If you GO TO COLLEGE and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you VOTE and are still unhappy, GO TO COLLEGE. If you go to college and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you VOTE and are still unhappy, GO TO COLLEGE. If you go to college and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you VOTE and are still unhappy, GO TO COLLEGE. If you go to college and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you have ten doctorates and vote once every two years, DON'T iPHONE COMPUTER.
Should have VOTEd for a candidate who wanted to abolish McDonalds. How about you GO TO COLLEGE and become a grubhub driver for McDonalds orders so you make $1/h more through tips?
Kinda tangential, but the whole libertarian culture of “if you got lied to/propagandized it’s your own fault for not doing the research/evaluting the risks, etc” is fucking whack. I was talking with my mom about trauma I got from my time at school (as in middle/high school), and her response was “you should’ve known better/gotten over it”, as if a struggling mentally ill child is supposed to be in charge of his own destiny while also having all possible levers of control taken out of his hands because surely you can’t trust a removed with things like control over their own body or mind!
Also kinda tangential, but I used to think the word was “tangenital” because I never looked closely at it
God that's the fucking worst. I thought we're supposed to be more productive by being able to specialize? But you know what's mutually exclusive with specializing? Being a jack-of-all-trades and knowing when your health insurance company is ripping you off, when your boss is ripping you off, when your landlord is ripping you off, how to do your taxes, how deal with any of those things if they actually happen. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps! And these straps, gotta pull on these too! Oh don't forget those straps gotta give those a tug! Oh woops you didn't pull on these ones and now the whole thing has come undone! Keep fucking pulling and don't forget about that other set of straps! What's that? Another group of people is being paid to pull the straps in the other direction? That's your fault for not noticing! Keep pulling!
knowing when your health insurance company is ripping you off, when your boss is ripping you off, when your landlord is ripping you off
Always
Well at least if you are smart and got a STEM major and even got employed full time right out of college and didn't even get your job or pay get interuppted by covid then surely you should be financially stable and able to buy a house in your mid-20s like your dad did working a union job in the early 90s, right?
Right?
...right?
I will live in fear of rent, health, car troubles until I die and goddammit I did everything they all told me to.
throw in the fact that costs of medical care, housing, and education have all increased at rates higher than inflation in most of the country and it's even higher!
Inflation hasn't been even across the economy, either. The vast majority of inflation since the 1980s had been in the price of housing, education, and healthcare. People who bought a home and finished college 20+ years ago have seen almost zero inflation, while people who were too young or too disadvantaged to get on the ladder are even worse off.
$4/hr in the 70s is "officially" $18/hr now, but you could much more easily rent an apartment (without roommates or with only 1 roommate!) or pay for college making $4/hr in 1975 than making $18/hr now. A studio apartment in NYC was like $175 a month in the 70s!
Let's talk about STEM majors. Most fields have a fucking crazy funnel effect that nobody warns applicants about. Case in point: many of my high school friends who got BSc's in bio fields - microbiology, genetics, marine biology, etc. - which have a large undergrad intake and accept people with good but not exceptional marks. Problem is, there's maybe one honours place for every 10-15 graduates, and masters places are even scarcer, so if you aren't top of your class, you aren't doing postgrad. And if you don't do postgrad, you're underqualified for the jobs that want university education, but also overqualified/not correctly qualified to be a lab tech.
So what the fuck do you do? If you can afford to spend another two years studying while earning fuck all, you can train to become a high school teacher (and then still barely afford to live because teachers are criminally underpaid) or else you're basically stuck in some shitty middle management job using none of your skills at a company that has '-lab' or 'path-' in the name, maybe.
Engineering and computer science still have decent employment prospects after undergrad, but engineering programmes are relatively tiny and good luck getting a place if you aren't like top 5 in your school.
TL;DR: the whole "well maybe if you didn't major in postmodern decolonial basket-weaving..." line is utter bullshit because the majority of STEM grads are just as utterly fucked on today's economy.
The secret about STEM is that it really means "engineering and Computer Science, maybe math and physics if you work for big data". Basically, if it doesn't require at least Calc 2, it doesn't count.
The only reason STEM pays well is because schools can't figure out how to teach calculus, which means there's a natural bottleneck. Companies still think that they have to hire a "Calculus passer" for many jobs, which pushes up the cost.
In American education, math might as well be magic. And calculus isn't even real math, it's what you take before you get to the real stuff ;)
I did all that too except just quit with no plans and am now flapping in the breeze lol join me
College-educated white men are firmly voting Republican, so I doubt that line of thinking really holds
"non college educated" is the liberals new fancy politically correct way of saying fuck you to poor people who didn't go to college. COLLEGE. Not even a high school diploma or GED is enough for those smug fuckers now.
went to college for only two years for computer science
What did you do next? I'm taking compsci in university right now and I definitely don't plan to stay there, but idk what my alternatives are.
Ordinary working people don't just get to drop out of college and worry about "not wanting to work for silicon valley ghouls"
whether you went to college or not
what if you went to college but think they're all nazi Friends of Epstein
GO TO COLLEGE
Goes to college
YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER DON'T YOU KNOW YOU NEED A GRADUATE DEGREE
Gets graduate degree
YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER YOU SHOULD HAVE LEARNED A TRADE
JOBS IN GRAPHIC DESIGN ARE WAITING!
THE HOT NEW INDUSTERY!
GET YOUR DEGREE IN GRAPHIC DESIGN!
gets a degree in graphic design
“Why didnt you get a job in STEM? That’s where all the jobs are”
Double-take
JOBS IN STEM ARE WAITING!
THE HOT NEW INDUSTRY!
...
I mean, when a million people around the world all get STEM degrees, it's going to drive the cost of labor down tremendously. People won't be as valuable as they thought they were.
Actually, does anyone remember when it was culinary jobs? I swear for a week in the late nineties it was all about culinary careers
You have a pell grant!?!? You know what you can do with that now that Biden is president right? Simply open a business in a disadvantaged community for three years. Gentrifying if possible. Bonus points if the business is in property development!!!
Oh shit you don’t have student debt....
