Some people may choose to ride out the recession in grad school. That may or may not be a good long term economic decision and they should really consider if the additional debt is worth it.
To a lesser extent, some people will enroll in colleges without a definite desire to get a degree. This, they could find themselves in debt with just a year or so of general studies credits. This isn’t unique to a recession, however. I met far too many people who ‘took a semester off’ and never returned.
Colleges may be facing cash shortages soon too. Not just decreased tuition due to decreased enrollments in future sessions, but decreased fees from housing (more students will opt to live elsewhere or take virtual courses). Immediate cash flow issues may be caused if the colleges do any kind of refund: my son just got a check back for some of his spring semester tuition and fees. I’m not sure how much: just because we paid it didn’t mean the money was sent to us!
Wasn’t there an oversupply of PhDs during Vietnam due to this, people were riding out the war in grad school?
Wages will go down, but in theory the higher human capital should have some society wide benefit
My dad might match that criteria about a PhD during Vietnam. I really doubt they would have taken him with severe asthma and really bad uncorrected vision.
There’s no doubt that overall society benefits from a better educated workforce, but the individual may not see a personal benefit.
One example is a guy I know from my online history discussion group. He’s 25 or so, a recent undergraduate and was already planning to get the Master’s anyway. So, for him it makes perfect sense. If you’re going full time to grad school, do it while you’re young. The time out of the workforce won’t be as relevant and you won’t be (hopefully) paying loans until you’re 50.
The problem with that is that we have a historically low capacity for the storage of refined petroleum products because the system is optimized for maximum throughput based upon usage trends, and even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is pretty limited in terms of how quickly petroleum can be withdrawn and transported to refineries. And petroleum extraction companies are shutting down their more expensive capabilities because the cost to keep them up and running with essentially no demand is prohibitive, but bringing those facilities back on line will take a substantial amount of capital and time. It isn’t clear what recovery is actually going to look like because, as you note, we’re going to see staged and staggered releases, and the public response once states start opening up and then witness increasing infection and casualty rates starting a month later is an unknown. There is also the complication of other necessary commodities like food (we’re already seeing the effects on meatpacking plants, and we’ll see the result of a lack of immigrant labor on the agricultural harvest) and of course the massive amount of unemployment which is going to mean that many families put their regular vacation plans aside for the indefinite future. How all of this shakes out is anyones’ guess because this scenario of a global depression due to lack of demand in the energy sector combined with food scarcity and pandemic limitations on travel and trade is unprecedented.
Stranger
Some of us made money (tiny bits) in grad school. No decent professor would push a student out the door in this environment. Not to mention grad students doing research are going to be delayed. We’ve extended the paper due dates for our conference because of this.
Who was it sent to?
Movie ticket sales.
Studios always jostle for the limited number of weekends during the summer. They don’t want to have to compete against other movies. And with a lot of movies having their release dates postponed, there’s going to be more movies competing for fewer spots.
In Australia fuel surcharges levies first appeared in ‘82.
Each transport company has it’s own metric and te levy they charge varies from single figures up to about 20%. There is always questions raised as to whether it functions as cost recovery or revenue raising.
One of our major logistics providers applied a fuel levy of 13% in March and has just announced it will be zero in May. Others haven’t moved.
In theory the levy should go negative if fuel prices fall below the calculation base price.
My son - the check was sent to him vs us (even though their billing system knows who actually remitted it).
We’ve told him to hold onto it because it is part of his tuition in the fall.
A lot of people have learned to do-it-yourself on a lot of stuff. Gardening, hair/nails, and cooking instead of going out. With money tight, I expect folks will continue with much of this even if the economy improves. Even though any single skill has a small effect, the cumulative effect on the service economy may be large.
I’m buying much larger hunks of meat and cutting this up myself to wrap/freeze. I’m getting a small (but growing) amount of vegetables from our garden, and my wife has proven to be an excellent hairstylist. I dropped the landscape crew and am doing all my own yardwork with cheap equipment from a pawnshop, and even dropped the cleaning folks. The amount of money we’re saving is substantial, and I don’t see us changing this even if the economy “V’s” itself right back to 2019 levels.
I think you might be an exception to the rule. I talked to a friend who’s a restaurant server, and who keeps up with other servers that she personally knows and knows from online groups, and according to them people are busting down the doors to restaurants. Everyone is tired of cooking at home, and BEING home, and restaurants offer a good solution to them.
Of course, limited capacity will keep people having to wait for tables, and servers having to work fewer hours. And job insecurity will probably make tips lower (hopefully gratitude and generosity will make some tips higher).
I think people were willing to make changes but only with an end in sight. And with a dire need. It’s awesome that you see yourself making these positive, sustainable changes the norm! But I am pretty sure they won’t be the norm for most Americans.
Partly cheating by responding to month old posts about short term crude oil prices. They went up a lot in May, charter rates for large tankers (to store oil) crashed (though still healthily profitable for tanker owners). The oil market can adjust fast, especially when it’s a matter of not producing (cashflow basis) unprofitable oil.
Your points are a little longer term, where it’s also impossible to predict oil prices but it doesn’t get proven to you as soon. 
Of course people are taking some market risk to choose a car based on their future view of gasoline prices. There could always be an at least medium term high oil price due to complete destruction of Saudi (particularly) facilities in a war or revolution. Although other than that getting hard to see how there could be one. US production will now retreat significantly (maybe 13mil bpd> 9 or 10 by next year) but little of that will represent production that couldn’t be restarted fairly easily. Same elsewhere. Whereas govts worldwide are unlikely to reverse their measure to bribe/coerce consumers into EV’, economical or not. Hard to see how oil sustains a high price from here…but it’s unpredictable.
Seems to me the more likely, though very unlikely, risk of crushing retail gas prices in the US is from a political sea change to several $1/gal gas tax like some other rich countries. To the extent one says ‘never’, I think long term very high crude market price is now closer to ‘never’ than that. Though neither can be 100% ruled out, and again oil can always go up a lot based on Mideast war or revolution, for short-medium term at least.
It’s pretty amazing how much of our spending is discretionary even though it sure seems “necessary” at the time.
We don’t have much space to plant a garden that would produce enough to make a dent in the grocery bills (which are surely higher, as we are doing online only). Haircutting - well, I am not attempting to do that to anyone in the household, so we’re simply doing without.
We’re mostly keeping up with the housecleaning but it’s a luxury I sorely miss - plus letting her go would cause the cleaner some economic pain. DItto the gardening service - except we don’t even own a lawnmower. Since we’re still employed (and are extremely fortunate there) I want to do what I can there. Ditto with restaurants. We definitely get less restaurant food than we used to, but if we can get takeout from some of the places we used to frequent, it’s a break for us AND a boon for them.