So, Mr. College Graduate, want to know your odds of landing in a career that actually uses the education you just paid six figures for?
About 1 in 4.
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"Sweet -- my major is so obscure, there's actually only one other dude doing it."
Yep, only 27 percent of graduates wind up in a job that requires their specific degree. (That's not counting graduate degrees. The success rate is higher for people who went to law or med school ... as is their level of debt.)
"Then why the hell did I just pay $100,000 for a bachelor's degree?" asks Mr. College Graduate.
Well, you hardly had a choice, considering your name is College Graduate, but also, as bad as things look for someone with a degree, you are absolutely fucked without one. This is the first way in which the system is rigged against you, and it's something that wasn't really true of your parents' generation.
You've wound up in a world where a college degree is a base requirement that's priced like a luxury extra. So, for the first time in history, in order to get a job as a secretary making $30,000 a year, you need a bachelor's degree that costs three times that. Even worse, the vast majority of you had to borrow to pay for that degree, and all told there is an astonishing $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt in the USA alone. And of course, much of that debt is owed by people who are using their expensive knowledge to roll burritos at Chipotle, a job that itself exists only because the robot they built to do it got too depressed.
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"I came from MIT for this bullshit?"
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