English BA/MBA works for $9.25 at Goodwill and on food stamps (employed, unemployment)
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I think most people are (deliberately?) missing the point of the original article. It's a micro example that points to macro problems with today's job market. It's true she hasn't made perfect choices, but neither do most people. She's supposed to be "average," or slightly above, as she has a BA. And being slightly above average often yields poverty wages for young people in America today. That's something worth thinking about. Nobody has claimed that zero reasonably paid jobs exist for our brightest overacheivers. But, by definition, not everybody can be an overacheiver. Even were the required talent and ambition universal (and it's certainly not) for every young person to get an engineering degree, we'd be overrun with engineers and the same people who ridicule this woman would be mocking those folks. We need to think macro.
I worked crappy jobs for 2 years after college, but eventually something came through. I then got promoted and eventually made more money.
You are not going to make 50K right out of the gate. I didn't 15 years ago and people won't today. Personally, I think people's expectations are way out of wack, building a career takes time.
I knew a woman in a similar situation who worked at a school cafeteria. She didn't have a degree: I believe she just had a GED. When the government offered her free job training with guaranteed job placement upon passing the training, she declined. Why? She doesn't like computers.
Pardon me if I actually read your posts. /shakes head. If you're not lying about your feelings, then you're certainly disingenuous.
Someone disagreeing with you does not make them wrong, or mean they exhibit a lack of comprehension-something you clearly have issues with. The professors I have worked with in my professional life (yes! a random state school guy can make it! but according to you, I should not have had high expectations...) tend to have that characteristic, so you're in the right field.
Here we go again. We've had this discussion before. You aren't disagreeing with me. You are going on a complete tangent to what I said and making it sound like it's disagreeing with me. Perhaps you should consider the statistics from students who attended state schools like Georgia Tech and Michigan to those who attended Arizona State University (which has a near 90% acceptance rate) and see what the outlook has been. Good state schools have a much brighter outlook than random state schools.
I worked crappy jobs for 2 years after college, but eventually something came through. I then got promoted and eventually made more money.
You are not going to make 50K right out of the gate. I didn't 15 years ago and people won't today. Personally, I think people's expectations are way out of wack, building a career takes time.
This is very true.
And it doesn't help that there are people here throwing around 60K salaries as the number to expect when you get out of school, some of them housewives and trolls.
She could have gotten an AACSB-accredited MBA from some random state school for less than $14k and still be much better off than she is now. At the time she went to graduate school, she probably had options that were less than $12k. People have to do their research. There is no reason why anyone in the past 10 years should have to attend an expensive school with a poor reputation such as University Phoenix unless they had a low GPA and/or wanted to avoid the GMAT. Her undergraduate GPA was good enough to get her into a traditional college; many of them have offered online MBAs for several years if she needed the flexibility.
She could have gotten an AACSB-accredited MBA from some random state school for less than $14k and still be much better off than she is now. At the time she went to graduate school, she probably had options that were less than $12k. People have to do their research. There is no reason why anyone in the past 10 years should have to attend an expensive school with a poor reputation such as University Phoenix unless they had a low GPA and/or wanted to avoid the GMAT. Her undergraduate GPA was good enough to get her into a traditional college; many of them have offered online MBAs for several years if she needed the flexibility.
True, but an MBA from XXX State is still not great for landing a job.
Here we go again. We've had this discussion before. You aren't disagreeing with me. You are going on a complete tangent to what I said and making it sound like it's disagreeing with me. Perhaps you should consider the statistics from students who attended state schools like Georgia Tech and Michigan to those who attended Arizona State University (which has a near 90% acceptance rate) and see what the outlook has been. Good state schools have a much brighter outlook than random state schools.
Here we go again, indeed.
We are in violent agreement that some state schools are better than others. What you fail to grasp, apparently willfully, is that those schools are simply out of the reach of most students, but they can still get a solid education and do very well at a 'regular' (middling good) state school.
Where we will always part ways is your continual refrain to 'study under the best professors'. That would be great. So would a pony, but most students aren't getting that, either. There was at least one post where you said that outside-of-classroom interaction was where [the] majority of learning occurs:
Faculty. Since majority of learning at college occurs during outside-of-the-classroom interaction with faculty and PhD students, prestige is based on the quality of faculty and students the institution (or program) attracts
Having gone to one truly mediocre and one excellent (not tier I excellent, but much better than average) state school-it's just not possible for a normal state student to interact with either faculty or PhD students much beyond class and office hours. Research? Ha, don't make me laugh. Work in that environment or not, you just don't understand state schools and their educational model outside of the top tier at all. It would be like me lecturing you about how Princeton works.
A degree in english isn't too brilliant but it need not be a professional death sentence.
You can always find semi-decent office jobs with that background. I have a colleague who studied literature in university. She's not using her degree directly but it did allow her to be hired here. She does all kinds of admin stuff around the office and she's a decently smart girl. I think you can become an insurance agent or underwriter too. Any degree works and you certainly make way, way more than at that warehouse job.
The woman in the story is a very poor decision maker.
Well said.
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