This is Why U.S. college educations are worthless.

Your perception about jobs is correct. From my old IT colleagues I hear that many great IT jobs are still going unfilled. So much so I was recently called by a recruiter I had done business with for many years.

My friend the recruiter had the sound of desperation when he called me. He asked half pleading that he needed me to do a 6 month job as an IBM IMS Data Base Administrator in Seattle (I was an IMS DBA in my younger days.)

When I heard his plea I laughed and exclaimed “…I have been retired many years Tom. I have forgotten most of that…” But he kept on “… listen you know more than any of these kids do. You know IBM stopped training on IMS many years ago. The manager of that unit has no idea what his IMS DBs are doing. He just prays they don’t crash. When it does crash it cost him an arm in leg to get back up. They desperately need you to teach them how to manage that IMS thing…”

I hated to turn Tom down. But I knew if I took that job it would be years before I made it home again. Their only hope is to hire someone to convert that IMS DB to a DB2 DB and that person is not me. I will plod along with my trading and enjoy life.

Quote from WS_MJH:

thanks for sharing your story. I think it's a good summation of the problems with the current economy. There are jobs out there, but in fields which not many people can do. Software engineering is a hard field that few can master, yet there's huge demand. The problem is that not a lot of people can competently do these jobs. So whenever I hear people say there's tons of jobs but people are not trained for them, I laugh. If more people could mentally handle those jobs, they'd do them.
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Late to this conversation, but I wanted to add that College educations are not worth it if you haven't been awarded some scholarship money. In that case, yes, it's a terrible investment, but if you're someone that earned a lot of money to attend a good school, it's not that others feel entitled more than they have to compete with such students who don't have money problems immediately hanging over their heads during college, and subsequently they perform a lot better.

I was a Kentucky Governor's Scholar, awarded a substantially valuable scholarship to a school now charging more than $40,000 per year after tuition, room, and board with miscellaneous costs halved between school tuition and board.

That I received grants, and not loans, was more than enough incentive for me to go to college. Others that do not excel during high school certainly have no chance of excelling at anything other than vocational aptitudes they otherwise had without having to go to college.

College educations are not worthless, and they aren't anything like a high school degree. If you haven't gotten enough scholarship money then it really is a bad proposition, but those of us who excelled will always have advantages over college graduates who were only given loans. It is a risk that's not worth the reward, and if you haven't received grants and scholarship money, then college really is an enormous expense that only greedy students who probably don't have any idea what they'll study until after they've been to the college for awhile will find out, drop out, or be weeded out through academic probation.

Graduation of any college says something about the student, but what they studied and how they apply it to their first jobs is way more important than the fact that they have a degree.
 
That's precisely the problem. The supply of college graduates is far too high because student loans are so accessible. When I went to school this wasn't the case so I did two years at a Community College and then transfered to a two year university. Not long after, I completed a Master's Degree with borrowed money in the form of a student loan. Had the loan not been available I wouldn't have gone to the school of my choice because it was damn expensive.

Not only do you get a student loan to pay the tuition, you get extra dollars to whatever you please with it. Supposedly, these dollars are meant to cover other college costs such as books and transportation but they don't really find their way into those products and/or services. They get spent on blue jeans and popular apparel. You gotta look hip when you go off to college to impress the laidies.

Quote from El Guapo:

Not in disagreement with your arguments, just stepping in with this...

I like Peter Schiff's idea, and perhaps others, to eliminate Sallie Mae. Possible course to lower tutions. Its simple, stop the government backed loan program, less students are then able to get student loans and thus cannot pay for tution. Demand falls off the cliff, low and behold, universities suddenly lower tuition to encurage enrollment. Until then, and with Sallie Mae, universities have no skin in the game with the government backed guarentee loan programs. I'm not against student loans, just those backed by my tax dollars. If the universities want to mae the loans, they should take on the full risk of default themselves. Perhaps we'll see a lot less of these useless degrees.

Just sayin'
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"The world needs ditchdiggers too."

A generation or two has been sold this bill of crap about college and post-grad education. Now we've got tens of thousands of lawyers with nothing to do, so they run around making everyone's lives miserable. In the meantime, good luck getting a fucking plumber or electrician to EVER call you back.

Not everyone is cut out for higher education. There is A LOT of money to be made in the trades and we've got vast shortages.

In the midwest, they're begging for SKILLED manufacturing workers. These are real jobs that pay well above the national average and this country literally - even with 9% unemployment - doesn't have the workers to fill them. That disaffected douchebag serving me my sandwich at Panera - crushed by $50K in debt from getting a degree in woman's studies at (name your favorite overpriced school) - would find him/herself in far better shape by going to a votech school (where their tuition might even get paid for by some ball-bearing manufacturer).

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_skilled-labor.html
 
Quote from ralph00:

"The world needs ditchdiggers too."

In the midwest, they're begging for SKILLED manufacturing workers. These are real jobs that pay well above the national average and this country literally - even with 9% unemployment - doesn't have the workers to fill them. That disaffected douchebag serving me my sandwich at Panera - crushed by $50K in debt from getting a degree in woman's studies at (name your favorite overpriced school) - would find him/herself in far better shape by going to a votech school (where their tuition might even get paid for by some ball-bearing manufacturer).

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_skilled-labor.html
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Very true, but how many of the "Occupy" crowd would be willing to re-train and work a job that requires, uh, real work? They think they're entitled to some bogus academic/gov't/nonprofit job where they can use their "East European Lesbian Literature" degree.

I've recently heard of several guys who bypassed college and now make more than almost any college grad in their mid-20s in the natural gas field. But they have to work hard.
 
Quote from RewriteQuran:

Our education is designed/tuned to create employees and NOT employers.
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Reminds me of a story. I met this guy and he designed a lock. Dropped the design into the company suggestion box and was awarded a few thou. He was pretty proud of himself as he should be. I looked at him and thought to myself he could have formed his own company and sold the locks to his employer amd made millions (he saved the co a large sum of money with his lock design and got a paltry award).

Oh well.
 
Quote from bwolinsky:

That I received grants, and not loans, was more than enough incentive for me to go to college. Others that do not excel during high school certainly have no chance of excelling at anything other than vocational aptitudes they otherwise had without having to go to college.
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That's just plain ignorant.
 
Quote from ralph00:

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Not everyone is cut out for higher education. There is A LOT of money to be made in the trades and we've got vast shortages....
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True! Most millionaires I know have only high-school dipolmas or high school drop-outs. They started to work for someone when they were young. By their mid-twenties, they became experts in their trades
and started their own businesses. Now they are in their thirties, they made enough to retire. The college graduates with advance degrees I know were happy to work for someone because of their college debts. Now many of them are either umemployed or underemployed. Even those with advance degrees holding good pay professional jobs are scare of losing their jobs. I doubt they can retire early.
 
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