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

well there's also something to say about idleness in the white collar 40h week

see: ilx.com

xp do you mean since he personally never put in 12-hour days at the sadness cannery in Manchester or something he couldn't know how rewarding that really was?

iatee ilx.com isn't loading for me ???

haha ilxor.com

I like how we have this overarching narrative about the american love of labor but at the same time we also believe that a significant % of americans are looking for an excuse to live the rest of their lives under the poverty line as welfare dependents

yup. then again i believe that the 'overarching narrative' is most often associated with one particular ethnicity of americans, while the 'significant %' are associated with other ethnicities. damn cynicism..

pearsockic

that there's really only two posters on ilx, velko and a sockmaster supreme

― harshbuzz to my chilt-on (zvookster), Wednesday, March 24, 2010 2:12 PM

zvookster would know about that : )

pearsonic isn't a sock

you guys all laughed at my farm camp idea and now youve all come back around

marx thought that once we overcame capitalism wed all go hunting a lot

dude was really into hunting, go figure

i'm not laughing at the idea - i actually think that a civilian corp (a year of military or non-military service, optionally) as prerequisite for no-strings-attached two years of college funding is a semi-brilliant idea.

nah silby re. Russell all I was saying was that as an aristocrat he knew a different kind of idleness from the laborer: it wasn't simply a way to rest his feet & turn his mind off, as laborers do, but rather a way to let his mind free.

even poor people have the internet now

facebook: the great equalizer

farmville: the great unequalizer

haha touche

allow me to raise the discourse: shit sux.

I'm liking this Bertrand Russell essay, though

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-the-jobless-the-mad-as-hell-millennial-generation/244552/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-unemployment-what-its-like-to-be-jobless-in-your-20s/244448/

just user emails nothing super enlightening

but I like the boomers/gen x/gen y narrative, we haven't talked much about that

I can linkspam my own thread right

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/09/05/rick-perrys-plan-10000-for-a-ba/perrys-college-plan-its-just-a-start

mostly just college profs defending the status quo

$10,000 for a bachelor's degree? Let's start by firing all the administration!

otm

haha I mean but you should see the admin levels in your av research uni, & most of it is aimed at nothing more than making more money---it's like the platonic ideal of Weber

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/Part_12.html

http://universityprobe.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Untitled-1024x700.jpg
http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-growth-at-uc/

this crazy old physics prof has written a lot of good stuff over the years w/r/t the UC system financing and costs:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/

esp: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/UndergradCost.html

admin cash is pretty sweet too

As an administrator at my research university, the disparity between administrators who reward themselves with golden parachutes into the millions and the rest of us reeling under salary freezes and the governor's forcing us to contribute three percent of our salaries towards retirement is -- well.

dangling modifier but you get it

that said, would your job even exist 30 years ago?

sure -- I'm the adviser to the student newspaper, website, and radio station.

I'm thinking of your assistant dean of undergraduate science research & the like.

were there really full-time people working for the student newspaper and radio station in 1980? (I genuinely have no idea, but surely there are some people who went to college in 1980 here?)

If there are good jobs, won't people train to fill them? The vocational part of a college education should be easy, but there is a lot about working that cannot be taught. I think a college education is more about quality of life, quality of existence, of which working is eventually a significant part, for most people.

I tend to take Dewey's line about the value of a liberal-arts-education in creating & nourishing a populace able to handle democracy

― Euler, Friday, 2 September 2011 19:17 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

where is the best place to begin reading about this?

liberal arts school

hiyo!

Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed", from 1897, isn't a bad place to start. I have it in my copy of The Essential Dewey vol. 1 (subtitled Pragmatism, Education, Democracy), published by Indiana University Press in 1998.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/education/13loans.html

Many borrowers, even those who are unemployed or earning little, can avoid default by participating in an income-based repayment program that began in 2009 but is not as widely used as might be expected. Under the program, borrowers who pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for 25 years — 10 years if they are in public service — can have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven; in 2014, that will go down to paying 10 percent of discretionary income for 20 years.

“In the age of income-based repayment, there is no reason for a student to default, since even a payment of zero dollars is acceptable payment, if you have zero discretionary income,” Ms. Cochrane said. “But as of April of this year, only about 350,000 borrowers have entered income-based payment, a small subset of the eligible population. Students need to understand the options, colleges need to share the information, and the department needs to make it as easy as possible for students to enroll.”

one of my friends is going to grad school - 100k for a non-profit type degree at a 'good school' - only because the gov't started this program. he considered it considerably less risky. I dunno if that's a good system in the long-term? also it's only available for public loans, so "there is no reason for a student to default" is misleading.

One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide.

― hardcore oatmeal (Jordan), Friday, September 2, 2011 4:57 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

+1

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/news/The-Art-Institutes--3531.shtml

Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice sued Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corporation, which is 41 percent owned by investment bank Goldman Sachs. The government has charged the company with fraudulently collecting $11 billion dollars in state and federal student financial aid between July of 2003 to June of 2011. EDMC allegedly collected $2.2 billion of that money in 2010 alone. That amounted to almost 90 percent of the company's 2010 revenues.

for-profit colleges are scum

Boger wanted a career in "live event and concert photography," and contacted the school after seeing its ads on TV, she says. "Ideally I wanted to work for Rolling Stone or Spin. They made it sound like if I went [to AI], they would help me find a job. They said 90 percent of their graduates are employed within one year in their field. They said, 'We have contacts at all the major music magazines.'

"I think [the recruiter] was telling me what I wanted to hear, because when I got out, they didn't have anything," Boger says. An AI career counselor gave her just two contacts at small publications in Austin. Boger was unable to reach one because that contact had moved to another job, "and the other said to me, 'You don't have the qualifications you need,'" Boger recounts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/education/21admissions.html?_r=1

In the survey, 10 percent of the admissions directors at four-year colleges — and almost 20 percent at private liberal-arts schools — said that the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants.

But they are not the only ones with an edge: the admissions officers said they admitted minority students, athletes, veterans, children of alumni, international students and, for the sake of gender balance, men, with lesser credentials, too.

important to note that 'colleges with a real admissions competition beyond a hs degree' are a minority to begin with. which is to say that those % are going to be even higher at ''good'' colleges.