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Newsflash! College kids are more depressed now than ever!
Awww. Poor babies. It must be hard to come to the realization that the world doesn’t owe you anything after years of being told that you can do whatever you’d like, as long as you want it enough.
I’m not surprised that so many college kids are stressed out, and even though my recommendation to them would be to suck it up and get over it, I actually do feel kind of bad for them. By the time most kids get to college, their parents, teachers, and counselors have been giving them a crock of horse crap for 17 years.
I was in high school in 2003 and college until 2008, and the whole time I heard a literal ton (2,000 pounds) of garbage like this:
- You can be anything you want to be!
- Get paid to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
- Go to college.
This advice is not just bad; I believe it is truly detrimental to the psyche of kids who hear it and then get slapped in the face with reality. Our society is sending way too many kids off to college to accumulate debt and struggle through their first 10-20 years of adulthood, professionally and financially. I think it’s time that we updated the advice we are giving our young people and started telling them what they need to hear; not what we want to believe is true.
You can be anything you want to be – You can be anything you are qualified to be
When I was in school, I saw a lot of people who wanted something so bad they could taste it, but they never did a darn thing to prepare themselves for it. Jim wants to be an engineer and has a history degree. Tim just wants any job and has an engineering degree. Who is going to get hired for an engineering job: the guy who wants it or the guy who is qualified? I hope I don’t even have to answer that question.
Here’s another one. Sara got a marketing degree and LOVES animals. Tara got a marketing degree and just kinda likes animals. She was also president of the marketing club in college, had three summer internships with reputable companies, and started a small marketing firm that did projects for local businesses and student groups. Who do you think will get a marketing position with the Humane Society?
If you want to do something, stop wanting it and start making yourself qualified to do it.
Get paid to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life – Get paid to do what you love and all the work it took to get there will probably be worth it
First, there aren’t many kids (or people for that matter) who could even tell you what they would LOVE to do for work. If someone does know, this saying makes them think they will just love their job forever.
In many careers it takes years of unfulfilling, low paying grunt work to even get to a position where you are qualified to do what you love. It is amazing how many college seniors feel entitled to their dream job immediately. I believe anyone giving career advice to a young person has a responsibility to make them aware of how difficult the work will be to get to that dream job.
Go to college – Go to college if you are good at and love math, science, or computers. Otherwise, let’s talk.
This is the worst of them all. If you like math and science, then there’s a really good chance you’re going to find a stable, well-paying job when you are done with your degree. Here are a few “top jobs” lists I found from CNN and CareerCast:
By my count, 13 of those jobs require a technical college degree (math, science, or computers), two require business degrees, four require either a certificate program or no college at all, and one requires a liberal arts degree.
Our parents and counselors are sending boatloads of kids to college for business, psychology, and liberal arts degrees, and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them. College can still make sense for the kids that want to study these things, but a default recommendation for these kids to go to college is, in my opinion, ridiculous.
In summary, I think we have a responsibility to give young people good advice. With over 50% of college freshman stressed and unhappy, it would be foolish to continue giving the same advice we have been giving. I don’t want to discourage kids from following their dreams; I want to give kids a better, more realistic idea of how to reach their dreams and how much time and money it will take to get there.
Don’t forget to enter my $25 Amazon Giveaway before Feb 6th, 2011!
Kevin McKee is an entrepreneur, IT guru, and personal finance leader. In addition to his writing, Kevin is the head of IT at Buildingstars, Co-Founder of Padmission, and organizer of Laravel STL. He is also the creator of www.contributetoopensource.com. When he’s not working, Kevin enjoys podcasting about movies and spending time with his wife and four children.
What’s wrong with just shunning grades and college and being a lifestyle designer baby!
Lotsa folks are doing it nowadays. Thoughts?
I don’t even know what a lifestyle designer is, but if they can get paid for it and they love it, then sure!
There are lots of jobs that don’t need a college degree or good grades. If you want to make a career in retail or construction or assembly line work, then you don’t need a 4.0. Just be aware that you limit your opportunities by not going to college.
Assuming you have an interest in engineering and the environment, Environmental Engineering would be a great career to be looking at. In my neck of the woods, they are very high demand and I only see this demand increasing over the next decade. With regulations and standards tightening, the amount of impact studies and monitoring required for major projects, especially in the resource sector, is growing rapidly.
That’s definitely a great undergraduate major. As someone with an engineering degree, I can personally attest to the fact that engineers weren’t hit nearly as hard as other majors during the recession. I had lots of friend with multiple job offers through the worst of the recession.
This is a helluva post right here! Definitely going in my round up.
I agree with you on the whole “business, psychology, and liberal arts degrees” thing. It’s a shame business is so overloaded, really. That’s one of the many reasons I’m going for finance rather than the general business degree.
Finance is good, but I can say from experience that you don’t need a finance degree to work in finance. I got an engineering degree and now I do finance for the IT part of my company. It’s amazing the breath of work available to someone with an engineering degree!
Yeah, I understand that.
Engineering majors are very respected in finance/business applications because they generally have very good problem solving skills.
As for the major itself, engineering doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so going to get an engineering degree vs a finance degree simply wouldn’t work for me.
I really enjoy math, number crunching, etc that is included in engineering, but when it isn’t applicable to something I’m interested in (money, for example) I’m not the best at making sense of it.
Honestly, for most degrees I can’t see there really being all that much “value-added” unless there is some post-grad certification that requires a degree. It’s only a few years after graduation that no one cares about your degree and everyone cares about your experience/history/what you can do.
In the business world, my experience shows that your degree typically doesn’t matter, although some jobs do require a finance degree, so I think you have the right business major.
I love your blog, nice topics! And I do agree with you about 80%, but the 20% disagreement comes from the part about not everyone going to college.
I 100% agree that many many kids are in college studying liberal arts and not learning anything. But I don’t think that’s because liberal arts aren’t helpful for a career, I think it’s because the schools are failing our kids by letting them graduate college with good grades despite being really bad writers and unable to critically analyze anything at all. There’s a new book out “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” that basically states that huge portions of liberal arts kids aren’t even reading more than 40 pages a week, which is insane to me. I studied psychology at the University of Chicago, and we had classes that had 250 pages of reading per week – and that was only one class! I wrote hundreds of pages over my 4 years there, I wasn’t coddled or told my writing was awesome, I basically had reality slap me in the face when I was being judged by people who routinely publish their work.
So, for me, the key is that when you are in college, you need to be challenged, and sadly many students never are, and they end up with zero skills that are applicable to jobs. With my psych BA, I got into a career in research that now has me with over a dozen published works, having written huge multi-million dollar grants that got funded, etc. I have been successful because I followed your item 1 – I built up my qualifications to the point that I am a very competitive candidate in my field, even though I’m only 6 years out of college. Unfortunately, too many people are told “sure, that job sounds great” instead of “do you really understand what jobs are out there, and what it takes to get them?” We could all use more career counseling and less pats on the back.
Great insights Sara, and congratulations on being so successful in the Psychology field and graduating from a school that is almost as good as Wash U. 😉
I’ll have to check out that book and I’m certain there is a lot more learning to be done in college than we see today, but I still stand by my assertion that not everyone should go to college. We need managers at Best Buy, trash men, UPS drivers, construction workers, assembly line workers. We also need plumbers, electricians, and nurses. These jobs require either a high school education or a certificate program. Let’s find out if kids would be happy doing one of those things, and if they would, let’s not send them to college to spend a bunch of money.
Oh yea I meant to say that I definitely do think that everyone doesn’t need to go to college! It’s kind of crazy how much debt people are getting into for it, only to be less qualified for jobs than someone who just skipped college & jumped into the workforce. And I know a lot of very happy people who got into jobs with low education requirements.
I totally agree that you can be anything you are qualified for! However, another trend I see among young people that I went to school with is that they become over-qualified educationally and under-qualified with experience.
I have an acquaintance who got their B.S. from MIT in something very technical. Then thought business would be a good fit, so is getting her MBA. While she is at it, she thought she would throw in a JD.
When she graduates, she will be about 26-27, have a ton of degrees, but hasn’t even worked a single job in her entire life (not even an internship). What kind of job is she going to get with this? What about the debt she is racking up to get it? I don’t think any company will hire her to a senior level position because of her education alone; yet she will need a senior level salary to pay back the loans!
Great advice. The most important thing is to take charge and set about setting the stage to be successful. I firmly believe the main reason for failing to succeed is just not putting forth the effort. I think real experience is very helpful. Getting into real workplaces early I think can help people really see what goes on. And then you just have to pay attention and realize it is up to you (unless you are a trust fund baby in a society that believes you should be treated like nobility of old because your parents are rich then you basically just have to not be a complete idiot and you will be fine – but an alarming number in your circumstances are complete idiots and blow their princely gifts).