Aside from hard science and engineering degrees where the technical knowledge is a foundation for what you’ll learn in industry, a college degree is simply a piece of paper that says “I received a balanced education and have my life together enough to focus, manage time, and complete tasks reliably for 4 years straight.” Rarely do you ever use most of the knowledge you gained in college besides the aforementioned life management skills.
Then why even bother going to a university? Seems like community college would be a much better use of your money to accomplish that
University is meant to be higher level and teach you soft skills. Academics also aren’t supposed to be the only thing you do, but participating in clubs and sports is supposed to give students experience in leadership to make them better leaders when they graduate.
It is supposed to be a civilian version of officer candidate school.
So then I really fucked up by working fast food to pay for my textbooks when I could have been out playing sportsball
2 vs 4 year degree. I do recommend going to community college first though and transferring if pursuing a degree.
Working in the AEC firm, I can absolutely confirm that engineering degrees teach you almost nothing you’ll do on the job. The disconnect between college and work in engineering not only exists, but is far, far larger than anyone may think.
It depends. I absolutely use my degrees in my job, including my Masters. However, I’m heavy into the kinds of design where it is valuable.
Also, a lot of the job is plan preparation and no one really teaches that in college.
That’s good you can use your skills in your design work! I see a lot of shell shock in my civil firm.
And yeah, absolutely. So many EITs, engineers, and even PEs live in CADD which is not taught nearly enough in the curriculum. Also, computer literacy is not emphasized enough, IMO. Every engineer these days works with computers, especially in Excel. Additionally, a lot of engineers especially don’t have people skills enough to effectively coordinate with all parties involved in their roles; it would be great to get some of that experience in mock PM situations or something during school. That all has to be taught on the job.
Eh. There’s more to it than like you need a degree to become a doctor, lawyer, psychologist etc. It’s just that you need to have a well layer out plan and a good understanding of what your strengths and weakness are. Unfortunately, in the US there’s a massive emphasis on getting into college right after high school where people barely know what they want nor have any real world experience. In Ireland there’s a scheme there’s a thing called a mature student where its basically encouraging people 23 or older to go into college. Like courses will have spots reserved for them and the like.
What do the kids do in the meantime? I understand it’s a lot to throw a “kid” into university, but it’s often done so they can get a career and start contributing to retirement and building wealth.
I mean it’s also impractical to have a family without some career so that gets put on hold too. Or worse they have kids and have to go to school at the same time.
I’m not saying everyone should go to college, but just defending the reasoning for those that do why they go as young as they do.
To be fair I feel like college is way less about teaching you anything specific and way more about teaching you critical thinking and abstract conceptualization.
Like I didn’t learn jack shit from my “American economical development in the 14th century” class but I did genuinely get good at telling good sources from bad ones while writing essays, and that IS a skill that has uses in life
It’s showing that you can complete a multi-staged project that required years of effort and investment without any immediate return on investment.
Even if you don’t learn anything in college, the sheer process of going through the motions and getting the degree demonstrates skills that are useful in an employee.
Skills that can be shown from working at an entry level job. Or through several other methods.
That’s not a good reason to require someone to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity to even apply for a job.
To be fair I feel like college is way less about teaching you anything specific and way more about teaching you critical thinking and abstract conceptualization.
That’s because conservatives want to replace universities with vocational schools. Nothing wrong with those schools, but its just another face of their culture war politics making their way to everyday discussions.
Conservatives often want to talk down the value of attending a university (particularly when studying liberal arts and humanities). Like the commenter above me points out much of university is about understanding concepts and developing ideas, and less how to do a particular weld or which pipe to use (vocation). It depends on what you study too, STEM will have more hands on but never as much as someone who went to a technical school to actually do the building of stuff. By convincing people that university is supposed to be vocational it feeds into their talking points about education being woke and unnecessary.
Kind of ironic coming from a group of lawyers and theologians.
Normalize lying to employers.
They lie to you all the time so fuck it.
How many employers even check to see if you went to college unless you got a higher level degree? Maybe a few will ask for transcripts, but it’s rare.
If they do background checks and you list it on your resume / hiring paperwork, they all do.
I used to work as a team lead on a call center help desk that had literally no requirements to get the job outside of a 10 question “technical interview” that features questions such as “can you name three programs that are a part of the Microsoft office suite” and periodically we would have new hires get fired once their background check returned that they lied about having a degree that they don’t actually have.
I don’t know why they lied - degrees aren’t even requested or required for getting the job, but they did and lying on anything that came up on the background check was an immediate termination
I’ve had jobs with background checks and they still didn’t care. Maybe in technical fields they do, but I’m in media/marketing/advertising design and production and they have never given a shit.
Don’t you know? Jobs work like prestige classes. You have to max your level and then you need to reset everything to be qualified. Age too, that’s where we get all the 20 year olds with 30 years of experience.
Besides, you are 30 already, yet have only 10 years experience. We are looking for at least 25 years for someone your age
We need someone with a millennium of experience with a framework that just came out a month ago.
