""I can make, like, twice what I'd make as a social worker waiting tables," she confided, "so I'm probably going to just stay here.""
Ding ding ding. Its great that she can't look past the next 6 months a realize that she'll never progress past a waitress or shift leader.
Having ANY BS degree in college virtually guarantees a $25k a year job in SOMETHING. My brother started an engineering job for 30k in 1996 when he graduated college and now makes over $300k a year as VP. Heck, I know people that start at 25k-30k with business degrees from ho hum state colleges that make over $50k after 4 years and now they're on the cusp to make upper management jumps in a few more years. That's a good wage for 20 somethings in south (obviously northern or western states require more income).
People need to get the idea out of their heads that they'll live like Paris hilton the day they graduate from college. There's a lot of time to build a very successful career in 5-15 years out of college. The six figure incomes just take time.
I graduated in 1998 with a B.S. degree in chemical engineering. The best job I could find for a year and a half paid about $19K, and I was lucky to get it.
You're right. A few years back our company tried for months to hire someone who could read blue prints. People applied and were interviewed wanting the moon simply because they had a "BS" degree.
Finally, we hired a Yale graduate who majored in Architecture and design. 90 days into the hire, we learned that he did not even know how to read blue prints, let alone know how to do a material take off from them.
Over the years we found that more often than not, the universities were churning out degreed grads the way the public schools were churning out diplomas to kids who can't read. And the universities convince the grads that once they have that "degree," they were worth their salary demands without a clue to the reality of the job world they were entering.
It was at this point we determined that the "BS" degree had more than one meaning.