Never Sleep, a book about transition
Mon 15 Dec 2008 – 23.20
Never Sleep is a new book about that oddball transition from design student to professional designer. The books seeks to be a sort of field manual for students and young designers helping to cut off some of the awkward moments before they crash down on your head.
The site features a number of essays, which are free and available, to give you a taste of the subject manner. Of course the book itself seems to be elaborately designed by the authors who are, after all, designers.
Not having read the book, I can take a guess as to what’s inside: the first half talks about finding a job. They’ll make it sound tremendously easy and straightforward, when in fact it’s not. Then there will be a few war stories about preparing a portfolio and interviewing. Then they’ll talk about how the working world is bizarre and how we get no time at all to complete a project (as a student you’d get 2 months to do a poster, on the job you get 4 hours.) And the rest will be a vague call to action on how to be a better designer.
And I imagine something about all-nighters, which is a discouraging reality of our profession.
That’s my guess — prove me wrong!
So if you’re a young design, or any other professional for that matter, you may find this useful and entertaining. Makes a great gift — use our affiliate link!
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posted by Scott in careers, education, life.
College Really Expensive, says NY Times
Wed 03 Dec 2008 – 12.06
The Rising Cost of Tuitions, via NY Times
This just in, the cost of higher education is ridiculously expensive. In fact, the phrase “fuckin’ overpriced” comes to mind. That’s my interpretation, but recent reports published in The New York Times back up my sentiment.
The Times article illustrates findings from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education regarding the costs of education.
Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.
In other words, we’re getting less and paying a lot more. We could debate [again] the general value of higher education and the manufactured “need” to have a degree, but what is clear is that our society can no longer afford higher education.
Over the last two decades, higher education institutes have began viewing themselves as corporations — paying their presidents as CEOs, treating their students as products, investing in branding, and even structuring degree programs to make piles of money in order to support underfunded subjects. But the drawback of this is that if they expect the American public to education as products, then it too will fall victim to the same rules of consumer culture. In this case: no matter the product, if it’s too expensive, we won’t buy it. (it’s a tough call when it comes to things like fuel, air travel, food, and now education). But that’s just a fact of economics — if we can’t afford it, we won’t buy it.
But let’s step back for a second. Do you feel that today’s college-educated workforce is less or more or equally educated as previous generations? Clearly, with the increased numbers, we’ve lost some exclusivity in academic prowess. Just think that 150 years ago anyone with a degree spoke Greek, Latin, French, and probably German, just as a matter of class and upbringing. But compared to our baby-boomer parents, the first generation of Americans who “needed” to go to college, I think we’re actually doing better. We’ve read the same books, studied the same subjects, and suffered through the same drama of academia, but we’ve done it all while multitasking with the Internet and information age in general. The average college student now is exposed to data and info every minute of every day, and our ability to index and reference it is more important than our ability to memorise it.
But is it worth the money?
For me, the six years I spent in higher education were immense and life-changing. You can’t put a price on that. But I’ll be paying $262.22 every month for the next twentysomething years! I can’t even imagine if I had gone to medical or law school, a situation where you can’t even work part time, and where scholarships are scarce. Considering the recession, I wonder if it isn’t wiser to save that $40,000 for every year of tuition and use it to start your career.
I’d be interested to hear your opinions on the money side of things, especially in light of the new statistics.
posted by Scott in careers, education, life, personal finance.