Is college a good investment?

Depends on what you studied. I couldn't be an engineer and enjoy the career I do without college, so my answer is obviously yes.

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You may need to move 

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This is the largest impediment I see with people who can't find jobs, unwilling or not even looking outside of the area they currently reside.

You’re trying to perform an assessment of a college education as a non-traditional student.

Most college grads are ~22 with recent internships and extracurriculars that showcase skills applicable to entry-level jobs. As someone put it to me when I was going for a career change: a company can ask a 22 year old first year employee to devote their lives to their job for the lowest salary possible and receive overzealous effort in return. It’s not really a guarantee for the mid-30s guy who might have some splotches on his education/work history to be able to come in at $40k to do grunt work for a company as he works towards promotions.

So I would say your experience doesn’t negate the value of a college education.

I do agree with others that you need to think outside of the box. Apply everywhere to anything remotely connected to your degrees and work experiences and be willing to go. You might work in Wichita, KS for a few years but could spend your 40s in a city/region you desire making decent money.

You need to get a physical labor job in the field and leave off your education from the application. Once you add “on the ground” experience to your resume in addition to your education, you either move up quickly or find another job higher up.

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Am I right?

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Depends on what you study. If you're in the STEM world, nursing/doctoring, or have one of the more technical business degrees then I would say no. There's a lot of demand for those kinds of jobs. If you're studying something that has very little economic value like 19th century French Literature, then you might have a problem. The good news, though, if you do manage to study something worthless, your student loans will probably be forgiven at some point. So there's that.

I know nothing about the field but it seems that a job that needs a degree in “Public Administration and Emergency and Disaster Mansgement” is one where the degrees are just to justify to HR your pay and validity to be hired.

The job offer comes from networking.

OP, with all due respect I'm thinking you might have gone about this the wrong way.

I could be wrong, but it sounds as though you expected to come out with a degree in hand and people would just immediately hire you. That isn't how it works and unfortunately nobody tells you that going in.

Sometime in the final year (even earlier if possible) get active in whatever student organizations are in your career field if any exist. If not, get involved in the professional community. Volunteer to do something, organizations like that are always looking for help. What you're looking for here is to get noticed *before* you graduate.

That gives you a huge jump in the job market, if you play your cards right you'll have a job lined up that starts immediately after graduation. If you graduate and are just another name in a field filled with hungry grads you're already in trouble.

If that's your spot, you may just have to take whatever job you can find for now and do really really well at it. Even something that only requires a GED. But do it so well that you can use that experience plus the education to enhance your resume and move up.

A degree by itself guarantees nothing. But being in school can get you into the local "network". So not a waste of time unless you waste the opportunity to get noticed.

I'm not trying to be hard on you, I made the same mistake myself before I figured it out.

I would argue against going back to school to learn about investing for a number of reasons:

1) you can find out anything you want to know for free online or cheaply though books. They won’t teach you magical metrics in college that you can’t get anywhere else where they have buy/sell decisions down to an objective science.

2) it’ll still come down to informational advantage. Why are you making the right call to buy or sell and the other guy is making the wrong one. And you don’t know if the other guy is a professional investor with a Bloomberg terminal on his desk.


Get the degree if it will help your career goals, but only for that.

If you want to get into investing follow these simple rules:

-Incorporate it into “pay yourself first” mantra. Commit yourself to put aside x amount a paycheck towards investing and leave it at that.

-Outside of extraordinary circumstances, do not buy individual companies. Buy market segments and classes. Start with things like large/mid/small cap and growth/value funds. Then go for broad segments you feel are undervalued like pharm, consumer staples, REITs, etc etc.

If you want more structure there are plenty of options to take. I personally am a hub member of moneyfortgerestofus but it’s not like I’ve done a broad sampling to give an intelligent recommendation of the “best”. His podcast is free if you want to start there. He has financially minded philosophical episodes about being happier with less but when he talks the technicals he seems spot on to this amateur’s ears. Start with ep one.

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But on the employer side, they are often looking for more local people for entry level jobs such as what this guy is probably applying to. It goes both ways.

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In a place like New Orleans? Sure.

A place like Austin or any other growing or larger metro where people are moving in droves not so much.

And the biggest piece is just having more options. Smaller markets you may see 5 openings for your particular dream job while somewhere else may have 30/40 and pays more.