If you’re a college student there are tons of great discounts out there and ways to save money.  I have been able to save $700+ EACH semester using these hacks by living frugally as a student. Enjoy!

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We all value education, don’t we? But as a current graduate student, I’m alarmed by the amount of debt my friends and peers are taking on… $20k, $50k, $100k, $120k. What will happen when our generation wants to buy a home, have a child or put money towards our retirement but we’re still paying off our debts acquired to get a good job in the first place?

I’m not one for conspiracy theories. I HATE generalizations, scare tactics or dramatic claims, but this document makes some thought provoking points about the growing debt of our country, of our college attendees and the economy.  I hate sounding the alarms, but this exact question has been  on my heart and mind for over a year- how will today’s college grads handle their debt, or will the bubble burst?

I personally am concerned that if we had an economic crash in 2008 over the housing market, but many college grads have more debt at age 24 than 44 years old have on their mortgage.

Thoughts?  Do you think the debt is worth it?  Is the answer to the devaluation of the bachelor’s degree simply getting more education (thus more debt)?   Do you know anyone that is in a huge amount of student loan debt? How are they handling their debt?

 I really want to talk about this and would appreciate your thoughts and experiences.

Jenny Blake is one-heckofa-blogger and now a pretty snazzy book author, as she recently released Life After College: the Complete Guide to Getting What You Want.

I just discovered a great resource through igrad.com which is choc-full of wonderful videos, and posts that will help you navigate your financial life.

Jenny just teamed up with igrad.com to release a very informative webinar which will surely shed some light on the climate of student debt, but also with some great tips to getting a grasp on managing your debt, finances and concocting a strategy that makes responsibility less scary!

Click here to listen to Jenny Blake’s iGrad Webinar on

“How to Rock Your Personal Finances”

There are plenty of people in my “real life,” that don’t get why I blog.  I’m a graduate student in a decent school and blogging has a (sometimes deservedly) bad wrap as being small league, unacademic and homespun.  The more I blog, the more I find that just because you use the internet doesn’t mean you get it.  I blog because it allows me to be in touch with an emerging market of internet business that is revolutionizing the way we sell, buy and make money, yet many academics, especially the younguns who use these technologies but rely on their “education” to build a career, simply don’t see it.

I originally decided to go to grad school because I loved sociology and the potential it held for understanding social problems, applying a personal and scientific methodology and interacting with those being studied to solve social problems.  That, my friends, was my nieve little dream- and it didn’t come true.  After about 4 weeks in the graduate program, after hearing cyncial professors joke about how we’d graduate to no jobs, loads of debt and disturbingly low prospects on ever landing the very tenure track positions they were using to tell us such things, (but hey, would still take my money) I was shocked and deflated.

I had busted my butt, spent hundreds of dollars, applied to 13 schools and took the worst standardized test ever created, and I sat in a bar with a friend in downtown Chicago and literally cried in my beer.  I had made an epic mistake, and it was costing me a lot of money to do so.

In fact, that epic mistake costs me about $8k a semester.  I write papers that nobody reads, about social issues that the country is divided over, and hand them in (poorly edited) to professors who have openly admitted to me that they don’t get to read it throughly  (and my good grades reflect this).

That chilly November evening was the start of a new thought process for me.   As I played with my coaster and chewed my bottom lip, my friend took pity on me (you know, after having a good laugh at my naivety) and we began to talk.  He was working for an online company at the time- and that kind of thing fascinated me, something he had to point out since I obviously didn’t want to admit his job was more exciting than my future career.

At the time, I had read blogs- I loved blogs, I had bookmarked them, shared them on Facebook, and made a few friends online, but I had no idea how it worked.  I also had no idea that entire careers were made around blogging, long established old-timey companies were now engaging in it, and indeed, there was something to be gained from becoming a blogger.

At the time, I like most people, knew that blogs were around but had no idea how they operated, how profitable they were, and I undoubtedly underestimated their power.  I didn’t understand that people were making money from home either writing, manufacturing or tinkering with blogs.  I had no idea that the internet was revolutionizing the way we do business and entrepreneurs make money- I knew it was happening, but I was ignorant to its magnitude and scope.

I was terrified but excited. The internet was changing the game, and reclaiming hope for the academically disenfranchized like myself.  I would remain in grad school, but the rules had been changed- the frame had been broken.  I didn’t have to wait around and play the game like other grad students did in order to be allowed to teach.  I didn’t have to pour hours into my writing only to have it languish in obscurity.  If I wanted to publish, I didn’t have to wait around or play into stupid academic politics to get published in a journal, all I had to do was hit publish. The power to tell me if my writing was good, or it sucked, or it needed work, or it meant something was no longer in the hands of few- but it was put out there for potentially, millions of people so different from myself.   My anger was turned into power, my frustration into movement.

Some days, I still grapple with my decision to stay in the program and finish my last semester or two.  The cost is high, the time is that I will never get back and sometimes the classroom is the loneliest place in the world for me since I lack the passion for program that so many of my esteemed peers have found.  I still love sociology, it has taught me about a myriad of social problems, but perhaps I have learned more about social problems by being in the program and seeing how the academic world isn’t functioning to actively solve them- and sadly, I think schooling is now creating some problems.

Sociology taught me about social problems.  Graduate school caused me to live social problems -especially those associated with our generation.  Suddenly, I was meeting students with 20-100k in student loan debt, living on food stamps and anxiously hoping someone would give them a break. It made it abundantly clear that our generation is going to graduate to epidemic debt, and has done little to prepare alumni to tackle the cost of their careers.  It has also taught me that education is based on an outdated framework.  In my few short months of blogging, I am seeing how the world is changing because I am no longer simply a consumer of these changes, I’m watching them happen and as a sociologist in practice, I am predicting how these social changes are going to completely change each aspect of our personal and professional lives.

Sadly, I see so many students applying emerging technologies to make their academic work simpler and easier, but fail to realize that these technologies are making the work easier, but it will not make the outdated pedagogies of the university system relevant.

Students use Skype for study groups, sidestep the over priced campus bookstore through Amazon,  give brutally honest reviews on RateMyProfessor.com, and learn languages via podcast.  While these technologies are making college better, they are also wiping out the very careers and employment mindsets of the previous generation- yet we, as a group, seem to be oblivious to these changes and cling on to the hope that our piece of paper we sacrificed so much for will be enough to save us in the digital age.

So, this is why I blog.   I love to learn, I love to engage, I love to do so for free and even make money as I learn.  Waiting for a teacher to package learning for me, and even paying to do so isn’t sustainable or even attractive anymore.  The jobs in academics are evaporating as we speak, so let’s get engaged.   As a generation, we are witnessing the changes taking place, the markets are shifting and it’s nothing to be scared about  - turn on your technology, turn on your mind and thrive in the rising tide of the digital wave.

Watch this video. Feel your heart and hope die a little, and then we’ll have a serious talk…

Hello recent grads and anyone interested in GETTING A JOB, let’s chat, shall we?

Videos like this really make me sad…but mainly annoyed. Everyone is saying that the economy sucks, but what’s going to happen when it recovers? I will wager that those “careers” we’ve all been told to seek out during our college years simply don’t exist anymore- they will never come back (Pensions? What are those?  Working in a career for 30 years? What?  Did we think the new millennium was just a cool new number?)  The game had changed while we were still in high school and college, but the economic fallout just made it abundantly clear that we had our heads in the sand to technological and economic changes we can no longer ignore.

I would say that the traditional job market is on a sinking ship, but truthfully- it’s already sunk. The fact that this piece is even newsworthy is  like seeing survivors of the Titanic waiting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean l0oking for an apology instead of trying to save themselves.

The ship has sunk. The jobs are gone. This is sad, sad fact. Let’s move forward.

It’s sad, in college that we aren’t taught to innovate. The whole POINT of going to college was so that we could get a good job, right? Well, most of us feel more compelled than ever to seek out that “good job” and career now since there are such steep loans to pay.

I want to be completely honest with you- I think that even when the economy recovers, the fact is- the game is completely different now. Jobs that we spent 4-6 years preparing for simply aren’t there, or, they’ve been snatched up by others with more experience than working as a barista while getting a degree in Art History, but the answer is NOT “more schooling.”

We can continue to play the “blame game,” of the bad economy- or we can pick up our game pieces, engage our minds and start to strategize for a new game where we play to win. If the jobs you’ve had thus far hasn’t made your résumé competitive, you need to start looking for something completely different, it’s worth a try. If you feel that you can’t get a job due to “limited education or experience,” your answer is NOT to go back to school for an advanced degree- if the degree you have now isn’t helping, I guarantee you, another degree will make you overqualified in one area (*cough cough* sociology) and underqualified and ill-prepared in others (

My suggestion to you?

-Pick up some books that will aid you in the paradigm shift that you need to understand the “new economy.”  I’ve read all the books below and it’s revolutionized the way I see the job market and helped me think creatively towards possibility.

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuck

 
Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable–Includes new bonus chapterby Seth Godin

 
Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actionsby Guy Kawasaki

 
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativityby Hugh MacLeod

-Develop more marketable skills that you can “sell” to potential employers, or use to start your own business.  It might have been great that you graduated at the top of your class, but to potential employers or potential clients if you go the entrepreneurship route, it won’t help them if you’re great at cramming for an exam or can write a good term paper without reading the book.  (Just chew over that for a minute).

The skills that got you through college don’t do you much good now.  (Blue books and Scantrons are not tools of the trade, sorry!)  What will make you look savvy and hireable is being able to sell the fact that you know how to promote a business with social networking (more than just logging onto Facebook for status updates during work hours),  or being able to promise your boss to boost sales with email or Twitter campaigns.   Trust me, many employers aren’t savvy on this- that’s why you SHOULD be.  Lots of people know how to use FB and Twitter, but can they profit off of it?  (Chew that over too).  Learn how and you will be marketable my friends!

The fact is, too many recent grads use technology everyday- they use apps on their iPhones,  talk products on Twitter, update their relationship status on Facebook.  They buy everything online and read books on Kindles…but how are we, as a generation such passive consumers of products, living along the cutting edge of technology- but are completely oblivious that these technologies (along with economic forces) have revolutionized the way we do business, thus changing the demand and need for different types of workers?

Well, I ask you now to be students of life.  Your education left you woefully unprepared for the New Economy.  Take the power back, put in the work, sweat a little and you will be rewarded.