It’s a tough economy out there.  Everywhere you look, people are making cutbacks or people are not hiring.  So you have to have some sympathy for new college graduates like Trina Thompson.  She matriculated at Monroe College in the hopes of landing a job thanks to the school’s good reputation and placement program.  However, after being jobless since April, she feels lied to and has sued the school to get her $70,000 in tuition back.

Lawsuits are rarely the answer, no matter how extreme the case, and this is no exception.  Hopefully, the judge will toss this case out before the ink dries on the paperwork.  That said, I can definitely understand her frustration, and she’s not the first person to consider a lawsuit.

For one thing, my generation (she and I are the same age) has been lied to since birth.  We’ve been told that the key to a good job is college.  You go, you learn, and you leave school and move right into the professional world.  You’ll make more money, you’ll be a big success, and your college experience will have been a benefit.  That’s simply not true.

You might make more money in the long run, and depending on your field you might start out better than you would as a high school graduate, but in most places?  You start at the bottom.   Even worse, you start out with crippling amounts of debt that you wouldn’t have had if you had just jumped right into the workforce 10 years previously, and a newly-discovered sense of disillusionment thanks to reality smashing your dreams of being an architect or IT drone.  The few pennies extra you bring in thanks to your education is offset by the 10 (or 20, or even 30) years of loans.

I’m not saying that college won’t be worth it eventually.  Maybe it will be.  But college isn’t a golden ticket to success.  Especially if you major in something you like (like I did) rather than major in something that will pay well (like Trina did).  It’s time to stop pretending that a college education means anything these days; college is the new high school, except way more expensive.

Tags: Monroe College, New York City, jobless woman sues college, Trina Thompson, unusual lawsuits

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