\n\n\n\nas someone with a bachelor\u2019s degree in english, i am inexpressibly tired of people telling me to get highly specific jobs that often require highly specific degrees.\u00a0\u201cjust go write for a magazine!\u201d you need a journalism degree for that.\u00a0\u201cjust teach!\u201d you need a teaching certificate, and also fuck you.\u00a0\u201cjust go work at a tutoring place!\u201d tutoring children with learning disabilities, which make up the majority of the clientele at those places, requires not only a teaching certificate but a specialized master\u2019s degree. \u201cjust go work at a library!\u201d you need a master\u2019s degree in library science to be a librarian. it is actually a highly skilled and extremely competitive field. you don\u2019t just\u00a0\u201cgo work at a library,\u201d you train for years in the vain hope that you will get one of handful of available jobs.\u00a0\u201cjust go work at a library.\u201d the nerve. the unmitigated gall.\u00a0\u201cjust go work at a library.\u201d ugh.
You don\u2019t need a degree to write for a magazine, you need a portfolio and a professional network, which university journalism programs are entirely oriented around helping you get. I know people who dropped out of journalism school the instant they had these two things because at that point it was a waste of time and money and distracting from their career.
Many states and school districts have programs to let you earn a license while you teach (though often in a particular subject that may not be English). This is in response to a teacher shortage driven by bad pay, lousy work conditions, and an extremely hostile political climate, but you would encounter those things even if you went back to school first.
As someone who has stared down the beast that is the public library job hunt, and was the first to blink: the absolute majority of jobs in libraries do not carry the title \u201clibrarian\u201d and do not require an advanced degree. In fact, librarian jobs are being eliminated in many places in a process called \u201cparaprofessionalisation,\u201d in which the job duties of lower-ranking and lower-paid employees are expanded in favor of replacing retired librarians. Anyway, most of my classmates in library school already worked in libraries and were getting the credential to angle for a promotion.
The brutal truth of higher education (particularly in the liberal arts) is that there is no amount of it you can submit to, no credential you can ever gain, that will get you to a point where people are going to reflexively defer to your elite status and just hand you the job you have \u201cearned.\u201d This is the promise of college, and it\u2019s a lie; the only time it was ever credible was when scarce university education was a thinly veiled excuse to reserve jobs for the children of the wealthy and well-connected who were going to get them anyway.
I\u2019m glad for both of the degrees I got and would happily go back and get them again, but if you let malaise push you back into school you\u2019re going to come out of it just as unhappy and significantly deeper in debt. The way to feel adequately compensated and respected by your job is to join a union.
The “drag queen story time” thing emerging in libraries pushed by librarians trying to establish themselves as a graduate-educated lawyer/doctor/minister(/accountant/realtor/teacher?)-type profession with a guild consciousness in response to elite overproduction is one of the funnier subplots going
"}