The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe • Hacker News Board

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#181

Post by OJFord » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #161

howard941 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is getting worse. It used to be hard to get 5 year loans for new cars. 8 year loans are pretty common. With the vehicle failing to reach the loan's end of life these new loans roll in the old loan's deficiency until someone defaults. A still relevant earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476381

Is it common for modern used cars to not last 8 years? I know lots of people driving cars that are 10-15 years old at this point.

Is it common for houses not to last centuries? I know lots of people living in very old houses.

Perhaps mortgages should have longer terms too?

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#182

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

rotskoff wrote: post #109

jmpman wrote: post #9

H1B compete with the newly graduated college students. Before people say that there’s no problem with STEM graduates finding a job, I’ll counter that many of my coworkers 20 years ago didn’t have STEM degrees, and were previously English majors, business majors, etc. They were people with technical aptitude who realized they had picked a field of study that didn’t quite suit their financial aspirations. They were abl…

It's probably worthwhile to think about scale in this context: There are only 85000 H-1B visas issued each year by the US; 20k of those are reserved for people with advanced degrees [1]. Given that there are an estimated 3.87 million software developers working in the USA [2], this seems unlikely to be the root cause of the inability of some graduates to find entry level software jobs. 1. https://www.uscis.gov/workin…

Why would you compare a yearly number to a total number? A better comparison would be the yearly net change in H-1B holders vs. growth in the number US software developers.

That number may even be better for your argument, because 65K/yr entry level programmers entering a 4000K programming market seems huge.

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#183

Post by deogeo » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

asark wrote: post #53

zeperoni wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's difficult when there is a motivation and purpose glut. Lot's of people/kids struggling to find connection and purpose. They hope they can achieve this through higher learning.

An alienation epidemic. Everyone wants a job that's at least one of: personally meaningful, or clearly helpful to others. Also it should pay the bills well enough to gain you housing somewhere with decent schools. Good friggin' luck.

> Everyone wants a job that's [..] clearly helpful to others.

I can imagine no better symptom to show how utterly sick the current economic system is, than that it takes luck to find a job where one is helpful to others and paid well. Helping others in exchange for money is supposed to be the basis of the free market!

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#184

Post by howard941 » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #161

howard941 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is getting worse. It used to be hard to get 5 year loans for new cars. 8 year loans are pretty common. With the vehicle failing to reach the loan's end of life these new loans roll in the old loan's deficiency until someone defaults. A still relevant earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476381

Is it common for modern used cars to not last 8 years? I know lots of people driving cars that are 10-15 years old at this point.

I'm not sure how common it is. Thing is that the market for used cars is fundamentally messed up [0]. That 8 year loan on most new buggies will be underwater for all but the last year or so of its 96 month life.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#185

Post by kittiepryde » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

mars4rp wrote: post #155

ineedasername wrote: post #64

I'm not sure the author's suggestion that potential students be diverted to trades/coding bootcampts etc., will solve too much, and instead may simply shift the problem into those trade industries as well. Somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000 students earn a bachelors degree each year. Let's say 25% of students should be diverted into trade schools instead. That will mean an additional 500,000 student per year ente…

That is not so bad to depress some of those wages, my plumber is making $2k/Day. I don't know too many people making that kind of money even in tech, let alone other disciplines!

I think your plumber has additional material and labor costs you're not seeing.

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#186

Post by supertrope » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

gerbilly wrote: post #143

The money has slowly been taken out of everything. It's a deliberate program. When a new market opens up, like say the internet in the 90s, then the investors and the people in charge will allow some of us to be overpaid for a while. It's really not out of the goodness of their heart's. At that point they are focusing on market capture, and they need bodies to help them do that. Eventually they find a way to make tha…

Irrational exuberance. Corporate management labeling a department or activity a "cost center" if it doesn't result in revenue or directly supports revenue generating functions.

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#187

Post by cellular » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #67

chrisco255 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least, when it comes to cars, they have gotten better in quality over the past 20 years. Not sure the same can be said about higher education.

If this were 10yr ago I'd agree. The 80s gave us computers. The 90s gave us good simulation software and the engineers used that to build us reliable cars. The early 2000s gave us plastic interior and exterior trim that didn't rattle and fall apart in short order. Since then we've tacked more gears onto automatic transmissions, hybrids have become more mainstream, sedans and wagons have been replaced with small SUVs…

I noticed a 2014 camry dashboard creaks like crazy! The older ones do not!

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#188

Post by vonmoltke » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

drak0n1c wrote: post #98

luisaguimaraes wrote: post #83

It's such a shame that the state can't support the education system financially, so that 20-year old people wouldn't have to take loans to study. It works in other countries, so why not in the US?

Federally guaranteed student loans exceed $120 billion every year. That is a massive subsidy, and it may be increasing costs for more people than it helps. The glut of admissions being able to pay artificially high tuitions is emboldening administrators to add more dormitories every year, expand the administrative class, and build rec centers -- raising tuition even further. > Last year, FSA provided more than $120 b…

Two nits:

1) $122.5B is the total financial aid, not just loans. Per the table on page 8, loans amounted to $93.8B of that. The rest were outright grants.

2) The FSA no longer guarantees loans; it issues them outright. It's incorrect to refer to "federally-guaranteed loans" except in the past tense.

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#189

Post by downrightmike » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:13 PM UTC

SuperPaintMan wrote: post #37

lemcoe9 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is "do a coding bootcamp" the common refrain from tech workers trying to help non-tech people?

Because tech work is magical and plentiful regardless of where you are and everyone can become a programmer /s

The drive into getting more people to code is to increase the supply and lower pay.

Re: The student loan crisis is really an underemployment catastrophe

#190

Post by 0xDEFC0DE » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 10:16 PM UTC

gerbilly wrote: post #143

The money has slowly been taken out of everything. It's a deliberate program. When a new market opens up, like say the internet in the 90s, then the investors and the people in charge will allow some of us to be overpaid for a while. It's really not out of the goodness of their heart's. At that point they are focusing on market capture, and they need bodies to help them do that. Eventually they find a way to make tha…

Space and re-usable rockets, although that's not really your average consumer market. Electric cars are mainstream too and that's new. Solar/renewables were old but efficiencies and markets of scale (?) made it more mainstream.

We have a pretty long way to go before the computing market is efficient though (bonus: it'll probably be tied to the actual computational efficiency of computers at some point because the markets will all be traded by computers).