5221

Well, you get to enjoy the prestige of being called a lawyer and it makes your parents proud.

5222

Funny.

5223

Point is, there are a lot of “dips” out there, by his standards. Student debt is out of control in this country and it isn’t the fault of the individual for taking it on. Less than 20% of the country is ever going to make six figures, but well over 40% of the country will finish college, grad school, or higher. Scary, but true.

5224

It absolutely is. Somebody who goes to a bad law school thinking they’re going to be rich hasn’t done their homework, and deserves every miserable day of their debt-ridden life in a shit job that doesn’t pay. You should know what you’re getting yourself into before you sign up for three years of school at ~$60,000/year.

5225

Not exactly, what the data shows is that

White people try to seem boring in their profiles to attract mates.
Black people try to seem religious in their profiles to attract mates.
Asians people try to seem simple in their profiles to attract mates.
etc.

What people are willing to say about themselves in the context of dating =/= what they actually do, or even what they THINK they actually do.

Like Chris Rock says, when you meet someone in the club you meet their representative. People simply represent what they think the people they want to attract want to see/hear.

5226

Yeah, I like those OkTrends posts but this one is a bit of a stretch. Obviously I know that I should take these posts with a grain of salt, since there are big, obvious biases in their data and that’s fine when they’re making conclusions about the online dating world. This post, however, is making conclusions about the real world based on their statistics. Really this is “What White People (That Use OkCupid) Like.” I know that it’s implicit, but given the reach and scope of this particular post I think they should be explicit about it.

5227

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH

Catches breath

So, lol, you’re saying that going to a “good” law school guarantees a six-figure salary?

The truth is lawyers have never made, on average, more than twice the national average at any time in the history of the US. The only relevant economic difference between now and 1950 is that tuition has gone up - a lot.

And it isn’t just law school. 12-PhD education is too expensive for most people to afford, period. If Britain, France, Germany, Italy etc. didn’t have subsidized K-PhD education they would have debt crises too.

5228

I’m saying that if you went to a top law school before the recent economic crisis, you would almost certainly be able to get a job paying a lot of money if you wanted one. It’s less certain these days because of the economy, of course. With those jobs, it’s quite possible to pay back your student loans within three years. I am not just talking out of my ass here: this is exactly my life.

In the down/recovering/whatever economy, going anywhere but a top school is a disastrously poor decision if you think you’re going to be rich. Going to a top school is still a bad decision, but it’s less bad.

5229

Not just that, it’s a “how people of different ethnicities represent themselves on dating sites.” I’m not saying that the ethnic differences aren’t real or important - they are! People’s perception of what other members of their ethnic group think matters a lot. In fact you could argue that perception is more important than reality when it comes to dating. But whatever you think, that has nothing to do with how people act in the real world.

For example, in the case of black people I know from quite a bit of personal experience that the supposed religiousness is very transparent. It falls apart on close inspection, and the impulse to put it into a profile comes from trying to appeal to a specific type of person you want to respond. I know lots of friends who literally never go to church, but quote the bible on their facebook profiles. This goes for both men and women, and I think the principle applies to the other ethnicities equally as well. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that it’s not really that white folks are actually boring, but simply that they’re afraid of offending or weirding out potential mates. And so on.

5230

Ha, jokes on them. I make more than that, don’t even have an undergrad degree and spent less than $10k (probable quite a bit less) on my education and graduated debt free.

5231

Nothing? Really? Absolutely nothing at all?

5232

Yeah that doesn’t jive with my experience either.

5233

Re: law school/advanced degrees, whatever. Someone once told me “There are a lot of smart, directionless people in law school.” Sometimes, I would argue most of the time, people get advanced degrees because that’s what they feel they ought to do and they want to impress people, not because they really want to do a particular job and have done the ROI of the cost of a post-grad degree. I did that ROI for law school and MBA school and just decided it didn’t add up. I think a lot of people don’t even think about how crushing the debt is going to be and how much it will impact them. Not all smart people need to get post-grad degrees, in my opinion.

As for stopping messaging, I don’t think it’s very polite to just stop all communication suddenly. Now if you don’t get back to them and they never message again, that’s one thing. But if they message/IM/text a few times saying “what’s up?” and you know you don’t want to date them, I think the old “it got really busy at work” thing is a fairly polite way to let them down easy.

Wait, I second, I’ve been told that before! Grrrr.

You can’t put too much energy into shooting down or getting shot down online. As Bill eloquently said, whatever. Online daters are about the most flightly demographic there is (of course we are all exceptions I’m just stating a trend).

5234

I may have laughed a little bit at eVow, I dont think its up to even the feature usefulness of PoF yet, but Ive actually been quite successful on it. Lots of pms, alot have dropped off but its all a numbers game.

And in fact, I have a hot lead right now. Shes a little bit younger than me, ok 6 years younger and 18, but shes in the same trade as me, has the same interests as me and shes supremely cute even if shes got a few extra pounds. Heres hoping this one doesnt show up to the date wearing a shirt thats wayyy to tight for her body that shes about to pop out of.

5235

Um, if you don’t even have an undergraduate degree, how did you graduate debt free, much less graduate at all? Did you go to a school where you graduate but don’t get a degree?

5236

Vocational/technical schools award certificates, not degrees, right? Maybe he went to one of those.

5237

In Canada only accredited schools can offer degrees (here it’s, more or less, what distinguishes universities from colleges, though I think that’s changing a little bit now). I graduated from a college and have a diploma in computer science from that school but no degree.

Colleges in Canada aren’t exactly like vocational or technical schools. To what degree can vary from college to college and even program to program. There are definitely some vocational type of training available but there are also programs which offer a much broader education.

I’m not aware of a parallel in the US, so a comparison is hard to make. You can get near university level of education at colleges here. My program was three years and included comp sci, logic, math (like calculus, statistics, linear algebra and discreet structures) business and english courses. Had I taken this program at a US school I likely would have gotten a degree for it. The school also offered things like EMT training, auto repair, electrician training, which are clearly more vocational/technical in nature. So colleges here are really a mixed bag of education and training.

The big advantage for me was price. I started at a university but couldn’t afford to stay beyond my first year (a slight oddity of my personal situation meant I didn’t qualify for many student loans) and transferred to the college. The two and a half years I spent at the college probably cost about the same as that first year at the university, possibly less. I don’t think I’d be in a significantly better position professionally if I had stayed at the university and gotten my degree. For me I think it ended up being a great outcome, I’m in an equivalent professional position (in fact the same as many degree holders) at a fraction of its cost. Though I imagine a bit of an outlier, I really don’t know the statistics of college vs university graduates in Canada.

5238

Being Canadian is cheating. I think that tuition at Canadian schools is really cheap, even compared to public universities in the US. The tuition at McGill for Quebec residents is $2000 per year. As opposed to Yale, which has tuition of around $49,000.

5239

Well my tuition as an Ontario resident at an Ontario university about 15 years ago was over $3k and it would have been around $4k for my second year. Quebec might not be the best province to use as a barometer here.

5240

Fuck, I go to an in state public school and my tuition is 8k a year, with room and board being 10k while I lived on campus.