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Quote from the comments on theatlantic.com

This guy pretty much sums up the failings of the system without saying it. Academia is out of touch with the market it is suppose to supply workers for.

procerus 3 hours ago I think most people know very well why they may not have a job - perhaps they're basically doing everything right but just haven't got lucky yet or applied for enough jobs for one to catch. Or perhaps, like me, they're basically unemployable and have no relevant skills or experience. I know that, and I'm not surprised that I'm at a low level in work. My degree is broadly useless, I got no industry experience/internships while in education, I have no other tempting skills like math, languages or programming, and also I'm a pretty weird, socially awkward person who doesn't know how to make people warm to him.

I only realised all that fairly recently and a bit too late to deal with while still in education, I should have caught it sooner when I went to the college careers presentations and there were a lot of accounting, tech, engineering, finance companies there. All through school I was fed ideas about how clever I was and how going to college is totally badass and I’ll walk into 50-60k jobs as soon as I graduate. Whether the teachers or my parents honestly believed it or not, it was bs, and quite damaging bs. I did what I was led to believe was necessary (by parents who had never gone to college and teachers who were clueless) and that was not nearly enough. Other people noticed what to do though, so good on them. My mind was elsewhere, never really focussed on a career and worried obsessively over my grades, this is my fault and I realize I shouldn't blame parents/teachers.

Now I am at point of really low self esteem because the sudden realization of my errors over the past 4 years comes to light and the fact is that I am not that clever if I can;t pick up economic/job trends and instead have my head in the clouds.

If you have a 17/18 yr old you need to sit them down and have long deep conversations about what it takes to become financially independent and you need to keep having those conversations until they say "mom, dad, I want to gain this skill and I can see from job adverts that I will be paid $xx.xxxx can we discuss what further education or job training/experience I will need to achieve this"

It is very important in my view that an 18 year old has at least 1 job and career path laid out before they move on from high school, they can change it as they grow older but at least they have something to fall back on. It is really scary how many students have literally no idea what they want to do once they finish school.




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