It All Starts with a Guidance Counselor

Do you remember all those career placement tests you had to take in high school? Most of these tests were really just a watered down version of the Myers Briggs Intelligence Test, but at the time it was one of the most exciting tests I took in high school. It forced me to think about the expansive career before me with a focus on answering one question: What will I do for the next sixty or so years of my life?

After taking a "Career Placement" test, I calculated my results. These results were supposed to determine which career path I should pursue, based on my likes, abilities and work preferences. The next step in the process was a visit to the guidance counselor. One of my favorite shows of all time, The Venture Brothers, summarized what a guidance counselor does in last week's episode:

Dean: What's a guidance counselor?
Billy Quizboy: Usually it's a guy you barely know who gives you career advice, even though his career is a guidance counselor, and sometimes he helps get you into college.

Guidance counselors often have stacks of pamphlets of various schools, most of them local, to hand out. They usually babble on about how great college is, how much you'll learn, how much more money you'll earn, yadda yadda yadda. From there, high school juniors and seniors decide to choose one of three paths.  They are:

1. Don't go to college. This makes your guidance counselor SAD. He will blubber on about how you'll become a janitor making minimum wage, how much you'll hate your life, and how depressed you will be that you never went to college.
2. Join the military. This also makes your guidance counselor SAD, but he is obligated to tell you this is an admirable choice. Honestly, the military is an excellent way to bypass college while still gaining very marketable skills and learning job-relevant information. Unfortunately, there's a pretty good probability that you'll end up in Afghanistan risking your life for a bunch of ingrates stateside. It is a risk that many young soldiers take, and for that, I both salute and thank them.
3. Go to college. This makes your guidance counselor HAPPY, to the point where he'll gush about how brilliant you are, how much you'll learn, and, here's the BIG LIE, how much more you'll make when you graduate.

Let's just say you went to college. After all, the name of the blog is Young, Educated & Broke. Whether you got an Associates, Bachelors, Masters or Doctorate, you're smart and you proved it. But here's where the BIG LIE comes in. On the brink of graduation, you scour the internet for potential jobs. You get in contact with the friends and acquaintances you've known and cultivated throughout your education. The desperate search for a job, any job, is on at full swing.

Finally, a prospect! A job that isn't a scam, located in a region you find suitable, and in a field related to your major. Assuming you were even lucky enough to find a job that meets all three of these criterion, you may find that the job doesn't pay nearly what you thought you'd earn. You have a college degree, damnit! You've worked so hard to get to this point. You've taken out thousands of dollars in student loans. You've scrimped, pinched, and scraped by, and it looks like you'll continue this "student life" even after you take your first job after college just to pay off those loans you took on and to launch your adult life.

But what about all those promises my guidance counselor made? He said I'd make a TON of money after college. Well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but, whether intentionally or unknowingly, he LIED.