Thursday, April 21, 2011

Graduate from Law School and You Too Can Sign Up for Food Stamps!

According to a recent post by "SoDespondent" on the JD Underground forum, a Top 20 law school's career services office helped a 3L sign up for food stamps!  Considering how extremely over-glutted the legal profession is and how having a JD often makes you overqualified and unemployable for non-legal jobs, a great many law school graduates are going to need food stamps.

If you are a college graduate and you qualify for food stamps, I think you should take the food stamps without guilt.  Our government's policies and our society's support for those policies have resulted in huge oversupplies of college and law school graduates.  So, smugly employed taxpayers and our government should help pay the price for the unemployment and underemployment crisis confronting many college graduates.

Here are some excerpts from "So Despondent's" initial post titled, Confirmed By Prof: Career Services Helping Students Sign Up for Food Stamps:

By telling them that yes, in fact, career services IS HELPING CERTAIN 3Ls LEARN HOW TO APPLY FOR FOOD STAMPS (EBT). They tried to provide some context and explain that the student who approached his counselor about how he would live has $140,000 in debt and will be working for "almost no money" at a nonprofit. They are trying to paint this as an atypical case and billing it as "noble self-sacrificing law student goes into poverty in order to do good works at nonprofit." Students aren't buying it, neither was the prof.

But apparently the word is out, now. I wonder how many more 3Ls, now that it's been confirmed, will slink into career services in the next couple of weeks to see if they too are eligible? Just another day at a TTTop 20 law school!
 From a follow-up post in the same thread, also by "SoDespondent":
Well, I don't know how well it stuck, but from talking to other students tonight, apparently this is in response to students asking them to start providing information on medicaid and food aid.
The big question on my mind, is, which law school is it and how many other law schools are doing the same?  Maybe the law schools can start advertising about how their career services offices will help graduates apply for food stamps, welfare, public housing assistance, and Medicaid.

Dear ABA, it's all your fault!

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Even Medical Tech Types Can't Find Entry-Level Jobs (the Higher Education Scam Continues)

I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room with my laptop where I have just stumbled across an industry journal for surgical technologists.  I don't know much about this field, so I quickly browsed through it and came across a short op-ed written by a newly-minted surgical tech lamenting the difficulty she is having finding an entry-level job.  This is interesting because according to current conventional wisdom, jobs in health care are supposed to be abundant.  (I'm under the impression that surgical techs assist surgeons in the operating room.)

The short article is titled, "In Search of that Perfect (Any) Job" by Sharon Goff, CST, published in the April 2011 edition of The Surgical Technologist.  She wrote that she is a mother in her forties who graduated with honors with an associates degree.  Here are three quotes:

Despite it all, I had no job.  As a matter of fact, only two girls out of my graduating class have gotten a job.
I have visited many online surgical technology forums and seen the disappointment and anger from techs all over the country experiencing the same thing.
I quit visiting the forums after that because they are too depressing.  Shattered dreams, mounting debt, many feeling lied to or manipulated by the schools they attended.
Presumably, thousands of unemployed and underemployed people have invested time and money retraining and re-educating for medical support fields.  It all sounds like another instance of for-profit (and even public) colleges raking in the dough by making false promises.

In the meantime, as Americans' aggregate student loan debt reaches record levels (daily?), the media and our government will continue to promote the higher education scam.  For example:  Ohio Universities Told to Develop 3-Year Degrees so that higher education is more accessible to people, allowing them to become "productive members of society" with solid middle class jobs.  Of course, our politicians and media commentators completely fail to realize that increasing the number of college graduates will not magically increase the number of middle class jobs, just the number of rightfully angry unemployed and underemployed people with student loan debt.

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