Skip the College Degree with Associated Overpriced Loan

Here is the only education you need (unless you want to be a lawyer, doctor or pilot)!

https://www.coursera.org/

The American Education System is one BIG ripoff!

This article outlines the fact the "system" is now forcing PPL to get degrees and buy into the UN-repayable over priced college loan. The article cites the fact that a car rental agent position now requires a degree! What do they pay rental agents - $50,000 a year? I THINK NOT! It would be safe to say that they do not make more than about $10 an hour. How are you supposed to pay your rent @ $900/MO, gas at $4 a gallon, car insurance, taxes, clothes AND a $100K college loan on $10 an hour?

The solution is start you own business. Many have done it and succeeded!

It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk

By CATHERINE RAMPELL | New York Times
ATLANTA —The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma:
the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even
the lowest-level job.
Consider the 45-person law firm of Busch,
Slipakoff & Schuh here in Atlanta, a place that has seen tremendous
growth in the college-educated population. Like other employers across
the country, the firm hires only people with a bachelor’s degree, even
for jobs that do not require college-level skills.
This prerequisite applies to everyone, including the receptionist,
paralegals, administrative assistants and file clerks. Even the office
“runner” — the in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents
back and forth between the courthouse and the office — went to a
four-year school. “College graduates are just more
career-oriented,” said Adam Slipakoff, the firm’s managing partner.
“Going to college means they are making a real commitment to their
futures. They’re not just looking for a paycheck.”
Economists have referred to this phenomenon as “degree inflation,” and it has been
steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Across industries and
geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma —
positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents, clerks and claims
adjusters — are increasingly requiring one, according to Burning Glass,
a company that analyzes job ads from more than 20,000 online sources,
including major job boards and small- to midsize-employer sites.
This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the
food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers
with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for
workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent.

Some jobs, like those in supply chain management and
logistics, have become more technical, and so require more advanced
skills today than they did in the past. But more broadly, because so
many people are going to college now, those who do not graduate are
often assumed to be unambitious or less capable.
Plus, it’s a buyer’s market for employers.
“When you get 800 résumés for every job ad, you need to weed them out
somehow,” said Suzanne Manzagol, executive recruiter at Cardinal
Recruiting Group, which does headhunting for administrative positions at
Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh and other firms in the Atlanta area.
Of all the metropolitan areas in the United States, Atlanta has had one of
the largest inflows of college graduates in the last five years,
according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer
at the Brookings Institution. In 2012, 39 percent of job postings for
secretaries and administrative assistants in the Atlanta metro area
requested a bachelor’s degree, up from 28 percent in 2007, according to
Burning Glass. “When I started recruiting in ’06, you didn’t need a college degree, but there weren’t that many candidates,” Ms. Manzagol said.
Even if they are not exactly applying the knowledge they gained in their
political science, finance and fashion marketing classes, the young
graduates employed by Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh say they are grateful
for even the rotest of rote office work they have been given.
“It sure beats washing cars,” said Landon Crider, 24, the firm’s soft-spoken runner.
He would know: he spent several years, while at Georgia State and in the
months after graduation, scrubbing sedans at Enterprise Rent-a-Car.
Before joining the law firm, he was turned down for a promotion to
rental agent at Enterprise — a position that also required a bachelor’s
degree — because the company said he didn’t have enough sales
experience. His college-educated colleagues had similarly
limited opportunities, working at Ruby Tuesday or behind a retail
counter while waiting for a better job to open up.
“I am over $100,000 in student loan debt right now,” said Megan Parker, who earns
$37,000 as the firm’s receptionist. She graduated from the Art Institute
of Atlanta in 2011 with a degree in fashion and retail management, and
spent months waiting on “bridezillas” at a couture boutique, among other
stores, while churning out office-job applications.
“I will probably never see the end of that bill, but I’m not really thinking
about it right now,” she said. “You know, this is a really great place
to work.”
The risk with hiring college graduates for jobs they
are supremely overqualified for is, of course, that they will leave as
soon as they find something better, particularly as the economy
improves. Mr. Slipakoff said his firm had little turnover,
though, largely because of its rapid expansion. The company has grown to
more than 30 lawyers from five in 2008, plus a support staff of about
15, and promotions have abounded.
“They expect you to grow, and they want you to grow,” said Ashley Atkinson, who graduated from Georgia
Southern University in 2009 with a general studies degree. “You’re not
stuck here under some glass ceiling.”
Within a year of being hired as a file clerk, around Halloween 2011, Ms. Atkinson was promoted
twice to positions in marketing and office management. Mr. Crider, the
runner, was given additional work last month, helping with copying and
billing claims. He said he was taking the opportunity to learn more
about the legal industry, since he plans to apply to law school next
year. The firm’s greatest success story is Laura Burnett, who in
less than a year went from being a file clerk to being the firm’s
paralegal for the litigation group. The partners were so impressed with
her filing wizardry that they figured she could handle it.
“They gave me a raise, too,” said Ms. Burnett, a 2011 graduate of the University of West Georgia.
The typical paralegal position, which has traditionally offered a path to a
well-paying job for less educated workers, requires no more than an
associate degree, according to the Labor Department’s occupational handbook,
but the job is still a step up from filing. Of the three daughters in
her family, Ms. Burnett reckons that she has the best job. One sister, a
fellow West Georgia graduate, is processing insurance claims; another,
who dropped out of college, is one of the many degree-less young people
who still cannot find work. Besides the promotional pipelines it
creates, setting a floor of college attainment also creates more office
camaraderie, said Mr. Slipakoff, who handles most of the firm’s hiring
and is especially partial to his fellow University of Florida graduates.
There is a lot of trash-talking of each other’s college football teams,
for example. And this year the office’s Christmas tree ornaments were a
colorful menagerie of college mascots — Gators, Blue Devils, Yellow Jackets, Wolves, Eagles, Tigers, Panthers — in which just about every staffer’s school was represented.
“You know, if we had someone here with just a G.E.D. or something, I can see
how they might feel slighted by the social atmosphere here,” he says.
“There really is something sort of cohesive or binding about the fact
that all of us went to college.”