Graduation.

u jelly?

Feels you’re describing my own university, except for the prestige thing, mine’s pretty famous…

…which is pretty horrible when you consider how horribly organized it is while still being among the country’s best. I guess it’s the bar that’s low, not the quality that’s high.

Got you beat on the group part: I’ve recently had to do a group presentation where everyone missed the damn point of their parts and I had to tie five wildly off-topic rants into a coherent, flowing presentation while delivering mine and with exactly zero time to prepare anything. I have seldom bullshitted so hard in my whole life and I somehow ended up getting better marks for that than in my best-organized assignments.

yes :frowning:

we get less than a month before doing an 8-hour exam and being thrown into a hospital

I think their bar exam is more comparable to our Step 2 USMLE than our Step 1. I agree that having to study for the step 1 is a pain in the ass. I’m taking it next winter during my psych rotation.

Clearly they were impressed.

I haven’t had my grades back on my exams yet, but all my hand-in essays have received A’s, so I’m pretty sure my final grades won’t be at all that terrible. They might even be good, we’ll see.

Wait a sec… I don’t think I’m much older than most people here, and though I’m still going to graduate too (by the end of the year), I should’ve done so about… 3 years ago, I think.

At what age do most people graduate where you guys live? I’m going to be 27 or 28 when I do, but here most people who hold a degree get it by around 22 to 24, 25 at most.

It depends. I have friends who are around my age (25) who already have their degrees, but I won’t have mine until 28 or 29. Other people I know are already hitting 30 and are just transferring to university. I think overall most people get it done with right away, and others take their time exploring.

The median graduation age has shifted from 22 to 23 during my lifetime, just as five years in college has become the new normal. It’s an upper-middle-class indulgence that has contributed to the excessive spending on higher-level education.

I was 22 when I got my Bachelor’s in Business Administraton, but I went back to school the following fall because I couldn’t get job. I finished with my Health Informatics certificate in the spring of 2006.

Congratulations to all the grads and good luck to all with exams!

I’m not going back to school unless somebody pays for it.

Well, I’m 25 and since I did the compulsory conscription before any post-high school education, that pretty much delayed my studies by two years. Then again, it also prevented me from getting a place in the university studying journalism, which wouldn’t have been my thing after all as an afterthought.

Ours was supposed to last for four years (about 60 creds a year), but I did some extracurricular activities like was a founding member of a student union and a member of the board for two years, which really took away from my regular studies.

Most university degrees are around 4-5 years, so in practice the average SHOULD be 23 years old. However, due to hurdles that have less to do with difficulty of classes and more with organizational problems, nobody ever completes the curriculums in time. Basically, take any curriculum and and +2 years to get a realistic estimate of how long it takes to finish.

Which is not to say the clases aren’t actually difficult. Most big universities happen to have quite high standards for passing, even though highschools are a shitpile. This creates a massive gulf between how good you need to be to graduate highschool and how much, much better you need to be to pass a single university course. So add in even more delay to graduations as everyone but the top students slam against the learning curve of first-year university courses and usually lose about a year learning how to actually… well, learn.

To add to THAT, the only way you can do everything you are supossed to do in a semester is by being supported by your parents, since the cost of living is so high supporting yourself means you won’t have much time to study.

Pile it all together, and it’s no surprise most of my classmates here in the last-years classes are over 30. If everything goes as planned, I should be graduating by the time I’m 25, and that’s considered moderately early.

I hear accountants get 2 years :wink:

You can call it indulgence or you can call it a crappy job market. Not that I disagree about the excessive spending part: I wonder how people accept $100K-200K in debt for a Bachelors.

Incidentally, I was reading the other day that youth unemployment in Greece was 1.5% in the 80s and nowadays it’s about 40%, damn.

If it were just the last few post-financial-crisis years, that’d be one thing, but five years of college had already become the new normal when I was there from 2003-07. The culprits are indecisive students who change their majors two to three times, and basically have to start over each time. Many of them also take fewer credits per semester to leave more time for socializing.

As for the huge undergraduate debts, I think people had gradually been deluded into believing that college must provide a good return on the investment. Just as policy makers assured us that the housing market would always be profitable, they have continually trumpeted the value of higher education for decades. Even as tuition costs skyrocketed, nobody thought to run a cost-benefit analysis on attending expensive universities. It was essentially the wishful thinking of elites combined with the gullible acceptance of the masses.

There is also a serious problem with deceptive statistics reporting by universities. Law schools, for example, often state that 90-95% of their graduates are employed nine months after graduation, while leaving out some key facts. First, graduates who don’t respond, are not counted. Who end up responding? The students who have jobs to brag about. Second, schools often make temporary job offers to graduates, which conveniently begin eight months after graduation and finish two months later. These students count as employed. Third, law schools usually don’t ask students whether they’re employed as lawyers, but merely whether they have jobs. This means a graduate bagging groceries contributes to the 90-95% figure. Also, there are similar problems with statistics on average first-year salaries.

As a result, law school applicants are fooled into believing that high-cost, low-ranked law schools are great bargains. In reality, many or most of these students would ultimately make more money by going straight into the working world, investing their earnings, and avoiding debt.

I think high student debt is also due in part to the ease of getting student loans. Due to them being non-dischargeable, they are handed out like candy. Schools know this, so they up their tuition, fees, etc. Book publisher up their prices. Students in turn have to take out more loans. It keeps cycling over and over. That’s especially bad in law school where absolute shit schools can still get away with charging 30k+ for school because they know there will be saps out there that will pay it.

That said, I’m not in debt all that much. Free undergrad. Free law school. Only had to take out living expense loans in law school, and even then I managed to live somewhat frugally. Whereas some people leave law school around 160k in debt for just those three years (and had to add in all the debt from undergrad), I left with under 50k.

Also, I had what I like to call a Fifth Year. I didn’t actually go to class. I graduated in four years and a month (one summer class the summer after the May I should’ve graduated). I then took a year off in my college town. Worked an easy job that covered, my expenses but got a year to dick around.

Personally I think getting everything done in four years is overrated. Why rush yourself? You’re only young once so you should be able to enjoy your time, both in and out of school. Taking five and more courses a semester is not fun and definitely doesn’t result in the best of grades, unless of course you have nothing better to do with your time than spend every free moment studying. Most people don’t have that attitude, and it’s unfair to expect that of others outside of a select few. Five years to get a degree is no problem in my eyes, and fairly reasonable. As for debt, if you take less courses it gives you time to work while studying meaning you don’t have to take out loans. That’s how I have been doing it. It’s a little bizarre here in North America making students pay for everything where you have countries in other parts of the world that cover at least a bachelor’s degree.

idealistic students head out of school with bachelor’s degrees in environmental studies, african american women aged 27 to 28.5 studies, double majors in sociology and geography…ready to conquer the world!

students realize there are absolutely no jobs outside of corporate world within 3 months

students take jobs at McNally, McAllister & McCockskey Consulting helping sell more coke to Zimbabwe

students get first paychecks

“W…W…WHAT IS THIS!!!”

students shocked at line that says TAX: $XXXXXXX

“I worked hard for my degree and to get this job. I EARNED this job. I WORKED hard my whole life to get this job, and now…now…the GOVERNMENT wants to take my money away…f…fooror.r…,.nOTHING!!!”

student forgot how he benefited from said tax dollars by going to high quality public school in white neighborhood, getting pell grants to offset college expenses, etc. etc.

“I…I can’t…LET THIS STAND”

WELCOME TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Yeah, “free” loans that are sold to 18-year-olds with best-case income expectations helped the bubble grow. Then you also had a Bachelor’s becoming a requisite for most kinds of office jobs (regardless of skills required) so that paper mills mushroomed to meet the demand and this in turn brings even lower the value of a Bachelor’s as everybody is expected to have one. So a Master’s ends up occupying the same spot that a Bachelor’s used to.

And, XWing, you are spot on regarding job statistics. That’s why it’s useful to look at average and median salary figures.