I have been working in a sort of warehouse based procurement position without a degree for the last 10 years, and I just paid off my hellacious student loans from my last attempt at college from 2008. I have kind of hit a ceiling so I am going to take online classes for a degree.

I was thinking of going into finance to go along with my past experience but could use some advice. I don’t really love that a lot about that world but I’m good at it. I am interested in more of a systems/supply chain sort of role, and I heard between finance and supply chain finance was better in the long run.

I mostly am shooting for a degree that will help find a position that will pay more for less work and is relatively AI proof AND allows me to work from home.

Ideas?

I dropped out of school to play music back when the Earth was still cooling. I spent 8 or 9 years doing everything the Cowboy way and then one day I was freezing, soaking wet, cutting ceramic tile with a wet-saw in a driveway while sleet fell on my head and I thought "Fuck this, I'm going back to school."

I re-enrolled in college, finished my degree and immediately went to work in a completely different field, but the degree was something I could point at and say "See, I finished."

Here's the thing: there are a lot of aluminum beard rock-aged dudes struggling to find work right now. A lot of the things our elders told us about what made us recession or unemployment-proof turned out to be not true. As a slightly-older-than-middle-aged IT generalist, I'm lucky to have the job I have where I have it. Late-stage capitalism has made the job market shaky for everybody, and the emphasis on keeping wages low and profits high means that a dude with a mortgage and young'uns is too spendy for these larger companies.

My experience is telling me that IT is still a sector with a lot of jobs, but make sure you're working a solid network now. Call your friends who have the sort of job you want and ask them what they thing you should do. It's rough out there right now.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Mar 21, 2024 11:19 am I have been working in a sort of warehouse based procurement position without a degree for the last 10 years, and I just paid off my hellacious student loans from my last attempt at college from 2008. I have kind of hit a ceiling so I am going to take online classes for a degree.

I was thinking of going into finance to go along with my past experience but could use some advice. I don’t really love that a lot about that world but I’m good at it. I am interested in more of a systems/supply chain sort of role, and I heard between finance and supply chain finance was better in the long run.

I mostly am shooting for a degree that will help find a position that will pay more for less work and is relatively AI proof AND allows me to work from home.

Ideas?

Shipping and logistics is always going to be around, and it's even an aggressively growing sector in tech right now. I wouldn't bet your hedges on AI proof-ness, though. We're in a transformative era where AI is finding it's place in the workforce. I was just reading about the possibility of it replacing 10% of low-level jobs. Elsewhere, you will find AI is more of a job enhancement, rather than a complete replacement. We as a society also have to determine what kind of role we want AI to take. To think that AI will replace all jobs is not good for anyone, not even billionaires, because a strong economy depends on a solid workforce. High unemployment won't be good for the US or any other country. It's the same as the dawn of the industrial age, where factories and automation took over a certain type of job, which provided new areas of worker exploration. I'm not saying this transition will not shed blood, but in the long run we simply have to adjust or watch our own economic system buckle under the pressure.

That being said, whatever you choose is personal. If you feel that you could do well in the long run by investing in an education, go for it. You are almost never going to find an "ethical" job, or at least one that pays well. We have a capitalist society and unfortunately, every company is forced to be competitive in the marketplace or get bulldozed by competition. It's the sad fact of it all. You can, at hte very least, choose not to work in highly unethical jobs, like being a hedge fun manager. Working on supply chain, however, seems pretty noble. Without a healthy supply chain, our society could easily fracture.

So, get on and do your thing, squirt!

I went back to college at 38. Though I had credits from my first stab at higher education in the 90s, I still had to have a full schedule to get financial aid, so I did a double major and got two associates’ degrees at a community college. After that I got my bachelors at a state university, took one year off to work a job I really wanted, and then went back for my masters degree. I’m really glad I did because for the first time in my life I have job security. There are some minor downsides to being an older student, for example you are unlikely to find a study group because it’s just weird hanging out with people who are practically teenagers, but otherwise it was great. You can talk to the professors as a peer instead of as a peon, and they tend to make more exceptions for older students because they know our brains have less plasticity. Plus we can use our superior communication skills, i.e. finagling, to our advantage.

When you enter into the workplace it can be a little awkward if people are expecting to hire 20-somethings, but you will always have the advantage of experience and wisdom that can help distinguish you from other job candidates.

Go for it!

My dad went back to school when he was 58 (!) and got an associate's degree in fisheries science, during which he worked in a little marine life center adjacent to the college, which he lucked into running post-graduation when his boss had to go on disability. (Lucked into by being a very clever, handy, incorrigible/pathological workaholic). He managed to make that bridge the gap till he retired at 72. We had a complicated relationship, but it's one of the things I greatly admire and respect about him. These past years I've been wondering if I should do the same, find something more stable that would take me to retirement (if that still even happens exactly).

Good luck, FM Wholelottallllllls.

Thanks y’all!

Good thread. FM DFtR’s experience was familiar; I also left college midway through. I was basically in good standing but I had what seemed like a good opportunity to move to a real city and play in bands and have a job and not be broke.

I fortunately had a work/career arc that got me into tech in the late 90s, and at this point no one gives a shit whether I have a degree. But it’s felt like a lot of unfinished business and I should get some stupid degree, if only to prove to myself I can finish a multi-year goal. I’m also absolutely terrified of doing this.

I’m signed up to start courses again. Thanks everyone!

A little late, but if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my experience of going back to school as an adult. Hopefully some of it may be relevant to you. I think that a lot of my experiences are specific to being a person-of-colour in an academic world tainted by a whole lot of -isms (trigger warning: white women with savior complexes and a lack of insight into their own privilege may be displeased with this post), but I think that my main takeaways from the experience are fairly generalizable.

I entered St. Cloud State University as a physics major right after high school in the fall of 2003. I got the best advice I'd ever gotten in my physics classroom, but I didn't really realize it at the time. It was an 0800 class, and pretty much everyone, including me, was zonked. Our professor looked at us, read the general lack of enthusiasm from the class, and told us "you shouldn't be here just because you want to get a piece of paper. You should be here because you're passionate about physics." Due to a combination of not having money and not doing so great in class, I dropped out before the winter semester started.

Fast forward about 10 years and I'd just about had it with working-class jobs. I spent 4 years at McDonald's - the last 2 as a shift manager - because there weren't any real opportunities to make real money during the recession, then a couple years cleaning paint booths at a bus factory before I got laid off, which was doubly difficult because I was the sole source of housing and financial support for my brother - who is on the autism spectrum and took ages to get his first job - at the time (that one FM whose name escapes me because I find her unimportant but whose personality traits screamed "extreme cluster B personality disorder" every time she posted told me to get over it because I didn't have kids and her past situation was worse). Then I got to work in the sweltering heat in a freezer factory that has since closed (as multinationals do, they squeezed the most they could out of tax cuts and deferred maintenance, then moved the operation to Mexico), and then I was paid just above minimum wage to unload shipping containers. I spent about 3 years working 7-day weeks at a flour mill before I finally said "fuck this noise, I want out."

Because the one thing my job working for ConAgra did do for me was money (hooray for union wages), I was able to both fix my teeth and pay for my associate's degree with cash, which makes me feel pretty fortunate. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but a lot of my favourite artists and social commentators had political science degrees, so I started out as a political science major. As part of doing my generals, I managed to take enough anthropology classes that it made more sense to switch majors, because I'd be able to graduate faster. I was very fortunate to have an amazing anthropology professor, Dr. Nelson, who strongly encouraged my enthusiasm for research, and suggested that I should become an anthropologist (she also felt I had a knack for sociology). When I graduated, I took a year off to figure out what I wanted to do.

Then, in late 2016, things took a turn. When you-know-who got elected, I just remember feeling very powerless. This might come as a shock, but being of Mexican descent in a world where the president vilified Mexicans on TV every day made me feel like I had a bit of a target on my back. I guess I was trying to figure out how to make some sort of impact for the better when I decided that social work was the profession (one of a very few occupations that is genuinely a profession, incidentally) that worked best as a vehicle for me to do the kind of things I wanted to do - community organizing, public policy work, getting people access to resources.

So I entered the social work program at a school that, as it turns out, is one of the whitest in the nation and spent 3 years (advice: don't go into social work with an associate's degree first unless it has a similar emphasis because you'll add an extra year of prerequisites) in absolute misery. Part of it was being significantly older than many of my classmates, but the bigger part of it was being a minority. You don't want to be a minority in a social work program. Social work students and faculty have a tendency to have an attitude of "we're the good guys, so nothing we do is wrong," and nearly every minority social worker I know has had similar experiences of being treated poorly in their social work programs by haughty 20-something white women with a white savior complex.

I will admit to being somewhat rough around the edges, still being only a couple years out from a heavy working-class background, but my experience of being marginalized by the class in general and one professor (since retired, thank fuck) in particular was pretty comparable to my friends who were LGBTQ or also brown. I remember one of my friends (who is a very out and masculine-presenting lesbian) and I had the same experience with him - being given periodic stern admonitions to be "more communitarian" and to "stop letting our egos expand so much" or some similar Freudian bullshit until we stopped contributing in class completely, at which point we were congratulated for "putting the needs of the class first."

Curiously, our white, cis female friends who had similar presentations in class never had this problem, and he had a tendency to perv on them... hmm.

It reached a point where I didn't trust anyone and was engaging in some serious preparatory suicidal behaviour. I guess at some point I decided to stop planning to blow my own head off and I went down to the basement and recorded a series of demos that didn't sound so great but helped my mental health (the track "You're in Denial" that I contributed to the fundraiser we did post-George Floyd was from those demos). And then I had an amazing field placement at an LGBTQ equity org that reignited my passion for social work. I didn't attend my graduation, partly because it was 2020, and partly because I didn't want to.

Since it was 2020, and I had nothing better to do, I decided to go to grad school. I was considering going back to St. Cloud State, because I've always felt an affinity for that institution. I had professors in undergrad discourage me from going back to SCSU on the grounds that the grad school you go to matters in your career, especially if you ever want to pursue a doctorate. They tried to push me towards some of the Chicago-area programs, since some of them are really high on the list of great social work programs. But SCSU just kinda felt right. They offered me a graduate assistant position which would pay me and cover half my tuition, and I got a field placement on campus that promised both clinical and program development opportunities. Also, my best friend was going to let me crash in his basement during the week, so I could commute up on Monday and come home on Friday. That one professor I was talking about told the class "the problem with SCSU is it's in St. Cloud." I said "we get it; there's brown people there."

I think going there was kind of a "fuck you" to everyone. It was a healing experience. I had a lot of good clinical experiences that made me more open to clinical work (by some strange twist of fate and job availability, I am now a licensed independent clinical social worker), I got to hang out with my best friend, and I got to learn from a bunch of really great social workers (unfortunately, the school has had to make serious cuts in the last couple years, which makes me very sad). And you know what? I ended up working in the same emergency department as a guy who went to one of those fancy Chicago-area social work schools... with around $100,000 less debt. Equifinality... it's a thing.

So, if I had any advice to offer (such as it is), I'd say finding the right school, where you feel like you belong, and where people aren't dicks, is huge. And, in fact, the research indicates that sense of belonging is a stronger predictor of outcomes than grades (see "Students’ Sense of Belonging: The Development of a Predictive Retention Model" by Davis et al, 2019 - it's illuminating). Also, finding a major that you actually give a shit about. College, and grad school especially, is an academic exercise to an extent, but it's really more of a test of your endurance, because most subjects are completely learnable with enough time and effort. You gotta find something that's going to be worth the effort, or you're probably going to say "fuck this shit" at some point. That is, "you shouldn't be here just because you want to get a piece of paper. You should be here because you're passionate about physics."

This thread rocks. It is only small for now but it reminds me of the old forum.

All of the advice so far is - as far as I am concerned - on point entirely.

My top tip for those jumping back in - hand in all of your assessments in time, even if they are not great. The quality will improve with time, but the deadline discipline will be worth its weight in gold.