In this particular case, the “whining” is nothing more than blame-shifting and a refusal to take accountability for their own lives. “Mommy and daddy promised me I’d have a job if I went to college so how dare anyone suggest I flip burgers now!”
No, I don’t think telling someone with that attitude to grow up is wrong. Especially in the midst of a situation where Mommy & Daddy are just as fucked but without the benefit of that degree when they all apply at the job that’s “beneath” said Facebook poster.
I have to admit I feel very much this way, as someone in their mid-20s. I was constantly pressured by my parents and extended family (most of whom are professors or work in administration at colleges) to attend college, with no financial contribution from them - thank goodness I didn’t listen, and went off to live my own life with the attitude that you shouldn’t go to college just to go - it should be reasoned and planned and the payoff should justify the expense. I may work service jobs (which I happen to enjoy!) but at least I’m not carrying 30k+ of debt for a degree I’m not using, like 80% of my coworkers under 45.
My facebook feed is full of (high school) schoolmates of mine complaining variously about their crippling student debt, the job they got thanks to their degree which doesn’t pay as much or make them feel as awesome as they think they deserve, or the job they have that doesn’t use their degree but pays more than anything they could find that would. If I could understand how the world worked at 18, why can’t they almost a decade later!!
No, the value of degrees changes pretty slowly with time. The value of a CS degree dipped a bit with the dotcom crash and subsequent recession, but it never dropped below the value of an English degree or an International Relations degree. The average starting salary of someone with a BS in CS has been pretty good for decades.
The reason that STEM degrees are more valuable is because people with them don’t end up with crappy jobs as often. The end up with better jobs. If you presuppose that you’re going to get a crappy job, then, yes, it doesn’t matter what degree you get. But we have strong empirical evidence that, yes, it does matter. Because people with useful degrees can get better jobs.
I’m not sure where you got this impression, but you’re wrong. I and many other people I know with CS degrees got “real” jobs right out of college. I know plenty of people who don’t have CS degrees, but who know how to code anyway, and they got real jobs. I went to a career fair at my alma mater a few weeks ago, recruiting for the company I work for. We offer really good jobs to people who are just graduating with undergraduate. My booth was within 50 feet of booths from Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and a dozen other well-known tech companies. They’re all hiring. Google, Apple, and Facebook (to name a few) have made mention of specific large hiring initiatives this year. The idea that the only jobs out there are crappy call center and security guard jobs is bollocks.
Now, I’m not saying that everybody can or should get a CS degree. But we should recognize that there’s an objective difference between the value of a STEM degree and other degrees. Some degrees impart knowledge and skills that are obviously demonstrably valued by people who make hiring decisions. Some don’t.
I felt burned by the whole “follow your dreams” thing. But then I actually started following my dreams beyond the whole “dreaming” stage, and they actually can come true. Not everyone can be a rock star, but there are some really cool industries out there that are eager for focused, hard working people. It takes paying your dues, taking some risks, and relentless laser-sharp focus, but it’s entirely possible for a somewhat smart person to have a chance at being a rising star in something neat.
I know it’s different when you have kids and a mortgage and all that- and that particular kind of stability has never yet appealed to me. But if you are free and have the energy, why just give up? You only get one shot at life.
It seems to me like a lot of the "follow your dreams’ sour grapes is self-justification. Working a pays-the-rent job is nothing to be ashamed of, but neither is shooting realistically for the stars.
I don’t think people are saying that there is anything wrong with pursuing something that you want.
I think people are saying that it is a luxury to expect to get what you want. Especially without paying your dues. Sometimes it takes years of paying dues to be able to get just a fraction of your particular dream. Sometimes all you ever do is “pay dues”.
I studied environmental scientist in school. It put in nine years of hard course work to this effort. I’m currently employed as an environmental scientist. I don’t know what I imagined I’d be doing fifteen years ago–when environmental science started to appeal to me as a potential career. But it wasn’t what I am doing now.
Sure, I had my fun slogging in marshes and swamps for a few years, escaping the alligators and the snakes, working underneath the big, open sky
(and sun…and rain…and lightening). But the trade-off was a salary that barely paid the bills and lots of mental and physical drudgery. Again…that wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t my “dream”, if you can say I even had one. But I could see that I was in the “paying dues” part of my career. I had to go through “THIS SUCKS!!” to get to something better.
And now I’m a bureaucrat. I spend my days editing and reviewing reports, fielding questions from the public and the press, and sitting in meetings all day long. I’m still a scientist, mind you. I still use the skills I obtained in school and in all my different experiences. But again, this wasn’t what I expected when I set out on this journey. I didn’t imagine the tedium, the boredom, all the tasks that I HATE doing. There is no fun in my job, though it’s not hellish or anything. The only aspect of coolness is just knowing that I’m part of the grand process that ensures protection of the environment. I serve the public responsibly, and I take heart in this.
I’m not going to get “burned out”…though I realize that this does happen to some people. I guess what keeps me in check is knowing that 99% of the people in the world–in the history of the world–do not have the luxury to follow dreams for a living. This is true even for people who’ve worked hard in school, too. So continually bringing up how hard you’ve worked in school…it’s meaningless. EVERYONE works hard in this life. Your efforts don’t make you more entitled to anything than anyone else. It just sets you on a certain course, and that course can meander at any time. The winners are the ones who can adjust and re-navigate wherever it takes them, without dropping out of the game entirely.
A person can follow dreams in other arenas of life and get the same fulfillment that a “dream” career does. Putting all your ego-eggs in one basket is setting yourself for major disappointment.
It has nothing to do with “entitlement”. “Technocrats” enjoy a superior economic advantage because they make the stuff that people actually use to live their lives.
I would hardly call IT workers a “ruling class”. Most of them can probably be better described as “microserfs”. You have a lot of guys like Voyager who probably love this tech shit so much they relish the opportunity to work on some problem all though the night. My boss is like that. But for the most part I see a bunch of socially “off” people who are enslaved to supporting the systems they maintain because they either are afraid of losing their high-ish income jobs, they don’t have the social skills to push back against unreasonible requests, they have nothing else they feel passionately about like friends or family or hobbies or they suffer froms some sort of compulsion that prevents them from just saying “fuck it” and putting it down for another day.
I wouldn’t call being a mid-level functionary in various corporate organizations as my “dream”.
This really is a tired old horse. If more people actually liked getting STEM degrees and did, then these degrees would be less valuable. But they don’t, and most people find the idea of being an engineer or coder to be undesirable.
I had an easy time making more money at 26 than the mid-career peak for just about any conventional engineering field. $150k mid-career is really not enough to spend years studying something you don’t like and then working in that industry for 20 years. Engineering jobs are stable enough, but there is little room for the huge upside you get from working in business, finance, or even law. Those fields offer enough big enough pots of gold at the end to justify doing something you hate for awhile. In most cases, STEM fields just don’t. The fact that Google, Apple, and Amazon are hiring a few hundred people among them doesn’t really suggest that thousands of more kids should run out and get degrees they hate. Goldman is probably hiring a few hundred people, too. But no matter how hard most kids work in college, they are probably not going to get the job at Goldman.
Medicine is not immune to this, either. The world just doesn’t need that many anesthesiologists, exotic brain surgeons, cosmetic dermatologists, or other luxury specializations. We do need more pediatricians, willing to work grueling hours for much lower pay. So going into medicine to get rich is as much a crapshoot as getting an English degree and going into investment banking.
Less valuable, yes. As low value as an English degree? I doubt it very strongly. The supply side of education will change the price, obviously. But the demand for engineers and coders and scientists is based on real objective results that those people can generate, not on fashion.
Doesn’t getting a good job in business, finance, or law pretty much require post-graduate education? If so, we’re not really comparing apples to apples. There’s no reason that you can’t get a STEM undergrad degree and learn some useful and valuable skills to fall back on, then go on to get your MBA/JD. I hear managers and lawyers who understand technical fields do pretty well for themselves, too. And if the lucrative future you hoped for doesn’t come to pass, then you can maybe get a good-paying job coding rather than a shitty job as a security guard.
Google alone planned to hire 6000+ people this year. You’re off by two orders of magnitude in your estimation of the market. I’m also not suggesting that people get a degree in something they hate. Did you hate all the subjects you didn’t major in in school? Along with my CS degree I took as many pre-law and film studies classes as I could fit in, because they were awesome. If those had been a better fit, it wouldn’t have been tragic for me to adjust to pursuing other interests.
That’s true. I’m not suggesting that anyone go into STEM fields to get rich. I’m saying they can get good, well-paying jobs using the skills they learn in school. I don’t think choosing a field based on where you can get really rich is a great plan for most people. Very very few people are ever going to get very rich.
In my experience those who like what they do work twice as hard and have ten times the fun as those who don’t. My kids haven’t had any trouble knowing how to work hard, and they also haven’t had any trouble working hard at the stuff they love.
As for me, I think it is tremendously amusing that I get paid so much for having a good time. I get interesting challenges tossed at me, I have a good time meeting them, and they give me a giant bonus. The money is great, no doubt about it, but the real thing I love is learning new stuff.
The person I’m thinking of didn’t just think he was smart; he was smart. And how do you explain the subset of people in one department who are having a great time no matter what the environment, and the subset who think everything is awful. I know of plenty of examples of people who thought it was all a waste and no one could get ahead while people all around them were doing great.
The stuff I write probably makes CRM software seem exciting to the average person, but I love doing it. I don’t know anyone who spends full time cleaning white boards, but I do know plenty of event planners who love what they do. It would drive me nuts, but that is fine.
When you are new at something you do stuff to the specifications of another because you need to learn. But you can suggest new ways of doing it, and, once you know the ropes, you can either develop the specs or get a reputation for being good enough that people can give you very fuzzy requirements which you will then refine.
The kids who worked for me this summer got reasonably good requirements from me, but then refined it and implemented it with the stuff they had learned in school to a level far beyond what I was expecting. That is why it is important to have jobs open for kids right out of college. They learn about the real world, and they teach about the latest advances those busy all day in meetings don’t have time to pick up on.
I’ve been working for 31 years, and all but 1 /4 of those years have been great. The bad times was a job with a psycho boss and a crap project, and I got out of there before going insane or getting fired.
Sure not every second is spent in a state of euphoria - but having a great love life does not mean you’re in bed doing it 12 hours a day either.
Well, first, what monstro said: you have to be prepared to do nothing but pay your dues. The odds are that it won’t work out for many, many people. I know this myself. One of my lines is music, and you have to do that for the love of it or it will stomp you right into the ground.
And then, as you note, once dream one dead-ends, you have to find another dream - and relentlessly laser-focus on that.
Thank you. I’m glad not everyone around here is a real downer. Dreams have to be somewhat realistic. Most of the kids who expect to be NBA stars are going to be disappointed.
One of the reasons why kids today are so screwed is that it really helps to not have kids and a mortgage if you want to take risks with a job. We’re making those who want these things wait longer and longer before they can find their niche.
One reason is we want them to pay their dues emotionally - in disillusionment as well as in life experience and debt service.
Gen Y seems to owe society payback right out of the gates. Their presumption that the status quo of a corporatist economy needn’t apply to them ended up ranking well-to-do and not-so-well-to-do people alike - anyone who bought in.
Maybe “shooting for the moon” is a better metaphor - in that it’s going to take maximum investment of knowledge, effort, money and time just to get to the next nearest place. Just like Apollo 11.
