You Gotta Go To College! [OC]
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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![You Gotta Go To College! [OC]](https://meta.cdns.win/en/2025/03/You-Gotta-Go-To-College-OC-860x860.webp)
The version in my more blue-collar area:
“You gotta get a trade.”
“You gotta get a trade.”
“You gotta get a trade.”
“You got the wrong one. There’s no call for that one.”
Small life hint:
Your parents are going to recommend to do what they did even though the world is different now.
Turns out a degree and a house both cost money and they aren’t as good value as they were 40 years ago
My dad drilled it into my head as a kid: “Get a degree. It doesn’t matter in what, it could be in Classic Phoenician literature, it’s a degree and it’ll open doors for you and life will be so much easier than it was for the rest of us, you won’t end up having to dig ditches or flip burgers.”
Today, he’s a mouth-frothing MAGA nut and thinks colleges are just liberal indoctrination camps and if we didn’t want those student loans then why did we think it was a good idea to go to college?
Parents: “You gotta get into a good college”
Me: Gets into good college
Parents: “College brainwashed you. You’re too woke”
I like how the dad looks sad at the end. Like if he grew up seeing people with higher college education getting better jobs than him, and so pushed his son that way and now regrets this.
College degrees are not worthless.
Hint: if you give your kid emotional support, compassion, love.. they’ll be able to figure a lot of this stuff out themselves
Me thinking a b.biotech and m.phil med biotech would qualify me to work in the biotech field… or any field at all.
The university was ostensibly a good one, top 100 in the world (currently uni is in the top 20, different field tho).
Silly silly me
Nowadays, experience is 10x more valuable than a degree. Look at any job posting, most require experience. Sad thing is, to get experience at the start, you will have to intern. Which means little to no pay to gain that experience.
I mean how was the parent supposed to know there future.
My parents make fun of my degree 20 years later, despite the fact they’re the ones who demanded I get the degree
Ya forgot to include the crippling debt you’ll have with it
A bachelours is worth about half a million in lifetime earnings, a masters about one million. Costs have gone up but it’s still worth if for the median person (if you finish).
The value of a college degree is VERY MUCH dependent on your field of study.
If you want to be a doctor, it’s mandatory.
If you want to be a lawyer, it’s mandatory in all but 4 states.
If you want to be an engineer/software developer and you don’t want to start your own company or be given a job by a friend, you will need it.
If you want to be a visual artist like a sculptor…4 years of dedicated practice might be more cost effective. Not saying you won’t learn great things with a college degree, but it might not have a positive ROI in terms of dollars earning vs NOT getting one.
Then there are various liberal arts/humanities degrees that simply rarely apply to future job income.
Sometimes I’m glad I was a disappointment to others early so that I can be less of a disappointment to myself now.
Who exactly is this post aimed at. I don’t find my degree worthless and neither do any of my friends lol. I get the cost of living to wage ratio is quite ass rn, but it’s kinda silly to act like educated jobs don’t make more money still…
Also, the massive sense of letting everyone down if you aren’t fit for college, or want to try and get into a trade…
The college degree isn’t worthless but it’s not the valuable part of the college experience (which SHOULD be the education, but…)
The reality is the connections you make with your faculty and administrators is the real thing you’re paying for, a network of people who you can use as reference to get job opportunities. That is the true economic value of colleges right now, as a means of advancing nepotism for your particular school’s employees.
I get it, it’s a joke, but it’s also a sucker’s claim. Year after year after year, this doesn’t change: https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm
Man that sucks.
Btw, you gotta get into a good collage.
This wasn’t just parents this was everyone when I was growing up. Teachers would harp on your grades because you needed good grades to get into a good school because if you didn’t, you would end up working a minimum wage job for the rest of your life. They imprinted on us the idea that if you didn’t go to college you would be a failure. Hell, look at some of the tv shows and cartoons back in the 90s and 00s. So many episodes were the main character was an average or poor student and the teachers would remind them of their future if they failed to go to college.
So sure enough, a good portion of my generation gets into college and just happened to do so right before or during the 08 crash which fucked the job market for the next few years and left a bunch of us all with college degrees struggling to find work.
The good thing is that my brother’s generation was told about other paths available should college not be an option. But those were never told to us while I was in school.
There was a bit in 1940 Loony tunes ([starts at 4:13](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2taye2)) where the dean of a college is congratulating Johnny and giving him a diploma and tells him to go find his place in the world.
Johnny walks off stage and right into a bread line.
And the guy in front tells him to stop shoving, and turns around to reveal he is the dean.
I mean at least Dad still congratulated him.
This is the exact kool aid my brother drank. Not his fault. He trusted my parents, family, his teachers and counselors.
He studied finance. Not exactly an ‘out-of-demand’ degree or profession.
Graduating with his degree and realizing that what he actually had was a pile of debt and a hyper-saturated job market hit him like a ton of bricks. The starting salaries in his field was the icing on that cake of shit.
That was eleven years ago. He never really bounced back from that realization and is extremely spiteful of everyone who he believes lied to him.