111–120 of 195 posts
A guy I went to school with did econ and acting. He was working as a producer for a while, and I heard he's going to be in a Netflix show
if you read around on the internet, in various and sundry forums, there is a rising acknowledgement among people that maybe their friends who accidentally got their girlfriend pregnant in high school and then got married and started working right away were the lucky ones... at the time it seemed as if those friends had messed up royally, but in hindsight, looking back over time and it seems as if the ones who got a g…
Turns out, starting work 4 years earlier in your life helps with compound interest.
My advice: go somewhere cheap, and get a practical degree. I went to CCU for most of my college career (back when it had just become a standalone university). Wasn't (still isn't) prestigious, but with scholarships, was entirely free for me, and it had the added benefit of attracting some decent professors who had retired to the beach and still wanted to teach part time. Today, for in-state tuition, it's around $47K…
I'll offer one anecdote of counter-college hate. I went to a local state school, graduated in three years with winter and summer classes, commuted for the second and third, worked the whole time, and came out with a very small amount of debt (maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember). I made friends in college, I was able to get into a great job via an internship that I got from the school job fair, and got…
If I had gone to college I might have ended up with a social life and probably wouldn’t have done much better/worse economically. I have this current theory that there are a lot of domain/industries even in software development are made much harder to get into for the “uneducated” because the companies tend to source less experienced employees exclusively through university hiring pipelines. Now I have no qualms abso…
My advice: go somewhere cheap, and get a practical degree. I went to CCU for most of my college career (back when it had just become a standalone university). Wasn't (still isn't) prestigious, but with scholarships, was entirely free for me, and it had the added benefit of attracting some decent professors who had retired to the beach and still wanted to teach part time. Today, for in-state tuition, it's around $47K…
$47K for the degree itself leads to much larger debt if you're in the sizeable contingent of students that also needs to pay for things like a place to live and meals rather than relying on parents. You're paying $12K/year for the degree and likely $18K/year for rent and another $18K or so for other expenses. If you're making $30K/year from a part time job and paying $4K of that to taxes. you end up with a $22K/year…
They put highest total at $27,091, or basically right within your 30k projection.
That said, 30k is basically full time at $15/hr, so that’s probably too high of an assumption if the hypothetical student is to graduate in 4 years. Though it is doable (I worked full time through college).
But this sounds like the exact opposite of what the OP did; there was no long-term planning involved in their decision, they just did what was expected of them. We can argue the huge impact of the established norm "Thou shall attend College" but that's not what happened here. It sounds like they could have studied anything but choose film, then were suprised that immediately out of school were not handed the keys to a multi-million dollar enterprise. Hey, me too, and everyone else regardless of industry or domain.
There's something extremely depressing about how popular this attitude of "college is a bad ROI, do something else with your time" is. For sure, in the US currently there aren't many alternatives, so this might be practical advice for the current situation. But that isn't how this argument is framed most of the time. Instead, it's often more akin to "poor suckers going to college, haha I beat the system!" as if skipp…
I regretted college while I was in college, but I was already on a debt treadmill. I am a vocal anti-college (in the US in its current form) advocate. Start a business instead. Fail. Learn.
if you read around on the internet, in various and sundry forums, there is a rising acknowledgement among people that maybe their friends who accidentally got their girlfriend pregnant in high school and then got married and started working right away were the lucky ones... at the time it seemed as if those friends had messed up royally, but in hindsight, looking back over time and it seems as if the ones who got a g…
Chiming in as a recent American college grad... One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes. Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But g…
That's surprising. I found that the humanities students (sans Communications) were far more intellectually curious. My friends in Philosophy, Classics, Economics^1, and Art were particularly great. Communications not so much.
Out of curiosity, did you attend a public "Tech"/"Mines and Ags" style university? At least in my state, that university was famous for churning out stereotypical engineer types and everything I heard from high school friends who attended sounded a lot like your assessment -- the STEM folks were incurious at best and huamanities was worse (because who would go to a Tech for a huamanities degree?)
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^1: At the college where I did my undergraduate, the Economics degree was kind of non-standard and really was more of a humanities degree.