In fairness, her experience was worse than most. You know going in that you’re not going to get a real job with a degree in Women’s Studies or Sociology. But this woman was sold a totally worthless piece of paper for $70,000.
Carrianne Howard wanted to design video games. But her $12 an hour gig as an industry recruiter didn’t work out, so now she is stripping at a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Howard told Bloomberg. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”
I happen to know a reasonably significant percentage of the game designers in the industry. For example, yesterday I got a call from a very successful old school game designer in Australia about an idea we’ve been kicking around for about a year, and in the course of the conversation we discovered that he had signed a game to the same guy in England who had offered me a job around that time. In other words, we had nearly found ourselves working on the same project. It’s a fairly small world. And I have never met anyone who has a degree in game design. It’s one of the more shameless educational scams out there. If you want to get into game design, study programming, play a lot of games, and pursue an internship as a tester.
Still, most people never learn. The punchline is that she’s saving her money… for a business degree.