A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

I became a single father when my youngest was a baby. I was juggling a baby plus a two year old and all that comes with it (obviously I couldn't breastfeed) with full time work. I saw the results of years of womens studies first hand. Zero services available to fathers of babies since every single government funded program was only for mothers. Being questioned about potential unsavoury activies because my two year old said they like wrestling at home with dad and everyone distrusts a father who is raising a baby by himself. How the entire gender studies academia misses that the culture in raising babies is hostile to men I don't know but I trust their professional opinions about as far as I can piss.

EDIT: I'll flesh this out with an example of why I don't value liberal arts degrees. Approaching one Christmas I was struggling. My work didn't go on break until 5pm on the 23rd, I was juggling that plus parenting plus all the other tasks that go into preparing for a family Christmas. I stumbled across a news article that I would summarise as "We need to thank all the women that are working hard right now to make Christmas special for us". I emailed this journalist, a graduate of the liberal arts, and mentioned that there are a number of men out there in situations like men working towards the same goal and the gendered language can be harmful. The journalist reponded that it's mostly women so there isn't an issue with this language. The same journalist who writes about how we need to make STEM more hosptitable to women, etc.

Her formal liberal arts education only taught her to see gender issues in one direction and didn't give her to critical ability to think about gender issues in a broader sense. So yes, I don't value when people have some parts of a liberal arts education.

> I know a lot of older people who regret not going to college

Sure. There's an equal amount of young people who regret going.

Not that they regret the education received per se, but do not feel that its value is anywhere close to the amount of student debt they are in.

Undergraduate courses should either be publicly funded or employers should adjust their expectations. Part of the problem is that nowdays college degrees are required even for fairly low-paying jobs, which wasn't always the case.

Find a job which pays you enough and you are not over stressed. If your job is too hard for you at the moment you need to find a way to be able to improve your skills

First off, this really has nothing to do with anything I said. It's you projecting your baggage onto me.

Which is par for the course.

I do not self identify as a feminist. The things I'm talking about having studied aren't the things you are thinking of.

I have a pretty good track record of being even-handed about gender issues in my comments in this forum. I still get a lot of flak. This discussion is a good example of that. My comment was downvoted and it currently has one reply -- yours -- which is openly hostile.

Given that I have been here eleven years and yadda, that gets frustrating. After eleven years of being reasonable, you would think that other people here would do a better job of meeting me halfway on certain topics.

Our current mode of working tends to create jobs that only work well for cis het white males with a wife at home whose primary responsibilities are taking care of the "women's work." This fact equally screws over not just people of color and women, but men like you who did the single father thing.

You have valid criticisms of how far too many women are openly hostile to men as their default position for trying to self advocate. I'm just as critical of that shit. I don't self identify as a "feminist" because my feeling is that "feminism" boils down "women are entitled to real careers, just like men have, and fuck all y'all men and to hell with the welfare of the children."

It actively disregards the very real sacrifices involved in having a career with the traditional pattern of male success, which includes often barely knowing their own children, and I was a full-time wife and mom for two decades. My adult sons still live with me. There is no way in hell anyone is going to get me to agree with a position of "Women are entitled to careers, even if that means shitting all over the children to get there from here."

I'm human. I certainly don't get everything right. But when I talk about the need to change how we work because the world has changed and our patterns of work are still largely based on this idea that "workers" are cis het white males with a wife at home doing the cooking, I'm not talking about "Fuck all y'all men." I'm talking about "This is why we default to certain patterns and those patterns aren't working for the world currently and there is no objective reason we need to continue to cleave to those patterns."

Some crappy things that happen at work are rooted in real world metrics. For example, harvest time on a farm is always crunch time because food is only ripe and fresh for a short period of time. If you don't harvest it in a timely fashion, it rots. It isn't going to keep and wait until later.

But many of the things we do today are more or less unexamined habits from the past and it's enormously difficult to have any kind of reasonable and productive discussion of that fact because you cannot talk about patterns of work without talking, to some degree, about historic patterns of gender roles and even slavery in the history of the US and people get very touchy about that and it actively interferes with trying to figure out "What piece of what we do is actually something the work, per se, imposes on us? And what piece is bad habits from a different era that are failing to die?"

We are all victims to some degree or another of the ghosts of the past in the form of cultural norms, existing built environment and so forth that keeps alive patterns from the past even well past the time that humans began actively and intentionally changing the things those were rooted in. As just one example: We outlawed slavery in the US, yet Black Americans are still quite far from having genuine equality with Whites. They see high rates of incarceration, high rates of unemployment, high rates of poverty, etc.

Trying to find patterns that are good for people in the here and now is hard and it's made harder by the inability to have a good discussion about the topic to begin with. Far too often, by the time the world agrees that X is bad and Y would be better, Y is also out of date and we should really be doing Z but we can't do Z because Z is the new thing no one trusts or understands and will not accept.

Thank you for replying to me instead of just downvoting my comment into oblivion.

Have a good day.

I agree with you up to a certain point. College isn't necessary to learn most things. For many disciplines, very little of your college education will be applicable. However, it can be much more difficult to get a job with no degree. Part of what you're paying for is that you get to be a product that the university sells to industry. There's a very stable and consistent path to employment for some degrees. That's worth $80k+ for many people.