Welcome to America where getting a degree is as useless (but still essential anyway) as getting a pedicure when you can’t afford to buy shoes to wear…because no one cares if life is fair anymore anyway.
Not too recently an article came out regaling law schools for pumping and dumping the system with aspiring lawyers who in the end were left with heavy debt loads and nary a job prospect in sight once they graduated. A lot of that is because no one really likes lawyers anymore and most law outlets where you can hope to make an eventual legitimate wage wont hire you unless you come from a top tier school. That plus everyone has figured to do things for free on the web and thus circumvent the need to hire lawyers. Which might explain why law degree application finally saw a hideous fall.
Which leads us to the next profession, where it is a bad move to get a degree it seems, that of a veterinarian, where you can also hope to be broke, left in debt and naturally disillusioned your degree is worth shit.
Explains gawker via the nytimes: The essential facts can be summed up in a handful of charts: since the recession, pet ownership and vet visits are down, along with average veterinarian salary; but the number of vet school graduates, and their average debt load, keeps climbing.
Of course this is not bothering vet schools who of course rely on all you aspiring vets to make money off as they keep cranking out graduates whose job prospects aren’t looking too swell.
And the level of debt for American graduates, says Dr. Alan M. Kelly, former dean of the veterinary school at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study on work force needs, is already too high. “The general guideline is that your debt should never be twice your starting salary,” Dr. Kelly says. “The debt of graduates today, on average, is three times their starting salary. Well, this is a cataclysm.”
Naturally you only want to be a vet because you love sick kitties and want to play with animals all day and if push comes to shove if you really need to make money you can always volunteer to strip at some club or just succumb to some arrangement that will allow you to stay afloat as long as you don’t mind selling your soul, your ethics and dreams down the drain pipe. Then again that could just my ass exaggerating and sensationalizing the state of affairs? There are always institutions that will allow you to consolidate debt and/or refinance your student loans. That would likely be your best bet as it is entirely more practical.
Reflected commentators on the web that made me wonder:
‘Let’s be real – if you go to school, you’ll be broke. MBA market – flooded. Law market – flooded. Doctor’s – flooded. College degree market – flooded. Hmm, I heard the same with blogging degrees.’
‘all of this college hating is tiresome. you know what? i hate paying my student loans too but I’m pretty psyched that my vet, lawyer, gynecologist, etc have college degrees. you complain but offer very little in the way of the solution. should everyone just stop going to college because it costs money? or should we educate everyone for free and still not have enough jobs to go around?’
‘While I find my job as a veterinarian incredibly rewarding and fulfilling, I also entered veterinary school with a pitiful understanding of the burdens of taking on so many loans. I blame myself, but I also wish my school had been more forthcoming.’
‘Universities have been been doing the same thing for decades: recruiting more students into graduate and undergraduate programs to offset the decline in state funding of education.’
‘But the United States is the only industrialized country whose university graduates worry about debt. The U.S. model is not sustainable.’
‘Higher education should be accessible for a nominal fee (e.g., $500 per semester) for all who academically qualify.’
‘Education is a society’s investment in its future. Every single other industrialized country operates in this principle. Why don’t we?’
‘This is really a microcosm of the economy at large, which is barely growing. Lacking growth we see this kind of stagnation in many places. So we have too many Veterinarians but also too many lawyers and too many music majors. The only thing we aren’t short of is the “masters of the universe” Tom Wolfe wrote about in “Bonfire of the Vanities”. A growing economy absorbs all these players and more. Without growth the newest generation craves the jobs of older generations who are not ready to retire. Young people have great difficulty starting life. The wheels are falling off. And that is why economic growth is the primary issue in our lives.’
well vets can always try to get work with farm animals, fish, food safety, medical/pharmaceutical industry etc., instead of “playing with animals all day”..