Students Are Paying to Do Unpaid Labor; What the ‘U’ Can Do
The Michigan Daily • By Haley Johnson • September 25, 2022
“I like to joke that I came into college as an idealistic liberal arts student and came out with a job in big tech. One day I was taking classes in political theory, philosophy and English rhetoric. The next thing I knew all I cared about was coding and passing technical interviews.
I’m not alone in this experience. I have friends who started as compassionate pre-med students but became consultants; I know engineers who had high ambitions of saving the world but ended up with jobs in the military-industrial complex.
These radical career shifts aren’t an indictment on any individual. Rather, they’re a reflection of a higher education system that is increasingly concerned with making its graduates ‘employable.’
English rhetoric wasn’t going to pay, but I was fairly certain that learning to code was. It was a pragmatic decision, driven by the fact that I wasn’t willing to accept more economic uncertainty than I had to. And it was better to know I had in-demand skills than hope someone would recognize the value of my liberal arts education.”
