With a broken pipe on a Friday, July 2nd, a plumber is worth more than any goddamn lawyer on the planet.
Back before we allowed the Free Market to make us less free.
That was already the case when I was in grad school ('94-'97). The immense majority of the people in my program were foreigners; even the few citizens were naturalized ones. Most of us were sharing house, often room, had no car or a car that looked like it would fall apart if it encountered a larger-than-usual bump. A few students who had originally lived like that started buying cars and getting houses away from campus; when we asked how come, they responded it was from taking on loans. We had all been offered all sorts of loans and CCs: we were preapproved for anything under the Florida sun so long as we were enrolled in college. But those of us still sharing rooms and walking to campus before the sun came up to melt our brains were not willing to put ourselves in hock to Discover, Visa and whomever else; the people who’d gotten cars were.
You don’t believe that a midrange university education is mid 5 figures? Okay. Hopefully the University of Alabama isn’t too elite of an example for you.
Honey, don’t even pretend like I said there’s anything wrong with plumbers or that they should be looked down on. Don’t even.
You couldn’t be bothered to use it to look up tuition rates, so that tells us a lot about your true feelings on the reliability of the “the internet”.
Here’s some straw, take your strawman and go stuff it.
I think it’s not so much about public-versus-private, so much as it’s about the non-uniformity of it. Having your medical/educational debt paid off or vastly reduced by a random wealthy benefactor would be a fine solution, if it were a solution that were available to everyone.
A student with “no means” is unlikely to pay anywhere close to sticker price.
I know… I’ve considered getting a PhD multiple times in the past 20 years; I keep coming back to the fact that there are two things that are holding me back. One, there’s no guarantee I’d get the sort of academic job that I’d want, or that would be better than my current IT career, and two, the likelihood that it would be somewhere I’d want to actually work that’s close to my family and my wife’s family is tiny.
But I keep hearing anecdotes about people who go all the way through grad school into post-doc research and then are somehow amazed/surprised that they can’t find jobs that pay reasonably.
This stuff can’t have snuck up on them; all I can come up with is that they have some kind of exceptionalism going on and are now shocked when they find out that they’re not as awesome as they think they are.
It’s a very desirable school because of the football team, and one of the two “big” universities in the state. Less impressive universities do cost a little less (though, as I have said in past, 4x what they cost 20 years ago and even the community college is 3.5x what it cost 20 years ago).
You did, when you said they weren’t productive enough for a B+ student to want to do that. For me, it would be the physical wear-and-tear on a body and the possible bad hours that would make in undesirable.
Education costs have soared, far outside the pace of wage-growth, for sure, but you certainly were disdainful of plumbing as a career/job.
And any person taking out a loan for a degree should check on the wages they can expect to earn from that degree. A lot of people really do think a degree is magic and no matter what it’s in, it’ll result in good-paying work. Sure, school (both high schools and college) should be more informative, but ultimately, it is the borrower’s responsibility to decide if the loan is worth taking.
Just as another data point, my university isn’t even in the low 5 figures, if you omit room and board. It’s a good state school but most people never heard of it. it gets overshadowed by that other, more famous, UW. But it’s engineering program is* top notch.
Notice the plug at the bottom - #1 ROI! My experience would agree with that.
*or, at least, was.
Look, I never disdained plumbing, but if you’re determined to take offense on behalf of Joe the Plumber, then substitute dog walkers our house cleaners or what have you. I’m just pointing out that economic productivity is not maximized when a high academic achiever is forced into work that doesn’t fully use their abilities.
Nothing is wrong with plumbers, and they should not be looked down on; the work they do is vitally important to the way we live. But it’s a fact that if we’re measuring productivity by the dollar value of the work people do, then a plumber (50,620/yr) is not as productive as a business analyst ($81,320/yr).
Education is necessary for a civilized society to function. If Europe is full of people with bachelors and graduate degrees and America is full of high school graduates, then we will see the economic consequences.
There are many problems with the education loan system, but them being loans you can’t bankrupt from is a good one actually.
Most other loans (house, car, etc) have collateral. So if you don’t pay the loan back, they come take the collateral. This means there is less risk for the lender and so they can offer lower interest rates (~3-6%)
Loans without collateral (credits cards), have sky high interest rates because there is nothing the lender can reposes to get its money back if someone stops paying. If people can’t pay it, the lender just gets nothing. The high interest rates make up for the fact that many people will never pay them back.
Education loans are also without collateral since there is nothing for the lender to reposes. One of the major items that keeps education loans’ rates low is that they are so stinkin’ hard to get rid of. If they were like credit cards, their rates would be 15-20% and no one could afford them.
As someone who not long ago finished paying off education loans, and as someone who will be paying them in the future (for kids) I hope they stay the way they are. I am going to pay mine back, I want a low interest rate.
If we are assessing intrinsic value by the cost of something, diamonds come out as being far more important than water. Sometimes measuring the importance of things by their cost brings paradoxical conclusions – it’s better to think of cost as a measure of scarcity rather than utility.
Apparently I am missing some letters here. I apologize.
Well the average salary for a preschool teacher is 28,570 USD. so I guess they are even LESS productive than plumbers.
No, I don’t believe that going to community college for two years and then transferring costs mid 5 figures.
As others have pointed out, yes, you in fact did.
I did look it up, that’s how I knew you were wrong. And how I, and others, have shown that anyone can find the average salary of a job in about 5 seconds. So there is no excuse for not knowing how much you can expect to make before you take out an $80K loan.
Whatever you say, honey.
I looked at the small community college in my hometown and a nearby public university. Just based on sticker price, two years at the local college and 2 years at the university is 62,500 and that was with assuming that for the two years at the CC the student is living at home, so no rent costs. I’m sure financial aid could knock the numbers down but I’m not invested enough to do that math.
I’m also not a big fan of restricting necessary jobs to only those who can self-fund and I’m really not a fan of telling someone who doesn’t want to be a plumber or electrician that they can’t be a biologist or an actuary because they weren’t born to the right parents. (I also don’t approve of pushing someone who does have an interest in automotive work or carpentry into a white-collar degree college track either.)
In Aus we don’t repay our government loans until we make a reasonable wage. But post-grad is government funded anyway. (Where the universities can still make more money is on “bridging” courses and on foreign students)
I remember a woman from Austria who was re-trained because there was no work available in her degree area – that government held up their end of the bargain that there would be jobs for those who did the training.