34.
“I majored in communications/global journalism. I transferred from community college in my Florida hometown to a Northeast four-year school in 2005 — the first year of the death knell for print journalism. Job outlook was so bad, my journalism professor urged us to consider switching majors. I’m not enough of a schmoozer for PR, so I stayed. First job in 2009 post-graduation was writing online articles for a SEO company. The pay was so low that an employee from Washington had to interrupt orientation to tell HR she was making below her state’s minimum wage.”
“Now I write for an online medical newswire — though much of my job is just data entry. It’s been 11 years now with no advancement (but more responsibilities) and modest, irregular pay raises. Last month I got a 1.3% raise, way below the average COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) increase around 3% — nets me an extra $20 a week. It’s infuriating since remote work adds an hour or more of extra tasks to my day; I’ve been doing it since March 2020, and the only other raise I got in that timespan was predicated on my being safely able to return to my news beat (city courthouse, not my company’s office), which has not happened.
So no, I don’t really like it. I wish more than anything that instead of going to college, I had focused on more sensible career training. I don’t need a degree to earn such a pedestrian paycheck and do a job from which I derive little meaning.”
—41, USA
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lizmrichardson/useless-college-majors-jobs