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Gen Z is giving up on college

businessinsider.nl

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Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#121

Post by CalRobert »

hef19898 wrote: post #82
CalRobert wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you switch mid-career?

I talked about mid-studies, preferably early so. Mid-career is harder, but doable. It largly depends on your field of study and experience. The more you are working at the interface between disciplines / industries / technologies, the easier it to switch between those. That's a career choice so, you can try to be more generalistic, and make career switches easier, or become specialized. Both are valod choices. That i…

I realize you were discussing mid-studies, I just was trying to illustrate that one of the problems with the German system is lock-in.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#122

Post by piva00 »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #117
piva00 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. Society benefits from having a highly educated population, even if wealth gen…

You don't believe that the scenario I'm describing as it is happening before your eyes is a sound argument?

Given that the USA does not provide universally free education and still suffers from degree inflation requirements, no, I don't believe it's a sound argument that free education would make it worse. It will happen anyway, as it is happening in the USA, even if it costs a lot.

At least with free education everyone has the opportunity to attend it no matter your level of wealth or your financial outcomes from it.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#123

Post by hef19898 »

CalRobert wrote: post #121
hef19898 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked about mid-studies, preferably early so. Mid-career is harder, but doable. It largly depends on your field of study and experience. The more you are working at the interface between disciplines / industries / technologies, the easier it to switch between those. That's a career choice so, you can try to be more generalistic, and make career switches easier, or become specialized. Both are valod choices. That i…

I realize you were discussing mid-studies, I just was trying to illustrate that one of the problems with the German system is lock-in.

Depends, I think there is as much lock-in, whatever that means when it comes to education, then anywhere else.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#124

Post by KronisLV »

romanovcode wrote: post #28
dncornholio wrote: post #6

Wondering if social media is in part responsible. It seems you can make a lot of money as content creator, especially in NA. I don't understand or believe the COVID story.

Survivorship bias. Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money.

> Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money.

Some people are just better at it, have better circumstances, work ethic, are more lucky or something like that. I stream on Twitch occasionally, as does one of my friends. Their channel has grown to being 3x the size of mine in months, whereas I've been occasionally streaming for over a year. Their earnings from that are also a multiple of mine.

Neither of us really have large communities, but some people will have 10 or 100 better growth than either of us, which is probably applicable to most types of content generation or platforms out there. Here's some info about Twitch from years ago, some interesting trends: https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch (many content creators will never really "make it big")

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#125

Post by Mistletoe »

fabian2k wrote: post #32
Mistletoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average. >The average cost of attendance for a student living…

You usually don't have 80k lying around at 18, and nobody is going to loan you 80k to invest them (and even if they would, the interest would fundamentally change your calculation). And 10% returns is rather optimistic, though the number I've seen most often in these kinds of calculations is 6-7%, so it's not that far off. So this comparison doesn't really make much sense as those students simply don't have the money…

It’s not optimistic it’s just the historic returns.

>The average stock market return is about 10% per year for nearly the last century, as measured by the S&P 500 index.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#126

Post by Mistletoe »

77pt77 wrote: post #55
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

The NIH grants starting salary for a lab technician that needs a college degree is about 35k. They could make that at a fast food chain and not have 100k in student loans to start out their life with, it’s not hard to see why some might give up on college.

Is that 35K for someone with a PhD?

No a bachelors. Post docs with a PhD are expected to work for about 48k.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#127

Post by Mistletoe »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #29
Mistletoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average. >The average cost of attendance for a student living…

> 80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. This isn't the alternative for most people. There isn't an option to get a mix of 80k in federal and non-federal students loans to throw into the stock market. The real question is, for most people, does it make sense to take on ~80k in s…

No one said 10% real returns. It’s 10% counting inflation, which is the number I provided.

> The average stock market return is about 10% per year for nearly the last century, as measured by the S&P 500 index.

I don’t know why people are getting hung up on this 10%, it’s just the historic returns everyone in Boglehead and FI/RE communities uses. If you wanted to use the 6-7% real returns after inflation that is fine too. The numbers still are the same, you’ll just get an inflation adjusted number. You’ll need inflation adjusted numbers on your college earnings too though, I don’t think the “extra 1 million earned by a college grad” is inflation adjusted.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#128

Post by red-iron-pine »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #60
erfgh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.

>Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked. A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (w…

I've known electricians working in data centers that made more than I did -- as the data center manager. I was also in charge of service delivery and some ISP/networking functions.

But.

Dude was 1) union, 2) worked 6 days a week to make that cash, and 3) they were long, hard days. This was also in the big data center areas outside of DC (NoVA) and probably wouldn't be a thing in rural Indiana, or Outer Nowhere, NSW.

FWIW I also know a plumber who owns their own business and had several underlings and they were making well north of ~300k takehome doing mostly construction/new build plumbing work. But again, long, hard days.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#129

Post by red-iron-pine »

fabian2k wrote: post #32
Mistletoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average. >The average cost of attendance for a student living…

You usually don't have 80k lying around at 18, and nobody is going to loan you 80k to invest them (and even if they would, the interest would fundamentally change your calculation). And 10% returns is rather optimistic, though the number I've seen most often in these kinds of calculations is 6-7%, so it's not that far off. So this comparison doesn't really make much sense as those students simply don't have the money…

10% is the total return, but you see 6-7% because that's the real growth after inflation, which assumes average inflation of around 2-4%.

So you're getting 10%, but in terms of actual, real, concrete gains it's more like 7%. Also remember that's the average so it's possible to see years of 5% and then a few of 14%.

The 7% number also looms large because at 7% a year you double your money in ~10.3 years; makes it easy to plan for 30+ year investment horizons.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#130

Post by dahart »

squokko wrote: post #103
dahart wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why does that make it a valid comparison? What data backs up this claim about not considering college (as opposed to chose not to)? The bottom third of people who do go to college don’t fare as well as the rest, and probably considered dropping out. It’s simply not valid to compare the bottom third of college grads to the top, middle, and bottom thirds of high school grads. They only did that so they could say th…

The only people making a real decision are the people on the border. The valedictorian is always going to college and the lunkhead is not. The only useful analysis is the one in the middle.

Real lunkheads don’t graduate high school, they were already excluded. The argument you’re offering is at some level explaining why college grads earn more, and you’re suggesting it’s because they were better prepared for college, more likely to choose it, able to afford it, etc. That is true.

But your reasoning does not justify the comparison that was made in the article, nor does it explain why it’s valid. The statistic is comparing incomes for people who graduated college to people who graduated high school and not college. It doesn’t matter whether they made a “real” decision, whatever that means, or not. It doesn’t matter if some people didn’t consider college, or if some believed they couldn’t afford it, or if some chose not to go. The question the article posed is what is the financial outcome of going to college vs high school but not college, and for that it’s not okay to compare the bottom third of incomes of the college group to everyone else.

You’re rationalizing one of many ways to partition college grads. You’re failing to explain why it’s valid to choose a partition for one group and not the other. The article did not offer a reason to use the lower third of college grads.

If the useful analysis is in the middle, then why not compare the middle third of high school graduates to the middle third of college graduates? That would be valid, and it would show, accurately, that college graduates on average earn more. Comparing the bottom third of college graduates to all high school graduates is obviously choosing to lower the average income of the chosen college group. There is no evidence in the article that it was done to make the comparison more fair, it doesn’t appear to agree with your comments or share your reasons.

In case you missed it, I linked to a different version of the Fed’s report that spends a lot of time trying to tease apart some of the things you’re bringing up, but in a scientific and statistically valid way. They try to answer the tricky question of how much of the income premium of a college degree comes from the person, and how much is actually due to college. They are accounting for ability level, family income, family history of college attendance, race, and other factors that capture people’s ability to choose college, and separate their intrinsic skills from their education. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37464064

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