College Degrees to Avoid

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All things being equal , it is to your advantage to get a degree than not to

All things equal, STEM is better for your job search than other degrees

Not all things are equal



College is not magic or mystery

College is not as great as society acts like it is

A degree is needed for many STEM jobs unless you create one.

A Liberal Arts degree and the right experience can show you are "management material."

If you struggle to get decent grades you should consider jobs that don't need a degree.

We live in a time of paradox. It's almost amusing how a degree these days is both valuable, yet at the same time worthless. Since, if you don't have a degree then you might be dismissed by employers for not fitting enough requirements. However, as going to College becomes more popular getting a degree loses the worth it once had. It's the whole if everyone is super, no one is problem.

As a current College/University student, this worries me. It can seem as if there is no correct option to choose. You can either not get a degree, and go for an apprenticeship in construction/hairdressing/working in hospitality etc (yet risk being taken advantage of, there's a lot of dodgy internships and apprenticeships out there...you have to be careful). Or get a degree, apply for work and maybe get in but you're competing against a large group of students.

Sometimes the younger generations are stereotyped as lazy and entitled. Yet we're expected to have more qualifications. But if we complain about that, we're considered whiny. If I had the exact same qualifications, with the exact same grades as my parents, and I applied for the kind of jobs they did...I'd be laughed at. We don't live in the same world as those before us.

I hate this attitude of if it's not STEM, it's worthless. As a few people have mentioned in this thread, not everyone can do STEM. I sure can't do the mathematically heavy stuff. That's just not how my brain works. It's not rewarding for me. To hear it time and time again from people, it's frustrating.

Some people seemingly can't see the worth in certain types of work. One of the positives of the course I'm on is the clients. It leads to networking connections and also gives me work experience. Back when I was sixteen, I was on a different course that also worked with clients. I actually got paid for that work, but they did attempt to slip by without paying the agreed amount a few times.

Which is fairly common in the design business. Sometimes you meet people with this attitude of "Why is it taking you this long? I could do this way quicker and better than you. Oh, you want money? Why not settle for exposure? You're so greedy for wanting to be paid". In these situations, it's rather tempting to reply "Sir/Ma'am, if you're such an expert at this, then why did you hire me? If you can do it oh so quickly with ease, why am I here? Also, why is your current website an insult to design, your font choice making me want to cry, and your code in absolute shambles if you're so good at this?".

But unfortunately, you can't. You have to be nice to the customer, whilst standing your ground. To patiently explain that if they agree to pay you, and you finish a website/ ad campaign/ promotional video/ code and design a mobile app for them/ manage their social media accounts/ whatever, they can't just change their mind and get your hard work for free. I don't care if you claim that you can do it so easily, because I've seen your work and it's not up to standard. That's why you hired me. It's not entitled to want to be paid after you agreed to do so. Nor am I immoral for not giving you stuff for free if we settled on a price of payment.

Sorry, I went on a tangent rant there for a moment. Anyway, some of what I do does occasionally fall into STEM. The technology part. I do minimal coding work in programs such as Dreamweaver. But most of what I do is visual design. Ideally, I'd like to make educational Children's apps and interactive stories. However, I'd have to learn more about animation and coding to do so. I almost made one once, but ran out of time to add all the features I wanted.

Do I regret not going down the apprenticeship route? Occasionally. Sometimes I wonder if I should've gone into hospitality at sixteen. Or taken that offer for a recommendation letter for an English course when I was seventeen years old. But instead, I stuck with the route I was already following. Will it be worth it? Depends what you mean. Perhaps it won't lead to the job I had in mind. Maybe I will end up flipping burgers. A lot of people don't get into the job they originally set out to get. That's OK. Does it make you a failure? No. Someone's got to do those jobs.

Although with modern day slavery, a lot of low paying jobs are given to exploited individuals by cruel business owners who give their workers little to no money. Older employees can't retire and work longer, young people looking for work can't get hired because of this. They apply for lower paying positions, but business owners don't want to hire them because they'd rather either exploit workers here or abroad since they know that they can get away with paying them less. Minimum wage becomes the norm. Except for senior positions, and when a job advertises an internal position they already have someone in mind. They just advertise it for legal reasons, they aren't actually going to hire someone new. Not everyone is like this, but I remain cynical.

Ideally, internships should lead to slow progression. But sometimes people get stuck being the intern forever and don't have any opportunity to progress.

The amount of job openings for people without college degrees is decreasing each day. I would go with S.T.E.M (which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and business majors now, because there are more job openings for the unemployed in these fields. Employers are more willing to hire autistics if they happen to show a S.T.E.M or business major degree. Despite all of that, if you happen to be the type of person who has made it past this and pushed through with a major like the liberal arts then you are very bright and spent your time very well.

Last edited by Zack1994 on 23 Mar 2019, 7:05 pm, edited 10 times in total.

The main point to the original article is that for some positions a college degree from a financial perspective is not always a winner.

Not all Aspies are STEM material. I suspect there are several Aspies that are great composers, singer, writers, screen writers, poets, etc. That doesn't make these professions are any less valuable to society but pursuing them through a college degree unfortunately may not be financially viable approach.

But we live in a two tier educational approach. One is professional college oriented and the other trade oriented. When my wife went to school, they separated individuals into one of those two categories at the end of 8th grade. Some students went to a college tract for high school and others went to a trade tract. She went thru trade tract. She went through 4 years of training as a seamstress. She became an expert in this trade. She can look at a piece of clothing and make a duplicate in the proper size from eyesight, without a pattern. She makes her own patterns. She can take ideas such as combining the element of several different pictures in magazines and create an outfit incorporating these feature. It is a gift and fills a valuable role in society. For any girl who is about to get married and her complex wedding dress does not fit and needs altering at the last minute, she is a miracle worker.

I took the professional route but that does not mean that I do not appreciate the trades. I always considered work to be an integral part of preparation for a career. Around the age of 10, I began cutting lawns in the neighborhood. In the winter I shoveled snow from driveways. I also sold garden seeds door-to-door in the springtime. This gave me spending money to pursue my passion at the time, which were comic books. In high school, I worked in a five-and-dime store. It is important for students to work during the summer and after school because it can help establish a good work ethic. In high school and all during college, I worked. I paid my way through college.

I worked jobs (20 hours per week) whenever I was in school and (40 hours per week) during the summers, the entire time I was in college. During my four years of college, I worked:
* in the main branch of a bank balancing daily receipts.
* as a postman in the downtown mail sorting station.
* as a parking lot attendant.
* as a warehouseman in a large department store storage facility.
* as a night shift operator on a cyclotron.
* with a supercomputer performing heat transport modeling.

I passed this tradition onto my daughters.
My oldest daughter was 13 years old when she started working a summer jobs detasseling corn. It was very hard manual labor. She was building a strong work ethic. It was important that she learned that without an education; this is the type of unskilled labor and low paying jobs available to her. You can be a ditch digger but do you really want to work that backbreaking profession for the rest of your life?

When my youngest daughter was around 13 years old during the summer she volunteer as a full time hospital volunteer (pink lady) for two summers. She wanted to become a medical doctor and this was good experience. Later she began to work in a store similar to a Wal-Mart. Before she even turned 18, they offered her a top management position in the store but she declined because she was going to become a medical doctor.

This attitude drives me crazy...and unfortunately, it seem it's just as prevalent among those on the spectrum (well those who are good at STEM) as it is among neurotypicals.



I don't think Aspies are any more likely to be STEM material than NTs, despite what Hollywood thinks. Maybe the stereotype originates from a small percentage of Aspies being hyper-intelligent in STEM.

Look who it is


John Nash "beautiful mind"

Autistic savant


Degrees in humanities and social science are worth less than STEM

But humanities and social science degrees are not necessarily "worthless"


Although , especially after the recession, humanities and social science degrees are often below salvage value

I'm not sure your point...I conceded some Aspies are hyperintelligent in STEM and as you allude, Hollywood likes to focus on those (and unlike John Nash, many of those characters are made-up).




I have social science degrees...I make less than the average person with no college whatsoever, so yeah they are "worthless, not merely "worth less." I'm not saying I should make as much as a STEM graduate, but could I make more than a high school graduate?

Look who it is

A sample size of one, is not representative


The average person with a nonSTEM degree, earns more that the average person with only a high school diploma

By definition, half of people are below average and half of people are above average


You do not know what your income would have been, if you had STEM degree or just high school diploma

Your income could be higher, the same, or lower



Someone told me that he got BS aerospace engineering. Ten years, no job in that field.


That is just one person


That does not mean that Aerospace engineering BS is "worthless".


Pattern recognition versus globalization

Lost Dragon, you're so right.

The nearly-impossible task of paying off student debt these days aside (not an easy mammoth to ignore), some people seem oblivious to what kind of work they'd like to do, what sort of degree/prep it will take, and more specifically what they'll do once they graduate. I suppose I was lucky decades ago when I half-stumbled across the field I think and feel I was meant to be in, but honestly--people who have the time and the chance and the help to make such decisions years in advance don't actually use it! I am intensely frustrated on behalf of my friends whose intelligent children are drifting around, "under-employed" by choice, oblivious to the likelihood that they should have either a) predicted the need for an advanced degree to get the work they actually want to do before the present day or b) for at least a little while, do the well-paying work that their B.S. degrees prepared them for so they don't have to work 10+-hour days at bars and restaurants all the while wasting the chance to enliven their resume, their skills, and their life experiences for whatever they decide to do down the road.

I was raised with the belief that an honest day's meager pay--even in something that others consider a lowly or unsavory position--is worth more than ill-gotten riches because there's dignity in doing what needs to be done, in doing something well (or at least giving it an honest try!). On top of that, I also believe in the value of knowledge for its own sake. I will always admire a woman I knew who went back to school for a second M.S. after retirement; granted, she had the $$, but she also had the motivation to do the work--not because of a job, or to carve another notch in her belt, but because she simply wanted to learn.

But hey--like I said, that's beside the OP's point. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled program.

So it's either STEM or homelessness?

(My degree is in geography/urban planning, minored in geology)

Tim


In the city where I live, according to the consumer, only about three percent of the adults work in STEM


In the local high school, only five percent of 12th graders were proficient at math


Plenty of people with no bachelor degree or nonSTEM bachelor degree, are not homeless


However, for autistics with nonSTEM degree, the economic future looks bleaker than for NT with nonSTEM degrees



Outside of STEM, jobs put a lot of emphasis on customer service


Restaurant retail sales


Outside of STEM, not many jobs are suitable for autistics personality or even introverts

I guess I'm just annoyed when people tell me, "oh, you have a liberal arts/social science degree, it's no wonder you can't find a job." I know or know of people with liberal arts/social science degrees who do just fine in the job market...they have something else that I don't. I don't know what it is....is it just because they have better social skills? Am I just in a particularly bad area for non-STEM jobs? I don't think my grades or the quality of the schools attended is an issue. I didn't graduate summa cum laude or go to an Ivy League school, but I think my academic record was respectable at least (I have a master's too). I think part of my problem is that I work two jobs with basically no advancement potential.

Don't even go to college to begin with...its just a debt scheme to make sure you owe money as soon as you get a career.

College has a value

It is not not "worthless"

But many things have value

Saturated fat has value and set es a function. Only a certain amount

College is not magic, a mystery, or anything like that

Some people should go to college


Some people should not go to college

The young lady who lived in the house I bought decided not to go to college with the money her parents had saved up for her. She, with her parents approval, decided to get married and start a family. They used the money to buy a bigger house.