5 ways "we" ruined the occupy wall street generation

Fun little read for those that are in business school.

http://liveyourlegend.net/how-business-school-killed-the-entrepreneur-and-some-worthy-alternatives/

 

Yeah... you've been sheltered most of your life, you've yet to really experience the wieght of the world on your shoulders. Once the safety net is pulled away things change quickly. Regardless of what you may think... you've been sheltered like most of us until up or around 18.

sorry kiddo... zombie is right, you are too young and too inexperienced to know how real life works. When I was 18 I had the same naive ideals as you, but once you get out into the real world... everything changes. It is an eye opener.

 

Interesting read, however just because you have a business degree doesn't automatically make you a genius in business. The same goes with any degree.
The degree doesn't make the person, the person makes the degree. The effort you put into your field of study determines how much you will get out of it. I work with a lot of people who have MBA's that are idiots. The only reason they got it was to have a slip of paper. Those are the people that give higher education a bad name and are making degrees worth less and less as time progresses.

I have a bachelor's degree in Management and Entrepreneurship. Going to college gives you a better understanding of how your field works and gives you different theories on how to approach situations you will run into in your career, however it is up to the individual to hone their skills and apply the appropriate learnings to their situations. I run a small business on the side and I will say that some of the things I learned in business school have helped me in running my business.

I applaud the college I attended by the fact that the majority of their professors were not career professors. Most of them taught part time and had normal jobs and ran business so they were able to apply real life examples of situations you will run into in the real world. The ivy league schools such as Harvard place a little more emphasis on theory than practicality.

Does having a degree help you in life? Yes. The degree in which it helps each person is different based on how they apply the knowledge they learned.

 

You can use a "flipping burgers" job as a stepping stone to something bigger. I, myself worked in a place like that and I have been self reliant since I was 15. I had many jobs over the years that ranged from cleaning toilets to flipping burgers to being a cook to working in casinos to being a driver, a delivery man, a food server and many more. In the end I graduated college and started working in my career field. Having had 23 non white collar jobs (seasonal and permanent ones) and 1 white collar job to my record I can honestly tell you that concept of having decent life no longer what it was back in the day. Having gone through college and working in my career field has certainly elevated my income levels but at a heavy cost of swimming in student debt for next 15 years. 15% of my income goes towards paying off student debt and that is a steep price to pay for entering unstable job market, crumbling economy and rising cost of living.

Back in the day it was not uncommon to default on your student loans (ie after you came back from draft many soldiers stopped paying and were forgiven), back then a milkman could support a family and have a house, back then flipping burgers allowed people to support families too. Not today. Cost of living is going up so rapidly that you can hardly catch up with it. Ipods, laptops, tvs.. forget about that... let’s talk food. Food went up 12% per year for past 5 years. By comparison cost of electronics went down nearly 50% in some cases. Owning electronics is a negligible expense and is a short term financial problem because it can be paid off in months (even if you flip burgers for a living) where as other investments such as education have to paid off in 15 years.

Generation that you call youth cannot get a job after graduating college and if you think that it’s not a big deal... explain that to millions of graduates every year who have to start making mortgage sized college payments just 6 months after graduating. College tuition is exponentially more expensive than it was before. College debt mostly belongs to private banks who will come after you if you stop paying and unlike completely walking away from mortgage with a bruised credit score to show for it, they will pursue you to ends of the world to get their money back. Since white collar jobs that most people desire require a bachelor degree that DID NOT come from place like Devry you almost HAVE to attend expensive school to earn more than $50,000 per year. You can, of course very happily go to ITT, Lincoln Tech, Devry, Phoenix but between you and candidate from ivy league school they will not pick you. And if you do get picked then you will likely earn substantially less. Case in point. Let’s say you want to apply for a job with a pay band of $33-$55K. Devry applicant fresh out of school will likely be offered $33 while Oxford educated applicants also fresh out of school will likely be offered $38.
Unfortunately it’s a chicken and egg argument when it comes to education. Technical schools will teach you practical skills while higher learning schools will teach you concepts and how to be adaptable. Technical school graduates will feel that they are equally capable but that is not always so in the eyes of both employers and peers with higher education levels. Knowing how to do something is often overshadowed by knowing why you are doing something in the first place. Higher learning graduates often advance through career faster, earn more, delegate their work to technical peons who generally stay around the same pay grade. Employers are less likely to grow those employee and that is especially true for blue collar jobs.

If you are considering going to a technical school you should be warned that MOST OF THE TIME credits are not transferable and tuition is less expensive because you are in fact taught how to be users and not so much innovators or thinkers.

If you ask me... third of the crowd that is protesting is unemployed while another third is under employed and final third is ready to hit retirement but they cannot afford to retire.
For every person that is not ready to retire, there is a person that cannot join the job force. For every person that is underemployed working multiple jobs, there is a person who could be employed full time on each of those jobs.
Socioeconomic inequality is so vast that poor people have to work 80 hours per week trying to feed a starving family while people 2 pay grades higher can work 40 hours, have 1 hour lunches, go on vacations, have a very well off financial status. You do not have to be filthy rich in this country to enjoy your life. You just have to have a combined family income that allows you to enjoy life perks.

Case in point: millionaire goes to a movie theater and pays $9.00 to watch a movie. For him/her that amount is laughable; on the other hand average middle class person paying the same admission fee will gripe about how much it costs to watch a movie nowadays; poor person on the other hand may not go to the movie theater in the first place because $9.00 is a lot of money for them.

Today more and more people slip into poverty. According to census 46 million people in this country live below national poverty line. One of you brought up an arguments that even thinking that pay bands need to be leveled off is communist thinking and that majority of filthy rich people have worked really hard for their money. Unfortunately while you are partially correct, there is a major caveat in that scenario. Historically speaking wealth is passed on along family line and that was true 1000 years ago, 500 years ago, now and it will be 5000 years from now. For every rich person who have made it from 0 (ie Justin Bieber, Bill Gates) there are thousands more than have got there because the second they left mom’s tummy their entire life was handed to them on a silver platter. How wealthy they are is not important, what is important is that life commodities cost the same to a millionaire and to the poorest of us and the only thing that separates us is how much we have in our bank accounts. If it cost $50,000 to have a very well off life and all people earned $50,001 then wall street protests would not happen.

Now do not get me wrong, people HAVE made the wrong decisions… bought houses they could not afford, spent their retirement funds years before retirement, have been financially irresponsible. Those people in my opinion have brought it on themselves. For each one of those people there is one socially responsible person who was not born into a rich family who have gone through trouble of going to school, working hard and ready to start a family. Those people are America’s next victim. Currently there is talk that Education bubble is next to burst. When that goes… mortgage crisis will seem like a walk in the park. From what I heard Americans owe something like a trillion dollars in student debt and that substantial portion of college graduates is not entirely happy paying that kind of cash.
I had 4 college loans. 1 already paid off. Another one I am only $4,000 away from paying off and 2 other ones I will continue to pay for another 15 years or so. Takes a deep breath.

 

Mark,

First off, thanks for serving. But, why do you call yourself a slave in your profile?

Trying to understand where you are coming from..are you specifically pissed (as I am) about the bail outs?

I'm of the thinking that each man (wealthy or not) should make his own way. The way I see it, we are not a free people if we are dependent on others and it's unfair as a society to create a system that causes people to rely on others...in essence thereby taking their freedom. That's a very high level of my take and I would be happy to go into WAY more detail but, first I'd like to understand where you're coming from...

 

That would have been me....

Thanks for the well thought out response, it really seems like it came from the heart. I believe you feel this way and are not just trying to make an arguement.

To further explain my take. It applies to both sides of the economic scale rather you are wealthy or poor.

I know where I came from (and I am old enough to have an opionion, as I believe all the people on here are), I know where I'm at and (unless something drastic happens), I know where I'm going. Trust me, I've had drastic stuff happen in my life such as loss of a job and life threatening illness in my family.

Going back to just my parents, my family was very poor. I'm talking about no running water in the house poor...not even any plumbing poor. All of us in my family have went from this to paying what I consider way too many taxes. The issue with me isn't rather or not it's going to rich or poor but, that fact that "we the people" think it's okay to take money from any group that is more than the cost of keeping our common infastructor going (hiways, military, police, fire department etc). To me, it's no more than walking down the street and having a man point a gun at my head and saying give me your money.

Think about how much all of us already pay. I'll tell you SOME of what I pay pay in taxes. Property tax (thousands of dollars a year), gas tax (over a thousand a year), dog tax (a few dollars a year), tobacco tax(a few hundred a year), liquor tax (a few hundred a year), sales tax (thousands a year), income tax (thousands a MONTH) and that's just to name a few and doesn't include the transfer tax of F.I.C.A. which my employer and I both pay. I'm sure my actual effective tax is in excess of 50%. Our government (we the people) already gets it fair share from me (don't tell me I need to give a little more or that I'm lazy). The spending needs to stop. People (rich or poor) need to find their own way to survive (and be free) as my family and I have done.

I keep seeing people in their 20s on here that support the movement or mentality yet I work with plenty of 20 somethings that make $100k plus a year. Many with 2 years or less college at a tech school. They were able to go to school or get the experience needed to NOT mortgage their future. Why is it the others can't yet expect those of us that could to pay for it in our "free" society? Again, I think of they guy with the gun robbing me on the street.

 

these occupy hipsters need to get rid of the socialism BS and jump on board with Fair Taxing. It's not fair to tax the Uber wealthy at a higher percentage rate than the rest of the populace but it is fair to tax all purchases equally across the board.

So the next time one of these greedy @ssholes buys a 5 million dollar yacht our dirty government will get about 750K.