From Aspiring Video Game Designer to Stripper

This is what a $70,000 college degree from a for-profit/Goldman Sachs college will get you. It's good to know that $12.9 billion in bailouts went to such an honest and wholesome company, don't you think?

Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Her bachelor’s degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered.

These days, Howard, 26, makes her living in a way that doesn’t require a college diploma: by stripping at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all."

More Tidbits from the book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids - And What We Can Do About It

A BIDER reader sent us an interesting statistic posted by author Sheril Kirshenbaum on twitter via the upcoming book "Higher Education?" which will be released tomorrow:

From 2005-07: 101,000 PhDs awarded & only 16,000 professorships created (via book Higher Education?) Recession undoubtedly increased spread 12:48 PM Jul 31st via web

So where are the 85,000 PhDs without an assistant professorship? They are likely writing blogs about their lives on public assistance, working as adjuncts, serving you fries at your local fast food joint, or sending out resumes as overqualified candidates for entry-level positions meant for GED and college graduates. I'm glad that this book seems to at least briefly touch upon the victims of the graduate school scam along with the college tuition scam. Maybe someone will someday write a serious book about the law school scam. I'm not holding my breath.

Several days ago, I briefly mentioned the book Higher Education? in a post about the college scam. With more information being revealed each day, I honestly cannot wait to get my hands on this book. I looked up the statistic and came across an interview with one of the Higher Education? authors, Claudia Dreifus, at More Magazine. This is a fascinating interview worth reading in its entirety, but I couldn't resist pasting some of the highlights below.

Why do you think a Harvard education may not be worth it?
First, it’s overpriced. Harvard has just raised its fee to over $50,000 a year, and that will trigger a cycle of increases throughout the system because Harvard sets the trend. Harvard says it’s raising the number of scholarships, and that’s well and good, but the overall effect of the tuition hikes on the rest of the system is thoroughly immoral—most schools are not nearly as well endowed and can’t award as much financial aid. I believe that the elite universities we call the Golden Dozen—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, Amherst, Williams—are, for the most part, overpriced prestige items.

But they have great faculty.
Over 70 percent of college teachers—even at top schools like Yale, Harvard and Stanford—are graduate students or adjuncts or gypsy visiting professors. That’s up from 43 percent in 1975. There are 181,000 teaching assistants at work in 280 research universities around the country. And it’s not just the elite colleges. Florida Keys Community College, for instance, has 24 full-time faculty and about 90 adjuncts per term. Using a contingent workforce costs the schools much less money. At Yale, for example, teaching assistants earn roughly $20,000 a year.

So the students are not taught by the stars?
Rarely. And this bothers me, because you’re cheating the young people.

Where are the adjuncts coming from?
Universities are overproducing PhDs way beyond levels anyone can use in this country. From 2005 to 2007, they awarded 101,000 doctoral degrees—but there were only 16,000 new assistant professorships created.

You criticize what you call “vocational training” at many colleges: Resort management. Equine science and management. Apparel and accessories marketing. Why does this bother you? Doesn’t it help kids get jobs?
I think 18-year-olds are too young to know what they’re going to do with their lives. We’re a rich enough society that we can give people four years to find themselves—to expose them for one brief moment to ideas and thinking, to take a hiatus from the world of commerce. We can afford an educated populace.

Even in these tough economic times?
Yes. It’s not a luxury to be educated.

What should colleges be concentrating on?
They should be exposing young people to the great ideas of the past and present, and they should be giving them a chance to stretch their minds. A return to the liberal arts: history, philosophy, English, physics. Science as a whole needs to be valued more on the undergraduate level. Too often science classes are taught by people who speak English too poorly to communicate clearly—all to save money.

What’s the solution?
De-emphasize professors’ need to publish and promote those who are good teachers. Abolish tenure. Pay adjuncts something like parity per course. Force professors, no matter what their ranking, to teach undergrads. Cap presidential salaries. And end sabbaticals: They’re a total waste of money—a raid on parents’ and students’ resources. If a professor wants to advance her career by writing a book, she should do it on her own time.

What can parents do?
The first value should be not starting your youngster off with five-figure debt. Consider alternatives to the most expensive schools. It’s not so important to be able to say, “My child is at Princeton.” What’s more important is to say, “My child has a good future,” which partly means a future without crippling debt.

Can any college deliver “a good future”?
A large number of CEOs of major corporations didn’t come from the Ivies but from second-tier schools. There are good things to be found anywhere; the system is big enough so there is something for anyone. The trick is to find the right match.

1st Annual BIDER Art Contest - Submit Your Entries NOW!

image courtesy of Nando at Third Tier Reality

Looking for a creative outlet to express your anger at the ABA, the legal industry, or your First, Second, Third, or even Fourth Tier Toilet school? Here is the place! Angel and I are hosting our very first BIDER art contest. If this is successful, we'll make the contest a yearly event. Please spread the word to your friends and tell them to enter.

Submit your own work of art depicting your law school experience, law school, career services, doc review, shitlaw, paying off student loans, having to deal with your boss or law partner, being unemployed or anything else about the law that drives you insane. We're giving you free license to express yourself through practically any medium. Scan and send us a drawing, painting, photograph, or even video. We don't want to restrict anyone's artistry, but please refrain from icky pornographic images, mmkay?

The winner will receive two 10 oz. bags of ground coffee courtesy of New England Coffee. It's not a $100k grand prize to pay off your law school loans, but beggars can't be choosers. Lawyers and law students worldwide can enter, but only the winner with the most votes from the United States will be able to receive the coveted ground coffee prize.

Please submit your art to hardknockslaw(at)gmail(dot)com by August 2, 2010. You can enter as many times as you want. I will post all the submitted entries and readers will have a week to vote for their favorite. We will announce a winner by August 10, 2010. Good luck to everyone who enters and have fun!

Added Note: We will NEVER reveal your true identity unless you specifically tell us that you are okay with having your real name published.

Everybody is That Person

From Biglaw to Trash Bins

My must watch prime time shows are Lost, Modern Family, and The Good Wife. Fans were kept in suspense all season over the competition between Alicia and Cary for the junior associate position at their law firm Stern, Lockhart & Gardner. Last week's episode finally gave us a winner. Of course, most of us guessed the winner would be our show's heroine Alicia over the young and cocky Cary. But until the very end, the race was very close with Cary as the likely favorite because of his higher billable hours and politicking around the office to put in a good word for him with partners Diane Lockhard and Will Gardner. That is, until Alicia had the guts to ask Diane what exactly she needed to do to ensure she'd get the job.

Alicia takes the hint that she's a goner unless she uses the Florrick name to build her client list and save her flailing law firm from more lay offs, including her own. After a "BIDER moment" with her stack of unpaid bills, Alicia decides she can't lose this job no matter what and goes to her cheating husband's creepy political operative Eli Gold (played magnificently by Alan Cumming) for help. We know this can't be good because Gold has wanted Alicia to commit to her husband's comeback campaign for attorney general despite her many reservations to stand by her man after his very public and humiliating affair with a prostitute.

Btw, I love Alan Cumming. He plays cold and calculating characters like no other. I'm so glad to hear he'll be a regular on the show next season. I love the part when he's like, "Do you want me to offer your nemesis a job and dump him the minute he gets here? Because I can so easily destroy someone's life in return for your loyalty to do whatever I ask next season. Bwahahaha."

So Alicia, unsurprisingly, can be that type of person when it comes to saving her job and keeping her family from moving to Chicago's South Side. What we don't know is whether or not Alicia will regret being that person when Gold's favor comes back to haunt her . Will she be able to put on a happy face when Gold forces her on the campaign trail with her husband? From the look Alicia gave Gold when he mentioned her husband's campaign after meeting with Diane and Will, she's only beginning to realize the extent of this favor. What Gold gives, he can easily take away if Alicia doesn't deliver what he wants from her.

Hah. Like a lamb to the slaughter, Cary walked into the lion's den without a clue in the world that his biglaw career was dead the minute Alicia sold her soul to the devil in return for his client list. Cary's an arrogant asshole, but for a few seconds I sympathized with his plight. He put in 110% to the firm, worked long hours everyday while Alicia was dealing with family drama, and all of it was for nothing. Can't say I blame him for seeking revenge next week. What else is an unemployed lawyer supposed to do with his time?

Welcome to our world, Cary! You did everything right, but in the end connections won out over your Harvard JD, ass kissing and billable hours. You're welcome to guest post here in between your job search and destroying the lives of your former co-workers. Cheers!

I Need A Freakin' Job

This is amusing.

"I need a freakin' job." That's the message President Obama saw as he arrived in Buffalo, N.Y., this afternoon for an event talking up the administration's success in creating new jobs. He also pitched Congress on approving a $30 billion credit for small-business growth.

Yet critics say Obama has been focusing his recovery efforts too narrowly and hasn't done enough to help people find work. After all, the latest job figures show 9.9 percent of the country still out of work. That inspired a group of unemployed Buffalo residents — who also have a website called INAFJ.org — to appeal to the president in the form of a billboard along the route his motorcade took into town.

Unfortunately for those who need a freakin' job immediately, neither of the major political parties think job creation is the number one issue for midterm elections. Why do we vote for these people again?

Yet jobs aren't a huge priority for either party heading into the midterm campaigns, as Politics Daily's Jill Lawrence notes. That might be because other issues have taken precedence. A new Gallup poll finds that for the first time in two months, the issue of "jobs" has fallen to No. 2 on the list of issues Americans are most concerned about. The new No. 1 issue: The economy in general. White House officials defend their efforts on jobs, saying the president has been focused as much on creating new jobs as on "saving" current positions.

Meanwhile, in the real world outside of lalaland DC where everyone gets paid by the health insurance industry and Sallie Mae, millions of people are suffering and the higher education scam continues. The New York Times interviewed a woman who took out a $17,000 student loan for an eight-month course to become a medical assistant after losing her adminsitrative assistant job two years ago. The program sounds like another for-profit college scam to me.

Ms. Norton, for her part, may be reluctant to acknowledge that many of her traditional administrative assistant skills are obsolete, but she has tried to retrain — or as she puts it, adapt her existing skills — to a new career in the expanding health care industry.

Even that has proved difficult.

She attended an eight-month course last year, on a $17,000 student loan, to obtain certification as a medical assistant. She was trained to do front-office work, like billing, as well as back-office work, like giving injections and drawing blood.


The school that trained her, though, neglected to inform her that local employers require at least a year’s worth of experience — generally done through volunteering at a clinic — before hiring someone for a paid job in the field.

She says she cannot afford to spend a year volunteering, especially with her student loan coming due soon. She has one prospect for part-time administrative work in Los Angeles — where she once had her own administrative support and secretarial services business, SilverKeys — but she does not have the money to relocate.

“If I had $3,000 in my pocket right now, I would pack up my S.U.V., grab my dog and go straight back,” she says. “That’s my only answer.”

With so few local job prospects and most of her possessions of value already liquidated she has considered selling her blood to help pay for the move. But she says she cannot find a market for that, either; blood collection agencies, she said, told her they do not buy her blood type.

“Sometimes I think I’d be better off in jail,” she says, only half joking. “I’d have three meals a day and structure in my life. I’d be able to go to school. I’d have more opportunities if I were an inmate than I do here trying to be a contributing member of society.”

My suggestion to flee the country might sound drastic to some of you, but when educated professionals who have done everything right are selling their blood to pay the bills or would rather commit suicide or be thrown in jail, that is when you have to consider other options. Oh, and as I mentioned last week, this won't be ending any time soon.

Millions of workers who have already been unemployed for months, if not years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market continues to improve, economists say. The occupations they worked in, and the skills they currently possess, are never coming back in style. And the demand for new types of skills moves a lot more quickly than workers — especially older and less mobile workers — are able to retrain and gain those skills.


There is no easy policy solution for helping the people left behind. The usual unemployment measures — like jobless benefits and food stamps — can serve as temporary palliatives, but they cannot make workers’ skills relevant again.


Ms. Norton has sent out hundreds of résumés without luck. Twice, the openings she interviewed for were eliminated by employers who decided, upon further reflection, that redistributing administrative tasks among existing employees made more sense than replacing the outgoing secretary.


One employer decided this shortly after Ms. Norton had already started showing up for work.

The Lost Generation of Scholars Who Did Everything Right.

A comment on the last post alerted me to this insightful Youtube video about a woman who is a Ph.D. and a published author, but cannot get a job.  I've heard that Ph.Ds have it worse than lawyers and it has been that way for a long while.  In any case, parts one and two are worth watching.

Enjoy!





Remember that this video was from 2008 and she mentions that lawyers go on to practice jurisprudence, whereas Humanities Scholars go onto wage slavery.  Well, we are about there right now.