Column: Worthless degrees only kind of worthless
Published April 6, 2010
I've just followed a banner ad link to TheLadders.com, a job site exclusively for positions that pay $100,000 or more.
I followed the link from a news article in which reactionary, under-informed, anonymous posters are responding to one another with non-sequitur diatribes as to whether President Barack Obama or the Republican Party are to blame for all the nation's collective ills. Judging by the spelling, grammar and level of cogency of these posts, the only place these people will ever score six figures is in Guitar Hero.
But unfortunately, looking at the eight job fields on The Ladders, I don't have much more hope than they do.
The fields run the gamut from finance to law to tech to, inexplicably, "real estate, sciences and construction" all lumped together as one.
As an English major with no desire to go to law school, nor to work as a grizzled construction worker-scientist who then puts his own hand-built houses on the market, I'm afraid I'm doomed to the humble life of a Guitar Hero-playing plebian.
So I have to wonder: Is The Ladders naïve for advertising to me and all the morons bashing Obama and the Tea Party? Or are my opinionated moronic colleagues and I the jargon-spewing, golf-playing CEOs of tomorrow? Is The Ladders marketing strategy misguided or just forward-looking?
All this thought about large dollar amounts was spurred by the sobering prospect of completing my exit interviews for all my college loans. For the last four years I've successfully avoided thinking too deeply about the incredible amount of money I've squandered skipping recitations and daydreaming through Andrew Clarke's food science and nutrition class. Faced with concrete dollar amounts and repayment plans, I can't help but entertain this unreasonable question: Is the amount I've learned in college worth the price I've paid?
The practical and, by all means, correct answer is that yes, it has been worthwhile. Over the next few decades I will easily recoup the tens of thousands of dollars spent in college, because my degree will act as my entry fee into a world of better paying jobs (maybe not quite The Ladders caliber, sadly) that people without degrees can only dream or watch movies about.
But like most people pursuing liberal arts degrees (more popularly known as "the worthless degrees"), I can't escape the feeling that I might have been better off pursuing something more practical.
And so I run thought experiments in which I had paid more attention in food science and decided I would like to pursue a job in that lucrative field. Maybe I would even find myself in Dr. Clarke's illustrious graduate course FS 8420 Meat Investigations. But somehow, I don't think I would be satisfied even if I investigated all the meat in the world. The money would be there, but something else would be missing.
As someone who's fond of naval-gazing and regretting my own decisions, it's probably time that I shut up and grow up. Whether I wasted my money here, I don't feel that I've wasted my time. I'd rather have an enjoyable life with a massive debt than a healthy bankroll and a lucrative degree in meat processing technology with an emphasis on restructured or low-fat meat products, supercritical fluid extraction and meat extrusion.
If I've failed, then I've enjoyed failing, and in the meantime I'll remind myself that getting a job through The Ladders isn't the only metric of success, and I could have just listened to Doris Day's "Que Sera Sera" and foregone all this worry in the first place.