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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying for years that we need mandatory career counseling for the young people. At least once a year.

Young people need to know what choices to make instead of the "follow your dreams" nonsense that works out for 1 out of 1000. Young people need to be aware of how many artists / historians / gender study / english students graduate each year and how bad they end up on average.

We need to show them that if you study X, your expected starting salary is A, and salary after 5 years is B. We need to show them trends and possible future skill demand.

They also need to understand what poverty looks like. Nobody thinks they will end up flipping burgers when they are in school / college. But many of them do, and the only reason is poor career choices.

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How about engineering a society that is a bit kinder to everyone rather than inflicting poverty on anyone? It's also unjust for the 'burger flippers' who make your food to live in poverty.

We need creative types. Artists, musicians, historians etc are no less valuable than engineers. If the market thinks otherwise then the market is wrong.

Artists, musicians, historians etc are no less valuable than engineers

On both average and median they definitely are less valuable. Free market basically figured that out.

What you're suggesting is some fantasy land where you ignore all that and pay everyone the same.

We should have social safety nets, sure, but to pay everyone the same is insanity. Because then I would like to be paid for sitting on my ass, playing counterstrike and receiving blowjobs.

Free market also figured out a 400$ per hour prostitute is more valuable than plenty of engineers and musicians so that argument doesn t really stand. Value and money are not always correlated.

Working in higher education, including 5 years of orientation, has led me to somewhat the opposite conclusion: That students need to stop thinking of their major as the most important determining factor in their career.

I watched the job landscape change substantially from the time people were at orientation to the time they walked across the commencement stage. The advice I wish I had imparted was to study something compelling and deeply important to the student (perhaps a mix of things, like liberal arts), but to also be mindful to learn life skills, from cooking to budgeting to time management to HTML.

> students need to stop thinking of their major as the most

But why? It is the most important determining factor in their career. That's a fact.

Here are some examples of things that have a stronger casual dynamic than study major:

* Social structures (ie, whether or not the student even has enough connections to find a good job or jobs)

* Health and well-being (whether or not the student is mentally and physically well enough to meet the challenges of the job market)

* Quality of instruction - if you have the major you want, but you aren't learning from the specific faculty teaching your courses, you are going to be behind. Better to choose a different major with better faculty.

I can go on and on.

Actually, the last thing we need is more mediocre, uninspired STEM graduates who joined these fields simply because their parents made them do it or because they expect to make big bucks.

While "following your dreams" needs to be tempered with a strong dose of reality, it really is important that young people discover their aptitudes and life-path. If that means getting a BA in literature and possibly floundering for a few years then so what? A well-rounded liberal arts education is a perfectly fine preparation for many jobs in the world of business. Do we really need to have college students reading and analyzing the insipid PMBOK instead of the great works of literature?

Quite a good point, why would this be downvoted?

Because HN was wrong about their guidelines preventing the inevitable decline of the community and as more people have gained the ability to downvote they just do it over anything they disagree with. I haven't even been here that long and I've noticed a pretty big increase in the frequency of this type of thing happening in less than a year.

Ouch. I don't think that's quite true. His point was ok, but he took the validity of the initial claim in the article for granted ("young men are playing videogames instead of working hard") and most people here actually don't think that's true. It's a factual disagreement not an reflex like you paint it. The original article is nothing but socially-punitive speculation anyway.

It's off topic in an article discussing non-college educated men. These people aren't even getting to the point of selecting a major.

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