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

I’ve never had a problem eating food from a gas station.  Just two weeks ago, I ate a couple of hot dogs purchased from a gas station.  They were delicious.  That’s not the first time I’ve eaten gas station food, and I doubt it will be the last.  There’s nothing like a fun food novelty. […]

Commissioner Roger Goodell gathered 32 NFL owners for one big question.  One of the league’s most wanderlust-stricken franchises is looking to move again.  The Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland Raiders, tired of gutting it out in a run-down stadium, were once again looking for greener pastures.  Only the Miami Dolphins refused to cooperate.  With a vote of 31-1, […]

In 2006, an injury to Dallas Cowboys starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe opened the door for an undrafted free agent by the name of Tony Romo to take the helm of America’s Team and lead the Dallas Cowboys to an early playoff exit.  Bledsoe went from starter to afterthought in a season.  Now, the circle continues […]

For 89 years, Oscars has never had a major mistake.  The last few Oscars might have had a few flubs, but at least they never got the most important category of the night wrong.  Well, that’s now changed, all thanks to OG Bonnie and Clyde legends Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.  When Faye Dunaway called […]

Tom Brady has been wildly successful, if controversial.  He’s the first quarterback ever to win five Super Bowls and only the second player to do so after Charles Haley.  Unlike Haley, Brady won all his Super Bowls with the same team, the New England Patriots.  The only thing that seems to be able to stop […]

Ben Affleck, no matter what you might think of him, is a talented actor and director.  He’s got the goods, but he’s smart enough to know when he’s in over his head.  All along, since he took on the mantle of Batman, he’s had his eyes on writing, directing, and starring as the Caped Crusader. […]

In May, students for the for-profit American College of Education were running into some problems.  Their access to email accounts and course information was locked down by Google, who had disabled their accounts.  The reason why?  A fired IT worker for the American College of Education locked the school out of their Google cloud account. […]