For us we had a big trade school you could go to for the last two years of high school. Normal school academic classes for one half of the day, the program of your choice for the other.
They had IT stuff, welding, auto repair, culinary etc. I went for EMS/Fire.
I still went to college. It’s a cool social experience but holy fuck it’s a bad financial move for most people. I’m glad I graduated debt free
I made the mistake of having avocado toast once and now I’ll never be able to financially recover.
sucks to suck, I’ve lived in a shoebox eating dirt for 40 years and I’ll probably own my shoebox one day.
Wow, that’s the dream partner
I actually had avocado toast at a breakfast restaurant once. That shit was amazing. And $18. I finally understand the hype.
Very easy to make. Use good toasted bread, rub one clove of raw garlic on the bread, then use half an avocado per slice, spread liberally. Top with some salt and pepper and serve.
I’m so rarely in the mood for avocado that it usually goes to waste when I buy any. Love putting Tabasco in the cavity left by the pit, and eating with a spoon.
This place served it lightly smashed with diced red onions and sea salt, with tomato slices on top. Would have loved some crushed garlic mixed in but honestly it didn’t need any.
Yeah, it’s not even really a “luxury” food unless you are buying it at a brunch restaurant. Less than $5.
Lol same… I’ve had it once and it was awesome.
Still paying off the interest…
The extra kick in the teeth is for those that for whatever reason couldn’t/didn’t go to college! All that messaging of “go to college or you’re going to be worthless” just so happens to have the affect of making you feel completely worthless for not having a degree! All those years on online dating I’d pass on people that were educated and/or had good jobs because “why the hell would they be interested in a worthless uneducated factory worker.” It’s fun!
I have no debt, nor a house though, but I do have tons and tons of depression and self loathing!
I too am exactly like you except I own a few homes.
I decided to pretend to go to college in a different country. Seems to be working fine for my career since I started doing that. It didn’t fix the self loathing tho.
This is how it went down for me:
My senior year, they herded us into the auditorium for a 45 minute presentation on how you would be a total failure and will be scrubbing toilets for all of your days if you didn’t sign up for college RIGHT NOW. After that, you were put in line for the recruiter where you’d pick your school and your major. When it came my turn, I told them that I wasn’t sure and was thinking of trade school. The recruiter said “oh.” and sent me back to class. The school seemed to care a lot less about my academic well being after that exchange. The Military recruiters were VERY interested in how I was doing though. Being a teen during the 00’s was wild.
Flipping burgers for us. There were only the two options. That or college. And a few minutes spent on talking to creditors if you can’t pay the loan but DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT YET just go to school the bills will take care of themselves.
20 years and 50k in as of yet unpaid student debt later for a piece of paper I never and will never use, I ended up going to trade school and getting it paid for by my employer entirely.
Now I have a better job, union representation, and almost no petty office bullshit. Had I entered the field after high school I’d be one of the most knowledgeable people in my field. But, it was college or burgers, they spent a lot of money to send that message as often as possible.
Very controlling and didn’t care about what we wanted in my experience. Wanted to be an aerospace engineer. Got a great scholarship to the school I wanted to go to, told me they’d disown me and not help if I moved out of state and ever failed. Showed where all income was coming from as it was Kettering University so with the scholarship and their program was set up for co-op, so you’d do school and internships (they help set you up with them too) back and forth through till you finish your degree. Nope.
Instead just wanted to put doubts in my mind and force me to go to a local University with the promise they would help me pay for it instead. Told me if I joined the Marines or such to get school paid for they would be pissed as well, my Uncle told my mother that a lot of people do well working after getting out of the military as they often get first dibs on positions, my mother didn’t talk to her brother for months.
They never paid a dime to the school they wanted me to go to, I never liked their programs… and when I did finally graduate had between $30-40,000 in debt… no internship experience and just kept trying to work in IT with the experience I had built without a degree. (No one accepted applications in other fields)
Maybe someone has agreed to hire me for having a degree, but really all of them have seemed to hire me because I had years of experience working and suppoting the software/hardware they needed/had. After all, the experience they want isn’t taught in any class I took to get the degree.
Calls from a recruiter literally every week and a monthly drop by because apparently that’s an ok thing to do.
The way the military straight up prey on HS kids naivete is pretty wild.
I didn’t have that experience, but it was a given for anyone in honors/AP classes that you’d head to college–they didn’t ask if you wanted to. My grades weren’t that great, but weighted my GPA was still alright. My guidance counselor asked if I wanted in state or out of state; public or private; small, medium, or large; and what I’d like to major in. After I said in state, she talked about a state-funded scholarship that was really easy to get 75% of my tuition covered. So, I went to the local university and majored in the first thing I blabbed about in that meeting. I basically signed my name in a couple of places and I was off to college. Ended up fine for me, but it could have gone much worse if I was a few years younger.
My school didn’t talk to me at all. They deemed me as having a learning disability, a lost cause and let me rot in the remedial classes. When I tried to get my education back on track, they stonewalled anything that could be considered risky, which was everything.
I was livid when they hand out guides during senior year on what colleges actually look for. Things that you should have been doing since freshman year. At that point, no one in my family had gone to a four year college, so the school was my only source of info on the topic. I should have walked out of the school that day.
That was similar to my experience. If your parents weren’t providing coaching for what constituted a “good” school or what might be a “good” major you were basically playing roulette.
Jokes on them, not even the state school wanted me because I was such a slacker in highschool. Working a dead end job, waking up after a year, and enrolling in community college was the best thing that could have happened to me.
Not only that, but they neutered secondary education to being basically just be college prep. It’s almost impossible to just live comfortably on a HS education from the past ~25 years because of how useless the information is to real life.
What was neutered? The job market left a HS education behind a long time ago, and that’s not because of the high school curriculum, that’s because of the job market
the curriculum did not adapt to the job market
It’s coming around in my area. In my day, the schools partnered with the local colleges for students to get college credit while still in high school.
Now, the local high schools in my area are also partnered with several vocational schools, including automotive, welding, industrial maintenance, veterinary, cosmetology, and about a dozen more. There is a work-study program where students are getting high school credit for on-the-job training from certain local employers.
The kids in these programs are graduating with two years experience in technical fields, while their college-bound peers might have worked a couple years flipping burgers.
You had some really good points until:
while their college-bound peers might have worked a couple years flipping burgers.
This is you being judgmental, not a reflection of reality.
No its sadly a reflection of reality for many. Kids who don’t know any better sign the dotted line on a 20k$ loan for a political science or liberal arts degree then wonder why their 4 year education didnt translate into marketable skills for a well paying job.
So they enter their early 20s living paycheck to paycheck on an entry level job barely making enough to pay off their student loans, this months rent, and have enough left over to afford food. This makes them rightfully pessimistic about the system so they go on lemmy to rant about capitalism while hoping it all burns down along with their loans. Its a predictable cliche.
I agree about everything else, but I thoght lemmy people were mostly employed (usually in tech sector), and are in their 30s~40s.
It depends on which communities of lemmy you frequent. If your on c/programmerhumor or c/Linux memes this demographic is fairly accurate, if your visiting c/solarpunk.climate, c/fuckcars, c/fuckcapitalism or c/leftism type communities its more likely to have the younger disillusioned political minded types buried in debt. If I were to put some rough numbers based on my time in lemmy its roughly 30% computer geek IT types, 30% political/ecological activists, 30% LGBQT+, 10% everyone else
This is true. I even know some people with STEM degrees in this situation.
That’s a completely different issue than what I was talking about though
I think you’re reading more into than I actually said.
Minors are generally prohibited from using powered equipment as employees. They can’t use packaging equipment, cardboard compactors, deep fryers, powered pallet jacks, drills, let alone machining equipment.
The “college-bound peers” I’m talking about are not participating in these vocational programs. If they are working, (which they might not be) their status as minors is effectively limiting them to unskilled trades, like retail and food service.
The kids in these vocational programs are considered students, not employees. Where an AP student is not allowed to use a ladder or a cordless drill at work, the vocational student at their work-study program can use a manual lathe capable of ripping them in two at the torso. They can gain experience with pretty much any equipment in their program that an adult would be allowed to use on the job.
These vocational students are graduating with two years experience in industrial work that the AP students were legally prohibited from performing.
The curriculum is cumulative. In order for it to adapt, kids would have to learn more advanced subjects earlier than they have in years past. There are lots of kids doing this in Advanced Placement classes, but most kids are not ready to progress that quickly.
we could also just allow kids to go to college for free instead of killing them with interest rates :p
No argument here!
And many colleges adapted to AP classes by…not accepting them
That wasn’t my experience as a millennial
Did you attend every college?
Where are they not accepting CLEP tests?
We have YouTube now.
Also:
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- By the way, this rule only applied to people of color. By the age of 30, you supposed to have at least 4 children. Now tell me where are my grandchildren?
Where is my financial stability?
You can have it at a later date darling, maybe you have to share a room with the baby in a single room apartment, or can’t afford to buy an Air Jordan or an iPhone for your children, but children are wonderful. Biological clock is ticking away rapidly, but financial success can wait. With Trump coming, your job likely can finally afford to give you a raise after a few tax cuts.
- boomers
Why don’t you have financial stability yet? Go get some financial stability
Also something something you’re not really gay
How did you get upvotes, you forgot you’re /s. Unless this is a rasict comment.
I had no postsecondary interests, but my parents were the embodiment of this, yep yep.
Turns out taking random subjects you have no interest in doesn’t result in success. Crazy. What did I want to do? Nothing. Still don’t. Unioned Plant Operator it is.
Luckily that was in 2010 Canada. Wasn’t much debt, just a waste of 3 years.
I love taking my twice graduated college educated ass to job postings for my field and being offered $60k CAD for highly skilled work that requires both a bachelor’s and about 5-10 years of experience to pay for my $40-50k worth of education. It’s great!
I’ve been in the job market for a while and apart from not having a bachelors degree, I have most of the certifications and experience needed. But I did the math, I am unable to afford my bills (excluding things like fuel for my car and food for the table) on anything less than around $65-70k. I don’t ask for much for everything else, but I generally need at least $75k a year to survive without starving or going bankrupt.
Life is expensive and it keeps getting more expensive, but the wages I saw posted over 10 years ago when I graduated, are the same wages I see now for the same or similar work. Since the cost of everything has increased significantly over that time, I just move on to other job postings.
Don’t mention salary in the post? I’m not interested. Don’t have an option for full time remote? No thanks. I don’t want to spend hours of my life every week in traffic, spending hundreds of dollars a month on fuel, just so you can look me in the face and say “you look tired”… Yeah, because I’m forced to be here and I’m not able to do this work from home.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home? I don’t understand.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home?
Control.
Exactly. It’s basically “tell me you don’t trust me as an employee, without telling me you don’t trust me as an employee”.
Americans are the poorest people I know with the most disposable income that seems to buy them nothing.
Come to Europe. You will be poorer and somewhat miserable, instead of regular poor and stressed.
I’m not sure that sounds much better lmao
The misery is the other Europeans telling us to stop smiling so much lol
Its still capitalism, just not in as an advanced stage like we are.
I’d wager they are moving back in the right direction, particularly a lot of anti-monopoly rules enforced by the EU being particularly notable at actually forcing change.
Something the US govt seems incapable of doing these days, tho I’ll give Lina Khan credit, she gave a good fucking effort.
I feel like we’re at a point where we’ve got to recognize and acknowledge that a country whose government implements laws at the behest of multi-million dollar corporations, due to those corporations buying the politicians that lobby for them, and in which the only laws that get past are the ones desired by multi-million dollar corporations is no longer a capitalistic country, but an oligarchy.
We still say we’re capitalistic country, but the distinction is one in which a country by and large is governed by a small group of people/business Executives (oligarchy), from one in which there is a separation of power between the government and the corporations that do business in it (capitalist).
Our legal system is so heavily influenced by the whims of corporations as to be the former. When citizens are unable to have politicians implement laws that serve the interest of the working-class people, because corporations wield such influence over our lawmakers as to block working-class citizens from effecting change, and only having policies implemented that financially benefit corporations, then we are no longer a capitalistic society. We are an oligarchy plain and simple.
We were sold a false bill of goods and then got blamed for it.
“Go to college” can be good advice. It really depends where you go to school (in state University vs private or out of state for costs) and what you major in (growing fields, salaries of people with that major, etc). Unfortunately, many of us didn’t get any advice on the second bit.
College is worthless unless your degree has a clear path or you have access to a powerful network. I say this as a college graduate lol
I graduated into Bush’s recession so naturally I doubled down and got a PhD. At least they pay you stipends to do that, even if I’m even less employable than ever! *Cries in millennial
The money I spent on my education could have bought the roof, a ton of bootstraps to pull up, but probably not the electricity. :(
I’m just saying if mortgages were treated like student loans we’d actually be in a better place as a society.
Banks would fucking love this. They would be salivating at the idea that home loans can’t be discharged via bankruptcy.
That was made the case because you can’t repossess an education (yet). I don’t necessarily agree with it but I also don’t actually have a problem with banks not being allowed to seize private homes within certain limitations.
Make sure nobody gives them the idea that giving someone a lobotomy or ECT may be the equivalent of repossessing someone’s “knowledge”. The bastard politicians might actually do it!
Being that most of the people who didn’t/couldn’t pay their student loans did pay rent… The banks would have gotten their money and many of the people would have equity. I’m not saying there wouldn’t have been defaults, but I get what they meant
Students would love this, you’d be able to discharge the debt via bankruptcy!
I went to trade school after college. Now I get my hands dirty for work and out-earn all my higher educated friends - except the ones who also work in trades. I also don’t need to worry about AI taking my job.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this but it isn’t all rainbows and sunshine in the trades either, especially for the self employed.
When you’re young it’s fine but as you get older your body starts to wear out and dragging water heaters out of some crawlspace or running wire in a non air conditioned attic becomes harder.
Still, sitting for 8 hours a day a desk can be bad for you too I guess. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
It’s pretty easy to extrapolate this to the whole concept of a full-time job being bad for you. It’s not whether you’re wearing out your body or your mind more, it’s that modern life requires you to wear yourself out just to survive.
Our ancestors fought hard for the 40 hour workday not realizing we were just deciding the dimensions of our cage.
To be clear I am not mad at them or blame them. But it’s still true.
40 hour workday
Stop giving them ideas.
Lmao I can’t believe I didn’t notice that
I absolutely love the metaphor and it succinctly express the class issue.
Tell me about it. I barely made it to 30 before I washed out of the film industry due to back and foot issues.
Because mechanization will.
EDIT: don’t you know difference between automation and mechanization?
mechanization may not but venture capital corporationism might.
Someone will “invent” Uber for plumbers and gardeners and now the trades all work for $4/day while the CEO graciously only accepts a $200,000,000 bonus that year.
Not that capitalism will do ot better, it will just find a way to pay less. And use automation as a scapegoat. “CEO did not rob you, algorithm did”.
I highly doubt that will happen during my lifetime.
I applaud your enthusiasm but stay vigilant, companies opting for AI are we less about “they can do my job better than me” and more just another tool to opress the working class.
I say this as someone who works in the film industry, who’s job right out of college is currently being replaced by AI. Soon much more than you think could be replaced, will be too.
Well, luckily I’m self-employed and I believe that even if there was robots doing the kind of manual labor that I do there would still be enough people left who’d rather hire a human. Time will tell I guess.
Unlike VC “AGI tomorrow, promise” bullshit, mechanization is very old and working concept. Just how many barbers with old razor were replaced with one with hair clipping machine.
Nope. Turns out robots are expensive and break down frequently.
Who said anything about robots? I did not mention them.
A 100k boston dynamic that works from morning until evening without breaks is hell of a lot cheaper than paying a lazy sack of meat 50k year.
But they just said it takes breaks frequently
You guys are all delusional and lying to yourselves lol, if they sold a roomba that could paint your floors or the upgraded version that allows you to subscribe to paint your walls, all of you fuckers would be posting pictures of the meme’s you’ve plastered all over your house.
Well, I sure would. I fix broken robots for a living and prefer it over house painting.
I’m telling you why that robot doesn’t exist. They’re insanely expensive, highly specialized, and require regular maintenance no average person would ever care to give.
Believe me I’d love to live in some kind of post-work society given your basic needs are cared for, it’s just equally delusional to think it’s here or coming from military robots.
If somehow I was able to purchase a house where I live (was never possible), it would have gone up in value more then the money I have been earning working my jobs.
Throw in the $168,000 in rent I’ve paid since college and that would have turned into quite a bit of equity
“You have your own head to think, why did you listen to me?”
You got so woke since going to college!
