manage a hotel, but you can't move up without that paper.

At the risk of derailing the thread into a discussion about the educational merit of college, I'll just say that I think any course that doesn't add value to your life is bullshit. A course in advanced chemistry can be just as worthless as a course in western philosophy if you're just studying it to get a piece of paper that allows you to have a good-paying job.

 

I'm gonna put this out there: nearly all of the rounding myself out as a human being occurred outside of school. Not "outside of school" as in "between classes" or those extra-curricular activities put on by the school, but I mean, entirely non-school activities, during summers at work, and during what bits of travel I could fit in. Which has also turned into the most valuable part of my time spent in college. I'll grant that my school was particularly large, impersonal, and lacked any real sense of community, and I was in a small faculty that isolated itself from the rest of the campus, and what I did during those summers at work is out of the norm for a college student, but isn't that kind of insane that the most intangible - and theoretically easiest - part of a university education should have come from everything outside of school?

I've had an idea lately. Any high school grad who wants the rounding out or growing up aspect of college but isn't completely sure about what to study ought to do one of those work-study abroad programs. You know, move to France or Germany or Argentina for a few months, or work as a liftie at a ski resort, spend part of your time learning the local language and part of your time being a tour guide or something like that. At the very least you stand a reasonable chance of breaking even financially (rather than dropping five figures on tuition alone over 8 months), you'll learn a ton of things about yourself, you'll move away from your parents and learn a modicum of independence (something many of my graduating class have yet to do), and along the way you might figure out what you'd like to study or at the very least what kind of person you want to be. Do that for a little while and then go back to school with some direction and motivation beyond "this is what my parents expect me to do" or "this is what all my friends are doing, so I'll just go along with it". It's better than getting sucked into a four year degree you didn't care all that much about, you'll have far more life experience than every other 17 and 18 year old who waddled off to campus without doing much in between, and you might even have a line on your resume that makes you stand out from those aforementioned 17 and 18 year olds.

I'm not saying it's a perfect idea, or that everyone should or can do it, or that it needs to involve going abroad or that sort of thing. But at the very least, unless you really know what you want to do and have the direction and motivation to pursue it, you can stay out of the Ponzi scheme of higher education for a short amount of time and hold off until you've gained a bit of perspective. I was one of those 17 year olds who waddled straight off to campus without a scratch of life experience. And I was lucky enough that, after a year of undergrad, I got into the degree program I wanted which gave me access to an awesome job during school that gave me a lot of experience and some pretty awesome opportunities. If I hadn't gotten into that program? I'd be just another one of a million bachelor degrees coming off the presses without much to my name, and too much debt to take any risks or have any adventures.

How does a course that gives you access to a high-paying job not add value to your life?

 

Not really, going to school full time while working for minimum wage, and not having to take out any student loans was pretty normal back then. Well, assuming you lived at home while doing it. The issue is that the capacity for debt increased and tuition inflation over time was noticeably higher than general inflation.

I agree 100%. I think I've said it before, but pretty much all these four year 'well rounded' programs have done was ensure that the average poor kid will never be able to compete with the average well to do kid. I realize that was never the intent, but it's what happened.

 

I have a degree in business admin and a degree in counseling psychology. I've worked briefly in both of those fields. I hated business, I loved counseling but the pay was shit.

I also interned four different times. That was key because it got me a pair of solid professional references that a professor wouldn't have been able to give me and I wound up working for one of those internships when I desperately needed a job. Working for free sucked, but to be honest, I didn't know enough to warrant any pay. I had to learn and they weren't going to pay me to do it.

I have worked in all manner of jobs: construction worker, crane operator, sales, computer repair, teacher, counselor, manager, law assistant, cook, stock boy and Peace Corps volunteer. I have fully leveraged my two vague degrees into all sorts of jobs, some interesting and some shitty, but I don't I anticipate being unemployed for extended periods of time because I have a variety of experiences and I'm willing to adapt. When I was unemployed or only had a part-time job, I volunteered at a rape crisis center, a social worker's legal office, and a Salvation Army.

The point is a degree will open doors. Most of the degrees will ONLY open doors. You can use it to show you are not a complete, lazy retard, even if it is just an English degree. I knew at a young age I was not going to work the same job for 25 years and retire, so jobs like IT, engineering or medicine were not for me. I haven't worked the same job for more than 3 years, ever. I also realized by working in college how necessary the degree was. You could get a decent supervisor job without a degree if you were dedicated and good at your job, but you would consistently get passed over for promotions by people with that degree. Also, you couldn't change companies as easily as someone with a degree.

The benefit of my ever-changing resume is I learned what I was good at, what I was not good at and I eliminated a lot of bullshit jobs from consideration before I graduated. That is the key to making the most of your education: knowing yourself enough to realize what you want to do. If you know at 17 you are destined to be an engineer, wonderful. If you are like most people and have no idea, then pursue your interests and find out. Just realize that you can learn about things you are interested in outside of the classroom and that experience is often priceless.

 

I think MoreCowbell and Village Idiot nailed it. For most of the humanities degrees, the value of your degree to an employer is that it a) demonstrates you have some capacity for intrinsic motivation, b) indicates you have the temperament to actually stick something out for X years, and b) allows the HR / hiring manager to cover his/her ass if you turn out to be a fuckup - "but he had a degree from <school>, how could I know he he had a Kobayashi-sized appetite for smack and would embezzle all our funds?". If you can then spin the degree such that it appears relevant to your interviewer, it shows that you have actually devoted some time into thinking about this (and thus probably actually want the job), and depending on the questions they ask, that you can think quickly under pressure. At the risk of turning anecdote into evidence, the interviewer that rescued me from secretarial hell knew damn well my Communications degree wasn't going to help me be a Commercialization Analyst, but my ability to craft a believable excuse for him to hire me indicated I had some brains that might be useful to him. In those entry level jobs, employers tend to look more for bright people they can train than an in-depth knowledge of some outdated textbook a Senior Lecturer wrote to get his Professorship.

That said, the key part of that paragraph is 'the value of your degree to an employer'. Taught properly, a course can offer you something a hell of a lot more valuable than entry into a job you'll probably hate in a couple of years anyway. History degrees are laughable from an employment perspective, but you know what? I can't help but think that if a few more people had history degrees, the world would be looking very different right about now. I wonder, if a sizable percentage of the population had studied, say, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, would those grainy 'WMD' photos have spawned an invasion that left 100,000+ people dead at a cost of trillions? If everyone was writing 2000 word essays on the link between prohibition and organized crime, would the War on Drugs have happened? Shit, if every high school in the Western world at least mentioned the Tuskegee experiments in passing, people might be a little more discerning when it comes to their Government's declarations of trustworthiness.

Then again, maybe not. Even though in my more elitist moments (and by moments I mean decades) I suspect that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, I'd love to see the entire education system, from primary right through to tertiary, focus on critical thinking. TLDR; getting and keeping a job is important. There are a few other important things out there in the world as well.

 

Alt-Focus

Arts courses. Jesus, society needs to wake up about this and realize what a spectacular waist of time, money and education they are for most people. It some states, schools have arts compared to technical/applied science ratios of 70-30. That is a LOT of wasted education, not to mention the average North American college student graduates, then "enters society" $24,500 in debt. On average.

I can bash arts courses because I, regrettably, wasted MY first college education on an arts course. The chance of you becoming a big success in the arts industry is about the same chance of you becoming a professional athlete. The downside is it pays less, and you are only around people that you regularly wouldn't wipe your ass with. Arts industry people are repulsive people, everything you hate-- megalomaniacal, ignorant, usually ugly and always going on about nonsensical things in orger to give off the impression of "edgy", "unique" or at the very least, "fuckable".

Anyone with a REGULAR job in the arts industry- a theatre stage hand, an aid on a set, stage riggers, or me: a set designer, etc. make about as much money as a lifeguard or that half-retarded guy by the beach that sells live bait. It's no living, at all. And the hilarious thing is, it's just as cut-throat and intolerable. You get treated with just as much contempt, and have to work around the same black turtleneck-sporting turds wearing enough Paco Rabanne to gag a Mexican pimp.

Right now, I'm a tender 34 back in night school for a trade, but this was carefully thought of this time. It has to do with where I am and the shitty condition of my city, and after doing my homework it seems like the smartest thing right now. It will take a while, but I can still work full time during the day and not lose sleep.