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This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

thelastpsychiatrist.com

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Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#41

Post by yalurker »

ahoyhere wrote: post #37
yalurker wrote: post #13

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of appli…

TL;DR? The essay doesn't knock college at all. It knocks the idea that the kid is better-educated at 21 than his father was, and that he has MORE opportunities because of it. It knocks the sad fact that the kid's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, but somehow taught the kid that he has to have A Real Job with a Career Ladder and 401k - or nothing at all: "The parents and grandparents, like so many parents tod…

It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma.

I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#43

Post by jerf »

fuzzmeister wrote: post #35
cynicalkane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to exp…

As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill.

Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees.

You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#44

Post by illumin8 »

yalurker wrote: post #41
ahoyhere wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR? The essay doesn't knock college at all. It knocks the idea that the kid is better-educated at 21 than his father was, and that he has MORE opportunities because of it. It knocks the sad fact that the kid's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, but somehow taught the kid that he has to have A Real Job with a Career Ladder and 401k - or nothing at all: "The parents and grandparents, like so many parents tod…

It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma. I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.

Yes, the basic premise was that college is more expensive now, but that college graduates are not any more educated than they were decades ago.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#45

Post by api »

yalurker wrote: post #13

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of appli…

It seems to be "beat up on academia year" this year. Yawn.

College might occasionally be over-valued in some areas, but it's not useless. Last I checked towns with strong top-tier universities were much healthier economically than towns without.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#46

Post by smallblacksun »

narrator wrote: post #15
starkfist wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Greatest Generation" refers to the parents of the baby boomers.

The "Greatest Generation" who guaranteed themselves the "Greatest Retirement" package. In the fairy tale, all the goods and services they consume will come from the magic money tree that the government fertilized somewhere with all the money they paid into social security. Back in reality land, a smaller population of heavily taxed and badly paid members of the Gen X and Gen Y cohort will have to change grandma's bed…

Um, that would be the baby boomers, not their parents.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#47

Post by jtbigwoo »

nroach wrote: post #19
yalurker wrote: post #13

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of appli…

I agree. However, another route would be to take a sum equal to your 1st year college tuition, and use that to seed a bootstrapped startup. Take a year, $20-50k, and see what you can build. If you fail, you still have (ostensibly) three years of college funding left to go, and you can probably pay off that 4th year through hard work by the time you graduate. When you graduate, you have the degree and a really interes…

As an eighteen- or nineteen- year old, I would have wasted that money almost instantly. Could it work in reverse with the money arriving in your fourth or fifth year of college?

Perhaps a curriculum dedicated to giving students more and more autonomy until they are working almost entirely independently by the fourth year?

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#48

Post by AlisdairO »

Overall I found this article disappointingly full of worthless generalisations.

There is absolutely no way that anyone who reads The Economist can have concluded that Europe has surpassed America in anything not involving riots, in the way that no one who reads Maxim can conclude that acne is in vogue.

I find this attitude deeply aggravating. Europe has simply chosen a different path to the US, and to pretend that the US is superior in every way is ridiculous.

Europe, on the whole, balances lower individual buying power and higher unemployment against taking substantially better care of its citizens, and much better class mobility. It's certainly arguable that the average citizen experiences a higher overall quality of life in (western) Europe than in the US. I can absolutely see how that style of life is not for everyone, so it's great that countries like the US exist, but personally, I prefer to live in a european model.

As for the value of a degree, when I went into my programme I was a decent enough (for my age) coder, with a serious weight problem and very limited social skills, and when I left I was a better coder with some good fundamental background knowledge, fit, and socially confident. My degree program did me the world of good - it's fine that it's not the route for everyone, but pretending that all degrees are worthless makes you look silly.

edit: It appears that my infrequent reading of The Economist has resulted in an unnecessary rant on my part. My apologies to the author!

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#49

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #43
fuzzmeister wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill. Many people are really…

[deleted]

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#50

Post by AmericanOP »

api wrote: post #45
yalurker wrote: post #13

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of appli…

It seems to be "beat up on academia year" this year. Yawn. College might occasionally be over-valued in some areas, but it's not useless. Last I checked towns with strong top-tier universities were much healthier economically than towns without.

You might want to think about that last point there.
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