WOOOOO FREEDOM! GOING OUT EVERY NIGHT!

You're leaving out way too many things in your description. For starters, it's incredibly short sighted.

Sure, you can skip out on college and get a $10 an hour job. And five years later...you'll still be at that job. Maybe you even got a promotion, and are earning $15! Which will barely be enough to pay rent. Your strategy is a great way to stay in shitty jobs and never be able to escape, because damn near every worthwhile opportunity will require a college degree. And there's no shortage of competition.

Cutting off the equation when they're 30 is completely disingenuous. Because a thirty year old with a college degree and 8 years experience is very, very different from a 30 year old who has worked menial bullshit retail jobs for 12 years.

Sure, the employment rate is 9.1%. But that's for EVERYONE. Let's take a loot at it by education:
No college or high school degree: 13.3%
High school degree: 9.0%
Bachelor's degree or higher: 4.6%

Having a bachelor's degree implies that you're half as likely to be unemployed.

Also, if you're graduating from a reputable college, looking for a job, and the best you can do is $35,000....you either intentionally got into a low-paying field or I question what you did wrong. You made some wrong choices somewhere. The person you're describing is just as much of an outlier as someone making $75,000 out the gate.

To add on to this...a lot of the tips in here are ways to game the system. If they worked for you, good. But students should keep in mind that they're often more trouble than they're worth and less predictable than you think. An hour worrying about what the professor's biases are, or exactly what will be on the test, might just be better spent actually writing a good essay or learning the subject.

Often, the easiest way to make it look like you did a good job is to just do a good job.

 

This is a tough thing to use since it varies by geography, 35k a year is good if you live in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the country. Making 35k a year out of college in NYC is very bad.

 

Well, yes, this is true. Although relatively few college graduates are gearing towards becoming a canola farmer in North Dakota. But my point is that the dire situation that VI is talking about is an extreme case. If you go to a decent school and bust your ass, odds are that you'll be able to obtain a decent job near graduation. If you graduate with a 2.8 GPA from Eastern Bumfuck State Technical College, the problem isn't college; it's you.

 

I work in university admissions, so this question is right up my alley. I have only two pieces of advice that if an incoming freshman makes a conscious effort to follow them, s/he will be happy with the time spent at uni. My first bit is my advice from my perspective as someone who works in admission and the second bit comes from my perspective as a former student.

1) Take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. In college there are so many opportunities that could lead to bigger opportunities and/or look great on a resume. These can in the form of jobs, clubs, leadership roles, or volunteering. At least explore every one of them that looks like it could fit your interests or strengths. I was a public relations major in college. Where I went, there was a student-governed public relations firm that worked with real clients. For whatever reason, I never even attended a meeting, and therefore, I never had solid public relations experience outside of a ho-hum three month internship. Only one company or firm called me to set up an interview for a PR position after I applied to more than 150 PR postings. On the flip side, one day I saw an ad on a bulletin board in the student center looking for students to work as campus tour guides. At just about every university or college, tour guides are part of the admissions office. I applied to the job and was hired. It turned out I was a natural at the duties and after graduation, more than half of my professional interviews have been for college admissions work.

2) Never come home without any stories. I always hated people who would spend their weekends in playing COD. I wanted to yell to them, "Get out there and make some memories!" If your football team has a game 12 hours away, kickoff is tomorrow, you weren't planning on getting tickets because of the distance (and they're expensive) but your buddy all of a sudden says "let's go to the game", get in the car and find a way to make it work. No matter how crazy the idea is, make it work. One time, my buddies and I met some girls at a party who said they had to make it an early night because they were driving to West Virginia for New River Gorge Bridge Day (a highly-popular basejumping event). Once we sobered up, we collectively decided we're going. What followed was a story of blindly driving through West Virgina backroads in the middle of the night, drinking on strangers's lawns, and one of our guys sneaking into press row using his expired press ID from his newspaper internship. There was never any doubt in our minds after hearing the girls describe the event to us that we had to, somehow, make this work.

 

There is a lot of talk about the magic "$35k per year" number coming out of college. Can somebody here give me some examples of what these jobs are? I think there must be a huge bifurcation in pay depending on what you want to do once you graduate.

Not to be a dick, but if you choose to go to a private liberal arts college and graduate with a liberal arts degree, you should know going in what your return on investment will be. Post-college salary information is extremely abundant. If you choose to go to a $30k per year college where you know you will be graduating with a $35k per year job, you have absolutely no business bitching about the outcome.

And let's face it, if you go to a good business-focused school (public OR private), there are any number of entry level jobs that pay more than $50k per year to start (with excellent prospects of growing 15-20% per year). Shit, there are a number of >$100k jobs out there for bright, ambitious kids. If you're interested in consulting, investment banking, trading, etc., you can afford to go to a $40k per year Ivy League school and pay off your debt within 5-8 years. It's definitely not for everybody, and you certainly shouldn't choose your major solely on what your post-college "market value" could be, but if you want to go to a $40k per year school, you should probably be thinking about your prospects pretty hard before you sign the loan documents.

Also, many public state schools have extremely well-respected programs. You don't need to go to an Ivy or a strong private to get a better experience or exposure to post-grad opportunities. The Big 10 is very well known for its business schools. Shit, I grew up in northern Indiana and went to Indiana University for around $10k per year (probably more like $18k now). I feel like I had a top notch academic experience and had just as much opportunity upon graduation as many of my friends who ended up out east at Ivy and other schools. If you live in a state with a strong collegiate education program, it's not a bad route to consider if you want to minimize your debt exposure.

Also, pound as much teenage pussy as you can. It will be the last time in your life when that will not only be accepted, but embraced.

 

I'll third what you guys said.

Yes, Village Idiot, if you get a B.A. in "15th century British poetry" at Harvard and can't get a job afterwards (that doesn't involve "would you like fries with that"), then that's your problem and college was indeed not a terribly good investment.

Of the people I know (here we go, anecdotal evidence), the ones that have engineering/science degrees are all very gainfully employed, making well above the $35k a year mark (at least 2x or 3x, if not more). We didn't start out with chump change, either. The ones with humanities degrees - a small fraction are lawyers, while the rest do social and secretarial work. I personally think I did just fine with my "Computer Science" degree, and didn't rack up anywhere near $30k a year to do it. Sure, I had to suck it up at entry level for a couple of years, but so does everyone.

FOCUS:

Remember, kids, when you're paying for college, you're not just paying for classes. You're also paying for all the "side opportunities" that come with it - studying abroad, internships (which are arranged by the college) and friendships with people who are going places. College is the best time to get your foot in the door of whatever field of work you're looking at - after you graduate, you have that catch-22 of "no experience <-> no job" and it's a hell of a lot harder.

Also: Play some sports, or take some gym classes or something. Unregulated cafeteria food is super unhealthy, and if you move out to an apartment, you're going to lose even that little bit of nutritional control as you stuff your slowly fattening face with doritos or whatever.

 

I got a good job at the first place I interviewed at, so I don't think getting a degree is worthless. I think about all that can be said is covered already... work hard, get an internship, be spontaneous, make friends, have fun.

 

I'm not really sure what you are arguing here. My first point was that people should appear to be conscientious students, and not rock up to class stoned. Furthermore, that if they had a problem, they should discuss it with their professor instead of assuming it was unfixable and re-taking the unit. Isn't that exactly what you said in your last paragraph? I honestly don't understand how you could take issue with this advice, what am I missing? Also, I'm not sure we are using Professor in the same sense. Here, a Professor is the absolute top of the academic profession, there is no promotion beyond it, and it typically requires a PhD. I'm guessing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that you are more akin to a lecturer? The reason I ask is that for any serious problems (rescheduling exams, etc), the lecturer isn't the person I would approach, as they don't have the power to make those sort of decisions, and they are accountable all the way up the food chain. You typically need to talk to the course co-ordinator or Dean of your area of study, who are usually high ranking Professors.

My second point was that if you know your lecturer has a strong bias, don't write something that contradicts it. Do you honestly believe that all other things being equal, the essay which attacks a core belief of the Professor's is going to score exactly the same as the essay that agrees with them? I wonder if you are quite as impartial as you believe yourself to be...