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

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I was researching the for-profit college industry today at work, and it occurred to me that the Obama admin actually has done quite a lot of cracking down on the scammy operators in that field, and have genuinely wounded the industry, possibly mortally. Something genuinely good the admin has don.

really? any good articles about that?

It wasn't something I found in one place but I found a lot of different things that added up to that picture for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/business/international/in-europe-fake-jobs-can-have-real-benefits.html

i promise you

you must read this

Spooky.

How long till we finally admit that expecting there to be a job for everyone is ridiculous and just start giving people $40k a year or so for life by default?

there's always a semblance of an out provided by the existence of unfilled jobs and the insinuation that the people who aren't filling them are somehow above them, not trying, etc.

ts: unpaid internships at real companies v dole money working at a fake company

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/man-stabbed-in-face-during-argument-over-whether-college-is-worth-it/101003

Here’s one more reason to avoid the onerous debate over whether college is worth the cost: to keep from getting stabbed.

Police say an argument Friday about the “worth and importance of a college education” resulted in one man slashing another in the face with a pocket knife. The Arlington, Va., news outlet ARLNow reports the victim was cut from the corner of the mouth to the ear after the other man became angry during the argument. The victim received 60 stitches at George Washington University Hospital.

The investigation into the crime is continuing, the police say, and the suspect was described as a Hispanic man, 6 feet 3 inches tall, and weighing about 220 pounds.

The crime report did not detail whether the suspect supported the value of a college education or thought it was a waste of money.

with what i have gleaned from my expensive liberal arts education, i will surmise that the argument was about something more than that.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/07/helicopter_parenting_is_increasingly_correlated_with_college_age_depression.html?wpsrc=fol_fb

One kid’s father threatened to divorce her mother if the daughter didn’t major in economics. It took this student seven years to finish instead of the usual four, and along the way the father micromanaged his daughter’s every move, including requiring her to study off campus at her uncle’s every weekend. At her father’s insistence, the daughter went to see one of her econ professors during office hours one weekday. She forgot to call her father to report on how that went, and when she returned to her dorm later that evening her uncle was in the dorm lobby looking visibly uncomfortable about having to “force” her to call her dad to update him. Later this student told me, “I pretty much had a panic attack from the lack of control in my life.” But an economics major she was indeed. And the parents got divorced anyway.

Yet more "oh my god your kids are in danger because you're DOING PARENTING WRONG." Kids are resilient and can handle a wide range of parenting styles. Parents should chill out about whether they're "helicopter parents" or not and they should certainly not freak out that they're dooming their kids to a life of depression because they're "overparenting."

I mean, you should also not threaten to get a divorce if your kid majors in the wrong thing, but that seems like kind of an outlier.

One kid’s father threatened to divorce her mother if the daughter didn’t major in economics

what is the point of trying to make a point by citing crazy outliers like that?

#slatepitch

http://fox13now.com/2015/05/30/son-killed-mother-in-argument-over-college-grades-sheriff-in-alabama-says/

quick, you've got 20 minutes to build a thinkpiece around this!

"The student loan crisis: are 'baseball-bat kids' to blame?"

in with 19 minutes to spare

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/were-making-life-too-hard-for-millennials.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

The most educated generation in history is on track to becoming less prosperous, at least financially, than its predecessors.

WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS

right on track

wait, who predicted it? previous generations were also the most educated in history at the time but were more prosperous than their predecessors

as always with these things there's a temptation to infer a structural permanent trend out of this, but there's obviously huge cyclical component. and not just the great recession, but like, it took a long time for the white-collar economy to adjust to the tech bust. boomers largely benefited from the boom and we suffered through the "correction"

also it's interesting that alarm over this runs contrary to alarm about automation, at least in terms of what to do about it. if education is not salvation because young cohorts aren't seeing the value of their education increase apace or even decrease, we should educate less. but if robots are going to take away all manual jobs, we should educate more! what do you do?

previous generations were also the most educated in history at the time but were more prosperous than their predecessors

i don't think the causality here is what they think it is

?

copy to quid ag thread?

yeah sorry. like, to someone on the g.i. bill, returning home to a fully industrialized hegemon perched atop a planet of rubble, education isn't just a cause of their prosperity but a symptom. they are already prosperous as they sit in class. when we sit in class, we're dozens of thousands of dollars in debt and the gauge is spinning, which is supposed to be okay because "education" makes you prosperous. maybe prosperity makes you prosperous. the g.i. bill is maybe an unfair ideal so: public colleges have almost doubled in adjusted cost since 1965; private colleges much more than that. quite apart from the changing economy it seems bizarre to sell someone something for twice as much as it was sold to you and then talk about how surprising it is that they aren't making a profit.

so no i didn't mean that the hermetic concept "more educated generation is less prosperous" is inherently obvious or predictable. (i don't think the reverse is either tho.) just that the other variables in this situation are not exactly obscured or arcane.

yeah but the causation doesn't have to go one way or the other, it's uh simultaneously determined. education is both a symptom and a cause of prosperity. extreme naivete (education always creates prosperity) or cynicism (prosperity only results from hegemonic power and education is a frilled bow on top to make us feel good) both wrong

the return to education increased a lot since the 70's so in some (possibly perverse) sense it makes sense for costs to have increased. but kids born into generations with shit labor markets get the sticky high cost without the sick job. some people say student loans should be tied to the unemployment rate the year you graduate. (i mean like everyone else here i'm a hippie who things school should be free and unlike half the ppl who post here live somewhere where it almost is due to low costs & a generous loans bursary system but to consider something plausibly palatable in US) if student debt was more equity like before the recession we would have seen a lot less of these articles

"our kids aren't getting the white collar jobs we hoped for them!" is both a quid ag and a general concern because the effect cascades in a predictable way: when those kids fail to get the jobs they hoped for they push less educated people further down into less well paying jobs.

ok got xp'd, think we agree

iatee had a good run with these threads

RIP, so sad he got run over by a self-driving car

What about the federal debt part of the equation -- I know it's generally considered an overblown fear on the left, but how much of that is a byproduct of being the most powerful nation in the world, and what happens if/when we stop being the most powerful nation in the world?

what do u mean

I mean rising federal debt discussed in the article as among the headwinds facing gen y

oh, well the demographic shift will happen to a lot of other countries that aren't or weren't the most powerful nation in the world, and some of those countries have a lot of debt too. but the solution to that problem is not "not having any debt" but "letting immigrants into the country so the demographics aren't completely fucked"

ow much of that is a byproduct of being the most powerful nation in the world, and what happens if/when we stop being the most powerful nation in the world?

xposts is federal debt necessarily correlated with the power of a nation? this is a map showing central government debt as a percentage of GDP:

http://i.imgur.com/jTIlTjf.png

http://i.imgur.com/qGeh74K.png

So...kinda? Easier to go in debt bc you/debt owners both confident that you'll generate economic growth to pay it off

oh, actually those maps might be misleading, sorry. if a country is white on the map, it doesn't mean that they have extremely low central government debt, it means there aren't data for the country at all:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.DOD.TOTL.GD.ZS/countries/1W?display=default

Pfft well shit idk

debt/gdp is cyclical. varies alot within countries over time as well as across countries, and doesn't have anything to do with "power" or gdp. also, the fact that some countries have more debt & some less is necessary (world debt = 0) and good: if one country has a recession and another doesn't, the first country can borrow money from the second. i don't know how this is related to tuition and i'm still not sure what hurting's point was

in the scarequote good old days, the hegemony (the top single-digit % or w/e) funded the tertiary education system via tax transfer because it was a key part of maintaining hegemony. boomers appear, the universities were opened up. asia industrialized, detroit fell, you know the story. the only people who could make a decent living were college educated professionals; the policy response was "let's turn everyone into a college educated professional!" what was made possible is now mandatory. a degree is now worth what a high school diploma use to be. the hegemony has responded: why are we paying for all this shit? and so they stopped.

how i break it down to an extent.

the only people who could make a decent living were college educated professionals; the policy response was "let's turn everyone into a college educated professional!" what was made possible is now mandatory.

politicians don't choose how many people go to college and it isn't mandatory for anyone to go, though. it wasnt a policy decision for more people to go to college its more like, hey you can make more money if you go to college... so people went to college. also there isn't a small group of organized people called the hegemony that used to pay for college for everyone and then decided not to...

mb there is a way to work power and hegemony into an explanation of returns to education but its not an explicit conspiracy theory IMO

when college was cheap and being college educated meant comfy middle class job for life, it was easier to justify transferring the cost to individuals. that decision wasn't made by some hegemonic conspiracy, it was made indirectly by the lack of resistance every time this state or that state cut funding and raised tuition.

it wasnt a policy decision for more people to go to college

it wasnt?

also

the hegemony has responded: why are we paying for all this shit?

seems more like something that's *going* to happen than something that did happen. if sending all those poor kids to college stops being the publicly accepted magical wand solution to all kinds of policy problems, then things are gonna get worse for the institutions involved.

I think that shit is gonna hit American universities in the not so distant future and that's one reason I've left the USA

certainly all kinds of questionable shit being paid for by someone or other when really we should be transferring cash directly from extractive oligarchs to the bank accounts of everyone else, it'd be extremely low-cost to run

maybe once it all collapses and they fire all the incompetent boobs who haven't been educating anyone i'll finally be able to get a job

Ok xps sorry I wasn't explaining myself clearly at all. First of all, it has nothing to do with tuition, it just has to do with the article posted about the problems facing millennials in the future, one of which is (allegedly) growing federal debt. And I was saying that I feel like the left take is often to shrug off the idea of growing federal debt being any threat to our future (hope I am not strawmanning here, do not mean to), and I am wondering what take on that people ITT have.