You can't live the same level of life without more schooling now.
It's an educational arms race. Graduate degrees and unpaid internships and long stint in "entry level" jobs that last for much of a decade, etc.
It is an educational arms race, however in any arms race there is plenty of money to be made selling arms.
Fuck unpaid internships, get a job at a small company where results are noticed. When you see something going wrong step in and fix it. I started my career in programming putting together a simple scheduling app in php. I didn't ask permission I went and coded it at home and brought it in one day and demo'd it to my supervisor. After that they didn't want me doing tech support any more and wanted me solving all sorts of other problems instead.
Whining about education is a crutch used by those who don't want to fill out resumes or otherwise work. Generally those people feel that now that they have an education all they need to do is sit back and wait for a cushy job to knock on their door.
Before one gets a degree they should type that degrees name into a craigslist job board and see what comes up, if nothing comes up then one should not expect to get a job as a result.
I wanted to add one more piece of advice, when you decide what you want to do, find the industry where that job is the "profit center" and also in the "profit center" pick the job no one else wants to do. Yeah, sometimes it actually really sucks, but usually there is just a little learning curve, and then it's easy. Never tell them this. You're now indispensable, likable, and if you saved your money properly you also have negotiating power. This means that you're likely to be offered a raise, if you ask for one accepted, and if they decline have the means to make them give it to you or find something else, and surprisingly at the other company no one wants to do X either.
Pro Tip: If you've just bought something major on credit (car, house, etc), your boss probably knows about it, this means that you will NOT get your raise for the thing you bought that you can't afford. This is also why if you talk about cars or houses with your boss he may convince you to buy something you don't need. The people who get raises are those who don't need it.
I disagree with the language but heartily approve of the message. Do. Not. Work. For. Free. For-profit corporations can pay you wages -- that is what they are for.
This goes triply for everyone here, since most of you have skills that the market actually needs rather than the collection of non-skill represented by your typical coffee gopher trying to break into publishing. However, people expect engineers to be congenitally incapable of negotiation and to work for free because they love their jobs, and they'll tell you that this is not merely permissable but morally praiseworthy and a good thing for your career. People who tell you this are lying to you. Do not listen to them, even if they are folks you otherwise respect, even if they are telling you that their OSS-using corporations are more morally deserving than e.g. Microsoft or Oracle.
The worst example I've seen related to this is my friend (business major) who almost didn't take a paid internship because she had already agreed to do an unpaid internship and would feel bad abandoning the company. I had to explain to her how bad of an idea it is to be loyal to a company that doesn't even value her enough to pay her.
Personal anecdotes aren't valid pieces of evidence...
The biggest advantage those growing up in today's environment have going for them is that everyone else their age is lazy. You can do far better today with the same work ethic of the previous generation.
... and neither are broad generalizations. In fact, the college admission process directly contradicts your misguided conceptions [1]. (Whether young people are working hard towards the right goal is another debate, but they are working hard.)
You're going to have to do much better if you want to argue that an extensively researched and reported global trend (degree inflation) doesn't exist [2,3,4,5]. Enough of this hurr-durr-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-because-that's-what-I-did bullshit. People who point out the issues with education are hard working people who have valid concerns. They aren't "whining".
[1] http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-few-more-col...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/education/12masters.html
[3] http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/05/27/cb.degree.not....
[4] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/world_agenda/art...
Would you be skeptical of "research" from the cigarette manufacturers that said tobacco is good for you and that tailor mades are the best way to get it? Color me unconvinced that more schooling is the answer.
It could well be that a degree is the best way to spend a half million dollars but I don't think it is.
Of course I agree with platitudes like "hard work and intelligent choices have far more of an effect on your life than a degree", but if you're going to frame the problem in that broad of a sense why should we even discuss it?
Several of my coworkers do not have 4-year degrees and make well over $100k/year.
Several my coworkers have graduate degrees from prestigious universities and are on the brink of being fired (some of them have been already).
A degree is not much more than a fresh start, a foot in the door, and some residual credibility.
A degree is not much more than a fresh start, a foot in the door, and some residual credibility.
That's true in some fields. But in some fields, you simply cannot succeed without a college degree. If you want to be a civil engineer designing bridges, you need a college degree. If you want to be a physician or even a registered nurse or physician's assistant, then you need a degree. Period.
Not many people are arguing it doesn't exist. People (or at least I) am giving evidence that college is not the only way to obtain this "premia," and that there is a cost, beyond which if college exceeds that cost, college is no longer favorable over its alternatives. Of course this is highly dependent on the university attended and the degree received and also depends on the individual involved. To blindly say, "college is always better" ignores all this evidence and turns off our minds to alternatives.
Do you honestly think the modern world can be navigated just as well by someone with drive and a 4 year degree as someone with an equal amount of drive and the training from the 4 year degree on average?
The world isn't designed for you. It's designed for all people, and for the vast majority of people, they need a much greater amount of training and education to get the same life their parents had by their age.
As for college, on average I suspect it's a wash, income wise. For every graduate with an engineering, science, or business degree who is able to jump into a cushy high paying job at most a few years after completing school there are 1 or more graduates with less economically advantageous degrees in softer liberal-arts disciplines who gain almost no advantage in job hunting from their degrees.
Traditional jobs are the first to go in tough economic times.
Trade school is a short term play. The world is only going to get more complex. While trade school might make someone better off in their 20s relative to someone who went to college, in the long term it will severely limit their opportunities.
I mean, I'm sure there are some very high paying jobs that don't require a college degree. But there are millions of people that lack a college degree who want to work. Shouldn't we assume that the vast majority of these people will not get high paying jobs and will be lucky to get 30 hours a week of minimum wage work?
Almost all such jobs involve significant amounts of manual labor, so that world tends to be rather disjoint from the world of college education and office jobs so there is definitely a lack of visibility from one world into the next. But that world does very much exist. The guys fixing your car, mowing your company's lawn, catching your seafood, transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock, resurfacing the asphalt on your street, putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road, assembling your cars, sometimes even the guy working in the deli section at your grocery store, they may be making much more than you previously thought.
catching your seafood
Fisheries around the US are collapsing. It seems like the seafood catching industry is shedding jobs.
transporting your food and goods in trucks or moving it off the dock
I believe that trucking has been reduced because of the recession which suggests that trucking jobs should decline slightly.
resurfacing the asphalt on your street
Many municipalities don't have the cash to spend on street repair.
putting up sheetrock in the new housing development down the road
There's a massive glut of housing stock right now. A few years ago, everyone and their brother was working in construction, building crappy third rate homes with substandard quality and chinese drywall. But then the housing bubble burst and guess what? Most of those sheetrock hackers were tossed out of work.
assembling your cars
There are actually very few jobs in automotive manufacturing in the US. This sector has been heavily mechanized. Have you seen the financial shape the automotive industry is in? It is heading for a major consolidation. And people aren't buying cars at the rate they once did since they don't have disposable income. This sector is likely to be shedding high wage jobs, not gaining them.
Yes but someone might invent a labour saving device that makes it easier to pave roads. This is what has happened with farms. The paved roads are not as important to humanity as food. Food is the most important thing to humanity, that doesn't mean going into agriculture is a good idea.
In what way is that not an arms race?