If you GO TO COLLEGE and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you VOTE and are still unhappy, GO TO COLLEGE. If you go to college and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you VOTE and are still unhappy, GO TO COLLEGE. If you go to college and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you VOTE and are still unhappy, GO TO COLLEGE. If you go to college and are still unhappy, VOTE. If you have ten doctorates and vote once every two years, DON’T iPHONE COMPUTER.
Well at least if you are smart and got a STEM major and even got employed full time right out of college and didn’t even get your job or pay get interuppted by covid then surely you should be financially stable and able to buy a house in your mid-20s like your dad did working a union job in the early 90s, right?
Right?
…right?
I will live in fear of rent, health, car troubles until I die and goddammit I did everything they all told me to.
Let’s talk about STEM majors. Most fields have a fucking crazy funnel effect that nobody warns applicants about. Case in point: many of my high school friends who got BSc’s in bio fields - microbiology, genetics, marine biology, etc. - which have a large undergrad intake and accept people with good but not exceptional marks. Problem is, there’s maybe one honours place for every 10-15 graduates, and masters places are even scarcer, so if you aren’t top of your class, you aren’t doing postgrad. And if you don’t do postgrad, you’re underqualified for the jobs that want university education, but also overqualified/not correctly qualified to be a lab tech.
So what the fuck do you do? If you can afford to spend another two years studying while earning fuck all, you can train to become a high school teacher (and then still barely afford to live because teachers are criminally underpaid) or else you’re basically stuck in some shitty middle management job using none of your skills at a company that has ‘-lab’ or ‘path-’ in the name, maybe.
Engineering and computer science still have decent employment prospects after undergrad, but engineering programmes are relatively tiny and good luck getting a place if you aren’t like top 5 in your school.
TL;DR: the whole “well maybe if you didn’t major in postmodern decolonial basket-weaving…” line is utter bullshit because the majority of STEM grads are just as utterly fucked on today’s economy.
The secret about STEM is that it really means “engineering and Computer Science, maybe math and physics if you work for big data”. Basically, if it doesn’t require at least Calc 2, it doesn’t count.
The only reason STEM pays well is because schools can’t figure out how to teach calculus, which means there’s a natural bottleneck. Companies still think that they have to hire a “Calculus passer” for many jobs, which pushes up the cost.
