Daily Fail: "The REAL reason grown women like me won't leave our parents' house"

Accounting is a good one. Trouble is most want to major in "fun" majors. Too bad fun majors rarely make any money. Stick to creative writing, pottery making or interpretive dance as a hobby.

Trades are what I always advised for people who like working with their hands and are not college people. Airline mechanics make upwards of 40 bucks an hour. Judging from the labor charges when I take the pug bus to the Acura dealer, auto mechanics do well. Plumbers often make more than doctors and lawyers thanks to kids' penchant for flushing nonflushables. For those in the middle (like hands on/want to go to college), engineering technology is the way to go.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."

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bell_flower
If I had kids today I would direct them to a trade. The world will always need plumbers, electricians and people to fix cars. If you show up and do the job you can make a decent living and it can't be contracted out to people in the Third World.

Even before I finished the thread, what came to mind was the thought "bring back the vo-tech (vocational-technical) schools."

Dh and I were in the brain trade, taking computer languages/operations courses in the 70s and early 80s because we were told "that's where the jobs were." And it was good, for a couple of decades, until everything started going to India. And today, you have internet connections like Elance

I'm glad Dh and I are getting out. We are freeing up two positions in the job pool, unfortunately those slots will disappear when we vacate them, most likely.

In the UK it's getting increasingly difficult to learn a trade. First of all we don't manufacture or mine as much as we used to, and now our economy is (dangerously) dependent on the service sector there are fewer opportunities. In addition to this, all of the apprenticeship schemes we used to have- Young Apprenticeships, the Youth Training Scheme (YTS)- have either been scrapped or have had their funding slashed. We have skills shortages, but with no financial incentive to employ British people as trainees companies are just recruiting fully-trained workers from overseas- right-wing voters and politicians bang on about "British Jobs For British People" but businesses aren't charities, and when they're struggling to stay afloat in this time of austerity, why shouldn't they do what's more cost-effective?

As for university, it used to be a minority who went- either academic nerds (like me) interested in learning for its own sake and hoping to go into a research career, or people doing certain vocational degrees to become vets, doctors, engineers etc- again, all of this is just another way of learning a trade (a PhD is essentially a scientific apprenticeship). The past few governments have tried to encourage more people to go to university whether it'd be right for them or not, and now getting a degree- any degree- is mainly seen as a means to getting a job afterwards. Now someone can do a degree in any subject and aim to get a 2:1 so they can apply to a "graduate scheme" with one of the big accountancy firms, and even the armed forces offer "graduate officer" schemes. With so many graduates flooding the market employers have just moved the goalposts- many now advertise secretarial and sales jobs as "graduate roles", for example. A Bachelor degree used to be enough to do a PhD but now most research groups expect a Masters degree as well...

The shortage of plumbers, and the money they can make, has not gone unnoticed but courses are costly and demand is very high- I know someone who did a course and had to join a two-year waiting list first, and he could only afford it in the first place because he'd been in a well-paid job and was changing careers. "Graduate nursing" is a thing now, and courses for nursing and midwifery are hugely oversubscribed. Some of the electricity companies offer "engineering apprenticeships" but again, only to graduates who have done specific degrees.

Oh yes, and there is now less funding for academic nerds to do research so I'm probably screwed as well... Now so many graduates are left working in call centres and shops I'm wondering if we're approaching a tipping point where we'll start heading back to the times when a minority of nerds went to university. For now university just seems to have become a part of The Life Script with people going because they feel they should or they don't know what else to do.

Elance was where I found the press release needed for not more than 20 bucks, and the 40 recipes for 15. I told them to remove my profile. If I want to work for free I will do it for the charities I like.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."

The problem is that there is soooooooo much stigma attached to not wanting to get a degree if you have degreed parents and can afford it. This snobbery is what leads to such disaster. I know a guy who got a degree in philosophy and couldn't find a job which, quite frankly, is not surprising. He ended up teaching English overseas. While there's nothing wrong with that I doubt that the debt he got himself into was worth it. But hey, he has a degree! eyes2

Right on, breakstuff!

I always enjoy tales of those who made it good while following unconventional paths.
Story of my life! I knew I couldn't afford college because I couldn't even afford a place to live. My path has been pretty much to start somewhere and stick with it until I maxxed the payscale, then trade up to somewhere that the previous max was the low end and stick it out until I maxxed that payscale again. Employers love a resume with long stints of employment, reliability means a lot these days.
Now I don't think I can find a job that pays better than what I have, so now I am counting down until early retirement.

Our plan is to develop enough skills and side income to be able to afford college in our retirement. I'm just disappointed that the days of MOOC and free colege via internet is now, and not when I will have the time to use it.
I effectively work two jobs already, so no it's not just a matter of doing it after work, all my time is sucked up with my jobly job, second income generation, chores, and the minimal leisure time I can squeeze into my life. Leisure time has been seriously lacking recently, and the hubs tries to make it my fault. No honey, we're both doing it to ourselves.

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rockchick
The problem is that there is soooooooo much stigma attached to not wanting to get a degree if you have degreed parents and can afford it.

Something people are shamed for not doing, along with getting married and sprogging... The degree has gone from being something people did if they wanted to and had the aptitude for it to being just another page of The Life Script. The system may have seemed elitist before, but now it's really just the same, except instead of being about people with degrees vs people without them, it's about people with good degrees vs people with crap ones!

Navi8orgirl said, "Elance was where I found the press release needed for not more than 20 bucks, and the 40 recipes for 15. I told them to remove my profile. If I want to work for free I will do it for the charities I like."

This was probably a ripoff scheme anyway. The posters might not have paid you even if you had done the work, since they figured you wouldn't bother with trying to pursue them for only $15 or $20.

If I had my way on these useless university majors, student loans in the US would be dischargeable in bankruptcy. (For all intents they are not, long story, think we discussed it here some time back.) If this simple change were made, lenders would simply refuse to lend big bucks for pursuing degrees in liberal arts and many other types of majors.

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screaming sausage

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rockchick
The problem is that there is soooooooo much stigma attached to not wanting to get a degree if you have degreed parents and can afford it.

Something people are shamed for not doing, along with getting married and sprogging... The degree has gone from being something people did if they wanted to and had the aptitude for it to being just another page of The Life Script. The system may have seemed elitist before, but now it's really just the same, except instead of being about people with degrees vs people without them, it's about people with good degrees vs people with crap ones!

It's really bad when this type of pressure makes people do things they subsequently discover they never even wanted to do. I have a friend from Brazil who decided to get a degree in the UK only to find out that it would be worthless in her country because the degree was an evening study one and the amount of tuition hours was not sufficient to be accredited. Colleges like that make outrageous claims, promise excellent job prospects and the like but of course it's just a way for them to line their pockets.