Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Bachelor's Degrees Are, For The Most Part, Worthless

Been doing some thinking recently, about my life and my career (well, job), and such, and came to the conclusion that, unless it is in a specialized field, Bachelor's degrees are worthless. I am a prime example, I went to school, got my 4 year degree, even graduated Summa Cum Laude (putting me in the top 5%, I believe it was, of all graduates from the school that year). Sounds impressive, right? Yet here I am working part-time for approximately $9.50 an hour. Meanwhile, I'm pushing 30. I've seen similar stories with friends of mine and hear on the news about recent graduates not being able to find work at all. That's because Bachelor's degrees are generally useless. I say generally because if your degree is in a specialized field like, say, microbiology or even mathematics, it is probably still helpful in a job search. On the same token, people with those kinds of degrees are probably less common and are going for specific jobs from the start. But for those of us with 4 year degrees in Communication, English, History, Philosophy, any of the arts, and so on, your degree (unless you got a teaching certificate with it) is worth slightly less than the paper it is printed on. I say slightly less because, while you still have a nice piece of paper, one side of it is now unusable for future printing. For most people, the job market is all about WHO you know and not WHAT you know. And since I'm not a big networker, here I am, low pay, low (and crappy) hours, no benefits, no paid time off, and no raises in...ever. So those friends of mine who never bothered going to college, don't worry, in the long run, you didn't miss a whole lot, plus you got 4 years of job experience on the rest of us! And for anyone with a good job, I have 2 questions: Are you hiring? and Can you put in a good word for me?