If you’re middle-classish, have college education and want to find a job, you won’t find much unless you have one or more of the following:
1. connections
2. prior mentoring experience
3. specific skillset including software that is proprietary and not taught in college

The only way you can achieve these goals is to have interned or worked in the field for more than a year. That’s just how it is. You cannot gain these perks any other way (well you can probably get connections if you happen to be born to the right influential family but that’s not middle-classish)

Obviously, if you’re low-classish, and/or don’t have a college education, you need to rectify those problems first.

The point is, that the only way you can intern or work in the field for more than a year is if you can afford to *not make money* while you are in or just out of college. Even if you somehow manage to get a job in the field you study before you graduate, you will not be able to work enough to “make it count” if you are a full-time student. Only a few special are selected to get good assistantships during college. So obviously this is not an *absolute*. Lord in heaven please do not write to me full of “success” stories of peopel you know who managed to slide through this problem THEY EXIST OKAY? I ACKNOWLEDGE IT IS POSSIBLE. But it is a tiny possibility that rests on many factors including luck, knowing the right people and not having anything to lose and all the time in the world.

This is the current reality. Merely getting an education isn’t enough anymore. Companies that hire people to the middle-classish positions expect you to be out-of-the-box ready for their jobs. The only way you can possibly be that ready is to have managed to get those jobs before graduating. Or get a much lower job and work up to it IF the winds blow favorably during your employment. Of course you better be ready to work for peanuts if you get paid at all.

Most of us can’t afford to do that. So here we stay; on the bottom. Just the way they want us to be.

The only other answer is to learn a trade, instead of learning a field. IN fact, it seems that learning a field should come only AFTER learning a trade.