generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

haha I'm prepared to play the bad guy but I think being somewhere w/ a sense of place is prob more important to me than most people?

I have said this in other threads but over the last few decades a lot of small towns or whatever have been drained of the sense of place they did have - if you're moving somewhere and choosing between walmart and subway or walmart and subway, well...(that's isolating city planning and local businesses as the only factor, and they aren't, but that sorta the raw material)

that's sorta*

lincoln, NE is actually quite nice

http://www.alternet.org/story/152809/the_http://www.alternet.org/story/152809/the__trillion_student_loan_rip-off%3A_how_an_entire_generation_was_tricked_into_taking_on_crushing_debt_that_just_enriches_banks_trillion_student_loan_rip-off%3A_how_an_entire_generation_was_tricked_into_taking_on_crushing_debt_that_just_enriches_banks

okay weird looking link but it works

lincoln, NE is actually quite nice

― homosexual II, Friday, October 21, 2011 4:03 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm!

guys... we have the internet now

it doesn't matter where we are... as long as we're jacked in... to the INTERNET

it doesn't matter where we are... as long as we're jackin... to the INTERNET

http://images.wikia.com/puppet/images/0/0e/Trekkiemonster.jpg

my jackin' just went up 200%

I wld like to read that book about the fragmentation of civil society, bowling alone or something like that. has anybody read it? any good?

time was your neighbour would lend it to you

when I think of people living in their big houses in America I just think of wemmick from great expectations

I would build a moat around my house if I could

I've taught using excerpts of Bowling Alone! I like thinking about this issue of "place", because I don't have any place I'm from, & so I'm prone to imagining or fantasizing about it. I think this is a common plight of children of immigrants, anyway.

I am also a child of immigrants and yeah there's something to that. I think that's one reason why I like big cities - it offers people a sense of place without requiring any connection from the person in return

I'm a child of the countryside and I like cities for exactly the same reason

yeah I can get with that; actually the place I live now, in the great plains, is pretty much a "nowhere" place & I confess that suits me also: I never feel like an outsider here, because there's nothing to be inside.

xp

I live out in the middle of the sticks and I hate the isolation.

I am also a child of immigrants and yeah there's something to that. I think that's one reason why I like big cities - it offers people a sense of place without requiring any connection from the person in return

that's an interesting idea, I've never heard it phrased like that

I've never felt like more of an outsider than when I've lived in small cities. The history of people is generally impenetrable; nothing worse than sitting at a social gathering listening to nothing but "remember when" conversations. In big cities I can get lost in everything going on around me.

My dream has always been to live in an apartment in a city. Sadly, I'm married to a man who is dead set against it (he actually suggested living in an RV in a city trailer park as an alternative!).

what's his reason? just a cultural thing?

every thread I start turns into the suburbs thread

totally euler's fault tho

It's because his dream is to live in the middle of nowhere.

But a city trailer park does seem like a compromise, unless you're thinking any place that would have a trailer park does not qualify as a city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/will-dropouts-save-america.html

all college students should just drop out and start multi-billion dollar computer companies - y/n

Well, one thing that colleges can teach is critical thinking, which might have been of some help to the author of that strange piece. I think I expect too much out of the New York Times these days.

Not a shock, the author is one of those bizarro "business gurus". http://www.powerofeyecontact.com/

http://media.linkedin.com/mpr/pub/image-GB_zBD8gFRyhjJpHA4PTB-FqwUGaioiHIOAhB7KqSkkl9Y6c/michael-ellsberg.jpg

Eurgh

If the availability of student loans contracts, or if students are less willing to take those loans, I would guess the non-prestige big private unis will be taking an enrollment hit, if they don't differentiate their environments from public schools. This is just a random thought I had on this topic he other day.

Also occurs to me that plenty of places likely won't even do something to lower the nominal tuition price. As long as there's still at least one student who can afford full pay, they will cheerfully extract it from them, even if the average discount rate goes up.

yeah I think non-prestige private unis are gonna be at the forefront of the crisis, cause they've always been offering a luxury product - the idea that they're offering a luxury product (rather than a 'better investment') is finally reaching the mainstream.

lowering tuition is difficult when you have fixed costs dependent on that tuition, but there are only so many rich people interested in non-prestige private unis in the country.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/how-dangerous-are-college-rankings-and-the-rat-race-for-prestige/245850/

^ complicating factors for those schools. people will always secretly believe that more expensive things are better and the race for that elusive prestige signal is expensive.

schools should charge a sliding tuition based on their national rankings

"non-prestige private unis" are prob gonna take a big hit---glad I don't work for one---unless they can get kids jobs that pay better than state unis, or if the bad guys kill our public unis.

the prob is public unis are gonna have increasing enrollment regardless in the future as they're increasingly considered 'the pragmatic decision' - so they can be defunded again and again before they'll actually start losing students.

that's true but there's a lower bound on how defunded they can get (we're playing with that already)

http://persephonemagazine.com/2011/10/dont-even-get-me-started-mythical-bootstraps-college-student/

http://chronicle.com/article/The-US-Should-Adopt/129504/

we were talking about migration in this thread?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/americans-migration-patterns-shifting.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/education/cooper-union-may-charge-tuition-to-undergraduates.html

RIP cooper union ;_;

founded in 1859 to provide free education for the working class

lol that game's been over for a while

But here's a revenue idea: contract students out for arch/engineering jobs and make them work for free. Call it an internship.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/

Despite the grabby headline, that article at least calls out the writers of the myopic Jeremiads for what they are.

I need to learn more about this bit of data:

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. […] Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading. […] two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA..

The goddamn liberal arts are still the foundation of our goddamn civic society, is what my takeaway is.

My problem: I don't have a degree. In anything. I should get one so that I can go farther in society. I'd prefer to get something like General Studies or Liberal Arts, something that gives me a good background in life. I know that no one takes either one of those degrees seriously. What should I do?

Sorry to drag this off topic.

my honest to god advice is to put a fake BA on your resume from somewhere inconspicuous and believable