This article has shown up in my FB newsfeed twice in the last week. The article is interesting, but the comments infuriate me. I’ve never seen so much disdain for non STEM, (and I guess high salary business?) majors! What do you all think?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-college-seniors-are-falling-short-1493118000?mod=e2fb
Don’t have access but I steer clear of comments sections these days. Very little good ever happens in them.
@doschicos My HS senior tells me to do that, but I can’t help myself. I didn’t think the comments on an article from the WSJ would be so hateful for some reason (I’m not into business issues or investing at all so I’ve never read the newspaper before, but read the article because our oldest is off to college in the fall). Never again. I’ll stick to my FB plant and bird ID groups! And CC of course, you all are pretty sane and polite here.
Sorry, I was able to access it from my FB feed even though I don’t subscribe. I didn’t know it wouldn’t be accessible from the link. Here’s a sample:
"After 22 years of being told by mommy and daddy how wonderful they are;
after 15 years of getting a trophy for just showing up,
after 12 or so years of social promotions at union run schools,
after 4 year or plus of indoctrination in a socialist world view, gender and ethnic studies…
These snow flakes of the class of 2017 are going to melt in the burning hard crucible of the economic reality.
I suppose when the only job they qualify for is at a rental car agency …then they can go home and live in the basement and default on their student loans…"
Ignore it. Ignorant comments by ignorant people. My non-STEM major college grad is gainfully employed, self-supporting, and happy.
Honestly, such comments don’t deserve the light of day and aren’t worth repeating.
I always love being called the little snowflake when the people calling me that are (presumably) “real” grow-ups who have nothing better to do than whine in a comments section.
8->
ETA: Oh I missed the last sentence.
I’m comfortably typing this… in the home I own.
With my non-STEM degrees.
Paying off our student loans.
Though I guess it could be said that Mr R lives in the basement since that’s where his gaming room is and thus where he spends most of his time.
@LeastComplicated Steer away from comments but not WSJ. Way more than just finance section.
Love that @romanigypsyeyes ! And @Sportsman88 OK, I’ll give the Journal another chance maybe even the finance section, but I’m not reading the comments anymore!
“I suppose when the only job they qualify for is at a rental car agency …then they can go home and live in the basement and default on their student loans…”
My cousin’s H first job out of college was asst. manager at a rental car branch. He is now President of the company.
Actually, many car rental counter jobs require college degrees. I’ve met folks who have relocated to accept and follow their car rental jobs. Congrats to your cousin, @emilybee. Car rental businesses are a tough and very competitive business, especially with the uber, lyft, ridesharing, mass transit, shuttle and other options crowding the market. There are also tons of mergers so there aren’t too many independent companies left.
Found this to be quite ironic considering one rep from a national car rental chain I chatted up while my friend made arrangements to rent a van from him back in 2011 was a STEM graduate(specifically CS).
Because he graduated into the dotcom crash he never broke into the CS/computer field, lived with parents, and ended up working retail/service sector jobs on a part-time basis for nearly a decade before landing the car rental rep gig.
And in that office, it seems he was the only entry-level sales rep who had an undergraduate degree. Everyone else was either still in college working part-time or had never gone to college.
Also, knew of several engineering/CS majors who endured long spells of un/underemployment due to downturns in their industry including a few in my extended family.
Shouldn’t be a big surprise at all, this is a combination of things
1)“My generation and proceeding generations were so much tougher and better, these kids are all spoiled, never had to compete for anything, were coddled, unlike us” (kind of ironic, given that likely the people who write these comments are baby boomers, whom the pre WWII generation claimed were spoiled, their brains rotted out by tv, would never accomplish what they did, we weak, etc…need I say more?).
2)Those whose whole vision of life is going for the brass ring, and anyone who doesn’t do it ‘their way’ is ‘a loser’ (irony to this one, too, IME a lot of the people who denigrate not going after the ‘golden path’ are people themselves caught in pretty dead end, boring jobs, but love to put down others to make themselves feel better.
3)Those who, whether they have made it or not, want to deflect from the reality that kids today have it harder then they did, that even college graduates have a rough time getting jobs, much in the same way that they blame the economic dislocation of blue collar workers on the workers themselves, that they ‘couldn’t keep up’ or whatnot.
It is funny, too, that few of these people know history, that in the ‘good old days’ there were times where kids lived at home, in the post WWII word in many places housing was scarce because of the depression then WWII stopping new building, and kids, married or single, often lived at home for a while, and pre WWII it was not uncommon at all. The stereotype of the slacker millenial who doesn’t have ambition or whatnot, the kid living in mom’s basement playing video games, is that wonderful archtype that like the baby boomers were all soft in the head because Dr. Spock made them that way, that they would end up all as drugged up hippies, the Gen X were self involved brats who would end up with McJobs, etc.
Unless you are dealing with a highly technical or academic subject (in which case an article might generate all of two or three comments), comments sections are a waste of time. They are a snapshot of the worst of America, and they never say anything useful or enlightening. Just a lot of flaming and insults.
I stopped reading them years ago.
@scipio:
I don’t know, have seen some esoteric academic articles with comments on them online (my son showed me some of the ones with music theory he reads), and I kind of wonder about them, too, them academicians and such can get pretty brutal, too lol.
Long before the comment sections in newspapers there were the old Yahoo stock message boards. Some of them were real cesspools and had nothing to do with the stock or the company.