College is not where you find a career. College is where you have fun and drink beer

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by glatt

This is a topic that is very important to me and I want to be as knowledgeable as possible about it. I need to figure out how much I should try to influence my kids' decisions about what they study and if they go to college.

My two cents would not to try to push your kids into a specific field (to certain extent) but to try to be top tier in whatever field they pick. I can't really back this up besides my limited personal perspective but that seems to be a better indicator of employment than fields of study. I would highly recommend this if your kids go into engineering. "Work hard, play hard" is the cool thing to do by senior year and looking back at my experience, I wish I had that mentality as a freshman.

Also, if your kids are good with their hands, going into the trades may not be a bad idea. Out of all my friends (many of them electrical/biomed/civil engineers), the guy making the most money right now just has a two year degree from a private technical college and fixes machines in the nuclear field. Keep in mind that he graduated 2nd or 3rd in his class and job placement after graduation is near 100% at that school.

[Griff]

This thread is floating around in my head today. I really liked what ph45 said.

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

My two cents would not to try to push your kids into a specific field (to certain extent) but to try to be top tier in whatever field they pick.

#1 is in college doing learning industrial design which she loves and appears to have a lot of directions she could go. I think she should be self employed and find her niche. #2 I worry about because she has a lot of me in her but fortunately smarter. She has time.

My administrator approached me today about a couple opportunities she wants me to consider. The first is starting a behavior focused classroom which county is desperate for and I basically asked for in a letter last month. The second is getting that administration certificate and starting to take the reins. Anyway I have the degrees as union cards and the certificate would be another even if they didn't play out smoothly when I first got them. I've said a lot of things in the past about "if I ran these classrooms" because I know what bad educational systems look like, anyway it may be put up or shut up time. Thing about these opportunities is with all the education, for the immediate future, I'll still be making 1/2 of what Pete does in a field far removed from her Fine Arts degree. College degrees are weird, they're both important and unimportant, its just a matter of how it plays out on the personal level. I'd prolly be better off a wood butcher.

[xoxoxoBruce]

In many (most?) corporate structures some dude in an office far away, decides which positions will require a degree in order for you to apply. But then likely as not the job doesn't relate to the degree, they often don't even specify degree in what. They don't care because they're going to train you to do the job the way they want it done. But they want to be able to brag how many degreed people they have

Boeing did a big push about 10 years ago where they pushed people out of jobs they'd been doing for 15 or 20 years, and replaced them with new college graduates. Well OK, fresh blood, new ideas, more gooder, right? No, they had the people being bumped out, train the new blood to do it exactly the same way, and warned the newbies not to deviate from what they were shown, as much of the methods/systems were specified by government contract. I heard a rumor that using degreed people allowed them to charge the government more for the same work, but couldn't substantiate that.

A friend just got forced out of one of Florida's biggest health care providers. He wrote and administered the programs that kept the pharmacies in seven hospitals supplied, and running smoothly. He even had an office with a door and window... but no degree. They decided to outsource his job to contractors, so they gave him three months to train them and buh bye.