What is the "real world"?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think it is slightly sheltered environment to some degree, at least when you are speaking of “traditional” residential university environments. In what other job will you have onsite psychotherapy, medical care, financial assistance, career counselling, fitness centers, tutors, alumni networks, entertainment (theater/dance dept shows), and a large potential peer social group. Plus food service and housing if you desire it. Out in the “real world” you are not constantly surrounded by people whose own job is to ensure that obstacles to your peak performance at your job are removed, whether they be mental, physical, financial, or academic.

It certainly doesn’t shelter a person from all or even most painful experiences. I don’t think that’s what “college isn’t the real world” means…

22

Education is not the real world simply because of the consequences. It has nothing to do with the amount of work you put into something

Let’s say you try really hard, put in effort and flunk all your classes. What then? Nothing really, you just lost some money.

What happens when you flunk out of your job? You lose your apartment, your probably will lose your health care, perhaps your girl/boyfriend will dump you.

You can live fine without a degree, you can’t live very well in a box under the interstate.

The consequences of flunking out of school are nothing compared to the consequences of bieng unable to make it through life.

If you think school is harder than a real nine to five job where your mortgage and your kid’s welfare and your health insurance and the ablity to put a roof over your head even remotely is as stressful as going to school, then your stress is not correct.

This isn’t to say there isn’t stress, but the fact is I’ve seen people stress out over a spider worse than I stressed out when my father died.

The stress level is not relevant to the reality of the situation

23

This entire thread, so far, seems to be about whether the world of adult employment is or isn’t more “real” than the world of being a student. But to a biologist, neither of these is the REAL real world. The real world is a world containing millions of different species of life forms, many of which make a bigger contribution to keeping the whole biosphere going than the one species, Homo sapiens, making these comments and participating in all these different human lifestyles… And that, dear friends, is why biologists think the whole idea of any sphere of human life being the “real world” is just hilarious.

24

the real world is where you go after death.

25

I guess I really haven’t been living in reality.

26

Yes, and there’s no guarantee that things will be fair. No one is required to help me other than a fireman or police officer, but they’ll only help if I’m on fire or bleeding. I need to be sober and have resources available at all times, ready to deal with all issues, and any bad decisions I make can piss off the wrong person or people, blunt the forward progress of my team members’ careers, or bring my own career to a grinding halt. To some degree, I’ve made all of these mistakes; fortunately, I’m perceived to have made many more good decisions than bad.

I made a bad call last week, and didn’t delegate a few pop-up issues to others. So to meet a deadline, I worked 17 straight hours to produce pricing estimates for a proposal, went home at 3:00 AM, and returned five hours later, to spend another five hours defending those estimates. The proposal had to get to Contracts by COB that day. Period. Other than people arguing with me because they want my bid to be lower, there’s no one to correct my mistakes; what I put out is what is going out, and a handful of people will have full time jobs for a couple of years if we win, but it’ll be hellish for them (and me) if I underbid. It’s terrifying.

27

I’m thinking there’s a market for a new “realty” show, My Hell’s Worse Than Yours.

28

Already been done - Queen for a Day - Wikipedia

29

People usually go to school on scholarships or student loans in order to pay living expenses. If they flunk out, their scholarship and/or loans may be revoked. In effect, they have lost their income and inherited an asston of debt in the process that they have no hope of repaying on minimum wage. People often are receiving student insurance and when they flunk out; they lose their insurance too. They also get thrown out of the dorm they were living in.

How is that any less of a problem then losing a job? Seriously, I can’t get my mind around this completely irrational perspective.

As for mssmith’s contention that working while in college also isn’t the ‘‘real world’’ because it’s not your career, would you then say that the janitor who has been mopping floors for 20 years to support his family doesn’t live in the real world? How about the stay-at-home mom of seven? Does she live in the real world? If you work for the family farm, do you live in the real world? How about war veterans on disability? 12 year olds starving to death in Africa? It’s a fucking arbitrary distinction, is my point, based on nothing more than arrogance and an inability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Working 9-5 is not some holy grail of reality, it’s just another shitty thing of a list of shitty things people have to deal with, and anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves.

30

Not for everybody. Some people who work are blessed with relatives or friends who could and would help them out financially before things got bad enough that they were living in a cardboard box under the interstate. Some have a spouse that they could get health insurance through. Some girlfriends and boyfriends (or spouses) wouldn’t dump somebody the second they became unemployed, imagine that. Some people have enough in savings to get through a period of unemployment without losing their home. Do you only live in the “real world” if you’re one paycheck away from the streets and have a significant other who wouldn’t stick by you if you were unemployed?

31

Am I real?

32

In the real world, it’s difficult to get a loan. It is especially difficult if you have no employment and don’t plan on working for several years. It is even more difficult if you have no collateral. Sounds like a bubble to me.

How can a student loan or a scholarship be considered income? One is a break on the price of tuition. If the person flunks out they do not have to pay this back. The other is a loan.

I have never known anyone with student insurance. I do not believe it was offered at my university. I also did not know anyone who did not have health insurance. This is because full time students get to stay on their parents policy until the age of 25 (in NY at least). Sounds like a bubble to me.

While there are always going to be exceptions to the rule, if you flunk out you can always go home, get yourself together and figure out what the next step is. When you are 45-years old, married with a family of two you can not go back to live in your childhood bedroom as appealing as that may sound.

33

Richie, Olive is referring to a particular kind of graduate program in which the school gives you three things:

  1. a break in tuition,
  2. a so-called salary to live on while you study, which is usually just above the poverty line, and
  3. “insurance” that lets you receive medical treatment at the university’s health center, plus major trauma.

Losing a fellowship like that is exactly like losing a job.

34

That’s not true for everybody in college. It wasn’t true for olives- she became an emancipated minor at 17. AIUI, things have to be pretty bad at home for that to happen. It’s not true for college students who are estranged from their parents, or whose parents are too poor to take them in again. Some parents just aren’t accepting enough to let a kid who flunked out come home and “get themselves together again”.

People do it, though. Other 45-year-olds have family members or friends who can contribute enough financially to at least keep the wolf away from the door for a while.

35

I repeat that 99% of the people who say this are referring to people who go straight from a comfortable middle class existence, into college, and if grad school they go straight into that. In other words to people who have never spent one day without a safety net, and seem to avoid any movement towards self-sufficiency.

While these people rather often are in grad school, being in grad school does not mean you are one of these people. I definitely knew some in law school, who have never had a checking account, never signed a lease, didn;t know how to cook, or shop for groceries, etc. They just went from home to dorm to dorm to dorm.

Olives you seem a little wrapped up in believing there is not one shred of truth to the statement. Personally I would say there is some truth in the statement, as per the reasoning in my previous post.

And finally, I think we can all agree most people say inane things all the time, it’s nothing personal.

36

I think the “real world” is what we accept as just the way things are or choose to MAKE our “real world”.

Most often, whenever I have heard someone use this term, they are doing so in a condescending, critical way. As in “you need to get your act together and join the REAL WORLD” (because you’re just too damn happy and it pisses me off because I’M not and how DARE you feel free to make choices I never felt free to!)

or “How will your kids ever deal with the REAL WORLD the way you’re raising them?” (something I used to get from time to time from those who found it endlessly annoying/threatening? for some reason that I chose to Unschool my kids, feed them a healthy diet, co-sleep with them as infants/toddlers, and otherwise practice a style of parenting they apparently found personally offensive/a tacit criticism of THEIR parenting choices. :confused:)

My comeback to such people, esp. on the Unschooling issue, was MY kids are IN the real world every day. It’s the kids in school who aren’t. Literally, this was quite true. My kids were out and about, doing things, meeting and socializing with people of all ages and backgrounds, engaged in “real world”, hands on endeavors instead of inside a school building, segrated by age, and engaged in “busy/school work”. (and just FTR, both have since entered school, my son at high school level and my daughter at 2nd grade level, and both are doing quite well, my son even taking college level courses for the past 2 yrs and both thriving socially…it appears they were hardly handicapped by their late entry into the “real world of school”…and if that isn’t an oxymoron, I don’t know what is. :rolleyes:)

I myself am a returning college student currently, and of course it’s not “the real world” in the sense of working a job you hate for pay and wishing you could quit it and maybe do something else with your life (an attitude some seem to have towards college students…that old misery loves company and is jealous or suspicious of those who attend a different party).

But of course it IS the “real world” because I have chosen to make it so. I faced a situation that wasn’t working for me (ME not working for a while due to the econmic downturn), decided to treat it as an opportunity to do something I’d sort of wanted to for years (go back to school and up my degree, choosing a totally different major which will qualify me to enter a whole new career path) and made it work (combination of a Pell Grant and student loans).

I go full time and counting time on campus and time spent on assignments at home, it IS a full time job…I worked ft at went to school part time last time and so I opted to arrange things so I could focus fully on school this time around.

So “The Real World” is, imo, highly, almost completely, subjective. And we have a lot more control over it than we often give ourselves credit for.

37

Funny, I was going to say that the ego required to claim that one lives in the “real world” is borne of resentment and the perception that his/her hard work and academic achievements are not being properly valued.

(*oh, and unfortunately medical students are exquisitely, if not unfailingly, capable of harming patients.)

38

I think the real world is a place where one has to provide for oneself by actually providing for oneself. That is, procuring food by actually procuring food, building shelter by actually building shelter, bartering for useful things one cannot obtain with useful things that one can obtain (ie, bartering with abstract, useless things such as numbers on a bank’s database doesn’t qualify), etc.

Sadly, I don’t live in the real world - I doubt that any of you do, either.

39

I think at least a couple of people here have suggested that there are virtually no consequences to screwing around in college and/or flunking out.

What planet are these people from? Perhaps they grew up in such positive economic times that you could make a decent living in them without a college degree. I’m twenty years old and in college right now, and the impression I’ve gotten from people who drop out or risk flunking out is that it really sucks. Flunking out of college is an absolutely terrible for your standard of living, present and expected. Your employment opportunities drop big-time. And once you flunk out the first time, it becomes much harder to get back into college, because you’re less likely to get scholarships or other financial aid the second time in.

Is it as bad as accidentally screwing up someone’s brain during neurosurgery? Of course not. But the vast majority of people will never be neurosurgeons, and for those people, flunking out of college is one of the more life-damaging things that can happen to them. It could be worse, but you can say that about anything. There are consequences in college education, period.

40

Bith, my husband did finish college, but it was from a tiny Christian college, in “Bible” with a focus on “Missions”. Thus, from the work force’s point of view, he functionally has no college degree. For years he worked a second-shift factory job. While working that job he bought and paid off one house, traded it in for a very nice second, put his first wife through nursing school, had driveable cars, and went on Caribbean vacations. He wouldn’t say that (basically) not having a college degree has made his life suck in any way shape or form… in fact, while his current job in a fly electronics lab pays more and works regular hours, it’s far more stress for him, and he sort of hankers for the old days when he could leave work at the factory and relax at home. I on the other hand have a completely worthless PhD. All it’s ever going to get me is the fellowship money I was paid while getting it.

But about the Real World: I’ve never heard this term applied in a broad way; it’s always said by one person about one other specific person. Some college experiences are The Real World while others aren’t; some grad school experiences are and some aren’t; some full-time jobs are and some aren’t. I especially like the poster above who says that the “real world” is having to build your own shelter and get your own food. That’s really “real”.