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

not enough plato, i think

haha i know, right? philosophy ph.d. students were always seriously telling me a version of that! english grad students lack reasoning ability, apparently

skim phaedrus tonight and youll have an even better job the next morning

also we can't write

i was told by an adviser 3? years ago that i would have no trouble finding a great job

What in the world. (This was what was being said to us almost twenty years ago and there was little belief in that either.)

philosophy students are the worst!!

oh no, she wasn't talking about the academic market. she was talking to me about how i was imminently leaving academia and how great that was. tbf to her she definitely knows about the humanities market. i think it makes her feel like a criminal on a daily basis.

i was just saying, just by virtue of spending all that damn time in grad school i returned to the job market at a terrible time, as did many of my friends who completed the ph.d. but are now tryign to find any job.

i mean we all made some poor choices i'm not trying to say we bear no responsiblity it's just not a failure of imagination/laziness problem imo

not gonna lie, I am very happy that I stuck with a CS degree and that I graduated in the mid 90s when anyone who had ever looked at a computer could get a job writing software

well i am really lazy but most of them are not

Maybe starting a PhD next year will work out and I can skip the shitty economy.

If I don't get in as a CS PhD though I am gonna be sorely tempted to apply to philosophy PhDs next go round and then what will become of me

failure to know the form of the job market

failure to understand alcibiades' lust for socrates

how is jobby formed

so, I am not sure how reliable these numbers are or what they're measuring but:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

table A-4 on pg 15 shows that the unemployment rate for ppl 25 and older with at least a bachelor's degree at less than 5% for the 5 months, slightly lower than what it was a year ago

I'm not sure how that correlates to "no one with a college degree can get a job" and I understand that it doesn't include most recent recent BAs

yeah i pointed that out upthread--the real crisis in employment is w/ ppl who have less than a HS degree--but this conversation seems to be taking place in the context of "people not being able to find jobs" because otherwise im not sure what the point is

iirc another criticism of that is that it doesn't take into account the quality of the job & degree creep - a guy with a BA or MS is doing something like data entry that even a HS dropout should be able to do xp

the two are linked as college gets more expensive and the end result becomes less of a sure thing, 'the way out of poverty' is now just its own type of poverty xp

yeah that's a big reason why why the hs dropout is unemployed xp

why why why

> maybe some peoples' 2.3 gpas will haunt them more in that future?

After your first job or so, I don't know if anyone ever cares about your GPA again?

also, don't remember if this was posted yet: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/just-dont-go-the-sequel/30693

that's partly due to your ability to hide it, if we have permanent online resumes, every stain from your past might be online somewhere

Facebook Timeline iirc

I mean, for real, you can probably tell most employers "yeah, I partied too much in college, but when I hit the real world I got myself together, and since then I've x y and z" and they'd wonder why you're even telling them about college.

Unless they're just looking for excuses to cut people, which has more to do with the economy &c. than anything else, then why would they care? Like Don Draper always sez, it will shock you how much it never happened.

I think that is true atm but less true in our linkedin-timeline world where your resume, academic and (just as much) work history is gonna be less in your own hands

this is just my crazy futurist predictions and not super important tho

I think the other thing college students get shafted on is lack of "experience." Dan's right in that CS degrees were (and to an extent, are) a golden ticket of sorts but most companies still don't want to hire a fresh from college guy these days. Once you get 2-3 years under your belt it's like job city, but finding the places that will hire you right out of school can be tricky.

I guess it's like that for a lot of jobs, but with even less demand and no particular skills requirement

failure to understand alcibiades' lust for socrates

Nothing simpler. By the same token as cannibals, who think they can absorb the virtues of their enemies by eating their choicest parts, Alcibiades felt (it was not a rational matter) that seducing Socrates would set a royal seal upon his powers of persuasion - and the power of seductive persuasion was the keystone of Alcibiades' career.

*gives aimless a job*

(aimless tuckshis thumbs under his galluses and beams benevolently)

http://bigthink.com/ideas/41034?page=all

I've got a good bit of student-loan debt myself, acquired studying philosophy in grad school. And then I dropped out before finishing my Ph.D.! Well, I don't regret it. Sometimes in grad school you'll hear students and faculty both speak with a certain dread of "the real world." It turns out, however, that universities aren't actually located outside this here space-time continuum, but are part of the real world, and a pretty great part, too, if you're lucky enough to get into it. I don't know that when I took out student loans to help support myself that I thought I was taking some kind of "gamble." I knew I was redistributing income from my future to my present self, and not really because I needed the money to make an investment that would payoff, but because I wanted to study philosophy and I couldn't otherwise afford it. I was buying the rarefied leisure of grad school and knowledge of philosophy. Now I know all about philosophy, will for the rest of my live, and I love it! Did I get some remunerative skills in the bargain? I reckon I did. I certainly sharpened my analytical and argumentative abilities, which came in handy as a think-tank fellow, and come in handy now as a semi-employed blogger for The Economist and Big Think. But so what! I spent years reading and thinking about Aristotle and Kant and Quine and Rawls, which is not everyone's idea of a holiday, but I'll always treasure that time in my life, and I've got more to show for it than a scrapbook of exotic snapshots. It remade my mind.

Now, what I'm not about to do is pitch a tent on America's lawn and complain that "the system" has done me wrong. That would be insane. I studied painting and drawing at State U on an art scholarship. I studied philosophy at two more State Us, subsidized by taxpayers the whole way, either in the form of tuition waivers (for being a graduate teaching assistant, a job that doesn't really ask that much of you, to be honest) or in the form of cheap loans I certainly couldn't have landed on the market. ("Please, sir: I have an art degree with a mediocre GPA, and I would like your bank to give me some money to read Roderick Chisholm. Please?") "The system" gave me a very nice time, and helped me accumulate some rather luxurious if not exceedingly practical "human capital." So I'm not complaining about debt-slavery or anything moronic like that.

he's the success story of someone in his position - can pay the bills, enjoys his work, even uses his analytical skills - but at the same time he misses the tragic aspect. the 'success story' - a semi-employed blogger has very little career security, probably can't really imagine buying property, etc. who knows, maybe he can bank on conservative think tanks employing him for the rest of his life. maybe his blog will get huge or he'll write a best seller.

but in reality
a. not everyone who drops out of a philosophy phd w/ tons of student debt can get a part-time blog at the economist
b. even people like him who 'made it' are often in precarious financial situations w/ unclear long-term prospects

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204224604577030562170562088.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

when the WSJ sounds the siren...

"It shouldn't cost this amount of money for higher education," he said. "Class size of ten is not necessary for students to learn."

this comment must be from 1975 or soemthing

haha

dunno why the AEI funded this, but it's a good look at the consumer information problems w/r/t college

http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/HigherEdDisclosure_RELEASE.pdf

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/3188138/

this is just personal anecdata, but everybody i know who went to nyu is doing pretty well now. that said, most of them graduated in the '90s.

nyu tuition 1995: $19,798
nyu tuition 2011: $41,606

I like how they (legally) have to give you all the numbers, but they sure don't have to do the addition
http://www.nyu.edu/bursar/tuition.fees/rates11/ugcas.html
http://cas.nyu.edu/object/bulletin1012.ug.financialaid#TUITION

seeing nyu go from also-ran "safety school" to insanely rich & powerful elite school has been something

combination of right place, right time, right willingness to put suburban 18 y/os 6 figures in debt

i blame felicity

NYU's institutional factbook/common data set numbers

NYU seems to meet about 65-70% of demonstrated student need with subsidized loans and need-based grants.

By comparison, my expensive liberal arts college's corresponding number for last year was 91-95%. Harvard meets 100% of demonstrated need. Boston University, 89-90%. George Washington University, 93-95%.

If you're really interested in googling "<random college> common data set" the line I'm looking at is H2(i) in the financial aid section.

Basically if you do go to an expensive private college, don't go to NYU, because it'll be even more expensive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us/homework-and-jacuzzis-as-dorms-move-to-mcmansions-in-california.html

man I wanna go back to school now

UC sprawl

such a horrible place to build a new research university

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/11/21/111121ta_talk_surowiecki

The bubble analogy does work in one respect: education costs, and student debt, are rising at what seem like unsustainable rates. But this isn’t the result of collective delusion. Instead, it stems from the peculiar economics of education, which have a lot in common with the economics of health care, another industry with a huge cost problem. (Indeed, in recent decades the cost of both college education and health care has risen sharply in most developed countries, not just the U.S.) Both industries suffer from an ailment called Baumol’s cost disease, which was diagnosed by the economist William Baumol, back in the sixties. Baumol recognized that some sectors of the economy, like manufacturing, have rising productivity—they regularly produce more with less, which leads to higher wages and rising living standards. But other sectors, like education, have a harder time increasing productivity. Ford, after all, can make more cars with fewer workers and in less time than it did in 1980. But the average student-teacher ratio in college is sixteen to one, just about what it was thirty years ago. In other words, teachers today aren’t any more productive than they were in 1980. The problem is that colleges can’t pay 1980 salaries, and the only way they can pay 2011 salaries is by raising prices. And the Baumol problem is exacerbated by the arms-race problem: colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high-profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio.

The college-bubble argument makes the solution to rising costs seem simple: if people just wake up, the bubble will pop, and reasonable prices will return. It’s much tougher to admit that there is no easy way out. Maybe we need to be willing to spend more and more of our incomes and taxpayer dollars on school, or maybe we need to be willing to pay educators and administrators significantly less, or maybe we need to find ways to make colleges more productive places, which would mean radically changing our idea of what going to college is all about. Until America figures out its priorities, college kids are going to have to keep running just to stand still.

being a graduate teaching assistant, a job that doesn't really ask that much of you, to be honest

WTF?

why aren't teachers as productive as factories? honestly.