Yeah, at some point you have to consider the ROI. "Art school" is not going to pay for itself. I'm not sure it's even useful for anyone truly talented, and it's definitely not useful for someone who doesn't have talent. So I'm not entirely sure what the point of it is.
I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
381–390 of 463 posts
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both of my parents were union tradespeople, one of them IBEW, working on telephone poles. I agree that the "trades" meme is merely a "grass is greener" perspective. The low capped pay and lack of personal autonomy (if not strong discouragement of it by the union perks) can make one miserable, especially when you're pushed into it at such an early age based on others' perceived assessment of your abilities. Also, I wa…
> I agree that the "trades" meme is merely a "grass is greener" perspective Nah, it's a meme being pushed with organized campaigns that take lots of money: it's an attempt to manipulate the labor pool to bring wages down in certain fields by increasing competition for jobs and increasing return to capital. Of course, so is the similarly heavily promoted “train everyone to code” push.
Hmm. Any source on that or a piece of journalism ?
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#383>So we finance it, or our kids do, 45 million of us owing a collective $1.6 trillion in student debt that not even Bernie Sanders could make disappear.
Considering $1.6 trillion dollars is about what we spend annually to maintain our global military empire (when you include all the legacy costs including paying for veterans healthcare), it really wouldn't be very difficult to make it disappear at all. Of course, its a matter of priorities.
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#384And 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…
Military is also a good option to college, especially if your specialty is a skilled trade. My brother did this straight out of high school. Spent a few years overseas and then eventually changed his specialty to biomedical equipment repair. When he left the service he made 60k/year and after 5 years he is at 125k/year. Also when you are in the service, you are getting paid and if you are overseas, all your bills are…
The danger is the military can legally lie to you with promises of what you'll be doing when you enter, and in times of personnel shortfalls that might be true.
But they can also make you cannon fodder or a deck swabber.
And ask the reservists about military promises from Iraq. Oh you're in the National Guard? Yeah we're deploying you to a foreign country for years on end.
And once you're in the military, you can be summoned for duty if they need you.
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's many viable routes that don't have to be academic. I hate the idea of universities being pushed down everyone's throat. They're higher education institutions and should be for people actually interested in academics and possibly/likely research. Half of the 'degrees' we have now are not academic, and half of these universities shouldn't even exist. I think all routes are fine. Everyone has different interests…
That may be the case, but I'd still wager that, for the majority, self-study isn't a viable route - particularly in technology. (And, IMHO, the many alternatives to academia aren't nearly the rosey picture you purport, particularly for people who hope to be sure of employment in a decade or two. It's clear that, while many will still be here, many won't.)
Self-study isn't what I mean. Nor am I referring to present alternatives to academia. I'm saying the higher education system is broken and this is something governments need to fix (and stop pushing people into university specifically, and accrediting so many that are worthless) and society needs to change in.
There should absolutely be institutions for education or trade-work post high school. These should not necessarily be universities and should still be aimed at all kinds of individuals, but talented individuals that are not good at and have no interest in academics.
Currently those institutions are often not widely respected. Colleges have become the norm post-18. That shouldn't be the case.
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you don't plan to start your life at 63? I'm not planning for retirement. 63 is a long way off. There's a lot of life between now and then, indeed the majority of my life is between now and then. These kinds of "responsible financial actions" are a bit silly imho. Invest in yourself now, and spend your time well now. College pays for itself, if you spent $100k on a decent degree I guarantee you'll earn that a…
Not planning for retirement in that you’re not even putting funds into a 401k or other retirement account? I get it if you’re strapped for cash but it sounds like you have the funds to save. This isn’t clever, it’s irresponsible especially given that just putting a little money away now literally pays dividends later.
I don't mean not putting in a 401k. The comment I was replying to was implying throwing $100k into a savings account is a good idea because you'll have a couple million when you're 63.
I do not advocate throwing $100k into savings for retirement at 18.
There's a difference between reasonable financial responsibility (401k, match pension contributions w/ employer, etc) and spending all your young years worrying about being prepared for retirement.
Enjoy the life you have. Be financially responsible, but don't over-do it, is what I'm trying to say.
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the law of averages have to say about 435 out of 2 million? My point is that Rayiner was more right than the parent comment: AOC's election doesn't refute the point that a huge number of humanities degree recipients are durably underemployed.
A "huge number"? Rayiner offered a few anecdotes about a few people a few years out of college... he brought up AOC; I merely tried to highlight how silly it was to draw any kind of conclusion from (that) one person. I know the uselessness of humanities degrees is an article of faith among developers, but the data do not support it. > It’s also interesting that although it’s a popular target of those who insist that…
"Underemployment" is measured in terms of people getting jobs that "require a college degree." But that does not directly measure whether college is adding value: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/di...
> For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.
When companies start requiring college degrees simply because it's an easy way to filter out the bottom of the barrel in a world where we've pushed everyone to get a college degree, the degree isn't adding value. It's just overcoming a self-created hurdle.
See also: https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/a...
> In the present study, I use ASEC data and skill ratings derived from O*NET to test the relative education hypothesis, investigating whether college degree-holders increasingly find themselves in lower-skilled jobs as more of their peers attend college. The findings support the hypothesis that as educational attainment rises in the population, individuals with college degrees are increasingly shuffled into lower skilled jobs.
I think the fact that liberal arts majors have such a hard time getting a job out of college is an indication that college isn't actually adding value. If they stumble around and eventually get a career, it may well be that it's the experience they gain in the meantime that is really adding the value (even if the college degree is checking a box).
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#388Earlier 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…
You do not have to be in a combat role to see combat, get PTSD, or get injured.
My nephews serve as examples. Their non-combat roles were heavy construction, setting up communication networks, and airplane mechanic. However all three actually saw combat. 2 wound up with PTSD. And one wound up seriously injured when the plane that was delivering him to a secret mission got shot down en route.
In fact according to some estimates, the prevalence of PTSD among veterans of the Iraq war exceeds the fraction who were supposedly in combat roles.
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to a random inflation calculator off the front page of a search (no doubt a sterling source of information) that's about $14,500 equivalent dollars. How does that compare to what you paid?
I paid $2700/year for tuition, $295/month for rent on a basement apartment (this is Seattle, so even in the 90s rents were kind of high on something nicer), and skimped on food way too much. Like I said, it was easier in those days. Dad paid my tuition, I paid everything else with a minimum wage job (and later internships, upgrading my apartment to a nicer university provided $425/month). Doing the math, it was way l…
Yep, my Bachelor's in CS and Math from at SUNY school was $2750/semester plus room and board. I worked summers, worked on campus, got a job on campus that provided a room, and took out just a couple of loans. I don't actually know how much my degrees cost me, but it was less than $50K and my family and I struggled to pay for it.
My first job out of school in '95 was a whopping $35K/yr and some benes.
I'm looking at the SUNY website and it looks like tuition, fees, room and board is about $27K a year now. It's about double what it cost me, roughly $108K for four years.
Re: I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
45 years from now, $2.1M adjusted for inflation (3%) is $533K. A lot of these compound interest calculators don't show you the values adjusted for inflation. It sounds great when you get 21x your investment. 5x doesn't sound as great, but it's more realistic.
The 7% figure they gave is already adjusted for inflation.
Only if you think you're getting 7% returns after inflation, which statistically is highly unlikely.
$2.1M is literally $100k compounded at 7% over 45 years.