Not your Father's (or mother's) education!

Policies that were changed in the eighties combined with cold war era thinking and the delusion of the free market and the nature of modern education have resulted in a misunderstanding by older generations of the nature of the plight of graduates and debt. This is not the same education climate as your mother and father's, nor is it the same job market, and neither can be treated with the same traditional methods.
Watch and be prepared. After you see this tell me honestly how the current state of affairs is anything like your father's education:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUMf7FWGdCw
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I have been reading about he plight of my fellow debt slaves, and I have been seeing the comments that some misguided, uninformed people give in response. These comments usually take the form of "Why did you decide to take "x" major? Didn't you know that it was a mistake? Just what do you think you would do with such a useless degree? You made a terrible life choice and I am not going to bail you out!"

Read this where "x" usually has to deal with the liberal arts. From Obama, the man we are all supposed to be looking to for "change" what he talks about is forgiving the loans of people that work in the public sector, or teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and other big ticket goals. the sad thing is it is just a bare number of people that will be able to capitalize on anything resulting from such a narrowly focused set of majors.

Focusing on science and mathematics, medicine and teaching is good political policy. Nobody will argue about the need for people to fill positions like that, but the problem between policy and reality is that not everyone is mentally able to handle cleaning bedpans for a living, hanging around sick people all day, slogging through reams of documentation to get proof for a case, staring intently at strings of code, or down at the heads of our progeny in classrooms.

Everyone has a set of skills and abilities. That is part of what makes us human. I would not expect a person gifted in language to be happy being forced to become a doctor, simply because it pays the bills, any more than that same English major as a graduate having to dig ditches to pay the bills.

Part of the cold war push in education was to turn out people with math skills, science skills, and fitness skills. The problem is that not everyone could be a jock or a science nerd or a math whiz. Nobody cared for the liberal arts. Those of us who have highly artistic skills were told to put our dreams away and to think rationally. "An art degree doesn't pay the bills!" said our dutiful patriotic parents, "You should go find a nice job and stop dreaming, because you'll wind up on the street!"

This thought is born out of a misguided philosophy of life that demands that money be the end-all measuring stick of success in life. It is born from a generation that was told every day that they had to excel in math and science to keep up with those communists over there and we needed to turn out people that could work the factories, invent the weaponry, make the laws, and cure the sick.

In the meantime, where has our art lead us, or our music or our literature? I think it sort of says something when one of the most popular pieces of literature for both adult and youth in our society is Twilight, which is written for sixth graders, among its many flaws. Our society is not balanced. We cannot remain competitive with the rest of the world if even our college graduates do not understand history, music, art and literature. What kind of a society are we setting up for ourselves if even college graduates are not expected to read at any higher than a sixth grade level?

But liberal arts aside, The business of education, and the business of debt and the condition of the job market are not the same as it was for our parents. Even those in "generation X" stood on the very edge of the nightmare we, their children, deal with. I may be thirty now and on the cusp of that generational divide, but I count myself among the younger, due to the problems and trials I share with those almost a decade my junior.

The world is moving fast; very fast. People are still joking about having trouble e-mailing and programming the video playback devices as they sit next to people who twitter, blog, schedule their appointments, track their money, and watch videos all on their communication device. There is a video updated every few years on the topic. If you don't believe how fast knowledge and technology is advancing, it's a very frightening eye opener:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUMf7FWGdCw

Did you catch that part about half of a student's learning in the freshman year being obsolete by the time they graduated? Did you also catch the part about training for jobs that don't exist yet? This is what it is like to be in college in today's market.

I have a degree in game design, so I am very familiar with the problems with a degree that employers don't understand. People look at my entirely legitimate degree, and instead of thinking of the many applications for a person skilled in animation, 3d-design, writing, music, storyboarding, team strategies, and multimedia specialization, they see Game Design and assume I am a head in the clouds gamer that never that hasn't grown up yet. the same will be done to people with skills that those in charge of hiring cannot comprehend.

I was at home the other day, and of course the subject of employment came up. It has become a subject that drives me to tears every time it is brought up. My sister, who is working toward a dental hygiene associates' degree listened in quietly as I haltingly detailed my lack of ability to gain employment, trying hard not to dissolve into bitter tars of failure and despair, to my baby-boomer father, who has had a job in the same company since he graduated, and who works for the same company as his father worked, albeit in a different capacity. My dad will retire having worked at a single company for the majority of his life. My sister will get out for a cheap rate, but she will have a job that will get her employment, even if it will keep her in a dead end job because she never completed a full 4-year education. If that means that later she will be able to go back and advance her degree, all the better. Perhaps that is the new way of education in a country that worships money.

So, in an era where the average person does not have the same job for longer than five years, how is anyone expected to have the money to pay for anything? Usually the higher paying jobs come with some history. If we are being forced, time and again, to restart our career track, we are not only never going to have the money to pay back our loans, but we will also not be able to have affordable life and health insurance. It seems that the only way that insurance is affordable these days is to have a group plan, and group plans usually seem to take a while to kick in, and then do not continue after employment with a company is ended.

This is not my father's workforce. My dad could expect to have a job with the same company all the way to retirement. His was the last remnant of an era of steady and lifelong employment, and sometimes generational employment. How can he understand the scope of a society in which an average person has 18 jobs before the age of 35? When talking about the issue of student debt and graduate employment, we are talking about the generation of people that are currently in office making the policy and coming close to the time when they can draw from their Medicare, social security, and the remnant of their 401k. How do we explain to an entire generation of people that the way that we have treated education, education funding, and entry level jobs cannot compete with the demand of exponential knowledge growth? It seems to me that without that understanding, we will continue to be oppressed.

This is not my mother's workforce. Going quickly is the notion that with a bachelors' degree, one can get a good middle-level job making a decent enough income to survive. At best, the jobs that I am considering in my desperation are no higher than $35,000 per year. not only does that not pay the bills, but it is equivalent to the money an assistant manager makes at a fast food restaurant. You do not need a bachelor's degree to be an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant. If I, as a graduate am only being offered that small sum, then why did I even bother investing in an education? Sometimes I thank god that working toward an education degree didn't work out for me, because I have had friends in education that get offered $22,000 per year. That's roughly $12 an hour, or equivalent to the pay an entry level janitor or security guard makes. In some places it's well below the poverty line.

When my mother was alive, she used to tell me "get some job, any job" but that is just not feasible. I can't pay my bills on my husband's salary, but I can at least have a roof over my head. If I get "Some Job, any job" I become one of the millions forced into perpetual underemployment. I still work full time, I still have to pay my loans back, but now, I am earning less than I should because I am not quite skilled, I worry about how that lack of skill affects my future employment, and I lose the skills I had in my chosen profession due to the advancement in technology. In the end, the banks steal from me, my job robs me, and I become further obsolete. This is why it was devastating to hear that phrase come out of the mouths of people that are supposed to be my support base in life.

The truth is that I would be worse off by just settling, unless I can get a fabulous, pie in the sky opportunity that offers the money I need to get out of debt.

To the people who say that if you don't have the money, tough luck, you can't go, or can't continue, do you realize you are condemning people to a lower status? Sure there are some outliers like Steve Jobs and bill Gates, but for the most part Education is still the ticket out of poverty for millions of people. Who are you to say that they can't have it in a society that demands it? This is even more hard hitting on the people that don't finish, because not only do they have school debt, but they have nothing to show for it in terms of a degree to put in that portfolio.

the point is, I just don't know if even Generation X understands the scope of the issue. student debt is just the fruit of a very wicked tree.