I love the education I received an wouldn’t trade it for anything, am I bitter about spending the last 3 years as a glorified secretary? A little, but I’m more upset that people, especially women who couldn’t swing the state U like I did are being shut out of jobs like mine when I know that I don’t need the analytical, writing or critical thinking skills I amassed in college to perform my job. I need patience, common sense, and nerves of steel.

Bottom line, a service economy will be the end of us all.

What do you do when you hate math but don’t know what you love?

I do sort of wish we still had two-year teacher’s colleges–I’d much rather spend two years learning about education than spend four years and a lot more money learning some about education and some about stuff I don’t care about, because honestly, I don’t love learning for learning’s sake. I like reading books, and talking to people, but I could care less about the specifics of most things. Maybe this is a terrible quality for a future teacher to have. I like to think I offset it with other qualities that all of my favorite teachers had–pateince, a sense of humor, an ability not to take things too personally, and others (I hope).

I do think we need to step up the vocational training in this country. A liberal arts education isn’t for everyone, not even in an ideal society–lord knows I don’t especially want one (in no small part because I feel like I’m learning a lot more so far in my year off, at an Americorps organization, than I did freshman year of college) and it’s a real shame that vocational education is seen as somehow “lesser.”

If what you want out of life is to focus on loving learning, then go ahead and pick a major that makes you sigh with geeky pleasure. But not everyone gets like that about learning, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I’m a PhD in English currently an Assistant Prof (yes, I have the elusive Tenure Track job) at a good, if isolated, Provincial University.

And hot damn, is this a great job. The ultrafun bits are teaching and research — never-ending joy and fascination, both of them, so much pleasure that I actually feel like I’m pulling off a fast one — they PAY me to do this stuff! SWEEET! The not-so fun bits are marking (shudder) and writing, which is best described as staring at the computer screen until your eyes bleed or fifteen hours have passed, whichever comes first. Then when you’ve finished, you do it some more.

Even the money is good — well, oddly enough, *especially* the money, which I never expected to be this good. The nice thing about graduate work in the humanities is that your expectations are so low that even a normal middle-class salary seems like wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And I do, actually, make better than average money, as do most of us from half-decent schools who have the astounding good luck to get one of these jobs.

I don’t like the town I’m in much, and I’m still paying off student loans the size of Mount McKinley, but I am strikingly, nay, astoundingly happy in my work and the job comes with intellectual and personal perks that are unbeatable in any field.

And, in all honesty, were I to win the lottery, I would not quit. Move, maybe. Quit, not.

So the answer is, yes, if you love the subject you’re studying, then the game is worth the candle. I was happy as a sessional, too: I didn’t make much money, maybe 35,000 - 40,000 but it beat all hell out of middle-management grunt work and/ or secretarial stuff which pays the same wage for utter, soul-destroying misery. Which would you rather do, answer emails or explain poetry?

The main problem with Academia is that it’s rather like the priesthood: it’s a way of life, but one that you  need to pay for up front, before you know that it’s right for you.

But yes, I’m on the side of doing what you love: you’ll be better at it than something you don’t like, and I can’t imagine being locked into something I disliked for the rest of my life.

The key, though, was knowing people. I got a summer job in conference desk work, which got me noticed by the director of the student/staff tech support department. Those jobs landed me a management position the next summer in the conference department. Due to the location of my office, I stumbled into a web development position, which didn’t work out so well, but got me some fancy recommendation letters, so that when my friend’s dad’s engineering firm needed an IT manager, I got hired on the spot. They didn’t care that I spent umpteen years pasting letters onto poster board and writing papers about Artemesia Gentileschi. I knew a guy, and I had something like 10 years of computer tech and programming experience. That’s what counts.

Networking >= job experience > degree > no degree

I, like Amanda, am a first-generation college graduate. I totally agree with her that for reasons not directly related to content, a college degree is increasingly essential. You just get access to resources and social connections that you don’t get as much elsewhere. This is a little problematic, though; I think college has gotten overly vocationalized and our society doesn’t offer as many opportunities for people to learn to do something they like and that they can make a living at without going to college. As one who’s taught in college, I’ve seen a lot of students who just don’t want to be there, but they go because (especially if you come from a middle-class family) that’s “just what you do”. But college isn’t for everyone, which is not to say there’s anything “wrong” with those people. They just need other avenues in order to develop their interests and talents.

As an aside, I recently read that some of the trades in my area are having a hard time getting people to fill available jobs. These are typically blue-collar skilled jobs in which you can start at around $50,000/yr., which is not bad for your first job. But these jobs don’t have the cachet of a desk job at MicroBorg; we’ve almost done too good a job of guiding people towards college in training for a white-collar job.

I majored in a science as an undergraduate, and I was thinking about changing my major to something very different by my sophomore year because I was underachieving and thought that the major I’d picked wasn’t for me. I let my parents talk me out of changing, and both, being working-class folk, thought I should focus more on my earning potential; my father told me flat out that trying to find “happiness” in my future job was useless and that I needed to go for the money. I stuck with it. Turns out that within two years of graduating, I was done with the sciences and made a change anyway.

After working as a temp to make ends meet, I decided to go for the happiness thing and pursue graduate school in history. Let me say that, in my experience, there are also pitfalls to the “education for its own sake” view. Education is good for its own sake, ultimately, so I don’t believe in the idea of the “useless” degree. It is, however, possible to go too far in pursuit of this noble dream, especially at the graduate school level. I would never tell someone that he or she shouldn’t go to grad school in the liberal arts, but I would tell someone to think very carefully about it, and if he or she is just finishing up undergraduate study, to take some time away from school and do something else.

If you can be happy without going to grad school, I would argue that you don’t need to go. The opportunity cost for Ph.D. study is significant. My field - history - has an average time-to-Ph.D. of about nine years. That’s nine years spent in relative peonage, and if you’re looking for an academic job, your prospects are, quite frankly, awful. Unless you’re from one of the very top programs, you’ll very likely spend a few years adjuncting wherever you can get a job. If you do get a tenure-track job, you have to be willing to go just about anywhere to do it; I love where I live and I decided that I won’t go to just any place just so I can call myself an academic.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great going through old books and archives and finding something new and writing about it. I love being an historian - at least in the abstract. But those archives and old books don’t pay the bills. It’s nice to be able to eat decently, have my own roof over my own head, and have some degree of independence.

Sorry this is so long. I think I could write several blog posts on this.

Gee, I wish somebody’d told me about that ten years or so ago. Granted that I’m not certain the middle class is something to which I aspire, given my experiences of it in youth, but it would be nice to have the option to choose one way or the other. (Of course, I’m still trying to determine in what context is ‘no one’, in the quoted paragraph.)

Regarding college and university, in general: I’m one of those folks who goes to university, finds out it’s nothing like what he expected, and drops out. How much did I need college? I suppose I can’t say for certain. But I’m a computer geek for a living, and from where I am there doesn’t seem to be much of any ‘career path’, at least not in an upward direction — I’m no blazing genius and I haven’t even got a bachelor’s degree in the field, so pick-up programming jobs and system administration work appears to be just about all I’m going to be able to find, at least around here. So long as the pay for that kind of work doesn’t go to crap, I should probably manage okay, but I wish I’d had enough clue seven years ago not to drop out, and I also wish I were willing to go into massive student-loan debt to go back to school — if I could be certain I’d be able to pay off the loans, I’d do it, but with things the way they are now, I just don’t dare.