Stop sending your kids to college and stop going to college, Why the Economy Sucks Exhibit B

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

I don't have a problem with it, you do. You are upset about the system that is in place, not me. And apparently people do need that system, or you wouldn't be complaining.

I thought it was ridiculous the entire time I was enrolled. I was entirely aware that I was paying for a chance at better employment. The cost of investment was low and the return was high. I just couldn't believe I waited so long. I was a non-traditional student and looking back I can't believe I wasted so many years thinking I could "self-smart" my way through the system.

Maybe you can, but I couldn't.

a reply to: JAGStorm

I'm glad that worked for you, but you still had to jump through their hoops. Maybe it was equally beneficial for you, but for me, I refused to play their games when I graduated high-school, and I refuse to do it today, so I continue to work my way around their systems without the help of the government. God has ensured my prosperity so far. I have no need or desire to do things differently.

a reply to: toysforadults

I'm willing to accept that.

a reply to: VekTorVik

Like I said, there are people who need programs to teach them. But there should be more options available to those who can teach themselves. I didn't say I needed the system, because I'm doing much better than most of my unemployed still high school friends who have all sorts of academic abbreviations next to their names.

a reply to: toysforadults

I completely disagree with you, on every single point. Not going to college isn't going to do you any favors. All not going to college is going to do, is force businesses to invest even more in automation, and give people like me more work than we can handle, to automate away the jobs people like you refuse to learn how to do.

Not every job is bad either, some are quite lucrative. I just recently won the job lottery on this front, but as I've said for years, there are jobs out there worth doing. Most of them require more than 4 years of schooling (it took 12 in my case), and there's no middle ground some will wind up with nothing, others employed in good positions but they do exist.

The issue isn't how to get people into skilled positions, that's already happening. What matters is what you do with the rest of the population that doesn't need to work. I'm pretty sure them being uneducated isn't going to help matters, but at the same time I'm not sure what that education is getting them.

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: toysforadults

Everything that can be exploited is being exploited. Medical insurance-property tax-public schools always need more$$S-and of course colleges are designed to get the absolute most $$$$ out of people (18-19 years old) who have no idea of the sh-storm they are getting themselves into.

Let's face it-every single thing that is required to be "successful" is pegged at 7,000 RPM and the engine is about to blow. If "they" can milk you for it they are. I hope this all works out, but.....

I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't be allowed into college until you're 25 or older and have some life experience. 18 year olds are completely clueless, and really don't understand debt, or what they want to do in life.

Several things are wrong with this idea. But there are alternatives to a high priced useless degree.

First, if you can't afford college, start at a junior college. They are very affordable. You should do this especially if you have deficiencies in your academic record and will have to take things like bonehead English, just to get up to speed.

Second, do some research into your degree program before you invest too much time and money going down that path. There are many many degrees that will not lead to employment. So choose a degree that will give you the opportunity to be gainfully employed.

If you have the brains to go get a degree in engineering, medicine, accounting then by all means go for it. If you don't have a clue what you want to study in college, get a job and work for a few years. You may find your calling by working some crappy low paying jobs and seeing who makes money and how they do it.

College really is what you make of it. Get a useless degree and it is useless.

a reply to: schuyler

I don't agree with this either. My major is extremely hard. Of the top 5 most failed classes at my university, all 5 of them happen to be in my program. 8 of the top 10 are in my program. Loans are easy, yes and at some schools getting in is pretty darn easy too (for my current school/major there are zero enterance exams/tests, anyone may join). But like anything in life, there's going to be a bar to entry. An easy major is going to lead to poor career prospects while a more exclusive major will lead to better ones.

originally posted by: rickymouse
Employers used to train the workers before. The worker started out at a reduced wage and worked their way up to the top pay within four or five years. But the workers got paid for learning. I trained quite a few workers in my life, They went on to other jobs with a good reference.

Our society has turned sideways now, I do not know how that could possibly happen, most of the things kids go college for could be learned on the job. I think that the Education field is poisoning our youngs minds, not everyone needs to go to college. You just need to learn proper work ethics when you are done, they do not teach that in school evidently.

This doesn't work in certain fields. Anything tech for example, the cost of an uneducated worker is just too high. Paying someone $60,000/year to work on the job, when there's about a 75% chance that they'll make a mistake somewhere that costs your company $5,000,000 just doesn't make sense when you can get someone with experience for $120,000 and have only a 2% chance of them making that same mistake.

There's nothing wrong with workers taking responsibility for themselves to get educated. The employers don't want to do it, and as evidenced by the massive cutbacks to college subsidies lately, society themselves don't want to do it. The end result is going to be far higher prices for the consumer, but the only one left to take the risk is the individual.

a reply to: Groot

Most associates degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on. I actually use one of mine as a mousepad, that's the most utility it's ever given me.

In the US you have a better chance of getting a good job with nothing more than a HS Diploma than an Associates.

I've got an amusing anecdote about this. Some years back I was working at a tutor for the local Communiy College I graduated from. Having 3 degrees from the same institution, I was tutoring a pretty broad spectrum of classes. When they hired me, they offered me minimum wage, just the same as what you would get for having no education at all. The school didn't even value their own degrees as being worth anything extra.

originally posted by: DAVID64
a reply to: toysforadults

Would you want a surgeon operating on you that was doing on the job training? That's about the degree of complexity we're talking here. If he were going to be a welder or something like that, I'd say fine, but a Nuclear Engineer?
It's juuust a bit more than "getting talked at and then reading a book".

There's more to it than that. If the employer were willing to take on the expense, they would be perfectly capable of offering on the job training. But no one wants to. Why should an employer take on $100,000 in expenses to train someone over several years, knowing the entire time that the person might not even pass the training and be a waste of money. Or worse, take those skills and go work for a competitor? It doesn't really make sense for the employer to teach.

That said, I think a lot of people misuse college. It's not really meant to be a job training system, but that's how it's used. The real point is to learn, and to learn how to learn. Liberal arts programs are absically what college is all about. Learning a mixture of math, science, philosophy, and writing in order to be equipped to communicate reasonably well, and analyze different systems to ask the good questions, and tell experts what you would like done. And that is something that no employer is equipped to do while they give you job training.

originally posted by: Aazadan
I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't be allowed into college until you're 25 or older and have some life experience. 18 year olds are completely clueless, and really don't understand debt, or what they want to do in life.

I agree 110%.
There may be few exceptions, but most kids at that age don't even want to be in school any more. Maybe that is the conspiracy, in order to keep people in perpetual debt, make them believe they have to keep digging further into debt before life even begins. Push them into the education debt bubble and cripple their lives with soul-crushing debt.

Honestly I believe education up to a 2-4 year degree should be free, and I'm no socialist. We pay all that tax money to the gov't so they can give it to foreign countries who HATE us...yet can't even keep our own populous educated.

Go figure.

This is disturbing. Down with honesty and integrity, and now add education to that list.

Thanks Trump.

Im not sure if this has been addressed as I don't have time to read the whole thread BUT, my roommate has a degree in engineering and has been looking for a job for months now. There is nothing out there. a reply to: schuyler

originally posted by: toysforadults
College has become the #1 barrier to Americans in order to enter into middle to high middle class lifestyles.

There should be quotas based on employment projections and more tech colleges. Only people slotted for an actual job should pay for college.

I have two friends who got degrees. Neither of them use them in their current job. One owns a successful hair salon. That was more the result of tech training and social networking.

originally posted by: NoCorruptionAllowed
Another problem that I have first hand experience and debt with is that our government is subsidizing scam universities. Ones with obsolete curriculum. It should be a crime and felony fraud convictions should have already happened.

OH how I would love to reply with my story but it will be in this thread by end of day. I was taken by a scam school. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online. May that school burn!!! Anyways, they stole my money and the school messed up my classes and screwed me over. Long story short i had to withdraw from a class due to being behind because of an ADMITTED error on the school's part! I was never even able to log into the course! Ok so no biggie right? NOT! IWhile going to this school the following year I was to transfer to a local school into our space program and that's when all HELL broke lose. Remember that class I withdrew from? Well when I went to transfer all my paperwork to the new school my aide /transcripts were on suspend because they said I had to pay back a class that wasn't taken because it had already been paid for. I was like what! Yup, they wanted me to pay BACK money that was taken without my permission for a class I never took! It was a total of $2500. The class? A damn art renaissance class! Yea such a pressing important class for interior design! Of course I didn't have the money to pay it myself or I most definitely would have. I remember when I found out I had THREE days to come up with that kind of money and I worked doubles at my job to try and make it but it wasn't going to happen so I never went to the other school and it has been a sensitive subject for me because all I have ever wanted was to finish college but with no funds it's hard! Not everyone has their parents or family to help them out. After all this happened I got really depressed for quite some time......


There is some good news I guess. The dept of justice is suing this school along with a few others for misuse of funds and for preying on low income students. It hasn't gone anywhere and they still dock my damn pay because of all this. I refuse to pay a dime because I was lied to and not given the education I was promised or remotely told I would get.

What they did to me was horrible, everything and everyone I spoke to was a lie. After it all happened I spent time looking up this school online and saw hundreds if not THOUSANDS of students in the exact same situation! It's utter BS! I had teachers who didn't even teach the course I was PAYING for, they were just teachers who offered to take on online students for extra money! So my math teacher was a damn english teacher! They had students grade our work. I had students in my class who didn't even have English as their first language yet they are grading my papers? I was paying ALL this money for what? To have students grade me who didn't even speak my own language?! OMG the insanity I went through with that school. If i had known then what i know NOW I would never have gone there. I felt preyed on after all was said and done. I was desperate to get into school and I thought that this school made it happen and they would make all my dreams come true only it turned out to be a nightmare.


So yea......for profit schools suck! The education system is a joke.

a reply to: mblahnikluver

I looked that school up and they're accredited. But in general, that's a problem with for profit schools, state schools don't have as many issues.

But, it sounds like you didn't understand the loan system. At many schools if you take a class but don't attend class, you'll be dropped from the class, yet you'll still owe the money for it. If you're paying for the class in installments, your loans will be retroactively reduced to not pay for followup installments.

As far as the second part, at most medium sized and larger schools the teachers teach, but they don't actually grade work. That falls to TA's, which are usually either upperclassmen or master's students. All in all though, it sounds like you didn't research things very well. There's a reason online universities don't have a great reputation.

Back in 1982 I got a liberal arts degree at a public college (my parents paid for it - so no loans, no debt). I got an entry level job at an advertising agency. I worked there for 7 1/2 years and worked my way up to an account executive level - never made a whole lot of money there, but gained a lot of experience. Got another job working marketing at double my previous salary - due to the college degree and the experience of my first job. Worked there another 7 years ending up with a decent salary. Moved to another place being a manager of a very small call center with a small cut in salary. I wouldn't have gotten that job if I hadn't had a degree. That call center expanded over the years, along with my salary. Worked there until they merged with another company that had a call center in another state - they wanted me to stay on and merge the data systems of the two call centers while managing them both. I was offered a six-figure salary if I successfully managed the merge/cross-training/etc. of the two call centers. (this was 10 years ago - I quit the job because I wanted to spend more time at home with my daughter and the new position would have required too much travel back and forth to the other call center)

All on a liberal arts degree from back in 1982. Okay yeah, it took about 20 years of working before being offered a six-figure salary, but I know for a fact that all of those positions required a college degree and my liberal arts degree was fine, apparently.

You can definitely get a college degree without acquiring debt. If your parents can't pay for it, you can get scholarships (if you worked hard in high school and kept your grade point average high, and did well on your SATs). If you can't get a scholarship, you can always go to school part-time while working full time and pay as you go - it will for sure take you longer than 4 years, but who cares - that time will pass by anyway - might as well use the time to your advantage.

One of the issues I see nowadays is that young people want instant gratification. They want to come out of college making six figures. In my day, it was understood that it would take years of building up experience to get to that point.

Not all of us are interested in being engineers or doctors or lawyers. Some of us just want a general advanced education that opens our minds to things we wouldn't have had access to in basic high school. A lot of companies will hire you with a general liberal arts degree. All the jobs I took just required a degree - they didn't care what kind.

a reply to: Boomy327

I find that hard to believe. I don't know what type of engineering degree your friend has, but we can't get people fast enough. And that notion is expressed from other companies in the same industry. They are all feeling a lack of man power.

originally posted by: VekTorVik
a reply to: Boomy327

I find that hard to believe. I don't know what type of engineering degree your friend has, but we can't get people fast enough. And that notion is expressed from other companies in the same industry. They are all feeling a lack of man power.

It depends on the area. I know a pizza shop in the town where I used to live, where every single person working there, the drivers, the pizza makers, the cashiers, etc has at minimum a bachelors in engineering or math. They work there because in this part of the country, good jobs are few and far between. I have no doubt that they could land something better if they were to move, but with roots in this area, it's not really an option for them.