[bane]

I grew up pretty poor and never had hope that I could go to college...so I never tried in high school, and never took my SATs and was resigned to a life in lower paying non-career jobs.

After a few years of this, I remember interviewing at a larger company for a position in their IT department. I didn't get the job, but the interviewer gave me life changing advice, "why don't you just go to the local CC?". I had no idea that was even an option, so I looked into it, the cost was cheap, it allowed for flexible part-time schedules, and I started my journey.

I ended up dual majoring, graduated from the CC, moved to a state Uni graduated with a BS, and later worked through an MS. It absolutely transformed my life. I'm the first person in my entire family to have been educated to this level.

I also grew up in an immigrant heavy area and met many wonderful people from around the world at the CC, who also all went on to get BSs and MSs and move through successfully better careers at major companies. CC was their entry point into the American dream.

Still, that stigma hung with me until I had an experience where I was able to move past it. I was invited to a be part of a business team to build a product to sell to an overseas customer. Everybody introduced themselves and their backgrounds, some were very impressive, and a couple of them even had graduated from the Ivys. It clicked then, even with all of this impressive education and experience, we were all working at the same place on the same effort and I deserved to be there.

Ever since then, whenever somebody tries to edu-shame me or another person, I always reply with "and yet we're all working in the same place" and that shuts it down immediately.

[than3]

I've had people give the same advice, and was only met with fraud and weed-out classes, structured in a way so that every simple misstep snowballs to failure. 15+ years of effort and resources with nothing to show to employers other than a transcript of Ws or Fs on those weedout courses which are required to even transfer, some repeated 8-10 times at different colleges and with different teachers. The same structural issues.

I hear this is less of a problem in Europe, but in the US, education is a farce. Wherever you are from, I'm glad it worked out for you.

I ended up dropping out and getting into IT, self learning system's theory along the way, and after a decade am back to trying to get a degree because a lot of employer's won't look at you if you don't have one. Or worse, they'll say you aren't qualified (despite having a decade of direct experience), and low-ball offer the already low salary (50% off). There are some truly despicable people out there.