There is a legal concept called "due diligence" where a party to a contract is expected to take reasonable steps to know what they're doing.
Googling "starting salaries for [my major]" is a very, very low bar for due diligence.
The posts in this thread absolving the student from making any effort whatsoever at due diligence is illustrative of the point I was making.
At what point do you consider the person a functional adult and assign some responsibility?
> It’s why we send 18 year olds to war.
18 year olds are most likely to survive the rigors of combat. Survival rates drop steadily from 18 on.
> No one else would take those odds.
Plenty do. The US, for example, has had an all-volunteer army since the 1970's. The Navy and Air Force have always been all-volunteer. My dad volunteered at 23. A lot of volunteers were rejected for being too old.
Of course, you _can_ find information and protect yourself from even these scams _most_ of the time, but I don't think the "just do your due diligence" argument holds enough of the time to dismiss the general argument being made, even if it applies to specific cases.
Besides, it seems weird that the senior class would never notice that the class that graduated just ahead of them is working at the car wash?
If you imagine the uncertainty and justifiable inertia involved in a realistic scenario, I don’t see how you can dismiss arguments that it’s not necessarily just the fault of kids for not doing due diligence.
Choices are:
1. continue, rack up $300,000 debt with no way to pay it off
2. change majors to something that pays
Which do you think is the sensible decision?
> just the fault of kids
You're infantilizing them. They are adults. They can vote. They can drive cars. They can sign contracts. They can join the military and command others. They go to the big boy prison if they commit crimes. They can consult with their parents or anyone they respect. They can marry. They can have gender reassignment surgery.
They can use google. Just like you and I can.
They're not victims.
Do you really believe they spent 6 years studying a major and had no clue what the career prospects were? I don't.
Then the onus would be on the banks to only lend to people who they thought could repay.
> Many of the students in my class who didn’t turn their degrees into industry success were insanely talented, but Columbia traded on its reputation to sell them big dreams that it could never deliver.
> During my 2nd year I suspected that the school wasn’t providing a launching pad to a career — most of the instructors were struggling to establish a career themselves & many weren’t even much more experienced than their students. A 4th yr student taught our cinematography class.
> The brass ring the program dangled was that your film could be chosen for the annual festival where, in theory, big-time agents would see it and maybe sign you. But it was cutthroat to even be selected for the festival. And tuition didn’t cover the cost to make those films.
…
> I slowly begin to realize this IS the deal. He made it pretty clear if I wanted my degree, I needed to help him sell his tv pilot. Yep, the Chair of Columbia’s prestigious graduate film program tried to shake me down in order to jump-start his own stalled out career.
The full thread is here: https://twitter.com/jstoteraux/status/1413326562821246978?s=....
Students definitely deserve some blame for signing onto these expensive programs without doing any meaningful research. But university admins can be corrupt, too, and it’s likely that they used their reputation as “Columbia” to sell students something they knew was fake.
Anyway, in response to the original point — I don’t think that’s a good example of entitlement since “scam” is a more appropriate word. I think they had stuff like “people being mean to waiters and flight attendants” in mind, which is a different sort of entitlement.