The Necessity of College Degrees in Today's Job Market

You’re 50 years old, sitting at the bar with your best friend of over 30 years, talking about the good ole days, reminiscing about your first love and how you looked forward to that first day of work at the job you thought you would have for the rest of your life. Suddenly you find out that your best friend just lost his job of thirty five years to a “snot nose kid” who just graduated college with a bachelor degree in engineering.

Not even a generation ago, most parents thought that college was a waste of time and money. People thought that the best way to get ahead in life was to leave school, get a job somewhere and start a family. Unfortunately, for people in the workplace today, this is no longer the case. More colleges and universities have become readily available for people who want to get an education and further their careers; it is no longer a privilege for the rich and upper middle class. College has actually become a spring board to get almost any job today, and will become a necessity for almost any job seeker in the future.

The new century has brought with it a surge of new jobs and with it the need to fill these jobs with college educated individuals possessing degrees in specified fields such as IT, engineering and the medical field. Looking in the local weekend classified ads will prove this point. Unless you want to be a long haul truck driver, which is going to take a Commercial Drivers License (CDL), work in entry level phone sale, or flip hamburgers for minimum wage, you are going to find that the other 99% of the jobs are going to require a degree of some kind. With that you are going to find a minimal amount that require an Associate Degree, but in order to make the kind of money that a lot of people are g...

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... that they worked at for 20 years, was sold to a foreign company and is scheduled to be torn down because the job can be done in Mexico for 12 cents an hour by some 11 year old that doesn’t know any better.

Even for those that are in college can sometime feel like the classes are nothing but a waste of their time. This is due to the general education requirement that is built in to almost every degree conceivable. People sit there and wonder why it is they have to take classes, that don’t count towards their degree in any way what-so-ever, but if they do badly in these classes; the grades still count towards an overall grade point average (G.P.A.). Most people think that the credit hours wasted, on these “elective” classes, could have been spent on learning more about their elected major, not to mention the money saved if the classes didn’t need to be taken at all.