This is my dirty secret
AI bots are about to out me
I’ve kept this secret closely guarded. I don’t actually lie about it; I gloss it over and avoid the topic if possible. But as I’ve been looking for a full-time job for the first time in 20 years, it’s becoming a problem thanks to AI.
I don’t have a college degree.
There. I said it. Now you know.
For the jobs that I’ve been applying for, it seems to be a given that I have one. The resume builder site that I use prompts me every single time to add it, telling me, “You seem to have forgotten to add your education. Employers want to know this information and use it to determine qualified candidates.” What it means is that the AI bots companies use to scan resumes are looking for it, not actual people.
LinkedIn naturally includes it, given its self-imposed reputation as the place for smart professionals to find jobs on their ever-upward climb up the corporate ladder. Never mind that what appears to be 70% of the posts on the site are “think pieces” generated by AI, while the remaining 30% are smug self-congratulations.
Some of the listings on the site themselves ask for ridiculous amounts of higher education. You want me to have a master’s degree in English literature before I can get a $65,000 job recruiting social media influencers to shill your client’s products on TikTok? That’s $70,000, not counting the four years of regular college before that.
How is the modern college system not a massive money-making scam? Using today’s numbers, a four-year public college degree, including room and board, can cost over $100,000 for in-state students. It takes an average of 10-20 years to pay off student loan debt. My husband went to college in his late 20s to increase his job opportunities and wages; he graduated in 1993. He still owes money for a computer science degree that’s never come in useful because it was outdated two years after he earned it.
My college experience
Don’t get me wrong, I went to a private Methodist university for a year. They contacted me recently as part of an LGBTQ history project to see if I’d share my experiences there. In an article in the campus newspaper, I was described as a “former student,” so they asked when I had actually graduated. I didn’t. I left after a year.
I have to admit, I was slightly humiliated to admit that I hadn’t cut the mustard. But then, when describing my experiences there, I remembered going to the school counselor when I was hit with my first bout of severe depression. I had stopped going to classes and instead spent most of my time sleeping in the dorm room or drinking myself stupid. If I wanted to lift the depression, the counselor told me, I should stop being gay. That was his solution to a mental health crisis. The article in the newspaper was about my activism in the local LGBT community.
I spent years forfeiting my income tax refunds to pay for that year of depression and self-doubt. Eventually, with the help of my senator’s office, I got the debt expunged and settled.
And then I stopped and actually thought about it.
What did I have to be ashamed of? I’d taken an awful experience, ignored the college’s prejudiced condemnation of my life, and turned it into a career that made life better for millions of people just like me.
Paying the debt
I don’t have a master’s degree in how to wrangle social influencers; I was one of the web’s first LGBTQ influencers.
I may lack a degree in political science or communications, but I built two of the largest queer news and politics websites from scratch, using ingenuity and practical experience. Over 1,000 of you already subscribe to this newsletter that I started a couple of months ago.
But good luck telling that to an AI chatbot. It’s not a consolation that AI is going to put a ton of college graduates out of work too, but that’s the world we live in now.
Someone recently suggested to me that maybe the solution to my financial woes was to attend college remotely, using grants and scholarships to cover costs and taking extra loans to pay my living expenses. After all, at my age, by the time the loans would need to be paid off, I’d likely be dead.
That would be full circle, wouldn’t it? Because it just sounds depressing.
Why put myself further in debt to get a credential from a system that refused to help me while I was helping others? I’d rather keep the life experience qualifications. I paid for them.
I had a similar college experience. I was bullied by the one group of people that had always provided me with comfort in my high school years; musicians. Particularly vocal music.
As a freshman in college I found myself being bullied by my fellow male singers. I was a tenor in my university’s show choir. My education prior to that time was at a Department of Defense Dependent School (DODDS) where children of service members and those whose parents were ambassadors and other dignitaries and their staff; whether it be the son of the French consular or the British attaches daughter.
My school was small, tiny by most standards, with 123 students from the seventh to twelfth grade. I excelled. However, at university I’d oversleep any classes before noon. I ended up moving to another state, and then to other countries (Germany and France), attending local schools part time, but I never graduated. Later I was able to identify the reasons for my initial failure, and just never getting back into the groove of higher education, was the bullying I had experienced at the hands of those I’d have usually found counsel.
I’d never been able to identify my bullying as it hadn’t happened to me since third grade. After all I was an 6’3”, 225lb pound athlete that was a football player and wrestler. I also tried tennis, but I was just too bulky. Haha.
Eventually I just stopped going and it just seemed unnecessary as I got older. I was erudite, well spoken, and could argue my cases around politics, religion, and queer issues against congressmen, pastors, and lawyers. Why should I spend another $200,000 to finish my B.A. and Juris Doctorate?
Btw, I had a military psychiatrist tell me I should “just stop being gay.” Oh, I forgot to mention I was booted out of the military during a witch hunt dedicated to ending the careers of queer soldiers. I’ll keep that story for another post as I’ve already written this long winded unsolicited screed.
We can trade horror stories on higher education anytime you want. There has been nothing elevated about it for decades now.