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< Thoughts on Education and Employment.
It's not your job but it may have been a blessing in disguise. Most of the private sector lacks not only the interest, but after 30+ years of not doing it, it also lacks the internal skills required to teach relevant skills to their employees. Having lost the ability of teaching narrowly-relevant skills (i.e. those that only apply to that particular position) to well-educated young people, it gradually outsourced the task of preparing people for their first job to universities -- many of which are now firmly focused on teaching you how to ace your first interview and then oh well you'll figure something out, as opposed to preparing you for a 45-year career.
In my (nerdy STEM) field I now routinely see fresh graduates who lack the theoretical knowledge required to stay up-to-date with what's happening in their fields for more than 5-10 years after graduation, not because they're dumb, but because that's not what their college education was focused on. By the time they're 35 they either move to essentially paper-pushing positions, or to high-inertia projects where they can live off obsolete knowledge, because they lack the foundation on which to learn substantially new and different things -- a foundation that universities now avoid building, since it doesn't directly lead to landing jobs so they can't justify it.
Some fields, and anthropology is one of them, don't bend that easily in this direction, hence their current status. But it's also a degree whose value doesn't diminish as steeply.
(Oh yeah, the fact that young graduates *owe the government* money for education is a fscking scam...)
I'm definitely excited to work in the public sector. Whenever I see people complain about their public sector jobs, I wonder "have you SEEN the public sector lately????"
I would have loved to have gone to grad school but my less-than-stellar academic performance during undergrad (I was working a lot and dealing with bad depression) kept me from doing so.