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

well yes, also morally

but I mean if you live in sprawlsville and need to get to your job, a cheap car is an investment that allows you to get to your job, the actual value of the car is going to go down but that's not the reason you bought it

and if you buy an expensive car, it's also not because you think it's going to increase in value. you buy it for social reasons, personal reasons, display name reasons, also to get places. but if you lose your job you can sell it. it's worth something as an object.

whereas college degrees - many of which cost as much as expensive cars - *are* generally considered financial investments. I buy degree X because it will increase my earnings potential in the long-run. (also cause it's fun to go to college, I want to meet girls, whatever, but if the investment factor wasn't there it'd be hard to justify the price. whereas expensive cars are veblen goods - people want them because of what they represent, not because a 100k car is gonna get you to work better than a 20k car)

well i just mean the resale value on cars is much worse than like any other product.

my technics have if anything gone up since i bought them, in contrast

I was going to say mortgage but the original nytimes thread reminded me real estate is way more expensive than $100-200k in a lot of places

whereas college degrees - many of which cost as much as expensive cars - *are* generally considered financial investments. I buy degree X because it will increase my earnings potential in the long-run. (also cause it's fun to go to college, I want to meet girls, whatever, but if the investment factor wasn't there it'd be hard to justify the price. whereas expensive cars are veblen goods - people want them because of what they represent, not because a 100k car is gonna get you to work better than a 20k car)

― iatee, Friday, September 2, 2011 8:13 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think id argue ppl go to college for similar reasons as buying a car -- what a degree represents, the status it confers, etc

(in addition to the investment)

I think that's true, but removing that factor from the 'financial investment' factor is difficult because they're related - do you want to go to college to fit in w/ the educated / upper middle class, or because it's historically the way people end up educated and upper middle class?

I mean, how much does a dartmouth degree impress people if you're 40 and you make minimum wage?

posts that hit a little too close to home

:( sorry I was trying to pick someplace nobody here went

haha i didn't go there also this thread is otm

I went to a tier 9 public school and I have a good job and all this shit about my generation being broke and unemployed/underemployed makes me feel guilty in one part, and in three parts just incredibly incredibly fortunate

I say good job in the sense that I make a living and I love what I do, I'm not pulling engineer or Goldman sax money by any means

fyi i am a college dropout livin the dream of a stable, reasonably paid (i live fine in brooklyn) job in retail.

also imo college was the biggest waste of time/money ever.

and i learned way more abt myself & how to interface with the world thru day-to-day living in nyc than i did in the classroom.

(i learned very little in terms of 'knowledge' at school outside of a few classes--one on science & ethics and another on middle eastern music.)

people should get a degree just for surviving in nyc imo

also otm in that i do feel incredibly fortunate that i have a job i don't hate in a field that interests me, when tons of the folks i went to school with remain unemployed or employed in positions they loathe. xpppppp

(i learned very little in terms of 'knowledge' at school outside of a few classes--one on science & ethics and another on middle eastern music.)

I learned a lot in college, in terms of knowledge. but i learn most by talking/discussing, and i was blindly fortunate to choose a school that made chatter the dominant form of instruction. But ... I learned a lot more from the social experience than the academic, and a lot of it was kind of ugly growing up and making mistakes. And I got very bad grades, mostly. But I don't regret it. I wouldn't have survived in a city, not at 18, not at 19...

I guess I'm saying 'different strokes' with a lot more words.

I posted this in the other thread but I think it's good so everyone shoudl read it cause it dispels the myth of 'you get a BA to learn valuable knowledge and skills': http://www.quickanded.com/2011/05/is-higher-education-a-bubble-fraud-conspiracy-ponzi-scheme-part-ii.html

it's all signals man. well, not all, and not for everyone. but mostly.

Yeah, another flavor to all of this is that since, what, world war II, stating the obvious truth that "college isn't for everybody" has had a sort of reactionary and anti-democratic flavor; untold effort has been expended by K-12 educators to get kids from underrepresented backgrounds into college. None of those folks are going to talk to you about why college might turn out to be a waste of time and money.

well sure. i think a lot of my college experience was impacted by my fairly negative attitude & overall disappointment with the way things actually were--mandatory critical writing classes at a 10th grade level, professors more interested in teaching you ~how to approach things~ than the specifics of those things, etc. idk, weird time in my life.xp 2 remy re: diff strokes

Finance interns make an average of about $13,000 for their ~10 week summer program. And they still complain about having to sometimes file.

I think what we're getting at here is that college can be good for signaling and can also even be good for the idealistic hippie academic reasons that some of us still like to believe in, but a lot of 18 year olds don't know what they want out of the process and aren't provided with information that might help them make the most of their time and their or their parents' money.

I'm an example--I've dropped (or been thrown) out of higher ed four times starting when I was 19.

harvard vs. umich is easy - howbout, idk, rutgers vs. bard? for someone 100% intent on going into certain fields, grad school, med school, the private school is generally a safer decision, even if it means massive debt. for someone who just wants to work an office job, the marginal gain might not be worth it. but most people don't know what they want to do w/ the rest of their lives at 18, and these calculations can get pretty complex.

― iatee, Friday, September 2, 2011 8:57 PM Bookmark

I'm pretty sure this is just not true, i.e. you would probably stand just as good a chance for law school/MBA/med school/PhD programs and most fields coming out of Rutgers as Bard. I could see Bard maybe giving you an edge in some field like media or the arts, where cultural capital is highly valued, but those fields pay jack anyway.

bard was a bad example, I was just trying to think of a regional 'decent' liberal arts school

anything on bottom half of this list would be better: http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf

anyway talking to one of my friends who (after months of desperation) just yesterday got a pretty good gov't job. was the peace corps job fair and not her elite university that got her a job, in the end.

btw something worth considering is that people with BAs or higher have an unemployment rate of 4.3

not that i dont agree that theres something "wrong" with the system, but unemployment rises precipitously the less education you have. which makes college seem like a not-horrible investment. depending on how much youre paying for it!

for reference: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

also cards on the table i am a liberal weenie type who would like everyone to go to college for the sake of going to college, what is the point of living in the richest and most technologically complex society on the planet if were not at least making the effort to give everyone the tools to talk about good books

I borrowed $160000 so I could learn how to talk about what I talk about when I talk about running

actually that wasn't a very good book sorry

but at least "you" have a job!

I borrowed 160000 so I could work in a cafe and listen to other people talk about how to talk about what I talk about when I talk about running

DAYO!!!!! my dear boy

if I were the president
I would wave a magic student loan forgiveness wand

then everybody could join an indie rock band

they don't have to,they could be rappers, or noise bands, or musical theater dudes, I mean the world is your oyster without student loans

you could become a dockworker!

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/can-the-middle-class-be-saved/8600/?single_page=true

still making my way through this article, not exclusively about college grads but does contain this

The return on education has risen in recent decades, producing more-severe income stratification. But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. Nearly 2 million people started college in 2002—1,630 of them at Harvard—but among them only Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than $10 billion today; the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution, which are creating much bigger winners much faster than ever before—a result that’s not even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the political influence that great wealth brings.

Recently, as technology has improved and emerging-market countries have sent more people to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the United States. “It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” Autor told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral (degrees), in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.”

College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

Without doubt, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. Indeed, on a relative basis, the return on a four-year degree is near its historic high. But that’s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree have been flat or falling. Throughout the aughts, incomes for college graduates barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a sort of wan celebration. “College graduates aren’t doing badly,” says Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on inequality. But “all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.”

from the same article, re: degree creep

All of that said, the overall pattern of change in the U.S. labor market suggests that in the next decade or more, a larger proportion of Americans may need to take work in occupations that have historically required little skill and paid low wages. Analysis by David Autor indicates that from 1999 to 2007, low-skill jobs grew substantially as a share of all jobs in the United States. And while the lion’s share of jobs lost during the recession were middle-skill jobs, job growth since then has been tilted steeply toward the bottom of the economy; according to a survey by the National Employment Law Project, three-quarters of American job growth in 2010 came within industries paying, on average, less than $15 an hour. One of the largest challenges that Americans will face in the coming years will be doing what we can to make the jobs that have traditionally been near the bottom of the economy better, more secure, and more fulfilling—in other words, more like middle-class jobs.

also cards on the table i am a liberal weenie type who would like everyone to go to college for the sake of going to college, what is the point of living in the richest and most technologically complex society on the planet if were not at least making the effort to give everyone the tools to talk about good books

I think this is true, but there's no reason it has to be done using today's college education structure. I mean we're operating w/ a basic model that's been around for centuries (okay it's a lot different today, but we've inherited the overall structure), not because it's the best of all possible ways to teach 18 year olds how to talk about books / create signals for the job market, but more because...well, it's there. in 2011 it still gets the job done. a BA is still a good investment, overall, I agree. but if you look at the trends w/r/t cost, value, risk - I don't think our current system is on a sustainable path. the best comparison is w/ our health care system.

another old blog post by the same author:

http://www.quickanded.com/2010/08/uc-world.html

basically the problem w/ online education today is that it lacks rigor, post-degree signaling, and it's mostly run by evil for-profit companies. but can you, in theory, get the equivalent of a *college education* online? absolutely. (this is harder w/ science and lab courses, but I suppose some institution could create a private lab an online student could go to.)

but basically, if college is just about 'learning how to talk about good books', there's no reason why we can't create a cheap, scalable way for people to learn the same stuff.

yes i agree with all of that!

"but can you, in theory, get the equivalent of a *college education* online? absolutely"

stomach flu worse today so p much all I can manage is "lol"

evidence-less techno Utopianism

I mean it's coming but the point is that it's gonna be shitty, cheap but shitty, & we'll make big money off it & maybe it'll be good enough for a lot of shitty white-ish collar work but that's not the Dewey dream & im gonna put my stake in that dream over further cheap atomized memorization in order to serve the ruling class

yeah I'm sure you can get one kind of college education through online services, but will it be equivalent to the traditional idea of a college education? by what metrics will you measure this?

what's the evidence that our current system is actually working when it comes to giving someone 4 years of education? it appears to be performing worse than ever:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much

45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.

you don't think an online model can compete with...this?