Remember the old saying: "No one can ever take away your education"?

But they can damn sure take away your job and your home these days, just not your diploma.

Unless maybe you default on your student loan because you can't find a job you have a degree in :shrug:

Computers? Why yes, I know how to use a Commodore 64.

It was a small business system for people who sold herbs.

It had better encryption than many banks did at the time.
It's funny how security obsessed herb dealers were.

it borders on paranoia.

:hippie: :smoke:

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

...isn't education. Learning how to learn and think is education, and that is always an advantage.

Not their fault but a pretty crappy deal for those tens of thousands of dollars and 2 - 4 years spent.

...I'm not exactly sure what kinds of "grads" you are talking about, or what they studied, but I'd say it *is* their fault if they didn't take responsibility for learning what they could as adults. There's a culture of "doing what you have to" to get by in college. Maybe it's society at large who is at fault for perpetuating that idea, but at some point, people need to man-up (or woman-up) and take responsibility for their learning and go the extra mile if that means being more competitive in the future.

But from many personal experiences I've had training people over the years I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "they never taught us that in college" for even the most elementary job functions. There's several schools that I consider diploma mills that are more interested in getting students to sign up and pay rather than to teach them anything. Sure they teach them a little math, a good vocabulary, how to write a resume, a fraction of of the skills for what their studying for and then tell them the rest of what they need to know they'll have to get "on the job".

...stuff they maybe should have learned even before college - but yes, it's difficult to generalize.

Here's an example of something that drives me nuts. A relative was talking to a store clerk in rural KY, and my relative mentioned that I lived in Washington. The young, female store clerk said, "Oh Washington DC!" My relative said, "No, Washington the state."

The store clerk obviously didn't know that Washington was a state and became embarrassed. She asked my relative, "Is that something that most people know??" She was assured that it was.

This is what I don't understand - why can't people take some initiative and learn things like that on their own. I'm not sure I was ever "taught" that Washington was a state while I was in school, but if you're cognizant of the world around you, you should just pick some of those things up.

You got to see this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww

At least she has her looks to get by with the rest of her life.

I took all kinds of math, statistics, physics, etc. When I graduated, I got a fairly good paying job with the title 'mathematician'. Oddly enough, my job was not to find eigenvectors. It was to write and run accounting programs in languages I had never heard of. Not something I could not learn, but also not something I could not have learned as a high school freshman. Amount utilized of my six years of classes = 0.00

Then I foolishly quit that job without having another one lined up. Spent a year looking for jobs and failing, so I went to graduate school. Sorta learned some cool stuff, mainly from books people were giving away after cleaning out their offices and from the library and nearby bookstore where I got a used copy of "Small is Beautiful" but that degree was not hugely useful either. In fact, to get my current job which is sorta good paying, albeit janitorial work, I did not put my 2nd degree on the job application because I thought it would hurt my chances. Major employers like Citibank and Phillip Morris, both of which I worked for, were not impressed with my two degrees.

Not that my degrees qualified me for the factory work I did for Phillip Morris, but how does it hurt to have a quasi-computer programmer working on your million dollar computerized line? I think I was very useful until I finally decided to get my revenge by no longer using skills they were not paying for. Thus the line was down for an hour once with a computer problem that I could have fixed in five minutes, and it might have been down for two hours if I hadn't fixed the problem just to prove I could.

I've actually been shown new things and out-performed by several individuals who only spent $4,000 at a community college than by those who paid $50,000 plus at a state university that I had to teach everything.

suitability to the corporate world of automatons. "Well that's great that you've got years of experience solving these issues, but do you know this tool?"

Blind obedience, connections, and regurgitated policy is all that matters today.

...a lot of corporations are critical of technical educations because they don't allow workers to apply knowledge to new skills. Case in point, learning foreign languages helped me understand computer programming. I was able to take knowledge of something unrelated and apply the mental skills I learned to something new.

excellent referrals, and a former 6-figure salary, then get back to me.

If you aren't "in the club", you're out. Get fitted for a paper hat, experience is detrimental.

:hi:

:(

As Carly Simon(?) once sang, "I've looked at life from both sides now".

But the point is, that this "30 years of prosperity" was simply the largest transfer of wealth to the upper 5%, and to the top .01% by thousands of times that, in history and it was done at the expense of tens of millions of destroyed lives and an entire way of life.

...there was once a time that the man selling ties at Sears and a guy who bagged groceries could buy a house and support a family with three to four kids. I actually knew a man who raised two daughters, bought and paid for a home and then retired with a pension from a supermarket chain who did nothing but bag groceries for the entire 27 years he worked there.

(the market value of your life) to the point that we simply cannot do more than survive.

A small price to pay for our supporting of the parasitic class in a lifestyle of such opulence that is beyond the comprehension of the sheeple, most of them anyway.

cause you to have a stroke at 45, like me.
I was a really, really good technology consultant, and now I can't balance my checkbook without a calculator.

they can make it so that your degree isn't worth anything, but they cannot physically come into your home and take the piece of paper away. At least not yet...

They can damn sure refuse to release your transcript or diploma. I know a couple of people who had it happen. Do they do it to people with defaulted student loans? I don't know. But they can take away your education too.

Welcome to the new world.

But that doesn't mean that it's worth anything anymore :(