Do I know Myself?

A month ago. I was chatting with someone who had recently graduated college, they have a student loan debt of $80,000 dollars. Education is a wonderful thing to have, but it is also a double edge sword.

A college education is meant to set you up on a path to financial stability, but many people who have a bachelor degree or above that find themselves doing work that never required the education they have.

I hold a masters degree and write and do regular work to pay my student loans. I will never say my education was a waste, it wasn't. I stepped away from working with students in 2016 because education had become about making a profit and less about the students and the education they were receiving.

Since graduating with my own degree. I have used it for liberal art purposes. I write fiction short stories, but I also write a book series called Higher Education. I am going to share with you one of those chapters from my second book, the Dark Side of a Degree. Why this chapter? It is because, this is the reason why many students think their education was a waste and why they do not have the financial stability that they had hoped for after graduation.

Chapter 10: Why Graduates Do Not Work in Their Chosen Field.

Simply put, there are too many graduates mismatched for their positions. Mismatched graduates face poorer prospects than those graduates that have been able to find positions that are better suited for their skills and knowledge that they have received at a university. Some have argued that university students are not taking the right courses which would be incorrect information, the courses studied are in demand and designed to give you specialized knowledge and employment skills.

One thing that colleges are lacking is better career advice that will help future students define the skills they will need to be successful upon graduation and matching a student with a degree program that is similar to their career choice is not going to help the student because that similar course may not teach all the requirements needed to be successful in the workplace after graduation. Career advisors need to take a more active role in matching students with career options, this is most important especially when you have students that are entering college with no family or social network of contacts to call on for help and advice.

Politicians complain of a skills gap, but graduates face an experience gap and colleges could fill that gap if they were to offer internships, it is easier for health care professionals to get hired after graduation because a part of their program is completing so many hours in a hospital to gain that working experience and with many employers preferring to recruit young people who have spent a couple of years in the workplace rather than raw recruitment's from a university.

Sixty percent of U.S. college graduates cannot find a full-time job in their chosen profession and college graduates ages 24 and younger face an uncertain job future. The economy is good for jobs right now in certain areas such as labor but as more graduates turn up it is going to become more difficult because you learn how to be book smart and when you enter the workforce employers only require certain skills that they need, for instance, if you want to be a computer programmer most employers will require a bachelor’s degree but all you need to know is soft skills such as problem solving, business sense, algorithms, data structures, programming languages and be able to think on your feet.

Colleges offer generic resume-building tips and interview skills for new graduates and studying a specific major is not beneficial to the employer when they can search all over the world for people who match the employer’s skill sets. Employers are looking for applicants with core business competencies. And sadly most U.S. undergrads, focus on training in their desired field and not enough time is spent on learning the skills. I am reminded of the time I went to see a doctor and I was explaining my symptoms and possible causes. Keep in mind I have had this body for decades I think I understand it pretty well and when something might be going on over someone who has seen me for ten minutes only to hear from the doctor, that’s not what it says in the textbook.

In the 21st century job market employers want creative professionals in writing, marketing, production and post-production, and many new graduates are lacking technical skills such as programming, web design, and search engine optimization and the most important one is critical thinking and many new graduates are not trained in finance, marketing, project management, and business administration. This is the future and it is going to be technology driven.

Let's talk about another factor that affects graduates from finding work in their chosen field that has nothing to do with the college they attended or the economy at all, themselves. Let’s face it, as young adults or older adults, we do not always have a clear path than previous generations did.

There are three areas that new graduates fall into after they get their degree and they are Sprinters (25% of the young adults) jump right into their career after college or are on a path to a successful launch after completing additional education. Wanderers (22% of the young adults) take their time—about half of their twenties—to get their start in a career. Stragglers (22% of the young adults) press pause and spend most of their twenties trying to get their start and for those who have never attended college they are the ones that expect you to find your way after graduating and the first thing you usually hear from a family member is, did you not know what you wanted to do before you went to college? Two-thirds of students struggle to launch themselves after college, The sprinters will usually spend their undergraduate years: 80% with at least one internship, while the wanderers at 64% were not sure what they wanted to major in when they started, and the stragglers at 42% had less than $10,000 in student loan debt and most likely dropped out in their first year.

The wanderers are those who do not have a big direction and they go through life as it comes to them, it is estimated that only 47% were able to find an internship after graduation and one in five were working in their field of study while the sprinters were not wasting anytime after graduation pursuing opportunities while the Stragglers will attend college off and on and go part time without earning a degree, roughly 12.5 million twenty somethings have some college credits.

Slow down the conveyor belt from high school into college. Too many students follow the herd and rush off to college because there is nothing else to do, and they subsequently become the Wanders and Stragglers. Surprisingly, those three areas that graduates fall into are also the same areas that they fall into in the work place. It takes a future employer sixty seconds to know which one you are. Think about the people you encounter on the street daily and you have never met them before, within one minute you have picked up on things about them. This is a reason why graduates do not find work in their chosen field after graduation, employers know how to spot people quickly and they know if you are passionate about the position you are applying for or did you get your degree based on someone else’s recommendation? Too many graduates hold degrees in things that do not interest them and they follow what is popular in the job market and they do not study what really interests them. Think of all the times you heard growing up. I want a doctor or a lawyer in the family but no parent will ever say I want a comedian in the family.

A college education has changed and students have a wide variety of choices beyond the bachelor’s degree, but the reality is when it comes to education a master’s degree and a PhD are becoming less needed in the work place.

People go to college to better themselves in terms of financial stability, if this is the only reason that you want to get a degree than an associate degree is all you need if you want an economic return. Graduates with an associate’s degree in an applied field (think registered nurses and power transmission installers) earn on average around $41,000 a year after graduation, some $8,000 more than those with bachelor’s degrees.

For those students who want to pursue a graduate or PhD degree than chase as many experiences that you can through research, studying abroad, or internships and jump into those tough courses, and activities that challenge you to work hard and learn from the best professors and peers. Such experiences will provide the most thorough preparation for the challenges, complexity, and ambiguity of the work world after college and prepare you for the technological changes that are coming.

Yes, the educational system is broke, it has been for many years. Big business is about profit and they are going to continue to squeeze every dollar from the American worker and the job market is going to continue to be over saturated with people with degrees, although you may not be working in your chosen field or you may have a degree in something that did not interest you to pursue it for the next 40 years, there is still something you can do with that degree, the trick before getting any degree is understanding yourself first and what interests you. It does not matter if your mom wants you to get a business degree if you have no interest or an advisor suggesting a degree in mathematics because your high school transcript showed that is where your best grades were if you have no interest teaching.

People who enter college for the first time need to shift their thinking from financial rewards to what holds their interest, if you enjoy being a journalist than that is what you should be pursuing as your major and when you go on interviews it will show that you are passionate about this and you will most likely be hired. Sprinters get hired, wanderers move with the times and stragglers get left behind and your degree has nothing to do with it and it goes back to doing what interests you and not someone else and if you can do that, you will probably find satisfying work in a degree that you wanted.