- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse
- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse
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i hate everything here, from the ridiculous price to the guy treating a degree like a simple matter of value exchange
it's like even the pursuit of knowledge has become just a tool to help or hinder your survival under capitalism and i really fucking hate it
"a degree is like a car" no it fucking isn't??
The goal of capital is to commodify everything. Neoliberalism is the speeding up of this force.
It's treated like one by institutions even though there is much more value you can gain in terms of education and personal growth. In many fields, they don't give a shit what you actually learned at college and if it applies to the job.
I went to school for programming and left a political nerd. I could have learned all the programming in my free time, on my own. Which is what I mostly did since my professors sucked. It was $70,000 for me to learn that the political system in the US fucking sucks. I got stuck with crippling debt for learning that this system only cares about the rich elite. I enjoy the irony for what it's worth.
Kids, don't stay in school.
I started as PoliSci and once I hit American Government, I got so sickened by what I was learning that I had to switch degrees. Didn't stop learning about politics, just didn't want anything to do with them.
For like a few years after I graduated I was going through my reformist phase and sort of wanted to go back and get a minor in PoliSci or something, but after I started getting more into theory I moved to the revolutionary camp and am at least thankful for not going further in debt.
It's funny because I had 2 history professors and a econ professor that were all fairly cynical and jaded and I think they are partially responsible for my college era radicalizing. My econ prof was a former banker and was like "this is stupid and we just make money by using your money to make more money and it's all stupid." One of my history profs basically taught the same material you will get from reading "A People's History of the United States" and watching the documentary "The Untold History of the United States."
I also had a PoliSci professor that I appreciated because he taught in a fairly unbiased way that I was unable to peg if he was Dem, Rep, or other. It was a rarity since the college I went to was in the TX panhandle.
- take out as much as they'll give you in loans for undergrad
- leave the US and never pay them back
Just leave the US for school. It's free in so many places, even for Americans
https://www.student.com/articles/countries-american-students-study-free-europe
Ah, It’s for Americans. Though, this did help me search for places that are free for Canadians but I don’t know if any of them are worth it (currently and in the next few years): Germany, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Poland and the Czech Republic.
You actually can do this (I think), if you claim the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion on taxes and earn less than like $110k/yr abroad, your adjusted gross income is 0 and with an income-based repayment plan you don't need to pay back anything until they get discharged after like 35 years I think
Yes, they are. University tuition has an inflation curve similar to that of Disney World.
my friend's wife went to school to be a veterinarian and she's still paying off her loan. She graduated ~15 years ago.
I dropped out of college back then and just lied on my resume to get an IT job lol
just said I had an unrelated degree because the position required a degree of any kind
Years later…
You never did tell us what degree you had.
Degree?
You said on your CV you had an unrelated degree.
I said I was unrelated to a degree.
lol I haven't worked there in years but I believe the actual degree I put down was psychology. I think they were just desperate to fill the position because at the time their IT dept was like 2 people
Which is a paltry salary for a family raising multiple kids and sending them to uni.
My oldest brother ended up learning welding from a community college, it was a great career move initially. Unfortunately he immediately ended up surrounded by far-right extremists in the first job he took and became a literal neo-nazi. Like joining neo-nazi marches and posting swastikas level.
We aren't on speaking terms anymore. It obviously isn't the trade's fault (and is more on him always conforming to whatever he is surrounded by) but I have maybe a slightly visceral reaction anytime I hear welding.
Learn welding, but maybe vet your future employers too.
The "academics are for liberals" and "trades are for conservatives" is a fucking horror that should have been erased from the world forever ago.
Just don't learn to code in community college (unless you plan to transfer to university), just self-educate if you can't afford university, and learn a different trade to make life easier. Community college coding is good experience as in skills, but school is abysmal, and you'll be learning everything on your own anyway as community college professors typically half-ass their courses and give the crappiest, contradictory, low-effort assignments and sometimes with little to no reading material, especially online. Make sure to research good practices and common pitfalls as you will not learn this in community college. Also, good luck, as you are competing with thousands and thousands of laid off tech workers. You'll be lucky to have an entry-level IT contract job with no benefits and no guarantee for future employment.
Also doesn't require school! But to be honest, as cheap as community college is, learning to weld there is a dilly of a deal. Contrast the, what, $800? spent on tuition per semester with at least double that for the same time period in welding supplies and electricity bills alone if you were learning at home. And that assumes you already have a welder.
that's like full tuition and fees at harvard, most state schools are more like $50k for a 4 year degree
Add on-campus housing and food plan and it's another $8-15k per year on top of that for in-state, maybe more now. And that covers the two main semesters only, summer and winter sessions have their own extra costs.
yeah 100k wouldn't surprise me when it's all said and done, and either way it's not something 18-year-olds should be forced to go into debt to obtain and shouldn't be treated like it's a car purchase
Yeah I think your numbers may be about 5-10 years out of date
Take out whatever you want, you'll never pay it back. Wish I did that in retrospect, I owe under 10k but I'll never pay it back, the degree was entirely useless for employment purposes.
If I ever became dictator, my first and only move before handing power over to someone more competent would be to raze all ivy league and private institutions to the ground, especially their poly sci departments.
My undergrad was...I think 50k/year? At the time, I think it is closer to 70-80k/year now. My graduate degreee (which was not in the US) was like...5k/year, and that was at one of the more expensive private unis in my country.
I don't regret my time in uni, it was extremely valuable to me besides the piece of paper I got at the end (which I do not use in my current career at all anyway). The cost is absolutely ridiculous though, I was in an extremely privileged position to be able to go and would not recommend many people do the same when they could make much better career choices.
Which is depressing. Education should not need to be a luxury.
"Learn to code!"
"Learn to weld!"
