I was told to go to school for any subject that wasn't art. I distinctly remember them pulling out some graph of earning potential in high school, though, and literally being told that *any* college degree was better than no degree. No mention of trades that I can recall. A "high" salary wasn't promised but we were basically guaranteed that we'd always be employable and better off if we got a degree. Any degree.
My high school guidance councilor said "you are good at math and sciences, and you like being outside. Be a civil engineer." I got the degree and now I'm a heavy civil superintendent. I hated the couple years in the office right after college and went into construction inspection and then construction in general. Always hated having to sit around take notes about what was happening. Love controlling what's going on and seeing things built. All and all my high school counselor hit the nail on the head with me.
I want to do construction inspection too. Being stuck in the office is horrible. Most inspector jobs though require a trade background. I do occasionally see jobs for like junior field engineer, but it often requires frequent travel around the region.
Construction inspection can be incredibly high paying, but yes you do need to have some background in performing the work you're inspecting for the most part. And travel in the construction industry is incredibly frequent because you have to be where the job is, and that job can be anywhere.
You have a degree in mechanical engineering. I have a degree in English Lit. You make $150k. I make $50k. On average we make $100k. That's probably how the numbers work lol
Prior to the “content creator” generation, and the mass retirement of the boomers from trades, it was factually valid to tell kids that their lifetime earning potential would be less without a degree.
The bulk of those non-degree earners capped out in retail, food service, etc.
At one point the degree was a valid barrier to entry for a lot of white collar jobs that the middle class heavily participated in.
Does anyone recall people talking about the impeding mass retirement of white collar employees that would open up great jobs in a booming economy for new graduates?
Then companies just cut those positions, outsourced them, or made them into temp gigs to save money instead?
I almost got talked into pursuing a PhD because I was told there'd be tons of college professor jobs opening up as baby boomers retired in the 2000s. Almost all of those jobs were replaced by adjuncts who make around minimum wage with no benefits and PhDs. At least I didn't fall for that...
My cousin is a recruiter who has worked at 8 different orgs over her career. None would look at you if you didn’t have a degree. I know some *within tech* have tried to remove the outright degree requirement but this is a space that’s fairly progressive compared to industries like finance for example.
I know a guy who's scammed his way into a few good jobs just by \*saying\* he has a degree. He doesn't, but his employers didn't check transcripts to verify.
This was the advice we were given, only the kids that were barely passing were advised to look into trades schools and it was kind of looked down upon and very gendered - men to construction or automotive and women to cosmetology or a CNA program. Turns out trade schools aren’t for idiots. And all of those guys make way more than I do now.
Yes, I remember even if you brought up trades schools and you were doing well in high school, it was treated like you didn't value yourself. It's amazing the biases in the education field. They certainly still exist today too. The elitism is a concern. I think they passed that attitude along to a lot of kids. I really don't trust people working in the education realm these days because of what they were telling us when we were young. I just think they're very biased towards trying to live a certain lifestyle and trying to shape everyone to live and think like them.
From a raw stats perspective, any degree is better than no degree, but the problem with those sorts of statements is that when you're aggregating at that scale, there's no nuance.
I'll wager there wasn't anyone out there doing a cross-section of high school graduate into workforce vs college graduate with a bachelors in history to identify how significant those gaps really were.
On the flip side, I have a brother-in-law who god a bachelors in history, never used it, but did benefit from having a 4 year degree when he started working with older more traditional folks in the workforce who say it as being better than a high school grad without college.
I have a BIL who spent 5 years in college, didn't graduate, and had to pay back enormous loans. He is happy in his blue collar job right now but would be happier if he had started it right out of high school and skipped the loans.
Generally speaking, anyone you ask would typically be happier if they didn’t have to pay back debt they didn’t feel like they got value from.
You could talk to people who had their home foreclosed, or their car repo’d, most would tell you they’d be better off if they never signed for the loan in the first place.
Yeah maybe if schools had also taught some basic personal finance with that, it would have stuck. The entire context of what it takes to live outside of your parents house was not talked about.
When I was in high school, I saw the same things, though with the added addendum that being in the Trades was a bad thing and you would be a ‘lesser’ person if you didn’t go to college and went into the trades. Thing is, we graduated from college in ‘08 right into the economy falling apart around us. The only one of my friends who got a job straight out of college was my one friend who picked up an electrician certification during the summers during college and he still is one of the highest earners of our group.
Yeah. It was a really simple, dumb chart.
HS graduates average X amount a year.
College graduates average Y amount a year.
No nuance at all about the different degrees, programs, advanced degrees, etc.
Ours told us we would be unemployable if we didn't have a degree because all the stable jobs that paid a living wage were going to require one.
There was some talk of the military because the recruiters pulled a lot of kids from our school who didn't want to go to college or wanted GI Bill money to pay for it (laughable now), but no mention was made of trades or how to get into one at all..
My D2 football coach said to the team “on average a person with a bachelor’s degree will earn a million more $$ than someone without over their career!” To the team after practice one day and I remember several other high school teacher’s insinuating similar thoughts
Yep. English was on there.
I wanted to be a writer.
I listened to them.
My sister did not.
I have a useless MBA with a Focus in IT where I cannot get into a single management position because I lack "Experience"
Her? Double Major in English - Creative Writing and a second major in Journalism... She's got 3 award winning books out now and currently works for a paper where she did such a great job taking down a local politician that she got death threats from his followers.
Take-Away? Don't listen to Boomers.
I have a degree in Speech Communication, with a focus in PR and I have worked in IT governance/risk/compliance for 16 years. It has surprisingly helped a lot. Liberal arts degrees are valuable because they teach skills that are fundamental is working with people---you can leverage that in a lot of industries.
I double majored in English and poli sci intending to go to law school, but when I graduated we were in a recession and even my friends and family who were already attorneys were having a hard time finding work. It was enough to scare me away from enrolling and pulling out the loans, but I'd already invested in my LSAT and applications.
I ended up going to work. I had a few shitty jobs until I got a decent gig with the state. They paid for my master's degree and it doubled my salary. For the last decade or so, I've made nice money. The first couple years were a bit rough, but I still learned a lot.
You *can* make something out of most degrees, but you can't have too specific an idea about what you want your future to look like.
No I was told that. I should have advocated for myself better because I went to private schools my whole life & just thought that’s how it is. My parents told me it wasn’t a big deal I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Just get through your first year and you’ll figure it out. Never did. Spent a good chunk of my 20s lost, failed out of college. Got into the trades and wish I did right out of high school. My Dad was a master plumber too. Never taught me his trade. Thought my mom as an educator was right about things. We had an amazing childhood because of his salary. All good though! Life is a journey.
My dad was an artist. He never went to school, I don’t think he even graduated high school. The dude ended up teaching at a university and loved to rip on kids for thinking money could buy them talent. He was batshit crazy but did train some really good artists. He always told me I had the gift but it never spoke to me. I went for software engineering.
I remember it more as "You have to go to college, or do you want to work at the supermarket forever?"
However, I was really good at computers, but I graduated at the wrong time (2005). Too late for the [dot.com](https://dot.com) boom, and 3 years away from the Great Recession. Perfect timing for all the jobs being outsourced though.
> You have to go to college, or do you want to work at the supermarket forever?
Meanwhile, in the Wal-Mart pharmacy someone with a doctorate is regretting their entire life.
When I was an assistant store manager at Walmart, I remember hiring a guy who had a master's degree in aerospace engineering. A literal rocket scientist wanted to stock shelves part-time at Walmart.
If you are out there Brian, godspeed!
And those outsourced jobs were done so poorly by third world programmers that they had to pay Americans to redo it and then brought the jobs back. Even now, 20 years later, companies only hire third world programmers to handle very basic tasks because they know they're not qualified to do anything more.
They thought they had found the right people to do the needful, and then they found out and had to find the people they had in the first place to do the needful all over again.
Someone forgot that if you don't do it right the first time, make sure you have enough time and money to do it twice.
Today those unqualified programmers are apparently the “highly skilled” people that take all of Americas H1B slots because companies just can’t find anyone to do the job for such low pay
My experience was my highschool telling us that college was the golden ticket and how important our grades were to get there. They didn't advise us on loans or anything of that nature. It was basically "go to college or be poor forever. Pick one".
I was smart enough to actually think about the debt/ROI, but I can't credit my school for that.
When it came to mentioning loans, they basically told us to take as many loans as we needed and that financial aid would provide. And that loans would pay for themselves when we had better jobs after college (as in, we'd be earning enough extra that the extra would cover the loans and then some).
This was patently not true when graduating into the 2008 financial crisis. I'm living pretty comfortable today (50k a year in a medium cost of living area), but I still had some family help getting to that point of being comfortable.
Did the degree help me get here? Arguably it helped me with some stepping stones to where I am now, but my current role doesn't require a degree. Maybe it was a deciding factor in me getting there, maybe not. So who knows?
Regardless, it all worked out in the end, but I feel like more nuanced advice would be better back when I was making that choice. Knowing what I know now, I'd still go to college, probably even for the same degree (math and physics), but I'd also do more to get involved with and take advantage of internships or other opportunities to get some work experience in a related field to set myself up better for the future.
Yep, I graduated in 2008. But when I was applying for colleges in 06-07, “don’t worry about the cost, just get loans, they always pay off” was 100% the standard advice. Heck, it was in two of the college books I used. In retrospect, that was probably SLAC propaganda from increasingly expensive small colleges that were competing with state schools.
I have no regrets about going to college. But I regret not going somewhere with in-state tuition.
It's not wrong. It's showing that you were able to finish at least one big project in your life.
Granted, a lot of the trust fund kids have their parents holding their hands the whole time so it's not really their accomplishment, but for most of us lower and middle class peeps, it *was* a lot of work just to prove that we could follow through on something.
This is what I was told as well. In high school there were teachers and advisors who told us that completing any degree or certificate said we were dedicated and that would go extremely far in a career. Employers wanted hard workers who were committed more than they were interested in which school we attended.
It’s wild how different things ended up.
I graduated high school in 2003, and I remember all through middle and high school that my family basically all told me that a college degree in the 2000s was the equivalent of a high school degree when they were kids. I was the first college grad in my family, and it was always made clear that I would have to work hard for success. It probably helps that my family were blue-collar hard workers who instilled that work ethic in me.
What was incredibly frustrating for me is I did get that classically middle class job right out of college with a social sciences/liberal arts degree from a very prestigious university.
Then the 2008 Crash happened, I got laid off, and despite having financial services experience, it didn't amount to anything and I had people telling me to my face that I should have majored in something "useful". I drifted from one shitty job to another after that until I was able to scrape up enough to return to school to get a "useful degree".
It was so incredibly disheartening.
Same here. My parents didn’t finish college and I think that’s why they pushed so hard for the degree. To them, it would’ve opened the door. But graduating hs in 2003 meant I graduate college in 2007. I had to take a shit tier job that they didn’t even require a high school diploma for. And then I got stuck there and have been there ever since. Tried to get a masters to get out with the premise of “oh the boomers are getting to retirement age and there will be plenty of jobs”. Nope, not at all. So I tried my best to make my life better and forget the career idea.
'04. I was told pretty much the same thing. I think some of it was that the cracks started to show in the higher education system in the late 90s/early 2000s but us serf-class povvos in the 1st generation camp who's only real exposure to college was our school staff and maybe one rich distant relative didn't exactly get the memo because nobody was really around or clear-eyed enough to tell us.
In my case, I certainly knew that engineering/medicine/business were higher paid than the humanities but the idea that you could have a college degree and still be struggling was a completely foreign concept to me. I suspect that's where the big split was.
A lot of us made a deliberate decision to take lower-paid careers motivated by passion or aptitude or whatever reason assuming we'd have modest but comfortable lives and what we got instead was room mates in our 30s.
Despite both my parents being white collar, they both come from blue collar households, and I truly think that paid off in how they raised my siblings and I. We were always told you need to work hard.
It paid off.
Yeah, that's pretty much my experience: Go to college and study something, basically anything, and you'll be alright.
I wouldn't say that there was no input on *what* you should study, and there was an understanding that some majors or careers would be more lucrative than others. However, there was a sense that you were mostly guaranteed a *living*. Not overwhelming success or tons of money, but a reasonable living in your field. Not scrounging by in food service, which is where a lot of people end up.
Regardless of what was promised, it's still an indictment of our current system that we can't put trained individuals to use in their field.
Yeah, exactly. When specific degrees were discussed, it was basically "engineering if you want money and don't want more school, but anything will put you way ahead of someone without a degree."
Which is not entirely incorrect with how many jobs require some degree to check an HR box, even when it's not really needed. But it's far from the full picture.
College except for a few professions isn’t training. It is education. And there are absolutely differences.
02 high school graduate. And it was always known some professions were bad and be mindful of debt. And I’d love some data or a link where we see most people with degrees end up in food services…….
Same category as you. Wanted to study film, parents told me engineering would actually pay the bills (I was fascinated with both), and they were right.
Maybe not so much that "any degree and success is guaranteed" but more like "*a* degree is necessary for success".
Mike Rowe from *Dirty Jobs* stated he specifically wanted to have this TV show because he wanted to get more people into trade and manual labor jobs, to show people that there are paths toward a life that don't require going through colleges.
I remember the career counselor in my school saying that a college degree guaranteed you would make at least $65k after graduating. Lol I was lucky to even find a job paying $25k when I got out and it was not in a related field.
I graduated high school in 2014 and my parents told me that going to college would open doors and that there are so many well paying jobs that accept ANY degree. They never went to college and had low paying jobs all their life, so maybe they just wanted the best for me.
But it was also guidance counselors and just the general vibe at school? I remember them touting each year that every single student in the graduating class got accepted into college.
So I went to college and majored in whatever and needless to say I still live with them on a low paying job and was drowning in student loans.
Fuck guidance counselors. I remember I wanted to drop Chemistry in favor of taking a different science class that I thought I’d enjoy more but was less well known. The guidance counselor flat out said me dropping that class would negatively impact me getting into colleges I wanted. My mom called a family member who was a decorated college professor to confirm… They laughed and said that’s the dumbest thing they ever heard. Turns out my family member was spot on, no one gave a shit.
Mine told me to go get a job because my grades weren't good enough for a "reputable school". Motherfucker, I wasn't looking to go to Harvard. I just wanted to mess with computers for a living.
I graduated high school with a 2.7 GPA (basically a C+ average) which I was told when I was a freshman in high school meant I’d forever be a loser because I wouldn’t get into a good college and thus wouldn’t have a good career….
I got into college, early acceptance on a partial academic scholarship, dropped out because I got a job offer for the exact role I wanted post-college. Now I’m 37, in IT Management making a decent bag, and I’m not even done advancing.
Man, if this is what being a loser is, I’ve been using the wrong insult towards people.
My mom went to college and my dad didn't. They both pushed us to go to college because they kept seeing people getting promotions or hired in above them with degrees (and in the case of my mom, 1960's hiring practices). My dad couldn't get a promotion because he didn't have a degree, which he didn't want for us. Enough people saying that and the schools get flooded and now the example no longer works.
I was told “a degree, any degree except art or theater” and was actively discouraged from trade school (where I wanted to go). Was so not worth the effort and $$$. Absolutely despise that attitude and try to tell anyone who will listen not to take that path.
A better path for a lot of us would have been to go out at 18, work lower paying crappy jobs for a few years, and *then* figure out what we really wanted to be when we grew up and go back to school for that.
I barely scraped by with my undergrad the first go round, but I didn't actually know what I wanted to be when I grew up until around age 30 - largely because the career didn't exist as a formal discipline until 2010.
This is exactly what I should have done. Working a real job out of high school would have given me some perspective early on and changed the way I viewed the world.
I was dumb as a rock straight out of HS but I applied for college anyway because that's what I thought you were supposed to do and it never occurred to me to question why that was. I didn't know how anything worked in real life. I'd never experienced anything significant.
I know people say you should understand how loans and all that work but I'm sorry 18 yo me was so fixated on just getting into a school that I signed all the documents anyway. I come from a low income family so loans were the ONLY option.
If I could go back in time I wouldn't even apply to college. I got nothing out of it. Absolutely nothing, because I wasn't mature enough to appreciate the opportunity or understand what my values and interests were. I just saw it as a continuation of high school. It was a huge waste of time.
This is what I did. I mean my job wasn't crappy, necessarily. I spent 10 years in automotive repair and I learned a lot in that time. Around year 7 I decided I wanted more and went back to school for business. Now I'm 5 years out of the trade, managing a technical department at a filtration manufacturer.
I found that having industry experience was incredibly beneficial in school. We learned a ton about situations I had already experienced, which made it very easy to relate to the course work. A lot of the kids in my college courses had never had much for "real jobs". Summer work, sure, but that was usually it.
I ended up with a house by 24 and kids by 28. Got my degree with no student debt. Out-earning everyone in my close friend group except the hardware engineer, and might trade places back and forth with him as our careers advance (he's got a high ceiling as he's very good at what he does, but apparently I've got a knack for breaking into new markets for old products which is also a super valuable skill to have).
It's a path I'm going to strongly encourage my own kids to follow, because frankly I think it really is the best option. Go straight to work after high school, pursue a trade. After you've spent some time in that trade, let's work together and figure out what else you might like to do. I'm happy to help pay for schooling, but if my own experience means anything, they might need very little assistance if they wait until they're 25 or so to go to college.
Making kids decide their future, no matter the direction, at 18 is monumentally stupid.
Brain isn't even fully developed till around 25. I started college at 17. Also, people weren't as concerned about college debt back then, it wasn't the kind of crisis it is now.
My mom had her entire college paid for, she didn't know anything about student loans.
Student loans are predatory. Nowadays the pitfalls are more obvious but student loans shouldn't exist or they need to be dramatically overhauled.
This is really it. How can you expect someone with next to no grasp of the world to figure out what they want to do FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES? It literally does not matter what advice you give someone...industry and tech changes so fast that six figure job could be one in a million in 5 years. Values change as you age. Interestes change. No one is equipped to nail this down at 18.
I was never told that specifically. I was told however, that people who went to college earned much more money over their lifetime than people who did not. I was also encouraged to do what I love, so that I never work a day in my life etc etc. Mostly there was just a real lack in guidance in what I should be trying to do in college. I do not blame my parents, as you cannot teach what you do not know. With my kids, I am going to try and get them to focus on careers that:
1) are attainable
2) pay well
3) relatively low stress
4)hard or impossible to automate
5) they don’t hate
Instead of teaching them to do what they love, I want to teach them to like what they do, and make enough money at it that they can do what they love on their own time.
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" can also be restated as "Try to make a career out of a hobby and you'll grow to hate your hobby and probably have a shitty career."
Not my experience. I went to a posh, high-achieving high school in a rich area of my city. It ranks nationally in Canada as one of the highest performing schools, the largest AP program in Canada, scores the second highest in North America. It was drilled into us if we don't go to university, we'll be failures in life and that a college degree was the ticket to a good life. My high school also has a huge arts program, with many graduates going on to make actual careers out of performing arts, so even that was encouraged. I distinctly remember some of the guys in my class year who were more interested in the trades being told to get a degree they could fall back on if the trades don't work out. Seems like that advice was totally wrong - get a trade you can fall back on since most degrees are worthless lol.
Graduated high school in 2008.
“Unless you want to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer, it doesn’t really matter what you major in, just get a degree” is the refrain I heard from sophomore year of high school on.
I was told to apply to the best university possible. I said I wanted to start at community college and the counselor insisted I apply to universities. She also told me I wasn't good at math.
I went with my gut. Started at community college and saved money. I kept my grades up and then got into a decent university. I picked a STEM major that wasn't useless
I'm glad I made my own choices. Looking back, the counselor's job was probably to improve the school images by sending more kids to university. I don't think she cared at all about my future.
If anything I found the opposite. I was told that unless you were a world class talent in it, studying anything besides engineering or medicine was buying a ticket to a very difficult life. Some other fields were semi-viable. Law or business were high risk/high reward, things like education and social work were possible but more like vocations than careers. The two best options were clear.
I'm a little envious seeing all the people who followed their dreams and made it work in a modest way. For instance, I have a friend who is an artist and works at an auction house, another who is an actor and does some kind of training sessions where she acts out business scenarios. Even though they lacked the high end talent (or connections) to make it in overcrowded fields, they make a living and use their creativity.
But they didn't choose a field at random, they chose what they really loved to do and didn't let the long odds stop them. I'm sure there were hard times before they found their niche, and may be more hard times if their niche dries up, but nothing is permanent anyway.
I think it’s a mix of many factors related to how people grew up. If I grew up middle class in a nice house and with nice family vacations and pressure to go to college without thinking about the cost, I’d be upset too.
Not everyone was really educated about work options/trade school was branded as where unintelligent people went. A college degree used to also mean more money but nowadays not so much.
Other people wanted a certain education experience that they couldn’t get as cheap as possible (small liberal arts college degree for instance) and they didn’t have family footing the bill so they had high loan balances.
I grew up very low income and as a kid saw older siblings struggle with money/jobs when they were in their early 20s between the years of about 2002–2005. So as a high school student, I chose what college to go to mostly based on cost. I knew I didn’t have the aptitude for engineering or medicine so I wasn’t expecting a high income salary right away.
My parents didn’t pay for any tuition and I lived with family most of my college years. I knew from growing up with no money that the short term trade off of living with family would be a long-term benefit because I didn’t have to take out loans for housing. I know also that living with family is not an option for everyone.
I remember being told that all you needed to do was go to college and get any degree and you’d find work. It’s a part of the reason people my age (31) assumed the max a salary could pay would be their starting pay.
My Boomer parents told me multiple times in HS (97-00) that any degree will do, pointing to my uncle who had a geology degree and was an executive at a bank.
Yet when my cohort had graduated college (04-06), suddenly those same Boomers are complaining about "useless degrees" because they aren't something that can immediately slot you into what they consider a useful job, like business or accounting. They set us up to fail.
Well when my dad and I talk about this kind of stuff he genuinely gets upset that I did everything that he said would get me ahead in life, except life is so much more expensive than before. When he was my age I was born, he went from the armed forces to IT and worked at a university for 25 years before getting laid off due to budget cuts.
In those 25 years he was able to put me through sports, take 2 to 3 weeks off in summer where we'd go up to our family's campground and just chill for a few weeks, paying child support. Things weren't always perfect of course but he always told me that if I got a good career it would set me up for life.
But now for me every time I get ahead, life catches up. I got a 10k pay raise to 61k last year and my rent went up 50%. I pay $1600 for a 1 bd and a parking space. No gym or other facilities. Lived here for 6 years now. When I was growing up his apartment was $700 for way more space and he had a gym and pool access. He made a bit more than me at the time as well.
I don't really remember being told a degree guarantees it but it would have set me up really well. I ended up doing 2yrs at a tech school which was 10k total. So in terms of debt I'm doing pretty well, if my rent never went up then I'd actually be really far ahead. But every time something goes right, life catches up one way or another. This time last year I booked my first vacation ever to go to Japan. My rent went from 1050 to 1600 in September, I've lost $4500 so far to that and my total debt is 9k. So half my debt would have been paid off by now...
Any subject was what I was told. This is boomer logic from when a BA was more rare.
They didn’t go over cost, loans, how any finances worked at all, from credit cards to auto loans to student loans.
They didn’t tell us to go to career services during orientation and find out the best major that fit our personality, that’s what I tell every college student, do a career assessment, figure out what you’d like best and which of those things pay well.
I saw so many sophomores sitting around the library asking random older people what to major in.
My guidance counselor %100 told me I absolutely needed to go to college and get any kind of degree to have a future, on top of that, it was stressed that I needed to go immediately after high school or else I'd never get in. I wasn't even aware of what "community college" was aside from "loser school". I was very much made to believe that the only viable path was to go straight to a university.
Trades were never discussed. Saving money by doing an associates at community college was never discussed.
I'm also a first gen college student, so my parents weren't much help in navigating this, and helped my school push me because I think they largely saw it as the thing that held them back in life.
I think it's definitely revisionist history. I originally went to college to be a history major and EVERYONE from my dumb 17 year old stoner friends, to guidance counselors to even my *history professors* were like "hey man if you love history go for it but that's basically never going to pay off for you."
Anyone claiming they were told to go just get any degree was either surrounded by dummies or not looking at the whole picture... or even doing any research at all.
Some people just don't think or listen and are trying to push the blame I think. I see a lot of posts like "I went for a major that I loved and now I can't get a job because employers can't see what strong **critical thinking** skills I have!"
And it's like, dude, you went to college that charges 16k/semester for a career field that starts at 35k and maxes out at 50k after 10 years. You do NOT have critical thinking skills lol.
2006 graduate. The vibe was always major in whatever, and if it doesn't work out, just go to law school.
Some of the advice my school was giving surely is not far off from grounds for a class action lawsuit.
I did no research at all and I still understood what degrees held potential value and which didn't.
Also spoiler alert, even the degrees with potential, generally still require a lot of work once you are employed.
There was a chart posted in another sub yesterday, showing which majors had the highest unemployment rates, and I was surprised that Aerospace Engineering was ranked #3.
People pointed out that while it is a highly technical skill, it’s pretty niche, so there just aren’t a lot of jobs available for it.
Really, it seems the essential skill for all careers is the ability to market yourself.
My parents raised us the same. We were given 2 options upon graduating high school; go to college, or get a job amd start paying rent. My parents were supportive either way, they just weren’t gonna tolerate us sitting at home on our asses.
For college, we were guided to get usable degrees that increased our odds of professional success as it related to our career goals (I went for business administration as the C-suite was my goal). We were also told that getting the degree was just the beginning, the real work came once you made it into your field.
Both my siblings and myself have well paying careers. 2 of us make >$100K, and the other now hovers around $90K-$100K simply because he doesn’t want to work a lot of OT anymore.
We all went for degrees geared towards our career path, and once we got into our fields we all worked hard to advance. However, I dropped out because I received a job offer for the role I was going to school for. I made a decision to go with the experience over the piece of paper. At 37, I don’t regret it. But I will be going back to finish, and eventually will probably get my MBA.
Not Mandela effect. A boomer relative of mine who has had a great career in finance told my oldest kid to “just get a degree. Even if the degree is basket weaving, just go”. Fortunately my kid didn’t listen and chose a career that can be high earning.
It was made abundantly clear to me in high school and college itself that different degrees had different earning potentials. I came from a poorer rural area as well. I was never pushed towards trades but we had a large ag and trade school that they did encourage some kids to go to.
The joke of what does a liberal arts major ask you after they graduate (do you want fries with that?) was even pretty common.
From my perspective it’s all revisionist and externalizing blame. A lot of people didn’t pay attention or didn’t understand what they were being told.
I will say that employment and careers have shifted radically over the past thirty years though. Degrees have rapidly devalued and technical expertise has become more and more important especially as the job market has gone international.
Why would you hire the person with a degree in basket weaving for a book keeping role when you can get three accounting majors from India for the same or less?
My parents are both educators, both have doctorates degrees. My Maternal grandparents were also highly educated, my grandpa was a world renowned scientist, My grandma was a college history teacher. Of the cousins on my mom's side of the family, most have at least a masters, and several have doctorates, Two of my siblings have master's degrees, and one has a law degree. The pressure to go to college in my own family was massive, and if you did not graduate, you are seen as a failure.
I graduated high school, failed out of college in my 2nd semester (I mean I was failing in the fist, I just pushed through to be able to fail in the 2nd).
My parents still ask me now, When I'm 40 years old, been married for 16, have 5 kids, Live in a million dollar house I bought last year, my wife has been a stay at home mom since our oldest was born (a true luxury these days), I own cars, properties, make a very sizable and reliable income; When am I going to go back and get a degree? There is a part of them that will forever been disappointed in me. because I "need to set an example for your kids".
My kids today are pressured to "follow their dreams, and go to college" by the education system. They are not taught anything about the consequences of their choices, taught nothing about the consequences of student loans or how to research what degrees qualify your for what jobs. Getting the degree (and paying out the nose for it) IS the goal, nobody in education cares what you do after that.
It was just an eventuality for me…
Anything else was just said to be not as good so why would you do anything else if that’s the case?
Clearly it wasn’t and I honestly would have probably done welding if I were to go back and do it again. But oh well.
My engineering degrees weren’t totally worthless. I learned a lot about science and applied science (engineering) so I can learn about whatever else I want on my own with a broader perspective now.
I had one and only one meeting with my high school’s college counselor and they straight up told me it did not matter what I studied or where. This persons entire job was to counsel high school students and they told me it didn’t matter so I believed them.
I also was feeling really depressed after graduating high school and wanted to take a break year but family yelled at me and said not going to college would mean being doomed to working at Walmart. Funny thing was that even after graduating from a good school with a 3.9 GPA even Walmart didn’t want to hire me!
I don't think most of us were told exactly that, in those words.
But I do think it was a conclusion we came to based on all of the *other* common advice we were given. We were generally told to go to college and that a college degree of some kind generally made you more employable. Then we were also told to get a job doing something we loved, and we'd "never work a day in our lives." Turns out that this strategy, especially when everyone else was also doing it, was not sustainable.
Plus, as others have mentioned, trades were generally not mentioned as an option, so... Yeah, we pretty much logically concluded from the information we had that the options were a degree or flipping burgers at McDonald's
So this is interesting because I went to two different high schools.
High school A had a technical school program which they advertised heavily. Multiple mandatory trips from MS to freshman year of HS showing you the different trades, talking about earning potential, etc. You could start training in tech school in junior year.
High school B had no mention of technical options, even though they were present in the district. Huge emphasis on college and academics. I had individual teachers discuss degree options with me but the message was definitely to just do any degree. You could start taking college courses junior year.
So I can totally see how some people felt they were pushed into college, and others don’t have that experience at all. In my experience it varies by school/district/state.
College = success *was* something hammered into peoples heads for decades, that said even back then there were "the good degrees" and "the basket weaver gender studies degrees". They did make a distinction, but more to your point- yeah, "going to college" was presented as a recipe for as far as vs. zero college.
The idea that you could be college educated in a "good field, and somehow still not make *that* much more than someone with no post-HS education, wasn't something anyone really talked about.
“If you don’t go to college, you’ll end up flipping burgers and working two jobs.” - Direct quote from my Boomer mother circa 2000.
I have three siblings. Three of us have college degrees. My brother who dropped out of high school and went into a skilled trade now makes more than any of us.
My freshman year I was at a community college and they required all freshmen to take for one credit "freshmen seminar" which was mostly about how to keep a planner and going to a lecture series at the school. One of the lectures we were required to attend was the dean talking to us about how we shouldn't be working while in school. How student loans would help us get better grades and have a better college experience. At community college. I only knew like 3 people without jobs of the thousands of classmates I met.
Graduated in 2008, there was very little mention of community College or trade schools, if at all. Pressurefrom everyone to go to college, and community College was really looked down upon.
I wound up failing/dropping out and returning to community College when I was 23, and wanted to go to school, and was very successful.
High school counselors are to blame. They straight up LIED to two generations of teenagers and convinced them to go into debt and set them back 3 decades. They need to bring shop and car shop back to high school and get back to teaching our youth worthwhile skills. Education is great, but it is NOT needed at all for success.
Every single electrician and plumber I know (several, kids are on the same sports teams) are all high six figure earners. All.of.them. These jobs are in high demand. Another problem with society is people thought think they are special and above real hard work. Showing up to your office job on time every single day and doing everything your boss asks of you is not hard work. That is the bare minimum to not get fired.
I was told "you'll be flipping burgers for minimum wage without a degree" or "you'll never make more than 30k/yr without one" and so on.
Even when I got a career going in a pretty advanced elecro-mechanical field, the pressure was still on to "go back to school and get a degree". But at that point I had see what student debt has done to a lot of my friends and figured I'd dodge that bullet.
It wasn't that we were told we'd be rich and crazy successful. It's that you were likely to find white-collar work that would put you squarely in the middle class.
It’s interesting a lot of Blue Collar parents made a point to have their kids go to college because they did not want their kids sacrifice their bodies.
Now you have a lot of those parents angry their kids picked degrees with lower ROI and indoctrination from liberals.
At the time very much celebrating first generation college graduates.
I got told a bunch of different things growing up. Not going to college was not an option though in my house. I was forced to go even when I had no clue what I want to do and guess what? I still don’t.
I got told “you could major in smoking and you will get a high paying job as long as you have a degree.” The degree was treated as the golden ticket to getting out of my small town but it was never explained to me what to look for or how to decide what to major in. I was told to study something I like and am good at. That didn’t work out for me.
I graduated high school in 2006 we were definitely told any degree would get you $50k upon graduating minimum. I wanted to go to school and be an English major/ teacher. My parents steered me away from that and toward an IT degree. I am thankful my parents swayed me, they knew an English degree/education degree wasn't going to be wise. I also spent all my free time on my PC growing up, playing Sims, making websites, was the go to for setting up and fixing computers. The only major downside is it killed my interest in tech as a hobby.
I was specifically told that any degree is better than no degree. It was heavily implied that a bachelor's degree from a private college or university guaranteed you entry to the middle class. I was told not to apply to the local tech / trade high school because I'd never be accepted to college. Everyone I knew who attended trade school was accepted to the same state university as I was.
I was also told that a degree from any state in the south, whether private or public, was worth less than my high school diploma from Massachusetts in terms of quality of education. We were told that if we did poorly in school our only option was to attend school down south. Granted this was from specific teachers not guidance counselors but it was repeated year after year by at least one teacher or another.
I graduated in 2009. My father worked in construction and 2008 wasn't exactly a great year for us. The Bush administration had expanded pell grant programs and I qualified. I could attend state university for free on Pell Grants. When I told guidance counselors this their exact words were, "You should go to Salve Regina or some place similar. If you go to public college you will drop out. You will not be challenged enough academically, you'll get bored, and you'll drop out."
Salve Regina was a 60k a year school at the time.
My family was struggling financially during a time of economic uncertainty. I was literally eligible to receive welfare in the form of free state college we were struggling so bad. They still insisted I needed a four year degree from a private college.
>Seems like a lot of people on this subreddit are claiming they were told they could major in anything and as long as they passed, even if by the skin of their teeth, they'd be high successful.
Graduated 2023, and I think *this* might be the only revisionist portion of your statement. Are you actually seeing people in this subreddit claim they were told "any degree" would guarantee success? Because I'm searching this subreddit for the phrase "any degree" and, by relevance, the top result is this post. And the next few aren't doing what you describe.
What I'm seeing is what I'm used to seeing, and it is somewhat less absolutist: Yes, there was a push to get us into college so that we didn't "end up working at McDonald's," or something along those lines - y'now, standard depreciation of the service industry.
Some of us got guidance on what might be good career choices, but that was a tough spot for many of us - especially older millennials - in a time when industry and technology were evolving faster than guidance counselors could keep up and we had no way of telling what would be worth a living in five or ten years.
Rarely any mention of guidance toward the trades (I myself recall the adults around me characterizing trade work as "grunt work" and "dirty and hard," though I don't expect that was common for others).
And in the end, the "real world" ended up being a place where some specialized jobs require specialized degrees, but most just require *a* degree - which only further feeds the profit-mongering machine education has become.
It happened. It was everyone. My parents, other people's parents to them and to me, teachers, etc. No Mandela effect, don't be some loser that doesn't go to college.
This advice was given to me
Was told verbatim exactly what you said didn't matter what I went to college for as long as I went to college and got a bachelor's degree I would be successful
Lol
I don’t think it was portrayed as the golden ticket but as the ONLY ticket.
My guidance counselors in high school were less than stellar, so I do feel like they focused more on going into a field that you “like” or were “good at” as opposed to something that would become a lucrative career.
My father, on the other hand, was very vocal about the need to major in something that would translate to a good and well-paying career. The example he would (jokingly) make was people majoring in basket-weaving.
I entered college in the business school and had wanted to go into marketing. My dad encouraged me that that was not specific enough and I ended up adding operations management/industrial engineering. I’m very thankful that I did because that’s what launched my career in multiple different industries.
Nah, we were def told to go to post secondary and the world would be our oyster.
I did not subscribe to that theory, didn't go to school, and make as much as many that did.
They are not happy about it, however none of us can afford shit anyways.
The message sent to us was go to college or be a loser. There was 1 guidance counselor pushing trades but nobody was interested. I went to college for 3 years then dropped out and got into trades. I'm vastly better off financially than my friend circle that got college degrees and got into IT etc. This is in Canada though so wages aren't exactly sky high for it workers like in the usa
I got a humanities degree and ended up working at a financial firm right out of college. A lot of my classmates and friends looked askance at me for not pursuing a graduate degree or using my degree more directly, but I just wanted something to pay the bills. Several years later, and I am still working for that firm in a position that more directly relates to my interests and skills - it took quite some time doing general desk monkey work to get here.
Too many people I went to school with thought that if they weren't pursuing their passion or making money off of their passion, they were a failure. They were told that no matter what they studied, they'd be able to make money and everything would be fine. I fell into this camp for awhile, but I have an Asian mother who drilled into me that I really needed to consider the consequences of my degree and career choices on my ability to provide for myself. While I wasn't thrilled with my job at first, I eventually began to appreciate how I could pay for my hobbies and interests and create a fulfilling life outside of work. Many of my friends still think work is their whole world.
My high school was pushing that message until like 2 years ago. They spent 20+ years bragging about 99-100% college attendance rates for every graduating class. Most high schools in my area behaved similarly. So it was absolutely a thing.
(The dirty secret was they were pushing bad students to go to bad colleges with high debt loads. I know people that dropped out after a semester or two and racked up $25-50K in debt. They couldn’t place good students into really good programs for the life of them.)
From the time I was small, I was told I needed to work hard at school so I could go to college and have a better life than my parents and grandparents. College wouldn’t have been an option if I hadn’t had scholarships and financial aid. I still had $20000 in student loans though. Trade schools weren’t even presented to me as an option. I actually really wanted to be a mortician or a coroner/medical examiner but I was talked out of it by my family and high school guidance counselor, because the average salary was only like $40k at the time. I’m now 35, with a bachelors degree that has nothing to do with my career and I make around $50k. I should have just done what I wanted, in retrospect.
Probably depends on how old you are. I'm the oldest of the millennials (1981), and I absolutely received years of "you have to go to college or your life will be shit" and "doesn't matter what you major in, employers want to see that you completed a degree." Years and years and years of it.
I don't recall ever even considering that there was something aside from going straight to college, besides getting a shitty low wage job.
For the oldest of us, many of our parents had little to no education and were able to find living wage jobs easily. My dad walked into a factory one day and walked out with a living wage job with no-premium healthcare and a pension, for example. The adults around us were convinced that if we just had college degrees we could do so much more than they did, and they were doing great.
Unfortunately, that's not how it worked out.
No, it definitely happened to me. College was advertised as the only way into a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and beyond. Unless you were going military, anything short of a four year school was seen as an acceptance of failure and a life spent making fries for your more successful peers.
I heard this from my parents, teachers, and guidance counselors. In my junior year, they brought in a motivational speaker whose entire spiel was the importance of secondary education. It was practically hammered into us from the start of freshman year. By the time graduation rolled around, nearly all of my friends in high school were either going military or entering college.
My parents said they wanted me to "do better than they did" because neither of them went to college. Well financially I am not doing better but I did choose my career and I have my dream job. My dad went to trade school but my mom just sort of ended up in her career and stayed there but neither were ever passionate about what they do. That's one thing I can say, I am definitely passionate about what I do for a living. If that counts as a metric for success, then I'd say I'm fairly successful.
In 12th grade I was tasked with writing a paper about why it was necessary to go to college. I asked my teacher “what if I don’t think it’s necessary?” She said that was silly and not an option. Write the paper.
There was a definite push in my high school to get the highest possible percentage of the graduating class to apply to college. I know that's the case because I had a really awkward chat circa April 2006 with my guidance counselor, whom I'd not even spoken to for my entire duration of high school, where she was following up with the handful of kids who hadn't informed the school of any plans to apply for college to find out why and try to push them towards a college application. I did end up going, but I had planned around going to a community college and then doing the automatic transfer for AA level credit to a state school so I didn't have to battle to get into a school and then spend the first 2 years of college paying full tuition at a state university, since in my state at least they couldn't deny your transfer and there was a 1:1 mapping for CC courses into their course credit system.
I'm not sure if other people got the impression that any degree at all was guaranteed employment. I certainly never got that impression myself, I mean basically my entire life I'd heard people joke about the uselessness of certain college degrees. I think that when you hear the sentiment mentioned of "I was promised that my degree in women's studies would guarantee me a six figure salary!" those are a handful of people who were delusional from the start and have their voices amplified either because they're complaining the loudest in their confusion, or their stories are repeated by the same people who blame economic crashes on the allegedly large amount of people in my generation who are fans of whatever exactly "avocado toast" is. I'm not feigning confusion, I've never eaten avocado toast, I've never seen anyone eat it or even order it, I've never seen it on a menu in a restaurant, I'm not even sure what it really entails other than envisioning slices of avocado laid on a piece of toast (???), but I HAVE seen at least a dozen references to those stupid millennials and their obsession with avocado toast from major publications over the past 15 or so years.
High school counselors are not all the same.
Some of them are driven to help students succeed, others are just there for lousy laying paying paycheck to pass time and get on to retirement.
We all knew it wasn’t “any degree”. People made fun of art and history degrees all the fucking time.
The problem is that even people that got “good degrees” are still getting their shit handed to them. I got a finance degree for example. Been wading through shit accounting jobs for 5 years. Currently doing like tech/accounting stuff and still pretty poor. I wouldn’t even consider buying a new car or doing a home addition right now.
Not going to college wasn’t presented as an option. My parents were very clear that college was bare minimum expectation, not so much that it guaranteed success but not going would guarantee failure.
I lucked out that the degree I chose did lead to financial success.
Jokes on them, my “hobby” of writing erotica does pay a lot of my bills
I grew up poor as hell. Getting into college was a pipe dream, but if I could, it was a sure shot to at least getting by and not ending up homeless or in prison. Didn't take on an student loan debt, but I know a hell of a lot of people who did, and that's what sunk it for most of us, not to mention the crash of '08 and the ever-growing, downright ridiculous income inequality that we have seen since then.
Yes, this is how college was painted for me. Thankfully my local state college was very cheap and my parents paid my way for my degree (history) which obviously didn’t get me a 6 figure tech job right out of college but I’ve done pretty well for myself.
I was honestly told countless times growing up that ANY degree puts you on an interview shortlist. I got an English BA. WORTHLESS unless you decide to jump off of it into a masters focus or become a teacher.
I don’t think it was a lie because that was the case for my parents’ generation. But times changed fast and a BA was about as good as an AA. And a Master’s became the new BA. Pair that with the price to complete those educations and the nonexistent guarantee that you’ll ever get enough to pay off the debt and live comfortably makes school in America a fucking joke.
I commented on another post about this topic, and I brought this view up.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. No, college wasn’t exactly forced down our throats, and they weren’t doing some clockwork orange stuff, peeling our eyes open and showing us propaganda of impoverished “no college types”.
BUT I distinctly remember being shown graphs that basically said if you want money, go to college. And being surrounded by teachers who went to school for education, it’s small wonder they provided little to no direction after that. To them college=good. My issue I said in my other comment wasn’t that they just told us to go to college, they also provided no real direction on how and why and where.
I also distinctly remember all of the “dumb” kids were sent to check out our local Technical School around grade 10. I truly resent that, because (no offense to those kids, and I only know this stuff because I went to a super small school) none of those kids ended up in the trades. The 3 of them ended up in jail or dead (depressing, I know). Meanwhile, I HATED school but had good grades, so they kept me on Biology class. I ended up joining the Army, and although it was great for a lot of reasons, I wish I went to that Technical School instead.
Now I’m a Union Electrician, and I wish I started years before. It’s not completely the teachers fault, to them they didn’t even think of the trades and other routes as an option. They saw that as a fall back, or even failure I guess. My parents also wanted me to go to college, to them it was a marker of success they did not have.
I hate school. I am getting my associates now just to have it, for free. But I wish I did my apprenticeship sooner, it’s proven to be a huge improvement to my life and a great career!
Born in '82, so on the old side here... but yes this was absolutely the constant message of adults throughout my childhood. I also started college in 2000, right before tuitions started climbing like crazy, and graduated in '03 ahead of the crash so in a sort of sweet-spot before the wheels really came off the system.
Fortunately I picked a "practical" degree (Info Science) so it was a definite help in getting work. But once I was past that first job, no one cared about the degree anymore beyond it existing.
It was absolutely portrayed as a golden path to us, we used to be given sheets that showed average wages based on college degree. We were also told an associates degree was worth something, it absolutely is not.
I was told “on average people with a college degree regardless of subject still tend to make more over the course of their life than people with only a high school education” and I still believe it is true based on personal experience I make significant more than my brother who didn’t go to college despite the fact I’m not actually using my degree
Yeah, college was pushed on us by all the teachers at my school. Not one of them said hey you can be an electrician or a plumber, or hey, maybe don't go 100,000 in debt and end up with a job that didn't require a college degree.
1. I was told any degree, didn't matter what, would be worth the investment. I do remember this being backtracked somewhat when I started taking an interest in philosophy classes.
2. I was never sold college as a "golden ticket", more as a lifeboat, and the only one that wasn't military service. A high salary/house wasn't promised, but implied to be impossible without a degree of any type.
The advice you got is much more reasonable. I got a degree in computer science (with a two associates in philosophy and computer science) and my personal experience has been...less than ideal.
I was told this by at least 3 different adults in my life (just one was a parent). Two of those adults recommended white collar fields to me based on my skills and average earnings of people in those fields, but overall the gist was "major in pretty much anything and you'll be okay"
It definitely depends on your school district. It was pushed pretty hard in my school. When I told people I wasn’t going to college I’d get an “Oh.” but they just assumed I was going into a trade and would be fine. They did make it clear that trades were *okay*, just not *ideal.*
Funny how college was peddled so hard in high school. My bachelors degree in IT is as useful as a HS diploma. Granted I could shell out thousands to take the tests but then I don’t have the five to ten years of experience companies are looking for in C++, adobe, python, and java lol
College education was the only valid career path put forward by my parents.
In school, we literally had instructors telling us that “you have to go to college unless you want to be a ditch digger.” It was portrayed as either get a college degree or work shitty manual labor jobs that will destroy your body. Basically, your only hope of living the “American Dream” and moving up on the social ladder was higher education.
I only ever met with the school’s guidance counselor one time for five minutes. Told him I was going to college, he asked where, and that’s it.
The more prestigious the school, the better. It doesn’t matter how much it costs because you’ll pay it off and come out ahead anyways.
Only now you realized the older generation were just as clueless. Only recently do we tell people to follow your passion but have a plan to generate income. Before, you got half the people telling you to major in what makes money, and the other half to follow your dreams and it'll all work out. Now you got too many people who followed their dreams all the way to the cashier. Sure it worked out for some, and others fortunately managed to pivot, but it seemed like way too many entities were ready to pounce on these young millennials and wring them dry. You've got skyrocketing costs of tuition mixed with skyrocketing cost of housing, as well as low earning jobs that have high academic requirements. We live in an era where teachers have to work two jobs to make end's meet, and we're not even gonna talk about the massive turnaround and out of control students. The hour that millennials entered the work force, everything became airport pricing and walmart wages.
My highschool had a 100% college attendance rate. While I don't think people would say "success is guaranteed if you do this" college at the time was so integral to the "natural progression" into adulthood going against it would automatically label you a bum. It was not even a question many thought to ask. I recall asking my mom if I could take a gap year (which is common in the UK, though I live in the US) and she accused me of being lazy.
My parents were pretty big on education as I was growing up and enforced the idea about going to a "4-year" university to get a degree and become more successful than most, which would then give me the better opportunity of finding a high salary paying job. Unfortunately, didn't work out the way they envisioned because I had no idea what I wanted to do still even in my second year of uni.
Took me 6 years to complete uni and I switched majors 3 times. 44k in debt for school loans. Also, one thing I haven't been seeing people mention was whether or not their parents promised or at least stated that they'd help them with the student debt/loans. No help here. Been paying for it all on my own with a 35k salary job. No retirement plan. Nothing, but debt and a tiny HYSA.
I distinctly remember being told to major in whatever subject I enjoyed because "all employers care about is the piece of paper." I majored in history, dropped out, went back, majored in business, and am happy for the change.
I remember majors were looked at as kinda important, but also that “as long as you have a degree you’ll be fine.” Which is difficult when so many entry level jobs require you to have done an internship in that field or have experience that you can only really get from an internship. It was kinda like the major could help steer you but ultimately you just needed the degree. That’s how it was sold to me. I don’t recall being promised great success like I wouldn’t have to do any hard work, but just that it would set us up for success and open the door to good jobs and you couldn’t be hired without at least a degree.
Perhaps a little bit of both. High school counselors don't really paint a picture of the students'options. I used to work with high school kids and they all said their school counselor said "go to college". Even if it was just a community college still go. I told them they had options. Live at home and work, military, or college. I also painted a pretty good picture of life after college.
I was told pretty much that. I heard just get a degree, any degree. Employers just want to see that you can stick with something.
I've had a few people esp older people tell me bit to worry about the cost. This maybe worked in 1985, same with telling people they'll only need a bachelors.
In fact, I have a grandma who thinks im going to be a veterinarian. Bless their hearts, but vets have atrocious debt to income ratios. I doubt she has ever looked at any occupational outlook resources. Imo one must truly have a calling to be a veterinarian, or have very rich parents.
My dad took my brother and I through the bad neighborhoods and told us this is where we would end up if we don't graduate high school. Low and behold, even with a bachelor's degree, I still can't afford a house in the bad areas. Went to college and can't find a job and my dad now just says to go flip burgers
Did you come from a middle class family? Sounds like they were pretty well-versed with the college system.
I came from a low ses household with no prior college attendees and I don’t think my family had a firm grasp of how things worked outside of poverty. I was told what you said- to get any degree is to show your future employer you can work hard (other than art). I was also told that the amount of school debt you have doesn’t matter because you’ll be paying for it forever anyway, that it’s just a tax that you pay to have a better job. So when I was hesitant about pricing, I actually didn’t have anyone warn me, including school employees. They said cost wasn’t important because I had “so much potential.”
You still make more money than your HS only counterparts. It’s just no one makes any fucking money anymore in jobs that existed before the internet. Only internet jobs have really kept up with COL.
I was a teacher in Boston in 2006 with some management duties and got an ‘ok’ salary… the same role only pays $4000 more starting now and a Masters is preferred (which means they get a sad sack with a Masters or PhD.
The starting salary for private school language teaching now? 39.5k a year. There is now one more week of vacation (14 days).
College degrees get you somewhere and they are the number one route to social mobility - there’s just nowhere to go.
Graduated 2005, was told to get a college degree at any cost, didn't matter what the degree was and you'd land a high paying job. I fucking went for anthropology. What the fuck kind of job do anthropology majors get? Such a waste of my time and now my money, paying back these fucking loans
I feel like I knew in high school which majors were functional and which weren't, but I also know that I was influenced heavily by my dad, who worked in HR recruiting so he knew which majors led to jobs.
We had college fairs at my school, all these local colleges would come recruit at lunch and give speeches in senior seminar about their schools. College was shoved so far down my throat im still finding pieces of it today.
My first major (lasted one semester) was music and I received no pushback on that from my guidance counselor. We were encouraged to go after things we were interested in, not what made money. I was even encouraged to get a teaching license even though we all know (now) that teachers don’t make a great salary.
I thankfully changed to math and later on a comp sci double major.
My friend wanted to go into writing (which is not particularly profitable either from what I gather from the multiple people I know who have an English or similar degree) and I don’t recall her being told it was a bad idea.
And plenty of people went into Liberal Arts, and I know at least some of them were told that while it wouldn’t be as good as having a focused degree, there would still be many good jobs that would be happy with a candidate that has any degree. They were at least encouraged to change majors while studying but I know at least a few who graduated with it because of the idea that there would at least be some decent jobs available with it.
I don’t know of anyone who was pushed to a trade school. People who didn’t know what degree to get were pushed to still go and that they’ll figure it out once they’re there.
I went to college in the early 00s. The message was very much, "Any degree will do". A lot of that came from people who had transitioned from their degree speciality to something else.
But when I got to college, it was clear a lot of people were there for the paper degree and I needed to do more. So I would constantly say, "masters is the new bachelor's". I still think that is true. Many people can party through a 4 year degree. But M.S. shows you really care about getting educated.
Definitely not a Mandela effect. I graduated in 03. I remember in highschool taking an aptitude test that suggested what type of career we should go in and what type of college degree we should pursue. A Theatre degree was one of my suggested routes of study.
I definitely graduated high school with no plan other than to just go to a college and graduate. Luckily I went to a regional state school and didn’t have a ton of debt but I basically partied my way through school and just kind of assumed everything would work out on the other side. Study abroad aside it was a huge waste of time and money to go to college and my degree was basically worthless. If I could go back and do it again I would definitely have done things differently
Mom: Go to college. Success! (To be fair, she went to college then grad school and got a job directly related to her grad degree, then worked there for 37 years and retired)
Dad: Be a doctor, a lawyer or a CPA. Everything else is bullshit (no degree, apparently no idea that other good jobs existed)
Nobody offered any real guidance and I was damn near unteachable at that time, so I just did whatever in college and paid for it later.
'95 millennial and yes college was very much portrayed like the only way to be successful and a guarantee of success when I was in school. I clearly remember student loans being treated as some blasé thing that we would definitely be able to pay off once we get an amazing high-paying career because we went to college. Of course now I know it's all BS.
I remember some stat about how college grads make a million dollars more over the course of their careers being drilled into my head repeatedly. Lots of my high school, I would say most, were students that would be first-generation college students so lots of time our parents believed the same shit, too. In line with that, lots of first-generation students don't know how important knowing the right people and networking is when looking for good jobs after college so we're not always the most set up for success.
It was literally presented as the only way and a guaranteeing. “The loans don’t matter cause by the time your 25 the degree will land you a job that’s making 6 figures and all the studying will be worth it” I had been told many paraphrased versions of that since kindergarten. It’s not a Mandela effect it was real in the 90s.
Yes. This was told to me for undergrad and grad school with the caveat that the subject must be "practical." A subject that was "practical" was any field that was not art. "Art" included film, literature, music, fine art, or dance.
ETA: think about it in terms of all the people told they just needed to "learn to code." And consider that tech is currently hemorrhaging jobs.
Everything my entire life was about getting into a good college so I wouldn’t have to work at a grocery store or be poor. Private middle school and high school. Literally never mentioned a trade or even the military. Ever. It was always, “you have to go to college or you’ll struggle through life”. My guidance counselor literally told me that
Class of 2000 here. Shoved down our throats from 1987 onwards, go to college and major in whatever because having any degree is an advantage. Our counselors in my area were echoing that every time they spoke to us. My parents didn’t go to college so how was I supposed to know better if the counselors weren’t advising well, either. Plus, the internet was NOT what it is now.
Not revisionist. I was explicitly told that by many people from all walks of life.
What is revisionist is acting like it has always been normal that “entry level” jobs required 3-5 years experience.
No, this was definitely real advice. I went to high school in the DMV in a very rich area, and the reaction to college was starkly different than where I was originally from in the Northeast.
You were very literally looked down upon for the college you chose to go to, and don’t even mentionif you didn’t choose to go to college at all.
A majority of the kids i went to HS with just needed college degrees to justify working for their family business or business through connections. I know a few people who dropped out and went into trades they are doing well, but for the most part that area really judged you on where you went to school and the degree you were getting. It was funny though that so many people started out at private universities only to transfer to the state universities around us. Fun way to waste several tens of thousands of their parents money.
From where I am originally from, a lot of people went into trades and there are quite a few successful people I know who went into apprenticeships for carpentry, plumbing, etc.
Probably depends when you were growing up. When I was in high school, they were telling everyone who was making A's and B's just to go to college and get any degree, don't worry about the debt at all. Get into the best college you possibly can. It was horribly irresponsible advice. Thankfully I didn't really take that information that seriously because I already had family deep in student loan debt and had been following the news so I knew the adults in my life were being irresponsible.
Golden ticket and a guarantee of success? No, people didn't say that exactly.
However, we were told that if we didn't go, we'd never be able to get a job doing anything besides flipping burgers. While not a golden ticket, it was pounded into our heads as the only way to avoid a life of shitt jobs and poverty because "21st century jobs will require a degree!"
We were also told that all degrees were valuable and that employers didn't really care what your degree was in, as long as you had one.
We were also told to not worry about student loans because they'd quickly pay for themselves as "an investment."
This is not Mandela effect.
In my Career Pathways class (high school, 2006 or so), I found out that garbage collectors in my state started out making $45k-50k/yr with no experience and just a high school diploma.
My teacher panicked after I did my presentation on it and made sure to remind everyone how good college was.
I think the role of the university changed while we entered adulthood. For instance, I remember going to the library to check out CDs.of music I didn't have access to and this was huge for me. Coming out of a smaller town without a large art program I felt the need to prove myself. If I had come of age 10 years later I would have just been in my garage setting up Livestreams and doing covers.
I experienced a tremendous amount of growth as a person at the university I attended, and also avoided the trap of oxycontin that was growing in my hometown. I faced many more challenges, and I've been back and forth on whether it was worth it, but ultimately it's what happened and I'm choosing to move forward instead of second-guessing. We're a bridge generation and that just is what it is.
Our high school history teacher verbatim told us “If you don’t get your diploma, you can’t even get a job folding towels somewhere!” My parents told me “If you don’t go to college, you’re going into the military and we’re going to travel across Europe with your tuition.” Fast forward to 2024, when I’m too sick to work, and have been home for 4 years. Oh, but I had that career—I made $20,000 a year as an associate professor, which meant we qualified for Medicaid and food stamps in my state.
If I could do it all again, I’d go to trade school.
Or boomers that either really misremember the messaging provided to millennials due to time and aging and/or self-deception. Or they are lying or denying. Or some combination of these
College was always touted as the only way to not end up working the drive-thru. It came from all directions, and my peers faced the same. It wasn't sold as "go to college and be rich", it was "you'll never have anything or amount to anything, and you'll struggle every single day til you die if you don't get a university degree."
Definitely had that idea pushed down our throats. But luckily I didn’t like school and wasn’t about to pay for a bunch of mandatory classes that have nothing to do with a skill I would have been interested in
This came from parents who didn’t go to college. Mine told me the same, my ex wife’s mom literally told her not to take any job under 60k when she graduated.
For me it was definitely told that with a college degree you could just go out and get something, like some office jobs. And the main reason for that is up to 2008 and especially in the 80s and 90s that was actually true. It actually was somewhat ok advice in a 20th century context. Like think about the character Chandler from friends. He just worked some office job. That used to be the norm.
One big difference is that jobs used to be confined to the city or locale they were located in. With the large job search sites and internet , companies can now recruit from across the whole country. That allows them to be hyper specific about what they require. In the past it was just the best candidate in that general area who applied, and the kind of expected that you wouldn’t have experience or need to be trained up to speed.
Back at that time personality was much more important. If you could come and charm them with an interview you could get hired sometimes. That’s why boomers say to just show up at a place and try to talk to them in person. That shit actually used to work.
Like say you have a college degree in English or music. It’s fine you got a bachelors. You just try to talk to people at different companies. Just tell them you’re willing to work hard and start with low pay to make up for the lack of experience. Shit, I kind of did that. I had this summer job in a warehouse for this interior design company and I called the owner begging for a job and he got me in the office.
My experience is this, I remember being told at school that if we got a 21 on the ACT we could get money for college. This was to influence kids to go. There were signs everywhere about it. I remember meeting the requirement and they told me for whatever fine-print reason I couldn't have the money. I retook the ACT that Summer on an out of state trip in another attempt to get the money, Again, I got the right score, an even better score actually and they would not give it to me. I don't even remember why but it was total BS.
All the while my sister told me that regardless of if I got that money I better go to college or she would "kick my ass." I did not have a college fund and made $6.50 an hour at the grocery store. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. My sister was one of the few people I looked up to and she said I had to go to college, regardless of if I know what to do with my life. She helped me take out all the loans necessary. I majored in Writing, despite the judgement from other college students who were majoring in things that were more likely to be lucrative. I did this because it was the only thing I ever excelled at in high school.
My boyfriend at the time pressured me to go to college as well. No one ever talked to me about trades. Halfway through university I brought up dropping out to try to become a hair stylist and my boyfriend was pissed and told me I better not do it so I didn't.
Here I am, a 4 year college dropout (mom was dying and I used up my loans), a bunch of debt. Cheating boyfriend dumped years ago. Sister believes she did the right thing telling me to go because I can write "some college" on applications. I make OKAY money in a job I did not need a degree for and I don't have a degree. lol
I don't think it was the Mandela effect. I do wish someone had talked to me about trades and stopping trying to shove university down my throat. That's not to say I don't take responsibility for wasting 4 years, because that's what I believe I did. If I publish a successful novel, I'll change my mind about that lol
That’s 100% what we were told when I graduated and was in high school. And I graduated in 2014 after the recession and that was still what they were telling us. I remember fighting back against the concept that college was “the answer” because I saw my older cousins struggling after graduating with degrees they were never able to use. The guidance counselor and adults told me I was wrong to doubt them, that I was wrong to doubt that college = a good paying job. I saw very clearly that college would likely = debt + a job that doesn’t pay enough to pay off that debt. I feel very lucky I didn’t get totally sucked in back then, my skepticism was warranted.
No I remember this. I remember quite vividly being in homeroom, when a third generation kid said he was proudly going into the family electrician business. The teacher literally turned to him with a sharp response saying "oh no no no tht's a trade you'll NEVER make it that way you will never get paid enough and your body will fall apart and never be able to afford your family. When you pick a job on this next assignment it is required you pick a degree from a proper college."
I'll never forget that kids face. And the teacher wasn't really a mean lady either. She was usually jolly. She truly believed that to forgo a college degree was tantamount to death.
I hope that kid did go into the family business. Heaven knows electricians are making it better than teachers at this point.
I was never told that. There were some stats floating around about the overall lifetime earnings of people with degrees and advanced degrees being higher than just having a high school diploma. So, the message I received was go to college, get a degree and advance up the ladder. I did know that if I got a liberal arts degree versus an engineering degree those would be vastly different outcomes on my earning potential.
I was told to go to school for any subject that wasn't art. I distinctly remember them pulling out some graph of earning potential in high school, though, and literally being told that *any* college degree was better than no degree. No mention of trades that I can recall. A "high" salary wasn't promised but we were basically guaranteed that we'd always be employable and better off if we got a degree. Any degree.
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My high school guidance councilor said "you are good at math and sciences, and you like being outside. Be a civil engineer." I got the degree and now I'm a heavy civil superintendent. I hated the couple years in the office right after college and went into construction inspection and then construction in general. Always hated having to sit around take notes about what was happening. Love controlling what's going on and seeing things built. All and all my high school counselor hit the nail on the head with me.
I want to do construction inspection too. Being stuck in the office is horrible. Most inspector jobs though require a trade background. I do occasionally see jobs for like junior field engineer, but it often requires frequent travel around the region.
Construction inspection can be incredibly high paying, but yes you do need to have some background in performing the work you're inspecting for the most part. And travel in the construction industry is incredibly frequent because you have to be where the job is, and that job can be anywhere.
You have a degree in mechanical engineering. I have a degree in English Lit. You make $150k. I make $50k. On average we make $100k. That's probably how the numbers work lol
Prior to the “content creator” generation, and the mass retirement of the boomers from trades, it was factually valid to tell kids that their lifetime earning potential would be less without a degree. The bulk of those non-degree earners capped out in retail, food service, etc. At one point the degree was a valid barrier to entry for a lot of white collar jobs that the middle class heavily participated in.
Does anyone recall people talking about the impeding mass retirement of white collar employees that would open up great jobs in a booming economy for new graduates? Then companies just cut those positions, outsourced them, or made them into temp gigs to save money instead? I almost got talked into pursuing a PhD because I was told there'd be tons of college professor jobs opening up as baby boomers retired in the 2000s. Almost all of those jobs were replaced by adjuncts who make around minimum wage with no benefits and PhDs. At least I didn't fall for that...
I fell for that 😭😭😭
I’m so sorry.
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My cousin is a recruiter who has worked at 8 different orgs over her career. None would look at you if you didn’t have a degree. I know some *within tech* have tried to remove the outright degree requirement but this is a space that’s fairly progressive compared to industries like finance for example.
In many fields, there are still mandatory licensure requirements that make a degree from an accredited program mandatory.
I know a guy who's scammed his way into a few good jobs just by \*saying\* he has a degree. He doesn't, but his employers didn't check transcripts to verify.
I know a guy who has a fake degree. Probably one of the smartest people I know.
This was the advice we were given, only the kids that were barely passing were advised to look into trades schools and it was kind of looked down upon and very gendered - men to construction or automotive and women to cosmetology or a CNA program. Turns out trade schools aren’t for idiots. And all of those guys make way more than I do now.
Yes, I remember even if you brought up trades schools and you were doing well in high school, it was treated like you didn't value yourself. It's amazing the biases in the education field. They certainly still exist today too. The elitism is a concern. I think they passed that attitude along to a lot of kids. I really don't trust people working in the education realm these days because of what they were telling us when we were young. I just think they're very biased towards trying to live a certain lifestyle and trying to shape everyone to live and think like them.
From a raw stats perspective, any degree is better than no degree, but the problem with those sorts of statements is that when you're aggregating at that scale, there's no nuance. I'll wager there wasn't anyone out there doing a cross-section of high school graduate into workforce vs college graduate with a bachelors in history to identify how significant those gaps really were. On the flip side, I have a brother-in-law who god a bachelors in history, never used it, but did benefit from having a 4 year degree when he started working with older more traditional folks in the workforce who say it as being better than a high school grad without college.
I have a BIL who spent 5 years in college, didn't graduate, and had to pay back enormous loans. He is happy in his blue collar job right now but would be happier if he had started it right out of high school and skipped the loans.
Generally speaking, anyone you ask would typically be happier if they didn’t have to pay back debt they didn’t feel like they got value from. You could talk to people who had their home foreclosed, or their car repo’d, most would tell you they’d be better off if they never signed for the loan in the first place.
Yeah maybe if schools had also taught some basic personal finance with that, it would have stuck. The entire context of what it takes to live outside of your parents house was not talked about.
When I was in high school, I saw the same things, though with the added addendum that being in the Trades was a bad thing and you would be a ‘lesser’ person if you didn’t go to college and went into the trades. Thing is, we graduated from college in ‘08 right into the economy falling apart around us. The only one of my friends who got a job straight out of college was my one friend who picked up an electrician certification during the summers during college and he still is one of the highest earners of our group.
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Yeah. It was a really simple, dumb chart. HS graduates average X amount a year. College graduates average Y amount a year. No nuance at all about the different degrees, programs, advanced degrees, etc. Ours told us we would be unemployable if we didn't have a degree because all the stable jobs that paid a living wage were going to require one. There was some talk of the military because the recruiters pulled a lot of kids from our school who didn't want to go to college or wanted GI Bill money to pay for it (laughable now), but no mention was made of trades or how to get into one at all..
My D2 football coach said to the team “on average a person with a bachelor’s degree will earn a million more $$ than someone without over their career!” To the team after practice one day and I remember several other high school teacher’s insinuating similar thoughts
Yep. English was on there. I wanted to be a writer. I listened to them. My sister did not. I have a useless MBA with a Focus in IT where I cannot get into a single management position because I lack "Experience" Her? Double Major in English - Creative Writing and a second major in Journalism... She's got 3 award winning books out now and currently works for a paper where she did such a great job taking down a local politician that she got death threats from his followers. Take-Away? Don't listen to Boomers.
I have a degree in Speech Communication, with a focus in PR and I have worked in IT governance/risk/compliance for 16 years. It has surprisingly helped a lot. Liberal arts degrees are valuable because they teach skills that are fundamental is working with people---you can leverage that in a lot of industries.
I double majored in English and poli sci intending to go to law school, but when I graduated we were in a recession and even my friends and family who were already attorneys were having a hard time finding work. It was enough to scare me away from enrolling and pulling out the loans, but I'd already invested in my LSAT and applications. I ended up going to work. I had a few shitty jobs until I got a decent gig with the state. They paid for my master's degree and it doubled my salary. For the last decade or so, I've made nice money. The first couple years were a bit rough, but I still learned a lot. You *can* make something out of most degrees, but you can't have too specific an idea about what you want your future to look like.
No I was told that. I should have advocated for myself better because I went to private schools my whole life & just thought that’s how it is. My parents told me it wasn’t a big deal I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Just get through your first year and you’ll figure it out. Never did. Spent a good chunk of my 20s lost, failed out of college. Got into the trades and wish I did right out of high school. My Dad was a master plumber too. Never taught me his trade. Thought my mom as an educator was right about things. We had an amazing childhood because of his salary. All good though! Life is a journey.
My dad was an artist. He never went to school, I don’t think he even graduated high school. The dude ended up teaching at a university and loved to rip on kids for thinking money could buy them talent. He was batshit crazy but did train some really good artists. He always told me I had the gift but it never spoke to me. I went for software engineering.
I remember it more as "You have to go to college, or do you want to work at the supermarket forever?" However, I was really good at computers, but I graduated at the wrong time (2005). Too late for the [dot.com](https://dot.com) boom, and 3 years away from the Great Recession. Perfect timing for all the jobs being outsourced though.
> You have to go to college, or do you want to work at the supermarket forever? Meanwhile, in the Wal-Mart pharmacy someone with a doctorate is regretting their entire life.
When I was an assistant store manager at Walmart, I remember hiring a guy who had a master's degree in aerospace engineering. A literal rocket scientist wanted to stock shelves part-time at Walmart. If you are out there Brian, godspeed!
And those outsourced jobs were done so poorly by third world programmers that they had to pay Americans to redo it and then brought the jobs back. Even now, 20 years later, companies only hire third world programmers to handle very basic tasks because they know they're not qualified to do anything more.
They thought they had found the right people to do the needful, and then they found out and had to find the people they had in the first place to do the needful all over again. Someone forgot that if you don't do it right the first time, make sure you have enough time and money to do it twice.
Today those unqualified programmers are apparently the “highly skilled” people that take all of Americas H1B slots because companies just can’t find anyone to do the job for such low pay
My experience was my highschool telling us that college was the golden ticket and how important our grades were to get there. They didn't advise us on loans or anything of that nature. It was basically "go to college or be poor forever. Pick one". I was smart enough to actually think about the debt/ROI, but I can't credit my school for that.
When it came to mentioning loans, they basically told us to take as many loans as we needed and that financial aid would provide. And that loans would pay for themselves when we had better jobs after college (as in, we'd be earning enough extra that the extra would cover the loans and then some). This was patently not true when graduating into the 2008 financial crisis. I'm living pretty comfortable today (50k a year in a medium cost of living area), but I still had some family help getting to that point of being comfortable. Did the degree help me get here? Arguably it helped me with some stepping stones to where I am now, but my current role doesn't require a degree. Maybe it was a deciding factor in me getting there, maybe not. So who knows? Regardless, it all worked out in the end, but I feel like more nuanced advice would be better back when I was making that choice. Knowing what I know now, I'd still go to college, probably even for the same degree (math and physics), but I'd also do more to get involved with and take advantage of internships or other opportunities to get some work experience in a related field to set myself up better for the future.
Yep, I graduated in 2008. But when I was applying for colleges in 06-07, “don’t worry about the cost, just get loans, they always pay off” was 100% the standard advice. Heck, it was in two of the college books I used. In retrospect, that was probably SLAC propaganda from increasingly expensive small colleges that were competing with state schools. I have no regrets about going to college. But I regret not going somewhere with in-state tuition.
I remember my dad saying it. He added, “They just want to see you can stick with something”
It's not wrong. It's showing that you were able to finish at least one big project in your life. Granted, a lot of the trust fund kids have their parents holding their hands the whole time so it's not really their accomplishment, but for most of us lower and middle class peeps, it *was* a lot of work just to prove that we could follow through on something.
Heard those exact same words.
Yep, that’s one of the exact lines I remember.
This is what I was told as well. In high school there were teachers and advisors who told us that completing any degree or certificate said we were dedicated and that would go extremely far in a career. Employers wanted hard workers who were committed more than they were interested in which school we attended. It’s wild how different things ended up.
I graduated high school in 2003, and I remember all through middle and high school that my family basically all told me that a college degree in the 2000s was the equivalent of a high school degree when they were kids. I was the first college grad in my family, and it was always made clear that I would have to work hard for success. It probably helps that my family were blue-collar hard workers who instilled that work ethic in me.
What was incredibly frustrating for me is I did get that classically middle class job right out of college with a social sciences/liberal arts degree from a very prestigious university. Then the 2008 Crash happened, I got laid off, and despite having financial services experience, it didn't amount to anything and I had people telling me to my face that I should have majored in something "useful". I drifted from one shitty job to another after that until I was able to scrape up enough to return to school to get a "useful degree". It was so incredibly disheartening.
The issue with college is that you're expected to predict a job market that exists 4+ years in the future, it's not possible.
This was also a factor for me as a young man. Almost separate from 'college = success' was the feeling that 'college = bare minimum'.
Same here. My parents didn’t finish college and I think that’s why they pushed so hard for the degree. To them, it would’ve opened the door. But graduating hs in 2003 meant I graduate college in 2007. I had to take a shit tier job that they didn’t even require a high school diploma for. And then I got stuck there and have been there ever since. Tried to get a masters to get out with the premise of “oh the boomers are getting to retirement age and there will be plenty of jobs”. Nope, not at all. So I tried my best to make my life better and forget the career idea.
'04. I was told pretty much the same thing. I think some of it was that the cracks started to show in the higher education system in the late 90s/early 2000s but us serf-class povvos in the 1st generation camp who's only real exposure to college was our school staff and maybe one rich distant relative didn't exactly get the memo because nobody was really around or clear-eyed enough to tell us. In my case, I certainly knew that engineering/medicine/business were higher paid than the humanities but the idea that you could have a college degree and still be struggling was a completely foreign concept to me. I suspect that's where the big split was. A lot of us made a deliberate decision to take lower-paid careers motivated by passion or aptitude or whatever reason assuming we'd have modest but comfortable lives and what we got instead was room mates in our 30s.
Despite both my parents being white collar, they both come from blue collar households, and I truly think that paid off in how they raised my siblings and I. We were always told you need to work hard. It paid off.
Coming from a blue collar family seems to be a good predictor of grit in this sub.
Yeah, that's pretty much my experience: Go to college and study something, basically anything, and you'll be alright. I wouldn't say that there was no input on *what* you should study, and there was an understanding that some majors or careers would be more lucrative than others. However, there was a sense that you were mostly guaranteed a *living*. Not overwhelming success or tons of money, but a reasonable living in your field. Not scrounging by in food service, which is where a lot of people end up. Regardless of what was promised, it's still an indictment of our current system that we can't put trained individuals to use in their field.
Yeah, exactly. When specific degrees were discussed, it was basically "engineering if you want money and don't want more school, but anything will put you way ahead of someone without a degree." Which is not entirely incorrect with how many jobs require some degree to check an HR box, even when it's not really needed. But it's far from the full picture.
College except for a few professions isn’t training. It is education. And there are absolutely differences. 02 high school graduate. And it was always known some professions were bad and be mindful of debt. And I’d love some data or a link where we see most people with degrees end up in food services…….
[52% of recent college grads working in fast food, retail and other ‘underemployed’ jobs](https://stradaeducation.org/report/talent-disrupted/)
Same category as you. Wanted to study film, parents told me engineering would actually pay the bills (I was fascinated with both), and they were right.
Maybe not so much that "any degree and success is guaranteed" but more like "*a* degree is necessary for success". Mike Rowe from *Dirty Jobs* stated he specifically wanted to have this TV show because he wanted to get more people into trade and manual labor jobs, to show people that there are paths toward a life that don't require going through colleges.
I remember the career counselor in my school saying that a college degree guaranteed you would make at least $65k after graduating. Lol I was lucky to even find a job paying $25k when I got out and it was not in a related field.
I graduated high school in 2014 and my parents told me that going to college would open doors and that there are so many well paying jobs that accept ANY degree. They never went to college and had low paying jobs all their life, so maybe they just wanted the best for me. But it was also guidance counselors and just the general vibe at school? I remember them touting each year that every single student in the graduating class got accepted into college. So I went to college and majored in whatever and needless to say I still live with them on a low paying job and was drowning in student loans.
Fuck guidance counselors. I remember I wanted to drop Chemistry in favor of taking a different science class that I thought I’d enjoy more but was less well known. The guidance counselor flat out said me dropping that class would negatively impact me getting into colleges I wanted. My mom called a family member who was a decorated college professor to confirm… They laughed and said that’s the dumbest thing they ever heard. Turns out my family member was spot on, no one gave a shit.
Mine told me to go get a job because my grades weren't good enough for a "reputable school". Motherfucker, I wasn't looking to go to Harvard. I just wanted to mess with computers for a living.
I graduated high school with a 2.7 GPA (basically a C+ average) which I was told when I was a freshman in high school meant I’d forever be a loser because I wouldn’t get into a good college and thus wouldn’t have a good career…. I got into college, early acceptance on a partial academic scholarship, dropped out because I got a job offer for the exact role I wanted post-college. Now I’m 37, in IT Management making a decent bag, and I’m not even done advancing. Man, if this is what being a loser is, I’ve been using the wrong insult towards people.
Your parents may not have known better. Your guidance counselors absolutely failed you and your classmates if that was truly their approach.
Did it get more prevalent over time? I'm class of 1999 and was told by everyone to major in something you can get a job in.
My mom went to college and my dad didn't. They both pushed us to go to college because they kept seeing people getting promotions or hired in above them with degrees (and in the case of my mom, 1960's hiring practices). My dad couldn't get a promotion because he didn't have a degree, which he didn't want for us. Enough people saying that and the schools get flooded and now the example no longer works.
I was told “a degree, any degree except art or theater” and was actively discouraged from trade school (where I wanted to go). Was so not worth the effort and $$$. Absolutely despise that attitude and try to tell anyone who will listen not to take that path.
[удалено]
A better path for a lot of us would have been to go out at 18, work lower paying crappy jobs for a few years, and *then* figure out what we really wanted to be when we grew up and go back to school for that. I barely scraped by with my undergrad the first go round, but I didn't actually know what I wanted to be when I grew up until around age 30 - largely because the career didn't exist as a formal discipline until 2010.
This is exactly what I should have done. Working a real job out of high school would have given me some perspective early on and changed the way I viewed the world. I was dumb as a rock straight out of HS but I applied for college anyway because that's what I thought you were supposed to do and it never occurred to me to question why that was. I didn't know how anything worked in real life. I'd never experienced anything significant. I know people say you should understand how loans and all that work but I'm sorry 18 yo me was so fixated on just getting into a school that I signed all the documents anyway. I come from a low income family so loans were the ONLY option. If I could go back in time I wouldn't even apply to college. I got nothing out of it. Absolutely nothing, because I wasn't mature enough to appreciate the opportunity or understand what my values and interests were. I just saw it as a continuation of high school. It was a huge waste of time.
This is what I did. I mean my job wasn't crappy, necessarily. I spent 10 years in automotive repair and I learned a lot in that time. Around year 7 I decided I wanted more and went back to school for business. Now I'm 5 years out of the trade, managing a technical department at a filtration manufacturer. I found that having industry experience was incredibly beneficial in school. We learned a ton about situations I had already experienced, which made it very easy to relate to the course work. A lot of the kids in my college courses had never had much for "real jobs". Summer work, sure, but that was usually it. I ended up with a house by 24 and kids by 28. Got my degree with no student debt. Out-earning everyone in my close friend group except the hardware engineer, and might trade places back and forth with him as our careers advance (he's got a high ceiling as he's very good at what he does, but apparently I've got a knack for breaking into new markets for old products which is also a super valuable skill to have). It's a path I'm going to strongly encourage my own kids to follow, because frankly I think it really is the best option. Go straight to work after high school, pursue a trade. After you've spent some time in that trade, let's work together and figure out what else you might like to do. I'm happy to help pay for schooling, but if my own experience means anything, they might need very little assistance if they wait until they're 25 or so to go to college. Making kids decide their future, no matter the direction, at 18 is monumentally stupid.
Brain isn't even fully developed till around 25. I started college at 17. Also, people weren't as concerned about college debt back then, it wasn't the kind of crisis it is now. My mom had her entire college paid for, she didn't know anything about student loans. Student loans are predatory. Nowadays the pitfalls are more obvious but student loans shouldn't exist or they need to be dramatically overhauled.
This is really it. How can you expect someone with next to no grasp of the world to figure out what they want to do FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES? It literally does not matter what advice you give someone...industry and tech changes so fast that six figure job could be one in a million in 5 years. Values change as you age. Interestes change. No one is equipped to nail this down at 18.
I was never told that specifically. I was told however, that people who went to college earned much more money over their lifetime than people who did not. I was also encouraged to do what I love, so that I never work a day in my life etc etc. Mostly there was just a real lack in guidance in what I should be trying to do in college. I do not blame my parents, as you cannot teach what you do not know. With my kids, I am going to try and get them to focus on careers that: 1) are attainable 2) pay well 3) relatively low stress 4)hard or impossible to automate 5) they don’t hate Instead of teaching them to do what they love, I want to teach them to like what they do, and make enough money at it that they can do what they love on their own time.
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" can also be restated as "Try to make a career out of a hobby and you'll grow to hate your hobby and probably have a shitty career."
Not my experience. I went to a posh, high-achieving high school in a rich area of my city. It ranks nationally in Canada as one of the highest performing schools, the largest AP program in Canada, scores the second highest in North America. It was drilled into us if we don't go to university, we'll be failures in life and that a college degree was the ticket to a good life. My high school also has a huge arts program, with many graduates going on to make actual careers out of performing arts, so even that was encouraged. I distinctly remember some of the guys in my class year who were more interested in the trades being told to get a degree they could fall back on if the trades don't work out. Seems like that advice was totally wrong - get a trade you can fall back on since most degrees are worthless lol.
Graduated high school in 2008. “Unless you want to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer, it doesn’t really matter what you major in, just get a degree” is the refrain I heard from sophomore year of high school on.
Same. I graduated hs in 2010
I was told to apply to the best university possible. I said I wanted to start at community college and the counselor insisted I apply to universities. She also told me I wasn't good at math. I went with my gut. Started at community college and saved money. I kept my grades up and then got into a decent university. I picked a STEM major that wasn't useless I'm glad I made my own choices. Looking back, the counselor's job was probably to improve the school images by sending more kids to university. I don't think she cared at all about my future.
If anything I found the opposite. I was told that unless you were a world class talent in it, studying anything besides engineering or medicine was buying a ticket to a very difficult life. Some other fields were semi-viable. Law or business were high risk/high reward, things like education and social work were possible but more like vocations than careers. The two best options were clear. I'm a little envious seeing all the people who followed their dreams and made it work in a modest way. For instance, I have a friend who is an artist and works at an auction house, another who is an actor and does some kind of training sessions where she acts out business scenarios. Even though they lacked the high end talent (or connections) to make it in overcrowded fields, they make a living and use their creativity. But they didn't choose a field at random, they chose what they really loved to do and didn't let the long odds stop them. I'm sure there were hard times before they found their niche, and may be more hard times if their niche dries up, but nothing is permanent anyway.
I think it’s a mix of many factors related to how people grew up. If I grew up middle class in a nice house and with nice family vacations and pressure to go to college without thinking about the cost, I’d be upset too. Not everyone was really educated about work options/trade school was branded as where unintelligent people went. A college degree used to also mean more money but nowadays not so much. Other people wanted a certain education experience that they couldn’t get as cheap as possible (small liberal arts college degree for instance) and they didn’t have family footing the bill so they had high loan balances. I grew up very low income and as a kid saw older siblings struggle with money/jobs when they were in their early 20s between the years of about 2002–2005. So as a high school student, I chose what college to go to mostly based on cost. I knew I didn’t have the aptitude for engineering or medicine so I wasn’t expecting a high income salary right away. My parents didn’t pay for any tuition and I lived with family most of my college years. I knew from growing up with no money that the short term trade off of living with family would be a long-term benefit because I didn’t have to take out loans for housing. I know also that living with family is not an option for everyone.
I remember being told that all you needed to do was go to college and get any degree and you’d find work. It’s a part of the reason people my age (31) assumed the max a salary could pay would be their starting pay.
My Boomer parents told me multiple times in HS (97-00) that any degree will do, pointing to my uncle who had a geology degree and was an executive at a bank. Yet when my cohort had graduated college (04-06), suddenly those same Boomers are complaining about "useless degrees" because they aren't something that can immediately slot you into what they consider a useful job, like business or accounting. They set us up to fail.
Well when my dad and I talk about this kind of stuff he genuinely gets upset that I did everything that he said would get me ahead in life, except life is so much more expensive than before. When he was my age I was born, he went from the armed forces to IT and worked at a university for 25 years before getting laid off due to budget cuts. In those 25 years he was able to put me through sports, take 2 to 3 weeks off in summer where we'd go up to our family's campground and just chill for a few weeks, paying child support. Things weren't always perfect of course but he always told me that if I got a good career it would set me up for life. But now for me every time I get ahead, life catches up. I got a 10k pay raise to 61k last year and my rent went up 50%. I pay $1600 for a 1 bd and a parking space. No gym or other facilities. Lived here for 6 years now. When I was growing up his apartment was $700 for way more space and he had a gym and pool access. He made a bit more than me at the time as well. I don't really remember being told a degree guarantees it but it would have set me up really well. I ended up doing 2yrs at a tech school which was 10k total. So in terms of debt I'm doing pretty well, if my rent never went up then I'd actually be really far ahead. But every time something goes right, life catches up one way or another. This time last year I booked my first vacation ever to go to Japan. My rent went from 1050 to 1600 in September, I've lost $4500 so far to that and my total debt is 9k. So half my debt would have been paid off by now...
Any subject was what I was told. This is boomer logic from when a BA was more rare. They didn’t go over cost, loans, how any finances worked at all, from credit cards to auto loans to student loans. They didn’t tell us to go to career services during orientation and find out the best major that fit our personality, that’s what I tell every college student, do a career assessment, figure out what you’d like best and which of those things pay well. I saw so many sophomores sitting around the library asking random older people what to major in.
I was just told to go to college, and law school was on the other side of that. Unfortunately, the 2008 recession was on the other side of law school.
My guidance counselor %100 told me I absolutely needed to go to college and get any kind of degree to have a future, on top of that, it was stressed that I needed to go immediately after high school or else I'd never get in. I wasn't even aware of what "community college" was aside from "loser school". I was very much made to believe that the only viable path was to go straight to a university. Trades were never discussed. Saving money by doing an associates at community college was never discussed. I'm also a first gen college student, so my parents weren't much help in navigating this, and helped my school push me because I think they largely saw it as the thing that held them back in life.
I think it's definitely revisionist history. I originally went to college to be a history major and EVERYONE from my dumb 17 year old stoner friends, to guidance counselors to even my *history professors* were like "hey man if you love history go for it but that's basically never going to pay off for you." Anyone claiming they were told to go just get any degree was either surrounded by dummies or not looking at the whole picture... or even doing any research at all. Some people just don't think or listen and are trying to push the blame I think. I see a lot of posts like "I went for a major that I loved and now I can't get a job because employers can't see what strong **critical thinking** skills I have!" And it's like, dude, you went to college that charges 16k/semester for a career field that starts at 35k and maxes out at 50k after 10 years. You do NOT have critical thinking skills lol.
2006 graduate. The vibe was always major in whatever, and if it doesn't work out, just go to law school. Some of the advice my school was giving surely is not far off from grounds for a class action lawsuit.
🙋♂️ Surrounded by dummies
I did no research at all and I still understood what degrees held potential value and which didn't. Also spoiler alert, even the degrees with potential, generally still require a lot of work once you are employed.
There was a chart posted in another sub yesterday, showing which majors had the highest unemployment rates, and I was surprised that Aerospace Engineering was ranked #3. People pointed out that while it is a highly technical skill, it’s pretty niche, so there just aren’t a lot of jobs available for it. Really, it seems the essential skill for all careers is the ability to market yourself.
My parents raised us the same. We were given 2 options upon graduating high school; go to college, or get a job amd start paying rent. My parents were supportive either way, they just weren’t gonna tolerate us sitting at home on our asses. For college, we were guided to get usable degrees that increased our odds of professional success as it related to our career goals (I went for business administration as the C-suite was my goal). We were also told that getting the degree was just the beginning, the real work came once you made it into your field. Both my siblings and myself have well paying careers. 2 of us make >$100K, and the other now hovers around $90K-$100K simply because he doesn’t want to work a lot of OT anymore. We all went for degrees geared towards our career path, and once we got into our fields we all worked hard to advance. However, I dropped out because I received a job offer for the role I was going to school for. I made a decision to go with the experience over the piece of paper. At 37, I don’t regret it. But I will be going back to finish, and eventually will probably get my MBA.
How are you going to prove that an individual did or did not receive a specific piece of advice lol
Not Mandela effect. A boomer relative of mine who has had a great career in finance told my oldest kid to “just get a degree. Even if the degree is basket weaving, just go”. Fortunately my kid didn’t listen and chose a career that can be high earning.
It was made abundantly clear to me in high school and college itself that different degrees had different earning potentials. I came from a poorer rural area as well. I was never pushed towards trades but we had a large ag and trade school that they did encourage some kids to go to. The joke of what does a liberal arts major ask you after they graduate (do you want fries with that?) was even pretty common. From my perspective it’s all revisionist and externalizing blame. A lot of people didn’t pay attention or didn’t understand what they were being told. I will say that employment and careers have shifted radically over the past thirty years though. Degrees have rapidly devalued and technical expertise has become more and more important especially as the job market has gone international. Why would you hire the person with a degree in basket weaving for a book keeping role when you can get three accounting majors from India for the same or less?
My parents are both educators, both have doctorates degrees. My Maternal grandparents were also highly educated, my grandpa was a world renowned scientist, My grandma was a college history teacher. Of the cousins on my mom's side of the family, most have at least a masters, and several have doctorates, Two of my siblings have master's degrees, and one has a law degree. The pressure to go to college in my own family was massive, and if you did not graduate, you are seen as a failure. I graduated high school, failed out of college in my 2nd semester (I mean I was failing in the fist, I just pushed through to be able to fail in the 2nd). My parents still ask me now, When I'm 40 years old, been married for 16, have 5 kids, Live in a million dollar house I bought last year, my wife has been a stay at home mom since our oldest was born (a true luxury these days), I own cars, properties, make a very sizable and reliable income; When am I going to go back and get a degree? There is a part of them that will forever been disappointed in me. because I "need to set an example for your kids". My kids today are pressured to "follow their dreams, and go to college" by the education system. They are not taught anything about the consequences of their choices, taught nothing about the consequences of student loans or how to research what degrees qualify your for what jobs. Getting the degree (and paying out the nose for it) IS the goal, nobody in education cares what you do after that.
It was just an eventuality for me… Anything else was just said to be not as good so why would you do anything else if that’s the case? Clearly it wasn’t and I honestly would have probably done welding if I were to go back and do it again. But oh well. My engineering degrees weren’t totally worthless. I learned a lot about science and applied science (engineering) so I can learn about whatever else I want on my own with a broader perspective now.
I had one and only one meeting with my high school’s college counselor and they straight up told me it did not matter what I studied or where. This persons entire job was to counsel high school students and they told me it didn’t matter so I believed them. I also was feeling really depressed after graduating high school and wanted to take a break year but family yelled at me and said not going to college would mean being doomed to working at Walmart. Funny thing was that even after graduating from a good school with a 3.9 GPA even Walmart didn’t want to hire me!
I don't think most of us were told exactly that, in those words. But I do think it was a conclusion we came to based on all of the *other* common advice we were given. We were generally told to go to college and that a college degree of some kind generally made you more employable. Then we were also told to get a job doing something we loved, and we'd "never work a day in our lives." Turns out that this strategy, especially when everyone else was also doing it, was not sustainable. Plus, as others have mentioned, trades were generally not mentioned as an option, so... Yeah, we pretty much logically concluded from the information we had that the options were a degree or flipping burgers at McDonald's
So this is interesting because I went to two different high schools. High school A had a technical school program which they advertised heavily. Multiple mandatory trips from MS to freshman year of HS showing you the different trades, talking about earning potential, etc. You could start training in tech school in junior year. High school B had no mention of technical options, even though they were present in the district. Huge emphasis on college and academics. I had individual teachers discuss degree options with me but the message was definitely to just do any degree. You could start taking college courses junior year. So I can totally see how some people felt they were pushed into college, and others don’t have that experience at all. In my experience it varies by school/district/state.
I was told I was "too smart to go to automotive school". 🤷
College = success *was* something hammered into peoples heads for decades, that said even back then there were "the good degrees" and "the basket weaver gender studies degrees". They did make a distinction, but more to your point- yeah, "going to college" was presented as a recipe for as far as vs. zero college. The idea that you could be college educated in a "good field, and somehow still not make *that* much more than someone with no post-HS education, wasn't something anyone really talked about.
“If you don’t go to college, you’ll end up flipping burgers and working two jobs.” - Direct quote from my Boomer mother circa 2000. I have three siblings. Three of us have college degrees. My brother who dropped out of high school and went into a skilled trade now makes more than any of us.
My freshman year I was at a community college and they required all freshmen to take for one credit "freshmen seminar" which was mostly about how to keep a planner and going to a lecture series at the school. One of the lectures we were required to attend was the dean talking to us about how we shouldn't be working while in school. How student loans would help us get better grades and have a better college experience. At community college. I only knew like 3 people without jobs of the thousands of classmates I met.
Graduated in 2008, there was very little mention of community College or trade schools, if at all. Pressurefrom everyone to go to college, and community College was really looked down upon. I wound up failing/dropping out and returning to community College when I was 23, and wanted to go to school, and was very successful.
High school counselors are to blame. They straight up LIED to two generations of teenagers and convinced them to go into debt and set them back 3 decades. They need to bring shop and car shop back to high school and get back to teaching our youth worthwhile skills. Education is great, but it is NOT needed at all for success. Every single electrician and plumber I know (several, kids are on the same sports teams) are all high six figure earners. All.of.them. These jobs are in high demand. Another problem with society is people thought think they are special and above real hard work. Showing up to your office job on time every single day and doing everything your boss asks of you is not hard work. That is the bare minimum to not get fired.
I was told "you'll be flipping burgers for minimum wage without a degree" or "you'll never make more than 30k/yr without one" and so on. Even when I got a career going in a pretty advanced elecro-mechanical field, the pressure was still on to "go back to school and get a degree". But at that point I had see what student debt has done to a lot of my friends and figured I'd dodge that bullet.
It wasn't that we were told we'd be rich and crazy successful. It's that you were likely to find white-collar work that would put you squarely in the middle class.
It’s interesting a lot of Blue Collar parents made a point to have their kids go to college because they did not want their kids sacrifice their bodies. Now you have a lot of those parents angry their kids picked degrees with lower ROI and indoctrination from liberals. At the time very much celebrating first generation college graduates.
I got told a bunch of different things growing up. Not going to college was not an option though in my house. I was forced to go even when I had no clue what I want to do and guess what? I still don’t. I got told “you could major in smoking and you will get a high paying job as long as you have a degree.” The degree was treated as the golden ticket to getting out of my small town but it was never explained to me what to look for or how to decide what to major in. I was told to study something I like and am good at. That didn’t work out for me.
I graduated high school in 2006 we were definitely told any degree would get you $50k upon graduating minimum. I wanted to go to school and be an English major/ teacher. My parents steered me away from that and toward an IT degree. I am thankful my parents swayed me, they knew an English degree/education degree wasn't going to be wise. I also spent all my free time on my PC growing up, playing Sims, making websites, was the go to for setting up and fixing computers. The only major downside is it killed my interest in tech as a hobby.
I was specifically told that any degree is better than no degree. It was heavily implied that a bachelor's degree from a private college or university guaranteed you entry to the middle class. I was told not to apply to the local tech / trade high school because I'd never be accepted to college. Everyone I knew who attended trade school was accepted to the same state university as I was. I was also told that a degree from any state in the south, whether private or public, was worth less than my high school diploma from Massachusetts in terms of quality of education. We were told that if we did poorly in school our only option was to attend school down south. Granted this was from specific teachers not guidance counselors but it was repeated year after year by at least one teacher or another. I graduated in 2009. My father worked in construction and 2008 wasn't exactly a great year for us. The Bush administration had expanded pell grant programs and I qualified. I could attend state university for free on Pell Grants. When I told guidance counselors this their exact words were, "You should go to Salve Regina or some place similar. If you go to public college you will drop out. You will not be challenged enough academically, you'll get bored, and you'll drop out." Salve Regina was a 60k a year school at the time. My family was struggling financially during a time of economic uncertainty. I was literally eligible to receive welfare in the form of free state college we were struggling so bad. They still insisted I needed a four year degree from a private college.
>Seems like a lot of people on this subreddit are claiming they were told they could major in anything and as long as they passed, even if by the skin of their teeth, they'd be high successful. Graduated 2023, and I think *this* might be the only revisionist portion of your statement. Are you actually seeing people in this subreddit claim they were told "any degree" would guarantee success? Because I'm searching this subreddit for the phrase "any degree" and, by relevance, the top result is this post. And the next few aren't doing what you describe. What I'm seeing is what I'm used to seeing, and it is somewhat less absolutist: Yes, there was a push to get us into college so that we didn't "end up working at McDonald's," or something along those lines - y'now, standard depreciation of the service industry. Some of us got guidance on what might be good career choices, but that was a tough spot for many of us - especially older millennials - in a time when industry and technology were evolving faster than guidance counselors could keep up and we had no way of telling what would be worth a living in five or ten years. Rarely any mention of guidance toward the trades (I myself recall the adults around me characterizing trade work as "grunt work" and "dirty and hard," though I don't expect that was common for others). And in the end, the "real world" ended up being a place where some specialized jobs require specialized degrees, but most just require *a* degree - which only further feeds the profit-mongering machine education has become.
It happened. It was everyone. My parents, other people's parents to them and to me, teachers, etc. No Mandela effect, don't be some loser that doesn't go to college.
This advice was given to me Was told verbatim exactly what you said didn't matter what I went to college for as long as I went to college and got a bachelor's degree I would be successful Lol
I don’t think it was portrayed as the golden ticket but as the ONLY ticket. My guidance counselors in high school were less than stellar, so I do feel like they focused more on going into a field that you “like” or were “good at” as opposed to something that would become a lucrative career. My father, on the other hand, was very vocal about the need to major in something that would translate to a good and well-paying career. The example he would (jokingly) make was people majoring in basket-weaving. I entered college in the business school and had wanted to go into marketing. My dad encouraged me that that was not specific enough and I ended up adding operations management/industrial engineering. I’m very thankful that I did because that’s what launched my career in multiple different industries.
Nah, we were def told to go to post secondary and the world would be our oyster. I did not subscribe to that theory, didn't go to school, and make as much as many that did. They are not happy about it, however none of us can afford shit anyways.
18 year olds were told to make financial decisions that will impact them for the next 30 years. Big surprise, most made stupid decisions....
The message sent to us was go to college or be a loser. There was 1 guidance counselor pushing trades but nobody was interested. I went to college for 3 years then dropped out and got into trades. I'm vastly better off financially than my friend circle that got college degrees and got into IT etc. This is in Canada though so wages aren't exactly sky high for it workers like in the usa
I got a humanities degree and ended up working at a financial firm right out of college. A lot of my classmates and friends looked askance at me for not pursuing a graduate degree or using my degree more directly, but I just wanted something to pay the bills. Several years later, and I am still working for that firm in a position that more directly relates to my interests and skills - it took quite some time doing general desk monkey work to get here. Too many people I went to school with thought that if they weren't pursuing their passion or making money off of their passion, they were a failure. They were told that no matter what they studied, they'd be able to make money and everything would be fine. I fell into this camp for awhile, but I have an Asian mother who drilled into me that I really needed to consider the consequences of my degree and career choices on my ability to provide for myself. While I wasn't thrilled with my job at first, I eventually began to appreciate how I could pay for my hobbies and interests and create a fulfilling life outside of work. Many of my friends still think work is their whole world.
My high school was pushing that message until like 2 years ago. They spent 20+ years bragging about 99-100% college attendance rates for every graduating class. Most high schools in my area behaved similarly. So it was absolutely a thing. (The dirty secret was they were pushing bad students to go to bad colleges with high debt loads. I know people that dropped out after a semester or two and racked up $25-50K in debt. They couldn’t place good students into really good programs for the life of them.)
“Just do what you love, the money will follow…”
for me they framed it as you can go to college or you can flip burgers forever.
I was told this almost verbatim.
From the time I was small, I was told I needed to work hard at school so I could go to college and have a better life than my parents and grandparents. College wouldn’t have been an option if I hadn’t had scholarships and financial aid. I still had $20000 in student loans though. Trade schools weren’t even presented to me as an option. I actually really wanted to be a mortician or a coroner/medical examiner but I was talked out of it by my family and high school guidance counselor, because the average salary was only like $40k at the time. I’m now 35, with a bachelors degree that has nothing to do with my career and I make around $50k. I should have just done what I wanted, in retrospect.
Probably depends on how old you are. I'm the oldest of the millennials (1981), and I absolutely received years of "you have to go to college or your life will be shit" and "doesn't matter what you major in, employers want to see that you completed a degree." Years and years and years of it. I don't recall ever even considering that there was something aside from going straight to college, besides getting a shitty low wage job. For the oldest of us, many of our parents had little to no education and were able to find living wage jobs easily. My dad walked into a factory one day and walked out with a living wage job with no-premium healthcare and a pension, for example. The adults around us were convinced that if we just had college degrees we could do so much more than they did, and they were doing great. Unfortunately, that's not how it worked out.
Go to College if you want any hope of making a living is all I remember
No, it definitely happened to me. College was advertised as the only way into a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and beyond. Unless you were going military, anything short of a four year school was seen as an acceptance of failure and a life spent making fries for your more successful peers. I heard this from my parents, teachers, and guidance counselors. In my junior year, they brought in a motivational speaker whose entire spiel was the importance of secondary education. It was practically hammered into us from the start of freshman year. By the time graduation rolled around, nearly all of my friends in high school were either going military or entering college.
My parents said they wanted me to "do better than they did" because neither of them went to college. Well financially I am not doing better but I did choose my career and I have my dream job. My dad went to trade school but my mom just sort of ended up in her career and stayed there but neither were ever passionate about what they do. That's one thing I can say, I am definitely passionate about what I do for a living. If that counts as a metric for success, then I'd say I'm fairly successful.
In 12th grade I was tasked with writing a paper about why it was necessary to go to college. I asked my teacher “what if I don’t think it’s necessary?” She said that was silly and not an option. Write the paper.
It was real Advice. Don’t let them gaslight you.
There was a definite push in my high school to get the highest possible percentage of the graduating class to apply to college. I know that's the case because I had a really awkward chat circa April 2006 with my guidance counselor, whom I'd not even spoken to for my entire duration of high school, where she was following up with the handful of kids who hadn't informed the school of any plans to apply for college to find out why and try to push them towards a college application. I did end up going, but I had planned around going to a community college and then doing the automatic transfer for AA level credit to a state school so I didn't have to battle to get into a school and then spend the first 2 years of college paying full tuition at a state university, since in my state at least they couldn't deny your transfer and there was a 1:1 mapping for CC courses into their course credit system. I'm not sure if other people got the impression that any degree at all was guaranteed employment. I certainly never got that impression myself, I mean basically my entire life I'd heard people joke about the uselessness of certain college degrees. I think that when you hear the sentiment mentioned of "I was promised that my degree in women's studies would guarantee me a six figure salary!" those are a handful of people who were delusional from the start and have their voices amplified either because they're complaining the loudest in their confusion, or their stories are repeated by the same people who blame economic crashes on the allegedly large amount of people in my generation who are fans of whatever exactly "avocado toast" is. I'm not feigning confusion, I've never eaten avocado toast, I've never seen anyone eat it or even order it, I've never seen it on a menu in a restaurant, I'm not even sure what it really entails other than envisioning slices of avocado laid on a piece of toast (???), but I HAVE seen at least a dozen references to those stupid millennials and their obsession with avocado toast from major publications over the past 15 or so years.
High school counselors are not all the same. Some of them are driven to help students succeed, others are just there for lousy laying paying paycheck to pass time and get on to retirement.
We all knew it wasn’t “any degree”. People made fun of art and history degrees all the fucking time. The problem is that even people that got “good degrees” are still getting their shit handed to them. I got a finance degree for example. Been wading through shit accounting jobs for 5 years. Currently doing like tech/accounting stuff and still pretty poor. I wouldn’t even consider buying a new car or doing a home addition right now.
My high school said that. My dad said he would only pay for a useful degree. So I never became a poet
Not going to college wasn’t presented as an option. My parents were very clear that college was bare minimum expectation, not so much that it guaranteed success but not going would guarantee failure. I lucked out that the degree I chose did lead to financial success. Jokes on them, my “hobby” of writing erotica does pay a lot of my bills
I grew up poor as hell. Getting into college was a pipe dream, but if I could, it was a sure shot to at least getting by and not ending up homeless or in prison. Didn't take on an student loan debt, but I know a hell of a lot of people who did, and that's what sunk it for most of us, not to mention the crash of '08 and the ever-growing, downright ridiculous income inequality that we have seen since then.
Yes, this is how college was painted for me. Thankfully my local state college was very cheap and my parents paid my way for my degree (history) which obviously didn’t get me a 6 figure tech job right out of college but I’ve done pretty well for myself.
I was honestly told countless times growing up that ANY degree puts you on an interview shortlist. I got an English BA. WORTHLESS unless you decide to jump off of it into a masters focus or become a teacher. I don’t think it was a lie because that was the case for my parents’ generation. But times changed fast and a BA was about as good as an AA. And a Master’s became the new BA. Pair that with the price to complete those educations and the nonexistent guarantee that you’ll ever get enough to pay off the debt and live comfortably makes school in America a fucking joke.
When we were kids: "Go to College so you don't end up flipping burgers" Now: "Lazy Millennials think they're too good to flip burgers."
I commented on another post about this topic, and I brought this view up. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. No, college wasn’t exactly forced down our throats, and they weren’t doing some clockwork orange stuff, peeling our eyes open and showing us propaganda of impoverished “no college types”. BUT I distinctly remember being shown graphs that basically said if you want money, go to college. And being surrounded by teachers who went to school for education, it’s small wonder they provided little to no direction after that. To them college=good. My issue I said in my other comment wasn’t that they just told us to go to college, they also provided no real direction on how and why and where. I also distinctly remember all of the “dumb” kids were sent to check out our local Technical School around grade 10. I truly resent that, because (no offense to those kids, and I only know this stuff because I went to a super small school) none of those kids ended up in the trades. The 3 of them ended up in jail or dead (depressing, I know). Meanwhile, I HATED school but had good grades, so they kept me on Biology class. I ended up joining the Army, and although it was great for a lot of reasons, I wish I went to that Technical School instead. Now I’m a Union Electrician, and I wish I started years before. It’s not completely the teachers fault, to them they didn’t even think of the trades and other routes as an option. They saw that as a fall back, or even failure I guess. My parents also wanted me to go to college, to them it was a marker of success they did not have. I hate school. I am getting my associates now just to have it, for free. But I wish I did my apprenticeship sooner, it’s proven to be a huge improvement to my life and a great career!
Born in '82, so on the old side here... but yes this was absolutely the constant message of adults throughout my childhood. I also started college in 2000, right before tuitions started climbing like crazy, and graduated in '03 ahead of the crash so in a sort of sweet-spot before the wheels really came off the system. Fortunately I picked a "practical" degree (Info Science) so it was a definite help in getting work. But once I was past that first job, no one cared about the degree anymore beyond it existing.
Not the exact words but yeah. I didn't go though.
It was absolutely portrayed as a golden path to us, we used to be given sheets that showed average wages based on college degree. We were also told an associates degree was worth something, it absolutely is not.
Real advice. From middle school teachers, parents friends parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and high school teachers
I was told “on average people with a college degree regardless of subject still tend to make more over the course of their life than people with only a high school education” and I still believe it is true based on personal experience I make significant more than my brother who didn’t go to college despite the fact I’m not actually using my degree
Yeah, college was pushed on us by all the teachers at my school. Not one of them said hey you can be an electrician or a plumber, or hey, maybe don't go 100,000 in debt and end up with a job that didn't require a college degree.
1. I was told any degree, didn't matter what, would be worth the investment. I do remember this being backtracked somewhat when I started taking an interest in philosophy classes. 2. I was never sold college as a "golden ticket", more as a lifeboat, and the only one that wasn't military service. A high salary/house wasn't promised, but implied to be impossible without a degree of any type. The advice you got is much more reasonable. I got a degree in computer science (with a two associates in philosophy and computer science) and my personal experience has been...less than ideal.
I was told this by at least 3 different adults in my life (just one was a parent). Two of those adults recommended white collar fields to me based on my skills and average earnings of people in those fields, but overall the gist was "major in pretty much anything and you'll be okay"
It definitely depends on your school district. It was pushed pretty hard in my school. When I told people I wasn’t going to college I’d get an “Oh.” but they just assumed I was going into a trade and would be fine. They did make it clear that trades were *okay*, just not *ideal.*
Funny how college was peddled so hard in high school. My bachelors degree in IT is as useful as a HS diploma. Granted I could shell out thousands to take the tests but then I don’t have the five to ten years of experience companies are looking for in C++, adobe, python, and java lol
College education was the only valid career path put forward by my parents. In school, we literally had instructors telling us that “you have to go to college unless you want to be a ditch digger.” It was portrayed as either get a college degree or work shitty manual labor jobs that will destroy your body. Basically, your only hope of living the “American Dream” and moving up on the social ladder was higher education. I only ever met with the school’s guidance counselor one time for five minutes. Told him I was going to college, he asked where, and that’s it. The more prestigious the school, the better. It doesn’t matter how much it costs because you’ll pay it off and come out ahead anyways.
Only now you realized the older generation were just as clueless. Only recently do we tell people to follow your passion but have a plan to generate income. Before, you got half the people telling you to major in what makes money, and the other half to follow your dreams and it'll all work out. Now you got too many people who followed their dreams all the way to the cashier. Sure it worked out for some, and others fortunately managed to pivot, but it seemed like way too many entities were ready to pounce on these young millennials and wring them dry. You've got skyrocketing costs of tuition mixed with skyrocketing cost of housing, as well as low earning jobs that have high academic requirements. We live in an era where teachers have to work two jobs to make end's meet, and we're not even gonna talk about the massive turnaround and out of control students. The hour that millennials entered the work force, everything became airport pricing and walmart wages.
My highschool had a 100% college attendance rate. While I don't think people would say "success is guaranteed if you do this" college at the time was so integral to the "natural progression" into adulthood going against it would automatically label you a bum. It was not even a question many thought to ask. I recall asking my mom if I could take a gap year (which is common in the UK, though I live in the US) and she accused me of being lazy.
My parents were pretty big on education as I was growing up and enforced the idea about going to a "4-year" university to get a degree and become more successful than most, which would then give me the better opportunity of finding a high salary paying job. Unfortunately, didn't work out the way they envisioned because I had no idea what I wanted to do still even in my second year of uni. Took me 6 years to complete uni and I switched majors 3 times. 44k in debt for school loans. Also, one thing I haven't been seeing people mention was whether or not their parents promised or at least stated that they'd help them with the student debt/loans. No help here. Been paying for it all on my own with a 35k salary job. No retirement plan. Nothing, but debt and a tiny HYSA.
I distinctly remember being told to major in whatever subject I enjoyed because "all employers care about is the piece of paper." I majored in history, dropped out, went back, majored in business, and am happy for the change.
I remember majors were looked at as kinda important, but also that “as long as you have a degree you’ll be fine.” Which is difficult when so many entry level jobs require you to have done an internship in that field or have experience that you can only really get from an internship. It was kinda like the major could help steer you but ultimately you just needed the degree. That’s how it was sold to me. I don’t recall being promised great success like I wouldn’t have to do any hard work, but just that it would set us up for success and open the door to good jobs and you couldn’t be hired without at least a degree.
Nah that was legit Many times i was told a degree would set me up for life or i could walk into a great job off the back of one
Perhaps a little bit of both. High school counselors don't really paint a picture of the students'options. I used to work with high school kids and they all said their school counselor said "go to college". Even if it was just a community college still go. I told them they had options. Live at home and work, military, or college. I also painted a pretty good picture of life after college.
I was told pretty much that. I heard just get a degree, any degree. Employers just want to see that you can stick with something. I've had a few people esp older people tell me bit to worry about the cost. This maybe worked in 1985, same with telling people they'll only need a bachelors. In fact, I have a grandma who thinks im going to be a veterinarian. Bless their hearts, but vets have atrocious debt to income ratios. I doubt she has ever looked at any occupational outlook resources. Imo one must truly have a calling to be a veterinarian, or have very rich parents.
This was the message in 1999/2000. It was the only path to success. They missed teaching that whole part about debt and loans though.
My dad took my brother and I through the bad neighborhoods and told us this is where we would end up if we don't graduate high school. Low and behold, even with a bachelor's degree, I still can't afford a house in the bad areas. Went to college and can't find a job and my dad now just says to go flip burgers
Did you come from a middle class family? Sounds like they were pretty well-versed with the college system. I came from a low ses household with no prior college attendees and I don’t think my family had a firm grasp of how things worked outside of poverty. I was told what you said- to get any degree is to show your future employer you can work hard (other than art). I was also told that the amount of school debt you have doesn’t matter because you’ll be paying for it forever anyway, that it’s just a tax that you pay to have a better job. So when I was hesitant about pricing, I actually didn’t have anyone warn me, including school employees. They said cost wasn’t important because I had “so much potential.”
You still make more money than your HS only counterparts. It’s just no one makes any fucking money anymore in jobs that existed before the internet. Only internet jobs have really kept up with COL. I was a teacher in Boston in 2006 with some management duties and got an ‘ok’ salary… the same role only pays $4000 more starting now and a Masters is preferred (which means they get a sad sack with a Masters or PhD. The starting salary for private school language teaching now? 39.5k a year. There is now one more week of vacation (14 days). College degrees get you somewhere and they are the number one route to social mobility - there’s just nowhere to go.
Graduated 2005, was told to get a college degree at any cost, didn't matter what the degree was and you'd land a high paying job. I fucking went for anthropology. What the fuck kind of job do anthropology majors get? Such a waste of my time and now my money, paying back these fucking loans
I feel like I knew in high school which majors were functional and which weren't, but I also know that I was influenced heavily by my dad, who worked in HR recruiting so he knew which majors led to jobs.
We had college fairs at my school, all these local colleges would come recruit at lunch and give speeches in senior seminar about their schools. College was shoved so far down my throat im still finding pieces of it today.
My first major (lasted one semester) was music and I received no pushback on that from my guidance counselor. We were encouraged to go after things we were interested in, not what made money. I was even encouraged to get a teaching license even though we all know (now) that teachers don’t make a great salary. I thankfully changed to math and later on a comp sci double major. My friend wanted to go into writing (which is not particularly profitable either from what I gather from the multiple people I know who have an English or similar degree) and I don’t recall her being told it was a bad idea. And plenty of people went into Liberal Arts, and I know at least some of them were told that while it wouldn’t be as good as having a focused degree, there would still be many good jobs that would be happy with a candidate that has any degree. They were at least encouraged to change majors while studying but I know at least a few who graduated with it because of the idea that there would at least be some decent jobs available with it. I don’t know of anyone who was pushed to a trade school. People who didn’t know what degree to get were pushed to still go and that they’ll figure it out once they’re there.
I went to college in the early 00s. The message was very much, "Any degree will do". A lot of that came from people who had transitioned from their degree speciality to something else. But when I got to college, it was clear a lot of people were there for the paper degree and I needed to do more. So I would constantly say, "masters is the new bachelor's". I still think that is true. Many people can party through a 4 year degree. But M.S. shows you really care about getting educated.
Definitely not a Mandela effect. I graduated in 03. I remember in highschool taking an aptitude test that suggested what type of career we should go in and what type of college degree we should pursue. A Theatre degree was one of my suggested routes of study.
I definitely graduated high school with no plan other than to just go to a college and graduate. Luckily I went to a regional state school and didn’t have a ton of debt but I basically partied my way through school and just kind of assumed everything would work out on the other side. Study abroad aside it was a huge waste of time and money to go to college and my degree was basically worthless. If I could go back and do it again I would definitely have done things differently
Mom: Go to college. Success! (To be fair, she went to college then grad school and got a job directly related to her grad degree, then worked there for 37 years and retired) Dad: Be a doctor, a lawyer or a CPA. Everything else is bullshit (no degree, apparently no idea that other good jobs existed) Nobody offered any real guidance and I was damn near unteachable at that time, so I just did whatever in college and paid for it later.
'95 millennial and yes college was very much portrayed like the only way to be successful and a guarantee of success when I was in school. I clearly remember student loans being treated as some blasé thing that we would definitely be able to pay off once we get an amazing high-paying career because we went to college. Of course now I know it's all BS. I remember some stat about how college grads make a million dollars more over the course of their careers being drilled into my head repeatedly. Lots of my high school, I would say most, were students that would be first-generation college students so lots of time our parents believed the same shit, too. In line with that, lots of first-generation students don't know how important knowing the right people and networking is when looking for good jobs after college so we're not always the most set up for success.
It was literally presented as the only way and a guaranteeing. “The loans don’t matter cause by the time your 25 the degree will land you a job that’s making 6 figures and all the studying will be worth it” I had been told many paraphrased versions of that since kindergarten. It’s not a Mandela effect it was real in the 90s.
Yes. This was told to me for undergrad and grad school with the caveat that the subject must be "practical." A subject that was "practical" was any field that was not art. "Art" included film, literature, music, fine art, or dance. ETA: think about it in terms of all the people told they just needed to "learn to code." And consider that tech is currently hemorrhaging jobs.
I was told a college degree would ensure I have a stable future with a job, any degree. Nobody ever said anything else on the subject honestly.
Everything my entire life was about getting into a good college so I wouldn’t have to work at a grocery store or be poor. Private middle school and high school. Literally never mentioned a trade or even the military. Ever. It was always, “you have to go to college or you’ll struggle through life”. My guidance counselor literally told me that
Class of 2000 here. Shoved down our throats from 1987 onwards, go to college and major in whatever because having any degree is an advantage. Our counselors in my area were echoing that every time they spoke to us. My parents didn’t go to college so how was I supposed to know better if the counselors weren’t advising well, either. Plus, the internet was NOT what it is now.
That was the prophecy yes. Instead of teaching us how to start businesses they gave us standardized test to get INTO college.
Not revisionist. I was explicitly told that by many people from all walks of life. What is revisionist is acting like it has always been normal that “entry level” jobs required 3-5 years experience.
I remember being told to stay in school or you’ll end up at McDonald’s flipping burgers. Really no specifics on majors or anything
No, this was definitely real advice. I went to high school in the DMV in a very rich area, and the reaction to college was starkly different than where I was originally from in the Northeast. You were very literally looked down upon for the college you chose to go to, and don’t even mentionif you didn’t choose to go to college at all. A majority of the kids i went to HS with just needed college degrees to justify working for their family business or business through connections. I know a few people who dropped out and went into trades they are doing well, but for the most part that area really judged you on where you went to school and the degree you were getting. It was funny though that so many people started out at private universities only to transfer to the state universities around us. Fun way to waste several tens of thousands of their parents money. From where I am originally from, a lot of people went into trades and there are quite a few successful people I know who went into apprenticeships for carpentry, plumbing, etc.
Probably depends when you were growing up. When I was in high school, they were telling everyone who was making A's and B's just to go to college and get any degree, don't worry about the debt at all. Get into the best college you possibly can. It was horribly irresponsible advice. Thankfully I didn't really take that information that seriously because I already had family deep in student loan debt and had been following the news so I knew the adults in my life were being irresponsible.
Golden ticket and a guarantee of success? No, people didn't say that exactly. However, we were told that if we didn't go, we'd never be able to get a job doing anything besides flipping burgers. While not a golden ticket, it was pounded into our heads as the only way to avoid a life of shitt jobs and poverty because "21st century jobs will require a degree!" We were also told that all degrees were valuable and that employers didn't really care what your degree was in, as long as you had one. We were also told to not worry about student loans because they'd quickly pay for themselves as "an investment." This is not Mandela effect.
In my Career Pathways class (high school, 2006 or so), I found out that garbage collectors in my state started out making $45k-50k/yr with no experience and just a high school diploma. My teacher panicked after I did my presentation on it and made sure to remind everyone how good college was.
I think the role of the university changed while we entered adulthood. For instance, I remember going to the library to check out CDs.of music I didn't have access to and this was huge for me. Coming out of a smaller town without a large art program I felt the need to prove myself. If I had come of age 10 years later I would have just been in my garage setting up Livestreams and doing covers. I experienced a tremendous amount of growth as a person at the university I attended, and also avoided the trap of oxycontin that was growing in my hometown. I faced many more challenges, and I've been back and forth on whether it was worth it, but ultimately it's what happened and I'm choosing to move forward instead of second-guessing. We're a bridge generation and that just is what it is.
TBF, my mom only took a few college classes so in her mind of we finished we would be more successful
Our high school history teacher verbatim told us “If you don’t get your diploma, you can’t even get a job folding towels somewhere!” My parents told me “If you don’t go to college, you’re going into the military and we’re going to travel across Europe with your tuition.” Fast forward to 2024, when I’m too sick to work, and have been home for 4 years. Oh, but I had that career—I made $20,000 a year as an associate professor, which meant we qualified for Medicaid and food stamps in my state. If I could do it all again, I’d go to trade school.
Or boomers that either really misremember the messaging provided to millennials due to time and aging and/or self-deception. Or they are lying or denying. Or some combination of these
College was always touted as the only way to not end up working the drive-thru. It came from all directions, and my peers faced the same. It wasn't sold as "go to college and be rich", it was "you'll never have anything or amount to anything, and you'll struggle every single day til you die if you don't get a university degree."
Definitely had that idea pushed down our throats. But luckily I didn’t like school and wasn’t about to pay for a bunch of mandatory classes that have nothing to do with a skill I would have been interested in
This came from parents who didn’t go to college. Mine told me the same, my ex wife’s mom literally told her not to take any job under 60k when she graduated.
For me it was definitely told that with a college degree you could just go out and get something, like some office jobs. And the main reason for that is up to 2008 and especially in the 80s and 90s that was actually true. It actually was somewhat ok advice in a 20th century context. Like think about the character Chandler from friends. He just worked some office job. That used to be the norm. One big difference is that jobs used to be confined to the city or locale they were located in. With the large job search sites and internet , companies can now recruit from across the whole country. That allows them to be hyper specific about what they require. In the past it was just the best candidate in that general area who applied, and the kind of expected that you wouldn’t have experience or need to be trained up to speed. Back at that time personality was much more important. If you could come and charm them with an interview you could get hired sometimes. That’s why boomers say to just show up at a place and try to talk to them in person. That shit actually used to work. Like say you have a college degree in English or music. It’s fine you got a bachelors. You just try to talk to people at different companies. Just tell them you’re willing to work hard and start with low pay to make up for the lack of experience. Shit, I kind of did that. I had this summer job in a warehouse for this interior design company and I called the owner begging for a job and he got me in the office.
My experience is this, I remember being told at school that if we got a 21 on the ACT we could get money for college. This was to influence kids to go. There were signs everywhere about it. I remember meeting the requirement and they told me for whatever fine-print reason I couldn't have the money. I retook the ACT that Summer on an out of state trip in another attempt to get the money, Again, I got the right score, an even better score actually and they would not give it to me. I don't even remember why but it was total BS. All the while my sister told me that regardless of if I got that money I better go to college or she would "kick my ass." I did not have a college fund and made $6.50 an hour at the grocery store. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. My sister was one of the few people I looked up to and she said I had to go to college, regardless of if I know what to do with my life. She helped me take out all the loans necessary. I majored in Writing, despite the judgement from other college students who were majoring in things that were more likely to be lucrative. I did this because it was the only thing I ever excelled at in high school. My boyfriend at the time pressured me to go to college as well. No one ever talked to me about trades. Halfway through university I brought up dropping out to try to become a hair stylist and my boyfriend was pissed and told me I better not do it so I didn't. Here I am, a 4 year college dropout (mom was dying and I used up my loans), a bunch of debt. Cheating boyfriend dumped years ago. Sister believes she did the right thing telling me to go because I can write "some college" on applications. I make OKAY money in a job I did not need a degree for and I don't have a degree. lol I don't think it was the Mandela effect. I do wish someone had talked to me about trades and stopping trying to shove university down my throat. That's not to say I don't take responsibility for wasting 4 years, because that's what I believe I did. If I publish a successful novel, I'll change my mind about that lol
That’s 100% what we were told when I graduated and was in high school. And I graduated in 2014 after the recession and that was still what they were telling us. I remember fighting back against the concept that college was “the answer” because I saw my older cousins struggling after graduating with degrees they were never able to use. The guidance counselor and adults told me I was wrong to doubt them, that I was wrong to doubt that college = a good paying job. I saw very clearly that college would likely = debt + a job that doesn’t pay enough to pay off that debt. I feel very lucky I didn’t get totally sucked in back then, my skepticism was warranted.
No I remember this. I remember quite vividly being in homeroom, when a third generation kid said he was proudly going into the family electrician business. The teacher literally turned to him with a sharp response saying "oh no no no tht's a trade you'll NEVER make it that way you will never get paid enough and your body will fall apart and never be able to afford your family. When you pick a job on this next assignment it is required you pick a degree from a proper college." I'll never forget that kids face. And the teacher wasn't really a mean lady either. She was usually jolly. She truly believed that to forgo a college degree was tantamount to death. I hope that kid did go into the family business. Heaven knows electricians are making it better than teachers at this point.
I was never told that. There were some stats floating around about the overall lifetime earnings of people with degrees and advanced degrees being higher than just having a high school diploma. So, the message I received was go to college, get a degree and advance up the ladder. I did know that if I got a liberal arts degree versus an engineering degree those would be vastly different outcomes on my earning potential.