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The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

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Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#41

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

r_smart wrote: post #39
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that 18 year olds should be capable of calculating cost-benefit analyses and execute long-term planning en masse is entirely too optimistic. Our schooling is way too bad to expect that, and our brains aren't even fully developed until the age of 25. The fact that so many young people feel the need to go to college to get a career in the first place is a sign that our economy is highly imbalanced right now. P…

One of my favorite things to knock on about is how we live in a capitalist society but our compulsory education doesn't ever address basic finance & economics. Most of these kids have no idea what interest is or what their post graduation payments are going to be like unless they've had the fortune of a knowledgeable parent or teacher taking the time to explain things. It's kind of shameful to me that I was 30 years…

I agree 100%. Out of my 4 years of high school, which included several AP classes, the best class I ever took was personal finance. It taught me how to manage money, calculate the cost of retirement, and think about what money is in the first place. Without the class, I would have severely suffered once I got on my own. The year after I graduated, the school removed the class because they felt it was irrelevant.

The cynical side of me tells me the system is made this way so the rich stay rich. Seeing the direction this country is going in isn't doing anything to change that idea for me.

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#42

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

adrianN wrote: post #35
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a market failure or market inefficiency caused by an politically induced scarcity of housing through zoning density restrictions. This is true, but it's also a failure of policies that have led to the majority of job growth being in the biggest cities in the country. If we could spread things out a bit and keep smaller cities a viable place to create jobs, the bigger cities wouldn't be impacted nearly as hard.

For a company it seems beneficial to draw from a bigger pool of potential workers by having their headquarters in a big city.

For a society, it seems beneficial to spread the wealth out a bit so there's development throughout the country. IMO, our government should be focusing on improving society instead of corporations.

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#44

Post by kpwags »

jMyles wrote: post #14
austenallred wrote: post #12

The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women's studies or a wide number of other things you might just spend the next 20 years figuring out how to live with debt you can't p…

I'm part of that generation and made that mistake for sure. > The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The takeaway here is, in part: don't do something just because you're told to. If our generation stops doing what we're told (which seems to be the case), then this will be a small price.

I generally agree that you should think about what you're doing even if you're told to do so.

That said, for someone 18 years old without a lot of life experience, when you're being told to go to college, that you need a college degree to succeed by just about everyone, and being bombarded from all sides with that message...might be a little difficult to really think otherwise.

I'm fortunate that I went into a good field and didn't come out with too much debt, but I don't even want to think of what my family would have said if I questioned the need for college my senior year of high school.

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#45

Post by treehau5 »

Did any of these kids (and I am one of them, graduated in 2013) stop and think that paying 50-70k a year after room and board to attend a university was insane? I had the option to go to a nice university, and maybe my horizons would have been expanded, maybe they wouldn't, but at the end of the day I am happy where I ended up and I went to community college for 2 years, and the public state university, for the remaining two., driving 1 hour to college from my parents house. Crazy I know. I lived at home! I ended up with 1/16th the debt of most of my cohorts.

It's fine if these kids were just doing exactly what they were told or people sold them on the koolaid, but generations prior also had to navigate the diverse world of snake-oil salesmen and people hyping up things and overvaluing them -- you can't beat teaching common money sense. Simple math. Teaching personal finance should be in inserted into middle school and taught all the way to graduation.

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#46

Post by reader5000 »

treehau5 wrote: post #45

Did any of these kids (and I am one of them, graduated in 2013) stop and think that paying 50-70k a year after room and board to attend a university was insane? I had the option to go to a nice university, and maybe my horizons would have been expanded, maybe they wouldn't, but at the end of the day I am happy where I ended up and I went to community college for 2 years, and the public state university, for the remai…

I agree, the taxpayers were pretty stupid for taking on the risk that kids wont be able to pay on their student loans. Too bad for the taxpayer!

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#47

Post by crusso »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #28
austenallred wrote: post #12

The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women's studies or a wide number of other things you might just spend the next 20 years figuring out how to live with debt you can't p…

I made that mistake as well. Did what people were telling me to do and it got me nowhere. Got a useless university degree in something I liked because I thought having a degree would help, and was told by everyone that I was too "gifted" not to get one. Found out it just makes you super pretentious at retail jobs while you struggle to pay off the debt. I managed to pay that debt off, and 5 years ago I figured out wha…

Did what people were telling me to do and it got me nowhere

There will always be people who give you bad advice. I know it's cliche to beat up on the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality that has grown in dominance, but maybe this is a legitimate beef against it. If kids grow up thinking that there are no winners and losers, how do they learn to discriminate when it comes to important matters like college, degree, and career choices?

I just wish the guidance counselors talked about the ROI of particular degrees

My guidance counselor in the 1980's told me to stay at an in-state school in Louisiana with a recommendation, "Why are you applying to Georgia Tech? That's so far from home." I ignored her. She meant well, but I didn't trust her to tell me what was best for my future.

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#48

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #31
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has less to do with viable job creation than wider political issues. It's cheap to open an office in Iowa, but talent/upper middle class people don't want to move there. Not simply because of social issues, but because companies don't pay enough. IE if I can save 20% of 150k moving to a cheap location is only viable if I can save 30k not just 20% of a lower salary.

The reason people don't want to move there is because that's not where the money is, which makes sense. But when everyone thinks like that, it causes most of the wealth to concentrate to a handful of areas across the nation while the rest suffers from lack of development. It's not even. There used to be a lot of legislation that prevented that and led to development across the nation, but most of that legislation was…

I'm honestly curious -- could you elaborate and perhaps cite some examples of such legislation?

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#49

Post by tboyd47 »

austenallred wrote: post #12

The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women's studies or a wide number of other things you might just spend the next 20 years figuring out how to live with debt you can't p…

It's more than just higher education. The previous generation was addicted to easy credit. They used it to enrich themselves and solve every single social problem. That trend will probably continue until millennials take their place running society. I really do think that will be the major shift in American society, way more than Trump.

Re: The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

#50

Post by enobrev »

This article and thread reminds me of how lucky I was for being a stubborn idiot after graduating high school.

I, too, was told I was too smart to skip college and that I'd be wasting my life. And since I graduated HS at seventeen, my insistent immigrant mother was able to dump me into the local university regardless of my feelings about taking a year off. And, so, I partied my ass off every day and dropped out after the first semester. Mom wasn't happy, so I was allowed temporary quarters until I found a job, and then I was off to find an apartment, and that semester was all mine to pay off.

A year later I found myself with a shitty job downtown (back room at a clothing store) and art school (graphic design). I lucked into a job doing IT and on-site tech support (managing DOS servers and clients), and by nineteen I decided all the adults were full of shit, dropped out of art school and moved to NYC.

It was hard. Lots of work; Lots of hustle; Lots of failures and bad days; All along with the occasional fear that I'd made the wrong choice by skipping college, as I saw a few of my friends who had gone to college get to about where I was in my own career. They'd caught up. My head start was over; But rarely surpassed.

At any rate, I'm 38, back home in Chicago where the price of housing is far more reasonable than the cities I've lived in (NYC, Seattle, Los Angeles), working 100% remotely, and just bought a house. As for the stats mentioned in this article, my wife really made the cut as a 36-year-old bartender who also didn't finish college.

I definitely feel like I missed out on something important by skipping school. But my career hasn't suffered for it, and I'm not sad I missed out on paying for it. And I'm pretty sure spending my twenties in NYC made up for whatever I might have missed, socially.

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