I just realized the following:
-I am the first in my extended family to have a tertiary education. My parents and grandparents were laborers.
-Despite having two degrees, I’ve never been able to use either of them
-I spent the next twenty years working various customer service jobs while never actually rising through the ranks.
-Today I’m over 40 and looking at living paycheck to paycheck until the day I die or retire. No-one in my generation with half a brain expects retirement to just, y’know, be there when it’s our turn. All of us are waking up to the reality that despite paying into SS for our entire working lives, we will never get even a fraction of what we put in back.
Given these circumstances, how am I supposed to convince my son to continue his education when he’s finished with high school? I feel like a liar already for trying to convince him that if he just works hard at something it’ll eventually pay off, because I have seen firsthand that this just isn’t true?
It depends on the field of study.
The quality of most degrees has been falling, at least here in Belgium. That’s because the subsidy structure incentivises the universities to pushing out as many degrees as possible.
So many uni degrees function the same way a high school degree would’ve in the past.
Trades like electrician, plumber, hvac, … are also an option for your son to consider.
If you work hard at some things, that’s as true now as ever. Of course you can’t just pick anything and expect to make a career out of it just because you work hard. Most olympic athletes have a dayjob.
Ironically enough, my son is currently in trade school to become an electrician. My degrees are all in fields that are now being taken over by AI, so since I missed my “entrance” by twenty years, that opportunity is long gone and never coming back.
So in a sense my degrees were a complete waste of time and effort.
It’s just… it feels like I have to lie to him. I’m not an example to him, I’m a cautionary tale. And I think he really does see the situation that way.
You could go back to a trade school and do the same. You are under 50 and have at least 25 years of life in you. Why throw the towel in and not work to change your future? It’s not like the trades are only for young kids.
You mentioned computer science as one of your degrees. My advice is to let this AI bullshit work itself out. It can’t think, and as an old programmer, at some point these programs being written will need someone that can think, and the AI bubble will pop. Unless everyone is fine with just copy/pasting all the code we have now. Computer science is a wide brush as well, and I am just speaking from my programming background. AI might tout itself as taking over the computer science field, but so far it’s all been failures in my opinion and at some point reality will set in that it isn’t more profitable in the long run to fire all your humans and replace them with larger if/then statements and more/corrupt data to work with.
I am not one of those kind of parents that pushed their kids. I figure it’s their life and they can do with it what they want. I told my kids I would be there and back them no matter what, if they wanted to be an astronaut or a garbage man/woman. They are all out in the world doing their own thing and I am happy with that.