Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of applicable skills that landed me a high-paying software engineering job instead of doing the manual labor or trivial office tasks that I was qualified for before college.

If you go to a private school to get a history degree then sure, it was 4 years of expensive partying that doesn't leave you any more employable. Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end.

It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to explain why it's valuable to be able to think about math and programming (especially to a math class full of skeptical kids). Essentially, a good liberal arts education transforms your world-view of those subjects the same way a good engineering education does. Just like you shouldn't condemn yourself to reinventing Quicksort when you can be capable of more advanced algorithms, nor should you find yourself reinventing Locke when thinking about politics. It is much better to build on the history of thought instead of being doomed to repeat it (and you'll only repeat it satisfactorily if you're a genius anyway).

OK, there are worthless liberal arts educations. But there are also worthless computer science educations, as anyone who's worked with other programmers has discovered.

I think most people agree with that, they just disagree that it's worth paying $50/hour to get. Go into any high end coffee place and you'll find someone you can have a good discussion with about liberal arts-related topics. I was talking about Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian democracy with a member of the U.S. Foreign Service at a coffee place a couple months ago. Talked for two hours - cost was $5 for an iced tea. Sure beats paying $150 for a three hour lecture and getting assigned some busywork essay at the end of it.

In theory, sure, you can. In your spare time you might run into someone who really knows his shit and enlightens you.

But, just as with the coffee shop, more times than not you run into people whose facade of knowledge would shatter the first time you ask a question. Trick being, if you barely understand the topic yourself, you'll only stumble onto a question that exposes their ignorance by chance. You're as likely to be led completely astray and have your time wasted as not.

Further, the chance that a given discussion board or coffee shop will contain someone interested and educated in the particular concepts you care to discuss when you care to discuss them gets pretty damn small beyond trivial depth.

The reasonable component in the price of higher education is about the quality of the interpretation and dialogue between yourself, the professor and the other students.

In short, you're paying to have some assurance that the discussion and/or lecture will be of a higher quality than you would find elsewhere and some assurance the discussion will occur and be relevant at a given time.

Nah, it's more arguing that you'd be better off learning by contributing to Open Source - then you'd get lessons and contacts for free instead of paying a lot of money to get.

> The reasonable component in the price of higher education is about the quality of the interpretation and dialogue between yourself, the professor and the other students.

$150 per class is a lot man, you can't just brush that aside. You can live on $150 for a whole week if you're frugal and live with roommates. And that's just one class. A day with four classes = $600 you're now in debt. That's a month of rent and cooked food if you're willing to slum it. Work on OSS, freelance, connect with people from the community - I say a month's worth of "living time" is worth a hell of a lot more than four classes.

Not its worth -- that's remained or even increased. But its value.

  value = worth - price

Anyway, it's a large part of what you'd get in college, free. All you have to do is make a commitment to watch some lectures and study supplementary material if you don't understand something. It's a hell of a bargain.

I stopped trying to write code back around 2004. It's not my forté. I excel at dataset analysis & pattern recognition, and communication/soft skills. While it does not apply so much to the startup scene and bleeding edge tech companies, the corporate world has a dearth of competent technical managers, not being technicians are hard to find, but because it tends to be a lot easier for liberal arts majors to acquire a working competency of tech knowledge than it is for hardcore geeks to learn people skills.

Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees.

You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.

A liberal arts education can only be supported by an economy that that is strong enough to allow it. Thats just not the case anymore. At least not for people to spend 4 years on; not to mention the negative cash flow. Its not that Liberal Arts is inherently bad, it is just unsustainable as it exists right now.

A computer science education is not merely vocational training, as you imply. But theoretical CS is still a hell of a lot more meaningful than postmodern literary theory.

* 4 Semesters of Latin

* Chinese Mythology

* History

* Linguistics

* Entomology

* Sociology

* Macro Economics

The way the college system works today, the "well roundedness" aspects are disappearing, and quickly. Don't blame the schools, blame ourselves - we're the ones balking at paying top-dollar for a hard science degree and then being forced to take "useless" liberal arts courses.

One of my biggest regrets of my collegiate education was not making a conscious effort to expand my curriculum by taking courses in the humanities department.

On the other hand, there are a glut of "enhanced worldview" liberal arts majors applying for jobs with little to no experience or day 1 vocational skills. They are not failures or cogs -- but from a hiring perspective there is little to distinguish one from another when sorting through resumes.

A liberal arts degree, from an employment perspective, is ubiquitous and a commodity. Specialization is worth more.

If I told members of my generation they could get a job in Pittsburgh, PA starting at $55,000, requiring 36-hour work weeks in 12 hour shifts, with city benefits and pension, and that it started 15K higher than my first job out of college, most would be interested.

When I told them it was working as a Pittsburgh Waste Disposal job (aka Garbage man), most would tell me to kindly fuck off. Their "degree status" is insulted that a starting garbage man will make 20-25K more than them, despite the fact I could never pay them enough to do the job themselves.

A history degree is just as applicable to this mindset of educability as a computer science degree. The only difference between the two is that a computer science degree offers its bearer some amount of vocational skills.

I feel that I received a very good education for the money I paid.

That's obviously false -- there are quite a few non-technical professions out there that are perfectly viable for careers beyond teaching.

For this forum, non-IT related degrees don't mean much, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value in one of the legion of other fields out there.

I knew a fellow maroon before I clicked the profile.

Hello, very definition of a straw-man argument. I'm surprised this is rated so high on this site.

To reiterate, his thesis is not about college, it is this:

"I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses."

Now, you can certainly take issue with the thesis he presents, but there is no point arguing about something unrelated to the point of the article.

There are a few types of people that go through college in different ways. You have intelligent people that have learned how to "excel" well, who fit the bill of the subject of the NY Times article. They get through with a decent GPA, party hard, and get a corporate job. You have intelligent people that thrive in the learning environment that college affords, and they gain a lot out of it. Their work ethic takes them places, and some develop that work ethic in college. I'm one of the latter, so call me biased towards it. Then there are the hard working, intelligent people who feel caged from the curriculum. These are the people who question the value.

The problem with the people that already have the strong work ethic and intelligence is that they assume that everyone is like those peers in the first group that simply go through the motions, and its not a question of whether they should have went to school but how they approached it. These are the loudest voices against the higher ed system.

It's undoubtedly a broken system, but inherent value exists for some. I think we'll see a revolution in higher education, hopefully sooner than later and ideally these issues are rectified.

And he has a valid point. There is very little economic benefit, outside of research and some professional fields, to pursue additional degrees.

I do, however, believe that past generations had more advantages with their degrees than my generation does.

Of course, this all presupposes that family or savings can fund that $50-200k in the first place. Unfortunately, many students are dependent on loans. Because the government backs student loans, bankers are willing to lend money for school where they won't do so for a startup.

If there was a provision that would allow you to get fully-backed "startup loans" that carry the same terms and guarantees as student loans, I firmly believe our economy would be stronger and default rates probably wouldn't be much higher than they are for student loans.

Perhaps a curriculum dedicated to giving students more and more autonomy until they are working almost entirely independently by the fourth year?

Myself and a CMU grad might have the same degree (B.S. in ECE)but our starting salaries are vastly different. I started out around 40K (w/no bennies) whereas CMU students would probably start closer to 55-60K + bennies.

Was this because CMU was also #1 in the world in ECE at the time? Yes, of course. But the point I'm getting at is private school's higher prices often imply that you will receive a better starting offer. Assuming our job markets are equally flexible, it could be 5 years before someone like myself "catches up".

Kids like the one from the NYTimes article have been raised to work smarter, not harder. Why spend 5 years paying your dues when name recognition or knowing someone will get you to same place without brow sweat?

It's not necessarily a college's fault. They're catering to wealthy entitled people and trying to take as much as they dishonestly can. Likewise, entitled children don't really understand a world that isn't catering to them.

I worked in IT industry before I started school, while going to school and after graduation. Most of my techy friends discouraged my degree every step of the way.

'Why the hell do you need it? Bill gates never even finished' was the tone of their message.

Well, I got my degree and sure I don't really use it in my job. Sure I had a big lump of dissapoitnment in my throat after I graduated and came home to realize the big pay off is not there. However, as lame as this sounds, I learned how to learn. I learned that as pointless as most of my classes were, ones that weren't will stay with me for ever.

Things I got out of it:

Got comfortable with the command line

Overcame a lifetime of math phobia (I was content with being math-illiterate before I knew its value)

Learned how to write coherent bodies of text

Got a primer in economics that helped me understand the chaos in 2008

---

I think too many people go straight to "you don't need college" rather than considering what kind of college they would get the most out of. Anyone would do well to have a simple AAS from a cheap/free technical college. Not everyone needs a PHD or degree from a top-rated institution.

If nothing else, everyone should get a basic degree even if they don't have any grand aspirations. It gives you tools to live a better life with whatever you do achieve.

Lots of stories on the net about rocket scientists losing their jobs, and conducting tour buses.

What about the name of that guy who's preliminary work on bio-luminescence won someone else a Nobel prize, but he himself is now unemployed?

It's human nature to think that we can avoid somebody's misfortune by simply following some known heuristics. It is true only some of the time.

Sure, it may not come with the creature comforts of a management job at a large corporation, but you're also your own boss. I know a lot of people who can't or won't put a price on only answering themselves.

To recap: Yes, a degree makes you more employable, but there's more to prospering than being a good employee. Especially as the corporate structure is figuring out that there are too many cogs in the machine.

Are you sure about that?

It knocks the idea that the kid is better-educated at 21 than his father was, and that he has MORE opportunities because of it.

It knocks the sad fact that the kid's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, but somehow taught the kid that he has to have A Real Job with a Career Ladder and 401k - or nothing at all:

"The parents and grandparents, like so many parents today, are disappointed in their son because he's not taking their advice, but in fact their son is taking their advice to its inevitable conclusion: he's holding out for the perfect corporate job."

It has, in short, nothing to do with you, your school, or your defensiveness about graduating college.

And if you think college graduates today are actually smarter than they were 30 years ago, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken. Their facts may be more up-to-date, however, writing skills, reading skills, and whatnot, are down across the board.

I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.

Look around on the web. Start paying attention to how many people consistently make basic linguistic errors like "loose" when they wanted to say "lose" or use the incorrect homophone for "there" or "it's" to indicate a possessive. Look for actual reasoning -- as opposed to pedantically regurgitating a collection of facts.

The sad reality is that getting a degree these days has become a lot easier, and increasingly has very little to do with how smart one is, but rather how skilled one is at cramming for a test.

The high demand and low supply in software developers has lead to both higher salaries and lower standards.

The author's conclusion:

"I'm not here offering a solution for the 45 year old guy with three kids. I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses. Jobs programs and stimulus packages are debatably good or bad, but assuredly temporary. Remember "the children are or future?" How about encouraging them a little? Maybe someday they'll pay for your social security."

edit: Or as one commenter said, get a corp job to save some $$$ while you work on something else on the side.

Yes, obviously. If you aren't even well-networked enough to get a job then how the hell are you supposed to be an entrepreneur? Being well-networked is probably the single best predictor of entrepreneurial success, so criticizing the grandfather's advice while telling him to start a company makes no sense.

The one thing the kid is probably right about though is not taking the job. When I was a kid we used to talk about McJobs, i.e. jobs with no chances of any upward mobility. These days pretty much every job at a big company is a McJob, so you have to be really careful about working for someone else.

There is absolutely no way that anyone who reads The Economist can have concluded that Europe has surpassed America in anything not involving riots, in the way that no one who reads Maxim can conclude that acne is in vogue.

I find this attitude deeply aggravating. Europe has simply chosen a different path to the US, and to pretend that the US is superior in every way is ridiculous.

Europe, on the whole, balances lower individual buying power and higher unemployment against taking substantially better care of its citizens, and much better class mobility. It's certainly arguable that the average citizen experiences a higher overall quality of life in (western) Europe than in the US. I can absolutely see how that style of life is not for everyone, so it's great that countries like the US exist, but personally, I prefer to live in a european model.

As for the value of a degree, when I went into my programme I was a decent enough (for my age) coder, with a serious weight problem and very limited social skills, and when I left I was a better coder with some good fundamental background knowledge, fit, and socially confident. My degree program did me the world of good - it's fine that it's not the route for everyone, but pretending that all degrees are worthless makes you look silly.

edit: It appears that my infrequent reading of The Economist has resulted in an unnecessary rant on my part. My apologies to the author!

I think you're misreading him. He's making fun of the reporting in the Economist which is alternately, "is Europe going to collapse?" "Is America going to become Europe and then collapse?" and "OMG scary Chinese." The Economist has a fairly particular world view, and he was skeptical that someone who reads it regularly can come out with a different one.

(They give reasons though, which makes it an interesting read even though I frequently disagree with them.)

"lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money.

Right now, the unemployment rate in most European countries is almost the same as it is in the US:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&...

Higher taxes don't necessarily mean less freedom with your money; a collective good that a group largely (or even unanimously) in favor of purchasing might go unpurchased due to the free rider problem.

See Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups"

When you are taxed, that money may or may not go toward something you want to purchase (and many times, the people in the middle and upper classes are paying for programs that they will never use). That money is gone and you have that much less to spend, save, or invest.

You also don't really have a say in where it's spent.

"sharing the value of common resources through taxation and public expenditure" is a related article: http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/robertson.htm

Yes, I know. I prefer to lose some of that freedom, because I believe the society I live in is better for it. I'm not someone who believes in individual freedom above all - I just think a high level of individual freedom is important.

Good data on the unemployment figures, although I believe (I may be wrong) that in the past Europe's unemployment has been worse than the US.

Is that a bad strategy, or when job hunting should you be pounding the pavement 24/7?

I recently moved away from a secure job that paid well to live closer to family. All my old friends asked me what I was going to do. I assured them I would have a job after my first day of looking.

I did. I worked serving fast food for three weeks before I found a job more in line with my previous employment. During those three weeks I worked serving food, I was emailing my resume out, making calls, and dropping to on local places. I worked my network and heard about an opportunity.

Having a college degree and working for 4 hours a day to find a job while mom and dad pay for your rent, food, and entertainment is a sign of utter failure.

I have been independent since I was 19, after my freshman year of school. I've said it before and will always say it. If I have to move back home after what I've accomplished thus far, I have failed.

It taught me an important lesson about really looking for the job and putting the proper effort in.

And yea, get a job doing something while you look. I haven't been jobless since before my first job at 15.

Ah, and for those three weeks, what did you do about the crushing, crippling depression and feelings of doom as you wondered if you'd ever again find anything better than fast food?

What's that? You didn't feel that way? Some of us do. This was such a powerful effect for me, personally, that when the company I was working for folded in December 2008, I borrowed money for two months to pay rent rather than getting a "just for now" job that couldn't pay my bills anyway, but which certainly would suck up all my energy and send me immediately into depression (presumably not clinical depression; I'm using the word to mean just being depressed), in which state virtually anything I do would be hampered, including effectiveness at looking for a job.

It is interesting to me the different notions of pride people have. I would lose all my pride if I had to take out loans to survive. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth.

It has been impressed upon me my entire life that self sufficiency is the greatest thing you can achieve.

I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression?

This is eye opening and like a field course in psychology to me.

EDIT I'm not going to baby anyone. It's pathetic to skate by on loans rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it.

My goal in life is to be the rock of stability that people can cling to when times are difficult. If that means ignoring my fears like they aren't there, then that is what I will do. If that means serving french fries to people that are more rude than you can imagine - saying horrible things about you just because you work at mcdonalds - then that is what I will do.

But please do answer my above question. I learn more with every comment that is made. EDIT

That's always worked for me, but it's never been something I could do by settling for less, as you were initially advocating. I always had to shoot for more.

Another thing that worries me, however, is that I know a lot of people who worked at least as hard as I did, and are still stuck in that $10/hr job. Who've made the leap, and fallen hard, and had to work their way back up to having a car and new clothes and a steady job again. Why has it been different for me? It doesn't seem like I've worked a lot harder. It doesn't seem like I'm vastly more intelligent. Basically, it seems like I was lucky to be intrinsically interested in things that turned out to have market value (programming, system admin, etc). None of my childhood friends were interested in those things until recently, and none of them have made it to the middle class, financially.

Look at it like a basic negotiation. You suggest a proposition, if it gets declined, you keep coming back with propositions more in the favor of the other party until they accept.

That is how I view it. I can't get a job that pays 60k right now, so I'll take this job at McDonalds that pays 20k. Meanwhile, I will continue to work my ass off to find a 60k job and prove to the hiring manager that I am the person that will benefit them the most.

The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. As I stated before. You obviously have a mountain of heart.

THAT IS WHY IT'S YOU AND NOT THEM.

There's certainly something to that. For me, though, it was psychologically difficult, to say the least, to hold the confidence and drive to make something of myself, while doing a good job at manufacturing refrigerators or operating a cash register. Given the large number of folk who never seem to get out of those dead-end service jobs, I think there may well be a lot of people like me. :)

Don't make excuses for them or yourself. It is a matter of ignoring the negative things (or spinning them in a positive light) and not giving up. Change can happen if you let it.

Wow. This is exactly the opposite of what I meant to convey.

It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth.

What's pride got to do with this? It's not about pride, or self-respect, or honor, or any of that. It's about a pervasive feeling of helplessness, of feeling unable to crawl out of the hole that you've slipped back into, after struggling out once before with lots of hard work and luck, and noticing that all the people you knew back in the day are still there, even though they're working about as hard as you did.

It's about fear. Once the fear has set in, that fear that you'll never succeed again, that it was all a fluke, that last year was the high point of your life rather than the latest step up on a generally progressing journey, everything becomes harder. It's harder to look for a job. It's harder to care about keeping up the non-job things you were doing. Coding for an open source project, playing a game or socializing with your friends, exercising, making reasonable-effort meals instead of nuking a frozen pizza, taking online courses -- these things start to seem pointless. Sending out resumes and calling recruiters becomes something you're doing because it's just what people do, rather than because you think that you'll actually get a new job that's better than the last one. Eventually you may stop doing that, because what's the point? You're exhausted, and you have to get up early to go to work and perform mindless activity with people you despise, because your fear and depression has poisoned your interactions with every new person you meet.

I've been down this road once before, in 2003, and I really didn't need to do that again. Instead, I looked for a job that could actually pay my lease (which was too high for a single minimum wage job, and I had 7 months to go) and other bills, and kept my spirits up by continuing to live life as though I were about to get a new job and therefore didn't need to shift into a lower gear (as it were), and that worked out much better. I did have to borrow for a coupla months rent (one after I already had a job, since I hadn't gotten a paycheck, yet), and I was out of work for 3-4 months, counting the months I didn't get paid for, but it all worked out.

In my life, every time I've shifted my aim lower because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do better, I've been right. Every time. What I've learned from this is that I should avoid spending my time and energy when it literally isn't worth it. It's better to keep my head up and my attitude cheerful, because without those things, I'll need a lot of luck to get back out of the rut again.

I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression?

It's not just life not going my way. That did happen in 2008, more than once (divorce, my business failed, then the company I started at when my wife and I split up also failed), but while I was very, very upset over some of those things, they didn't drive me into the depression and ennui that I used to feel all the time in the early and mid 90s, when it seemed that there was no way out of my current situation. In situations like that, the solution has always been to quit my job, rather than get a new one. In late 1997, I quit my refrigerator manufacturing job and bought a Novell Certification guide with the money I would otherwise have spent on gas to get to work that week, and by early 1998 I had a Novell network job (no previous tech jobs).

In 2008, I left Alabama and came to the DC metro, and had a good job within a coupla weeks. Only a few months before that, it had felt like I was trapped in Alabama with no future but working at $10/hr. This experience reminded me exactly what feeling to avoid, so that when that company failed in December (after not paying since mid-October), I knew exactly what I needed to do: I did all the job search stuff I could easily do for another programming job, and I avoided doing anything that I would do if I were planning to be out of a job for months. I played games. I watched a lot of TV. I did some Erlang and played with Java on my new G1. I invited a friend to come up to stay with me and look for a job here because the economy and job situation was so great around DC (!).

This sustained burst of optimism did the trick; I got a nice contract gig that turned into a permanent position, where I still am. If I had gone to get a gone to get a job at McDonald's, even assuming I'd immediately gotten a $10/hr, full time position, I would have been making less than my rent per month, after taxes. So, still borrowing money, but without the energy and optimism.

After reflecting on this and writing about it, I realize that part of the problem is that I'm very introverted and somewhat antisocial. Virtually every low-paying job is a service job, which means dealing with people all day. Much of the drained, depressed feeling I had for much of the 90s could probably be traced back to feeling forced to interact with people I would rather have avoided or ignored. Extroverts might well have the opposite reaction; I dunno.

I used to be extremely introverted. I thought I was smarter than everyone else (not saying you're like this), and pretty much was happy doing my own little thing. Then I got my first job. I had to go out and talk to a lot of people. Even though it was usually small talk, it had to happen. 2-400 people every day (I was a bank teller). That gave me some interpersonal skills and a shitload of confidence.

I like that you got the Novell book, studied, went after and got a job. That kind of thing takes heart.

But ultimately, that is what I don't understand. You have so much heart, but it seem like you don't want to recognize or apply it all the time. If one job at McDonald's wont pay the rent. Why aren't you getting a second job at Barnes and Noble? It sucks. It totally does, but there is a silver lining; You're in total control.

It is puzzling to me that you feel better about yourself living off of loans playing video games than working at a dead end job.

I've created a theory, rather unpopular among some of my friends. I think that people that believe in luck are more inclined to feel like you feel... You even specifically mentioned luck at the top of your comment. I don't believe in luck. As funny as it may sound "A real man makes his own luck" (Cal from Titanic, also quoted by Dwight Schrute) is what I subscribe to. Anything I get is because I worked my ass off to get there. I work hard, I produce results, life gets easier in the tough times... Believing this has made a significant change in my outlook on life.

Oh, if I'd thought I was living off of loans, I'd have been doomed, sure. Instead, I was just temporarily borrowing some money until things improved. That turned out to be true, and those people got paid back. The whole point was to live as though I were about to get a job paying what I'd been making, which helped enormously in believing that I was going to, which helped me stay optimistic over the months until I actually did, which meant I kept trying at an optimum sustained level, and that I could smile and joke when talking with recruiters and interviewers, rather than saying the minimum required to get off the phone in the expectation that it wouldn't matter anyway, etc.

But enough of my life history, eh? :)

What I get from this post is that you have to delude yourself into thinking something that isn't true to not lose hope.

That is a very dangerous way to think. If you don't accept reality, you are losing out. Not just on what is actually happening, but it is how to build confidence in yourself. "I am in a terrible situation, but by my ability to think of my feet and provide for myself when I needed it, I am very capable." There are a lot of important self actualizations that occur when all hope is lost.

If you'd like to have more of a discussion rather than some name calling, I'd love to talk about it.

How would some side work suck up all your energy? It's not like you have to think to serve fries, stock shelves or wait tables. Working crap jobs is the best motivator I've ever had to do better for myself.

It sounds like you've never done it. You have to think to do all of that stuff -- not enough to keep you from being bored out of your skull, but enough that you can't actively think about something else and still do it well enough to keep your job. Stocking shelves might get that way after a while, but those others involve talking to people, which isn't interesting, but does require a lot of processing to figure out what the expected responses and questions are. I have enough trouble making pro forma conversation passing someone in the hall:

"Hey, how was your weekend?"

"I'm fine; and you?" (Oh, wait, what was the question? Dammit, that should have been 'Pretty quiet; how was your weekend?').

Thinking about something else during conversation doesn't really work, you know?

Come up with all the excuses you want, but at the end of the day you're still mooching off your friends when you're perfectly capable of doing some job while you look for more work. IMHO, that's not acting like an adult.

Well, these days, I'm the moochee, in your terms. But that's fine, because helping each other is what friends do. I don't think it's childish behavior to accept proffered help when you need it; succeeding is hard enough without insisting that every little gain must be solely due to your own hard work.

Firstly, why are his feet in a house and not on the pavement? The jobs available in a listing on a website are a vanishingly small portion of the total available jobs out there.

I have a friend who once needed a job (he was a qualified electrician a self-taught and fairly talented IT guy, in industrial settings not a terrible combination) but had no degree or shiny paper to back him up. What'd he do?

He hit the road. He drove down highway 401 in Ontario (the industrial heartland of Canada), hit up a number of factories and shops along the way. He would walk in, demand to speak to someone senior, introduce himself, talk about their need for someone of his qualifications, leave his resume, and move on.

He had a job within a week, after multiple callbacks. None of the places that called him back had the position externally open, much less on a website.

The vast majority of the world's jobs are unadvertised - if your only source for jobs is a website, you are failing yourself.

[edit] My friend is also the highest-paid high school dropout I know. Hell, he makes more than I do.

That doesn't mean that he should want it, just that he doesn't seem in 23 odd years to have grasped the concept of earning something.

Concerning the article, my wife pointed out that when she graduated with a Liberal Arts degree and started working as a tech-writer back in 2000, her starting salary was $42,000. A considerable more useful sum than $40k would be today.

The guy in the article seems pretty stupid not to have taken the $40k, seeing as he seems to have no other plan whatsoever. One revealing thing is his comment about his cell bill. You can be sure his parents are also paying for the house, for food, supplying a vehicle, paying insurance, buying him clothes, medical insurance.

My verdict: he's a sheltered little corporate would-be drone, with zero actual knowledge of the world.

I'm currently in an argument with my parents about attempting a startup after I graduate vs getting a job and trying to start something on the side. Obviously the parents think it's too much risk, I think I've tried to "follow the rules" for too long and have nothing to lose.

Anyone else been in a similar situation?

After a few contracts I wound up joining a cool startup as lead developer since I wanted to pay off student debt fast and get some experience before starting my own. In a year or two, I'll likely be finishing up with this startup I'm at now and will have saved enough money to pursue my own thing full time for a while. Who knows what will happen then ...

This all from someone who had some student loans to pay off and not much money saved.

Both contract jobs and longer term employment with a startup have been hugely valuable experiences that I am grateful to have had before starting my own. There is a huge continuum between working for a fortune 500 company and as an entrepreneur.

When I first started looking for a job back in high school, my parents (both entrepreneurs) told me to accept the first job I got and then keep applying to the ones I was looking for.

Having a job currently shows that you are at least likable enough and capable enough to have someone else want to hire you at the present time.

I think, however, that there is a problem in school (even high school) that pushes students towards wanting to start off making decent money with no input as if they are entitled right off the bat. Scott says he expects his political science degree to entitle him to $75,000/year (more or less). I bet all of his teachers nursed him along with, "These are skills to get a high-paying job..." They did that crap through most of my normal HS and college.

So the question to ask yourself is what encouraged you to start a business? What made you take a risk on yourself? For me, it was oddly enough teachers at a college vocational school during HS that didn't express "finding a dream job" but rather learning for the betterment of oneself. We were encouraged to do good work and show off that work rather than grind our way through busywork and exams into a high paying job.

We cant hold higher education responsible for people making poor decisions. It isnt the college's fault that his lack of humility kept him unemployed. That is his own issue. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the only time in history that a typical 21 year old (presumably from any background) can come out of college and immediately enter the top 1% of wage earners (in finance and some engineering). Even looking beyond finance, look at what kids fresh out of law school and med school (even not top tier med schools) are making. Even teachers, who we typically view as underpaid, make considerably more now than they did in our parents generation if you take into account the 200 day work year and benefits.

When I was 19, 20, and 21, I didn't see the importance of college. Now that I'm 29 (with a bachelor's degree), I do. I suspect that many of these articles are written by students or people that don't have a lot of life experience.

Life is not a checklist!

College can't replace life experience. But, many of the articles I have seen go in the opposite direction and say that college is useless.

To some it may be useless, but you will only get something out of it if you put in the effort.

Is this Russia?"

Hah. Best quote from the article. Between the baby boom, rising life expectancies, and the 30-60% drop in boomers' retirement funds, people of Scott's age are facing a completely different scenario than the two generations before his. No shame in slacking by while society sorts itself out.

Give each one $50K, what happens?

I have issue with calling the baby boomers the greatest generation. They've saddled this country with an unimaginable debt burdon, creating a situation where their kids may be the first American generation who's quality of life may not exceed that of their parents, yet the baby boomers call their kids lazy for not wanting to pick up the tab and pay for their extravagances.

However, Scott from the OP is still a lazy sack of ...

My dad (who personally is as conservative as they come, though with fond memories of FDR) is of the tail end of this generation--he enlisted just in time to go to Okinawa. He always tells me people living today don't fully understand what WWII was really like. It wasn't like Vietnam or Iraq where everyone at home carries on as normal while the troops are on the front lines--everyone was in the war effort, whether it's boys too young to enlist working in shipyards churning out a ship every day or two, or old men in Bend, Oregon meeting at the bar and planning how to defend the town in case the Japanese landed, to the rationing. And that's America--not Britain where they had bombs and rockets raining on their heads, and where the success or failure of the RAF could dictate whether your family survived the night. Total war means the entire population is involved, and WWII was the last total war the English speaking world ever fought. Keeping all of that in mind, I'm willing to forgive a lot from the WWII generation.

Back in reality land, a smaller population of heavily taxed and badly paid members of the Gen X and Gen Y cohort will have to change grandma's bed pan and they better be damned productive given how long everyone's living.

They call the offspring generation the boomers after all. The "greatest" did a perfect job in understanding what they were doing in that respect.

Their children, however, are the ones who use their own strength to ensure lucrative benefit programs for themselves on the backs of their offspring in the Gen X/Y bracket.

Did you know in '48 they claimed the cost of nationalized healthcare would go down in time as the population got healthier...?

Also, you could have the American system that only seems to go up in costs exponentially.

First, because most would agree that getting degrees in a technical field are more justified and warranted than non-technical fields. So you're going to get two totally opposite conclusions from the folks dissing $100k history degrees versus the folks praising $70k electrical engineering degrees.

Secondly, software and business degrees are probably among the two fields where you can arguably gain the exact same knowledge and skills outside of college, free or very close to it, and at your own pace, and be just as qualified to work in industry. Unlike say medicine or chemistry or physics, etc. But here on HN software and business are probably two of our top most interested fields among readers. So we know a lot about these fields in particular. And the readers here should be very aware how easy it is to access and use free and independent resources and techniques to teach themselves in the areas of software and business. But with software and business in particular we have two camps, each further split into sub-factions, and they are all essentially right when it comes to their positions. Yes, having college education is better than not. Yes, college is too expensive. Yes, you can learn most things on your own. Yes, having that piece of paper WILL help you in the long term. No, of course you don't actually need it (with exceptions like doctors, etc.) All of these positions seem in conflict, but they're not, and that's where the controversy comes from. Because everybody is right.

This element can not be understated. When I want to learn something about Ruby on Rails or Java I have a pile of resources: open source code, free online tutorials, books, forums, StackOverflow, HN, etc.

For a lot of other disciplines, this is not the case. You are lucky if there is a book on Amazon that gets close. Forget websites, forget forums, forget open source, there is just no equivalent to all of that. It makes it a lot more difficult to survive without a college degree becuase a lot of times you are rederiving things.

It would be an interesting experiment for pg to list flame war topics when they emerge, link to a few insightful summaries (like yours) in the posting guidelines and then ask people to write about something else.

I spent three minutes skimming this article and it's perfectly clear what the author's thesis is; that the millennial generation has been raised to expect a breed of safe, corporate job in their favorite fields which just don't exist in the quantity that young adults wish they did. He suggests that they had better relax their standards and take some risks if they want to get work.

The author may not be Hemingway, but it's hardly difficult to understand. Learn to fucking read.

Is that necessary?

Amazingly, rufius's comment was at +11 before I posted. My speech must have been very convincing.

I get the feeling that voting for comments on their merits here is a long lost cause.