I agree with this. I’m just pointing out you can have a household with two professional degrees these days and still not to be able to afford a house. I think college is the right choice for a lot of people, certainly not everyone, but the reality is that no matter which path you take, it’s a different situation for people my age and younger.
I do think the rise of this sort of thing is tied in some ways to young people’s expectations changing. If a career track can’t bring you a house, or kids, or a comfortable retirement, what is the purpose of work beyond basic survival? These grifters prey on that disillusionment.
The flip side of this is that I know of young people who refuse to work because a job doesn’t instantly fulfill their dream requirements.
The grifters are marketing to them, too.
I’m one of the lucky few why enjoys what I do and has felt like my job helps with my self-actualization or whatever; I’m contributing toward a better world in an area I care about. That choice came at a substantial paycut, though. But it’s hard for me to lecture young people about just doing what they need to do to get a paycheck when I had high standards myself - I was just lucky enough for it work out for me.
Well I think the purpose of “work” is that there is stuff that needs to get done for society to survive and function. But we’ve abstracted a lot of it and filled people’s head with the notion that if you get a fancy expensive degree you only have to do the more prestigious “high value” “self-actualizing” stuff and get paid really well for it.
For example, you and your husband have two prestigious and advanced (and presumably expensive) degrees that would seem to position you for careers in academia or social work. So the question is who should pay you to do that? And if the intent is to actually improve people’s lives (as opposed to providing you a job that makes you feel self-actualized) would that money be better spent teaching people to be welders and plumbers or even providing services like child care so they can go to their jobs
The business world isn’t that much different IMHO. Outside of certain technical disciplines, much of the business world seems to be about getting the right degree from the right school so you can enter a society of professionals and go through the motions of playing work crafting pretty Powerpoint decks and giving glowing status updates to your boss. Do a good job, we’ll give you a bit more money and a fancier title.
You’ve hit on a central dichotomy of economics.
You can look at “jobs” as a product businesses produce that people consume, or you can look at “labor” as a product people produce that businesses consume.
And because people in bulk are nasty selfish barely-social social critters, every actor in either paradigm is mostly interested in selfishly screwing their counterparty and their peer competitors for a bigger slice of whatever pie is incidentally (accidentally?) being produced while we’re brawling over the scraps.
Well, I think the dichotomy is that so much work is automated that most people have limited ability to contribute real economic value to exchange. So it becomes less about providing a useful product or service as it is about…I don’t know…something else.
The New York Times has a story today that touches on this:
On the other hand, that nytimes link also says that 94% of computer science graduates and 93% of computer engineering graduates [i]did[/i] succeed in finding jobs.
[quote] ”Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.” [/quote]
Of course, six percent unemployment is worse than 3 per cent for other majors, but it isn’t a total collapse of the profession.
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(edit, about the formatting:–why didn’t my use of the tags work? I failed twice. The i tags on the word “did” did not produce italics, and the quote and /quote did not produce the standard format of a quoted text ( indented, with the grey line on the left) mods–what did I do wrong?)
Your quote tags need to be on a line by themselves. So this:
[quote]
blah blah blah
[/quote]
gives this:
which works.
But this:
[quote] blah blah blah
[/quote]
gives this:
[quote] blah blah blah
[/quote]
which does not.
By far the easier way to indent quote some text that’s not a snip from someone else’s post is just start the paragraph with a >. So this
> blah blah blah
gives
blah blah blah
It needs an extra blank line after the text you want indented / highlighted to signal that you want the indent / quote to end. One extra > and one extra Enter are a lot less fussing.
The reason I feel “self-actualized” is because I’m actually improving people’s lives as a direct result of the career choices I made. In fifteen years I have raised and stewarded millions of dollars for various charitable causes, including for issues very close to my heart. If you want to make it a matter of sheer economy, I’ve raised several orders of magnitude more dollars than it cost to educate and employ me. It’s nice to be able to say that, you know? I find it most fulfilling to work hard on a grant and then see that program or thing become reality. Of course generating resources for survivors of violence, and helping children and adolescents with OCD are both incredibly useful and helpful at improving people’s lives, so we both feel pretty good about our jobs, yeah.
As for the cost of our education, it just goes with the territory these days. My husband came from a privileged background, I didn’t, I went to undergrad on a full ride scholarship. Despite having different resources, we both put everything we had into our education and sacrificed a lot to make it work. Throughout my entire academic tenure, I faced a number of obstacles that would have withered most people. My degrees are not only a means to an end, not only a symbol of how much I value education, but hard evidence of what a stone cold badass I am when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
For some people a degree is only a means to an end and that’s fine - in today’s economy I feel like that’s probably the most important consideration. I don’t suggest everyone take the same path we took. But people like me should absolutely be given the opportunity to reach their full academic potential, especially when that potential is used in the service of others who face just as many if not more obstacles than I did.
From past comments and this one it sounds like you have a really distorted view of my school and career trajectory and in particular my motives for pursuing the best education I could. I didn’t do it to get rich or marry rich. At its foundation, my motive was this: I loved school. And I wanted to translate my love of school into something that left a mark on the world. And I did. I pursued macro social work in particular because I believe intervention at the systemic level does the most amount of good, and because I was well-suited for the conceptual and strategic thinking that it requires. I think the graduate program I chose was the best place to teach me those skills.
It was absolutely a privilege to earn my degrees, and my attitude toward privilege is you have to be a good steward of it. Everything I didn’t earn, I put to work. What more can you ask of someone?
thanks. but what about the italics? I put i tags before and after one word (“did”) , and in the past this always worked at producing the word in italics
Let me try:
[i]
did
[/i]
and it still doesn’t work.
(Sorry,about the hijack…If I have any more problems with formatting, I’ll take it to the Feedback forum.)
If you have questions about how the Discourse software works, they might go better in the SiteFeedback forum.
Interestingly, I just quoted the part of your post with the italics tags, and it did italicize them. I don’t know why it didn’t work for you.
You can also italicize by putting *asterisks* around what you want to italicize. You could try that and see if it works.
It’s the new interface. By default, now, the board has WYSIWYG mode on. In WYSIWYG mode, if you type a tag, the board software assumes that what you want to show is a tag, and so it adds escape characters to make it not actually work. Toggle the switch on the upper-left corner of the input window to put it back to the way you’re used to.
Definitely not in the neighborhood of your choosing, and given enough geographical and zoning constraints (I’m looking at you, Bay Area), maybe not even in a few metro areas. But people commute into Manhattan from PA and. Into DC from WV. That’s a big radius with a wide range of housing options.
But I’m looking back at your earlier post and I think you were making more of a time series statement. Even if there are options now, I agree there were more, closer ones, before.
I would just like to say that I’ve really appreciated the nuanced perspective you’ve brought to this thread.
My husband’s business is located in one of the only areas of the state he can get a high number of clients from the tri-county area. Any movement to a lower cost of living area would cost him his clients. He doesn’t provide general therapy but specializes in OCD and tic disorders with children and adolescents, which means he has to be in a populated area to work within his speciality.
Currently however we are living in a manufactured home at less than 50% the cost of what a one bedroom studio apartment is around these parts. Our home expenses couldn’t be lower for where we’re living. Although they are jacking up our lot rent at every opportunity.
Most of our expenses are spent on health insurance (about $30k a year in medical expenses) and child care. And the rising cost of groceries because my son has a feeding disorder and will mostly only eat dried fruit and nuts (I shudder to think what his adolescence is going to cost.) I don’t know what a “normal" family budget looks like to compare it to, but I can definitively tell you we couldn’t afford even a $100,000 mortgage. I know because I ran the numbers.
We save about 40% of our income for retirement, my son’s education, and other savings, but we don’t have any left over for a mortgage payment.
Thank you, I felt like an asshole after I wrote that. I think there’s a certain narrative about what kind of person attends an elite university and having grown up in a rural area with relative poverty I saw education as my way out of a culture that didn’t want me anyway. Of course my classmates didn’t know what to do with me either. So I have always felt like, okay, I came from this, but it’s not what I am, but also I’m not entirely this other thing, either.
I remember in graduate school our Dean, who was teaching a class on child welfare, off-handedly mentioned he was placing an announcement for his daughter’s wedding in the New York Times, and my classmates descended into a friendly argument about whose parents should pay for what. It was moments like those that just reinforced how different I was. Even before I became a legally emancipated minor and started my adulthood at age 17 with $300 to my name, my parents made it clear to me they weren’t paying a dime to help me after I turned 18, and I was expected to move out on my 18th birthday. And that was not unusual, just the culture where I lived.
My Mom instilled the value of a good education in me from a young age. She had me at age 19 over Spring Break and never missed a day of class. After she graduated with her degree in mechanical engineering she took an engineering job and for a short time we were doing pretty well, but she was deeply unhappy. She ended up leaving engineering altogether and helped her husband manage a small business. It was not a lucrative endeavor. They worked constantly, often spending the night in their office. I knew I did not want that life for myself. And she always reinforced the value of education and taught me that student loan debt is always good debt. So I naively thought, with a college education I could handle anything.
She couldn’t have predicted how much the world and the economy would change from the time I entered college in the first week of September 2001 and the time I graduated in 2007. I don’t even know how to explain it to people who weren’t there.
I’m clearly a bit older than you, but I think this is the crux of it.
People who graduated college before, say, 1990 have no idea about two key issues in higher education:
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The monetary cost of that education, assuming you work as much as possible, live as cheaply as possible, and take out only government loans. Their lived experience tells them this is maybe challenging but feasible. It is no longer feasible. I see that every day.
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The career benefits of that education. Yes, you need to tick “has a college degree” for a lot of jobs, even if you don’t really need that degree to do the work, but it is way more difficult to get from graduation > job than it was even three years ago, and certainly much more than thirty years ago.
The fact that large numbers of people get through on parental money and scholarships & manage to be fully employed within a year or so of graduation does not negate the fact that it’s a million times harder than it was within living memory. The economy has changed, the world of work has changed, and the world of education has changed.
Edit: despite that, I think the educational benefits to the whole person, and the soft skills built, are still as valuable as ever. They just aren’t as GOOD a value, and aren’t as straightforwardly rewarding.
Exactly! I’m happy with my career but I don’t think I could have afforded graduate school at all if I had to take out more undergraduate loans. I lucked out because when I emancipated I had to move to the city where my Aunt lived, and when I did that, I received a revised financial aid award notice stating I was getting a full ride. The scholarship was for kids who were academically talented and poor that lived in that specific city. I never even applied for a scholarship. So ironically I probably came out better financially than if I hadn’t emancipated.
In retrospect there were probably people from my school pulling strings to get me that scholarship because they knew I was going through a lot. And I know there were people at my alma mater making sure I kept my scholarship when I was struggling too much to carry a full course load. A lot of my academic success came from people who went out of their way to help me for basically no reason. And I’m talking about a school with 50,000 students. I will never forget them.
For graduate school, I mean it cost a lot but they paid half my tuition which I was told was unprecedented. You think you’re getting a deal that way!
Would I make the same decision for undergraduate? In a motherfucking heartbeat. Even if I had to pay for the whole thing. I’d pay off those student loans for the rest of my life if I had to. Even if I hadn’t met the love of my life there, it was utterly transformative to my understanding of the world.
Graduate school? That I honestly can’t say. I don’t have a real high opinion of that institution. I did get a great education and it opened some career doors when I was just getting my start. But it was also super expensive. I might have had the same results with a less expensive school.
I’m not beating myself up about it either way.
As I don’t really know your career or education other than my interpretation of what you shared here, I’m sure I have distorted it somewhat.
It does seem like that at least since I graduated college (in 1995) there has been a growing disconnect between the value of an education and the cost. You value education for its own sake and found a career that gives you meaning and purpose. But it also doesn’t appear that lucrative. Which I think speaks to a growing trend of students taking on the high cost of education only to graduate and have it not pay off for one reason or another.
Which then begs the question of what is the purpose of higher education? Is it to (at least in part) exist to open more lucrative doors for people who want something better out of life? Or is higher education just meant to be a class marker such that only the wealth can afford to go and where it doesn’t matter what sort of job they do when they graduate?
So then what should people do to actually earn more money?
Holy false dichotomies, Batman! An education is to enable you to become a better person and a better citizen. Everyone should be getting an education, lifelong, though not necessarily through degree-granting institutions.
I know a lot of people who make a lot more money than me and they feel their work is meaningless. Some of them got into it because it’s what their parents expected, some just didn’t know what they wanted to do, and other people experienced a significant mismatch between expectations and reality.
I think it helped that my program was a lot of hands-on job training through two years of internship, so I knew what to expect. And I already had prior non-profit experience. I spent a couple years working before grad school to be sure this is what I wanted to do.
I knowingly traded status and profit for meaningful work and when people tell me they don’t feel like they are doing anything useful, I don’t know what to say to them, because while I’ve definitely had individual jobs that sucked, I’ve never had a career trajectory that sucked or felt like I was trapped in the wrong line of work. But there’s a danger to treating education as purely economic and transactional because that’s how you end up like my friends, wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life.
I’m not saying I do as much as I should, but I’m fan of the song All These Things That I’ve Done by the Killers. To me, it’s a song about being depressed and feeling like you want to make a difference in the world but like you’re not good enough to rise to the occasion (which everyone feels sometimes!) but the song concludes
While everyone’s lost, the battle is won
By all these things that I’ve done
If you can hold on, hold on
When you can help yourself out of despair by reminding yourself no, you did this thing, what you do matters, it makes a difference.
What’s the price tag on that?
By the way I’m not implying there’s any specific line of work that makes a difference more than others. I think people can find meaning in all kinds of work. But they often don’t. Why is that?
I think a lot of the reason I enjoy my work is because I have a lot of creative freedom and autonomy. It might be as simple as that. Of course Trump is trying to destroy nonprofits right now and seriously fucking with my sense of self-worth in the process because there are good people on payroll who need to get paid and it’s stressful as fuck but heyyyy
All these things that I’ve done
You know, maybe it’s like marriage. I put some serious thought into who I married, too. You can make all the right choices and still get fucked over but how many people really think about what their career will look like beyond the paycheck? I might not have been thinking enough about money, but I know people who don’t think of anything else. And they are fucking miserable.