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I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

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Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#331

Post by itronitron »

starpilot wrote: post #304
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've suggested to my kids that they study two separate areas. I think it makes you stand out in a very good way if, for example, you have a dual computer science / art history degree. I'm lucky though because my kids are dual US-Canada citizens. They can go to university in Canada and it's very inexpensive.

I asked a mechanical engineer in hiring if a double major on a resume made any difference to him. He said that if the major was not related to engineering, he really didn't care about it. They're paying you to be an engineer, nothing more. I studied Russian and in aerospace engineering in the US, employers absolutely did not care about it. I now resent the time/money spent on that coursework, and wish I had taken sta…

having more than one degree won't help someone get a job, but it will help that person succeed in their career

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#332

Post by fzeroracer »

tptacek wrote: post #302
tmpz22 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with vocational training that /r/personalfinance and similar forums trumpet is that it often points directly to manual labor which leads to severe physical decline and often injury. I hope industries such as plumbing, welding, HVAC, construction, etc. have improved and now teach best practices for safe lifting, mandatory physical therapy, and enforce them - but I don't think they do. Effectively what we'r…

I see this argument, about physical demands, a lot, and I don't understand how it's coherent. Somebody is going to do these jobs. Is the argument that it's not fair for kids who could go to college to be that person?

My parents destroyed their body doing professional fishing as their career.

They were very happy that I decided to get a desk job because they didn't want me to be in perpetual pain and disabled like they are.

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#333

Post by jki275 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #277
jki275 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they’re not. I retired last year. I deployed to Afghanistan multiple times. I’m literally someone who experienced the life you’re trying to tell me about. Your studies are mostly bullshit written to drive an agenda.

> Your studies are mostly bullshit written to drive an agenda. It could be that that's true of of a variety of scientific studies from diverse sources with no reason to have common agenda, or it could be that that's just true of your unsubstantiated pseudonymous anecdotal ranting in an internet discussion board.

Cite the studies and I'll be glad to explain to you why they don't say what you believe they do, or why their methodology is laughably incorrect.

Again, btdt. I don't need a think tank to write a paper to tell me how the military works.

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#334

Post by itronitron »

vsskanth wrote: post #4

Serious question: how does a parent deal with their high school kids wanting to pursue college in a field with a low probability of high lifetime earnings (art, theatre etc.) ? Especially when they are middle class without generational wealth to insulate themselves

Tell the parent that their child is as unlikely to become Lee Iacocca as they are to become Robert Redford.

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#335

Post by tptacek »

fzeroracer wrote: post #332
tptacek wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this argument, about physical demands, a lot, and I don't understand how it's coherent. Somebody is going to do these jobs. Is the argument that it's not fair for kids who could go to college to be that person?

My parents destroyed their body doing professional fishing as their career. They were very happy that I decided to get a desk job because they didn't want me to be in perpetual pain and disabled like they are.

So then your argument is that nobody should fish professionally, right?

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#336

Post by turk73 »

I have two children and one is coming up on college age. I'm not advocating for "Ivy League" for her. There would have to be a really strong argument for that because the prices have skyrocketed in the past 20 years. Nobody is "working all summer to pay for college" unless it's at some corporate internship that actually pays decent.

My kids need to be practical people, understand money and especially debt, and be able to make strong investments choices--and also take the risks I couldn't take. College debt is not a risk, it's a surefire way of being poor and having fewer options. You have to have a plan you can articulate whenever you are taking on debt.

The only reason I can see stretching to some rarefied school is because you want to connect socially with people who are more well off than you are in hopes of "marrying up." I think that what I just said did pretty much worked out for me--after all the hard work I put in, a fundamental irony of my life is that my happiness didn't come from schooling, it came from marrying the right woman whom I would not have met had I not sought out a PhD. You can't overlook the indirect benefits.

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#337

Post by chadcmulligan »

honkycat wrote: post #98
hajile wrote: post #71

And here we have once again why the government shouldn't be subsidizing student loans and shouldn't exclude them from bankruptcy. We need to quit incentivizing sub-prime loans. Unlike the housing crash where the houses retained most of their value and could be sold later, you can't sell your degree to pay back the money. If you're getting a necessary degree, it's very uncommon to default on your loan because you'll b…

I think this trade school obsession is foolish. Everyone cargo-cults it as "pragmatic" without actually analyzing what the jobs entail and what you can actually expect to make. Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without. You EARN that pay in the trades, and being an electrician is dangerous. The work is hard on your body. A lot of electricians end up on disability. I wasn't very academic growin…

I come from a family of tradies, I was one myself for a few years, then went to uni. You can't expect to do this after about 40, maybe 50, and expect to have a lot of health problems - bad back, foo-foo valves burst etc. Whereas with the professions you can expect to work as long as you want.

Then of course there are the tradies I knew of when I was young who are dead from it, not many but a couple, I don't know anyone who is dead from computer programming.

There is perhaps one trade that seems to be OK in my experience - plumbing, its not particularly hard work and there's always demand, but you know, digging up sh*t all your life is the trade off. You don't see many old plumbers though - they're probably out in their yachts. Worked with nurses in health for a while - the number of nurses with bad backs is incredible.

Go to uni

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#338

Post by qualqual »

leetcrew wrote: post #95
criddell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything wrong with going to school for an education rather than training. Frankly, I wish there were more kids working on a liberal and fine arts education. It's one of the reasons I'm a big fan of the free-college-for-all plans being pushed by some politicians.

this sounds like a really bad way to spend my tax dollars. by all means, use them to educate the next generation of teachers, social workers, and scientists, but don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years and still need government assistance at the end.

> don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years

This is completely false. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Art history students subsidize the cost of education for STEM students.

At least in Canada, your tuition is the same whether you study a STEM field or art history. But STEM has greater costs association with teaching, i.e. lab equipment, lab technicians' salaries, shop spaces, computer labs, etc. Much of social sciences and humanities teaching is based on a JSTOR subscriptions and a computer projector in the basement of a crumbling concrete building built half a century ago in the far corner of campus. 90% of the money that Social Science and Humanities students pay goes to fund the STEM programs.

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#339

Post by brandonmenc »

david38 wrote: post #90
vsskanth wrote: post #4

Serious question: how does a parent deal with their high school kids wanting to pursue college in a field with a low probability of high lifetime earnings (art, theatre etc.) ? Especially when they are middle class without generational wealth to insulate themselves

Just say you won’t pay for it. Show them the numbers, what it costs, what it pays, and say you aren’t rich enough to study a hobby. You need to study something you can support yourself with. They can always go off on their own and do it. At that point, they are adults and you’re done your best.

> Just say you won’t pay for it.

And?

There are plenty of banks and government agencies more than willing to let a 17 year old sign up for a crushing student loan.

> Show them the numbers, what it costs, what it pays

Most 17 year olds are incapable of making a good decision even with this information.

Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

#340

Post by dragonwriter »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #320
dragonwriter wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The odds are very low. The odds are very high for post-9/11 veterans (and higher the more of their period of service is post-9/11 within that group), who are more likely to have been deployed and seen combat than veterans of earlier eras (both because of optempo and organizational changes that have increased the teeth to tail ratio of uniformed services as support functions have been moved to contracted support.) T…

This discussion interested me enough to do some casual Googling. The US military's statistics from 2011 say that only 15% of service members are actually involved in combat roles; slightly over 1 in 7. See figure 2 and figure 4 here: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Improving-the-DoD's-To... . And, of course, not every service member who is in a combat role gets PTSD or injuries. If you have current tooth-to-tai…

It's hard to find any simple, clear, current figures, but this has a historical study for deployed units through Iraq 2005 (which clearly isn't exactly what we want), and it shows (in the counts that don't include contractors for Iraq 2005, so the ones that are actually addressing uniformed personnel and using the same standards as earlier figures) the highest tooth to tail ratio since WWII, as part of a late (relative to the whole period of study) reversal of what had for most of the post-WWII period been a trend of decreasing the tooth-to-tail ratio.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-ins...

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