me_irl

Aw, thanks. I'll definitely get the beard, but not the fancy telescope job, lol. That hand is already dealt and I took another path.

Because a degree isn't job training. Education and training are very different.

Think of how sex education and sex training are wildly different things. They can compliment each other but they aren't the same. You go to college for the education.

I think that "get a degree so you can get a job" mentality that our parents and parents parents touted is advice from an era gone by. An era when having a degree set you apart from a sea of high school diplomas. It didnt matter if it was in medieval art History. It was a university degree (so you were smarter than the average bear/could learn and be taught).

It got distorted over the years and now we are here. Lots of degrees, people "go to school to get a job", and then can't land one because...well. it just sucks

If you don’t understand why universities teach subjects you don’t approve of, then you don’t belong there

I thought it was just my uni. Sometimes class feels like a dialogue between the professor and myself with 20 random strangers in the room.

I get being a little shy, but I'm in second year now and people still aren't offering anything in class, it's weird.

This strikes me more as a result of the push for everyone to attend university, and the perversion of higher education's function to be almost purely vocational at the undergrad level. Now, companies no longer seem to offer any proper internal training for the majority of roles, preferring to just require a college degree, any degree, and say, "Eh, this person got a BA in Medieval Tibetan science fiction, they should be able to figure it out." Positions that my father was hired for in the 80s and 90s that he excelled in offered 3-6 month training periods, and were accepting pretty much any candidate who showed an interest in learning and could pass an interview. These same positions now want a BA, internships and multiple references to be considered, and have eliminated the training programs offered, assuming new hires will either know how to do the role already, or figure it out as they go.

While I think that anyone who in interested in doing so should have the right to pursue higher education, I think the push for everyone to do so is probably misguided, ultimately doing a disservice to most students, and to the idea of tertiary education as a whole. There are many people who don't have any particular interest in pursuing further studies beyond, "I would like to get a job and not die starving in a gutter, please." They aren't really going to benefit from a university education aimed at pursuing knowledge for its own sake, and this sort of curriculum also doesn't necessarily serve the increasing demand of universities to be fancy vocational institutes, so the course work gets dumbed down and everyone gets a subpar experience. Of course, students are going to be disengaged if they didn't really have any interest in rigorous study of a field to begin with, but have arrived at their chosen major by function of either how easy it is to get a degree (and thus, tick another box in HR software), or what the expected return on their investment in tuition will be.

In my opinion, rather than pushing for everyone to attend university, we ought to demand more of our primary and secondary educational institutes (though, in the US, we should probably have them properly functioning at their currently inadequate level first, I suppose), and stop letting companies off load the costs of job training upon applicants. Bring back more paid apprenticeships, in-house training, and stop stigmatizing anything but white-collar employment in an office or high-prestige fields, such as medicine and law. I'd also like to see companies required to list specific degree requirements, rather than simply having an exclusionary requirement for a degree, any degree, in their job postings. If a job requires advanced mathematics, sure, require a BS in Maths, or science fields that have a heavy emphasis on the same. If the degree requirement can be met with a BS in Zoology, a BA in Criminal Justice, or an "Oh, shit, this guy knows this ancient software our business relies on!" without any degree, I think it should be eliminated as a requirement. And that's not a hypothetical situation, but reflects my coworker, my boss and myself respectively, in my previous job at a pharmaceutical plant.

Pipe dreams, I know, but we should hardly be surprised that students are not as engaged when society has fundamentally altered the meaning of obtaining a degree at the university level, obliging many who otherwise had little interest, if any, to sign up for tertiary education as a bare minimum to possibly live somewhat comfortable lives.

Networking is also difficult if you're not neurotypical and/or handicapped...

Higher education has been like this for many decades, really the result of the great expansion of colleges and universities beyond the education of a tiny elite, that happened after WWII (at least partially a result of the GI Bill).

During the lockdowns, there was a lot of demand for software, so programmer wages were inflated due to demand. We're still in the pandemic, but now that everyone has decided to pretend we aren't, they don't want to pay programmers as much. So the tech companies decided to downsize and create an artificial surplus in order to lower wages. You're unemployed so that you'll compete with other CS graduates and drive down wages. It's a conspiracy.

I’m in the same boat!!

Ha ha, I sometimes threaten to make my kids ride on the roof, but of course they'd be into that. They know I'm mostly full of shit by this point anyway.

I'd like to try the paper ball fight thing, but with my luck some kid would lose an eye. Being a bus driver was probably a lot more fun before they all got video cameras.