> I imagine this will start changing. When I was a kid, that group of adults had the benefit of cheap degrees. Today, now that group of adults is us and we did not go to school cheap (personally I don't fall in to that category out of personal choice, but most of my friends do.)
This rings true for me. The main reason I even went to college was because I bought the story that "if you do well in school and get a college degree, you'll get a good job and be set up for success in life."
Yeah. That didn't quite work out as planned. I enjoyed school and the things I learned from my degree were cool, but I use literally 0% of it on the job now, and it doesn't even help get me interviews very often, because it doesn't have the magic letters "CS" in it. Thirty years ago, a bachelor's degree might have been a ticket to a decent professional job, but those days are long past.
I'm not sure what I would have done as an alternative plan, but I'm sure it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. Not starting out behind a very expensive 8-ball could have possibly helped me a lot.
This is really a shocking dereliction of duty on the part of teachers and guidance counselors. It was just easy to go along with conventional wisdom and not apply any critical thinking and they ended up really screwing a lot of kids over.
All that said, I wish someone would have shown me the value of a really high-end education and helped me attain one.
Playing devil's advocate for a second, what if the teachers and guidance counselors still believe it to be true? They're likely from a previous generation or two, where simply having a college degree opened up most doors.
Then again, what if having a college degree really is still better than not? You don't have to spend $300K on undergrad to get a degree- and I think that is what we should be pounding into kids' heads. That's great that you want to go to a private school for undergrad and two more years to get your masters so you can be a teacher, but paying 5-10% on $300-400K and topping out at $65K/year is a shitty economic deal. Go in-state and work while you study. Search for the grants, so many random grants go relatively unclaimed.
It's like buying a car- when you focus on the prospect of a low monthly payment and not the fact you're paying for 95 years, it's easy to hide how much money you're flushing down the toilet.
EDIT: I took on about $50K in school loans and worked a minimum 20 hours a week through uni. I worked as a motorcycle mechanic, farm hand on a dairy farm, tech support for the college, hardware testing for a lab, and all kinds of contract development work. Sometimes in the same week.
Some days it sucked, most of the time it was tolerable, and it was often pretty fun. I also learned something about my own intestinal fortitude that school never would've taught me.
I think it is difficult for someone from my parent's generation, who had so many benefits (no offshore competition, defined benefits pensions, lifetime pensions, etc) to understand how tough life is now. You hear about it, but until you struggle with it it is difficult to know.
1. Work while you study: why work a part time job for $X and go to school part time, when you could finish school in half the time by going full time and spend the remaining time working for $2X? Work study is generally counterproductive.
2. $65K is still a lot of debt. Lots of my peers have that and $20K/yr jobs.
The truth is, there simply aren't many good options for today's young adults. There are a handful of fields that can pay well with a degree, but then you have the risk that you won't be able to finish. And there are fewer fields where you can work without a degree and get paid well. Even in CS, a field where you usually can get jobs without a degree, I've roughly capped out my pay without a degree at age 29.
So I didn't give up any potential salary earnings I didn't already give up by going in the first place.
My point is that college can still be a good option for lots of people, they just need to focus on the cost/ROI. The horrors stories that we hear about are typically from a dumb kid who went to an out of state or private school, got a a 'general' degree and had no job qualifications. Then they were shocked people were t just handing them money.
I've yet to hear a story about a kid that did two years at a community college, finished up their BS in engineering, and then had life crippling problems with their debt.
Is this not the case anymore?
Although the classes themselves took half a day (started at 7:30, finished at 13:00) the coursework we had to do was incredibly high, teachers never coordinated, they just assumed that you had all free time of the world.
In one semester I had to quit my job, and slept to little that I got incredibly sick, my apartment reeked sugar, because I was drinking coca-cola and energy drinks so fast that empty bottles were piling up near my computer, I slept on average 4 hours per day, and went from 110kg to 125kg
And mind you, this was to do coursework, NOT any kind of paying work, when I finished university my net worth was incredibly negative, right now it STILL is negative, I am living with my parents right now to dedicate 100% of my income to debt paying, and still don't see any perspective of actually paying it (specially because when I consider the past year or two, the average INTEREST I had to pay, was higher than my average income).
But in Brazil you can't ask for bankruptcy, ever... In US Student Loans can't be rid of with bankruptcy, but you CAN make another loan, pay the student loans, and THEN go bankrupt... in Brazil this loophole doesn't exist.
And Brazil has a incredibly high interest rate, credit card interest is 400% year, overdraft and personal credit interest in a bank is 300+% a year, special credit for business with government subsidies are still around 100% per year. (and I never saw anyone that qualified for it).
The effect is that if you are in debt, you are screwed... and if you HAVE money, investing in any business is stupid idea, specially with our high inflation (currently about 11% per year), it makes much more sense to loan to the government (that currently will happily absorb it, and pay interest that is usually at least 14.25% year + inflation), so noone invest in creating business anyway, so you never find jobs, startups are non-existing, creating a startup is bad idea, and so on...
At the institution I attended, FT was 12-18 credit hours in a semester. You could take up to 21 with permission from the administration and your professors, and up to 24 with permission + paying additionally for the 3 credits.
The difference between 12 credits and 18 in terms of work load and scheduling hassles is astronomical yet both are full time. Our professions always said 1 hour in class = 3 hours outside of class. Assuming that held true (it rarely did on an individual class level but on a semester level it was pretty close), 12 credits = 48 hours a week and 18 = 72.
If you're only taking 12-15 credits you probably should have a 10-15 hour/week job. If you're taking 18 I wouldn't even do work study on campus for gas money, you just won't have the time unless you want no social life.
My engineering classes all preached 4 hours of study for every hour of class- I don't think I averaged two for most classes and graduated above a 3.2 GPA. Except EE courses and physics. I had to buckle down for those.
Challenging programs have relatively little to do with it. It's almost 100% about the prestigious schools and the networks that come along with them: the old "it's not what you know; it's who you know," deal.
> All that said, I wish someone would have shown me the value of a really high-end education and helped me attain one.
Education is always valuable. It's schooling that's not always worthwhile.
I didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I didn't know anybody at the job I got as a new grad. I individually made more money in my first year out of university than most families did mid-career. I was not unusual among those in my program.
A degree in engineering pays off in part because it's a challenging program.
The degree is worthless. The wretched right-wing connections are even more worthless.
If you aren't going to meet that bar, then it's probably not worth it to go to college because you're probably not going to learn much.
This is demonstrably false, and a college education is still the best bet a person can make on his or her future. In the same breath people say "all our manufacturing jobs went to China" and "why not go to a vocational school and pick up welding?"
The options I considered were:
1.) Ivy League
2.) Smaller, 2nd tier private college, with incentives for in-state students.
3.) Private military academy, where my Dad went
4.) My main state university.
Since my parents were kind of lower-middle class, #1 was mostly covered by financial aid, so the real differences in cost between that and the state university were only a couple thousand a year. The doors that having that name on the top of my piece of paper opens are well worth it.
Options that would have been suicidal, financially:
A.) 2nd or 3rd tier, out-of-state non-Ivy private school - most are still in that 40-50k price tag range, without the endowments to offer the same financial aid packages.
B.) Out-of-state tuition at another state university - again, price tag in the 30-50k range, no subsidy, reduced prestige
Though i went to college, I'd recommend people who don't have a wild passion towards a specific subject (if the outlook is cloudy I mean) earn, save and buy a house in cash.
And in regards to passion, I don't mean necessary a love for something, I mean a drive to REALLY get good. If you don't have that for school, then work, earn and make yourself a good situation so you can get education with disposable income when the passion comes.
College education has quite a lot of worth, but that worth is much less than it used to be and the price is much more than it used to be.
A degree that has some value is useless if obtaining it costs you twice as much as that value.
The value of a college degree is largely up to the student. Chart a course to it that takes the hard courses and masters them, takes advantage of the research and other opportunities there, and the resulting degree will be worth something.
He got demoted to some horrible computer operator position because an audit of HR revealed his degree, and the auditors found that robotics wasn't computer sciencey enough.
The union grieved it and he was eventually made whole a few years later.
I've worked with software engineers senior to myself who had B.A.s or Ph.D.'s in math and no degrees with the letters C and S in them, including a few younger, fairly recent graduates.
I do have the magical letters "CS" in my degree, but I also have a second major in mathematics. While I must confess I hardly use a fraction of the math I studied on a daily basis and have forgotten most of it, it has served me well and there have been numerous times I would have been lost without it.
Pardon, but you seem a little bitter. I suspect you have no idea how good you have it, compared to say, most graduates with a degree in humanities from an expensive liberal arts college.
All that being said, if your intended career path is software engineering, I would tend to agree that studying software engineering is the best education to prepare for it.
They seem extremely bitter with little justification, to be honest.
> I suspect you have no idea how good you have it, compared to say, most graduates with a degree in humanities from an expensive liberal arts college.
Poli Sci degree from an expensive liberal arts college checking in. Ask me how many sub-$40k/yr programming jobs I've taken because they're all I could get with a Poli Sci degree.
It's a shame that we've somehow structured our systems so that we clearly do candidates a disservice, even though we keep saying that attracting talent is of the utmost priority.
(We are working to change it in our niche of Sales, but even there we have these same battle stories).
My CS degree definitely helped me out.
You can't just expect to give everyone a degree and have a nation of professionals, with "someone else" (people in foreign countries, immigrants) doing the blue collar work. For two reasons: one, there just isn't enough demand for professional-level work. Two, people differ in innate ability, and education level is often more useful as a proxy for that ability than for what it concretely teaches you. Giving everyone the same degree, even if you somehow get everyone to recite the material, will not give everyone the same level of ability - it will just destroy the degree's value as a proxy.
I wouldn't blame the councilors, teachers and parents too much, though - they have to focus on the individual case. Blame the politicians and thought leaders instead, who should have been able to see the effect at the collective level. If you're advising an individual, it's fine to assume that the market environment will not be affected by their actions. If you're advising a nation, it's not!
I'm doing fine now and paying back my loans. But I wish I better understood APRs and monthly payments and what those numbers actually meant in context.
I was the oldest of the brood, and my parents didn't have any money, so I chose to go to SUNY whatever for something like $8k/year.
Graduated with $1,200 in debt, for my apartment deposit and repairs to my ancient car.
MANY of my friends who went to prestigious private schools got bait and switched on aid in their sophomore year and got stuck with loans that they are paying to this day.
I would take it if I had a rich father, but mine wasen't.
He liked to brag he was a well paid union electrician, but we seemed to barely get by. After taxes, and my mom's depression shopping. (She didn't spent much, but she needed to buy something everyday. She was clinically depressed before people knew about depression. Later in life when she got a job, the depression went away completely. She is now literally afraid to retire.) My father always said she was the reason he didn't have any saved money. It wasen't the tiny amount she was spending, it was taxes, bills, life, etc. We did have money for emergencies though. I remember the family dog, a dachshund, slipped a disc. My father walked in, and said no to the operation. We all started to cry, and he asked how much. He gulped, and he finally said yes. She lived another 7-8 years?
Oh yea, why wouldn't I take money from him to go to college?
I just didn't want any more stress to succeed back then. I was taking hard courses, but my father was working harder at his job. When he died, he told me thanks for not asking for money growing up. Yea, we had our differences, but I never felt indebted to him for any big decisions in my life. It was a liberating feeling at the time. Looking back, I could have used some help, but glad I didn't take it. I did take the student loans though.
Plus, going to college was easier in the 90's. The courses weren't easier, but the price was reasonable, or at least I thought. My biggest gripe was the cost of used books, and transportation to school. I still think if I had a reliable vechicle back then, my college life would have been easier. Later in life, I went to automotive school. One of the reasons was I just want to know how to work on vechicles the right way. It was still pretty cheap to go to a community college in the late 90's.
I got by cheaply by going to a state school, and working security jobs. Actually, my best college jobs were mini-storage assistant manager jobs. These mini-storages are 99% full. You just basically sit in an office, and walk the grounds every once in a while. I would get all my studying done on the job.
Cost of going to school back then was cheaper than today though. I repeated that because I see how you young graduates have been extorted.
And it definetly wasn't a party school. I don't remember one party, but then again it was a state school that was out in the boonies, and most of the students just wanted to graduate.
I still knew the worst day at school was better than working construction.
I assume you never worked construction? As someone living in a rural area, working outside, staying physically fit (honestly a huge factor for me), working in a different place (all local) every 6-months to 2-years, making a minimum of ~$35K (and more as you learn more skills and management know-how) is not so bad.
I'm not saying education is bad, not at all. I am saying be careful what you disparage...
I have a good friend of mine who moved locally from the Kansas City area. He was a union carpenter, electrician, and framer there, so he approached our union hall. They snagged him up the same day, and was out on site the next.
He has full benefits. 401k, insurance, vacation, sick pay, etc... And he works for the union hall. He decides the radius where he works, and gets paid 38-52k year, depending on the specifics of the job.
Contracts last here from 6 months-2 years, just because there is that much work available.
I've honestly given thought going down that path, purely because everywhere needs construction. It's damn useful for houses to high rises.
I consolidated but I know that some of mine were at 6.8% fixed thanks to this lovely change:
2006-07: Replacement of separate variable in-school/grace and repayment rates on the Stafford Loan with a single fixed rate of 6.8%. Replacement of variable interest rates on the PLUS Loan with a fixed rate of 8.5% (FFELP) and 7.9% (DL).
We're at 6.8% right now.
Consolidation loans also offer a longer repayment timeframe I believe. In this way if you make the payment amount small but pay double, the extra will be entirely on the loan principal.
Back when I consolidated SoFi (and probably others) didn't exist. It might be worth comparing rates and terms with them as well.
My British student loan, from the government, is currently at 0.9%. It's never been more than 5%. I have cash I could use to pay it off, but it earns more interest in a savings account. (And may be useful if I want an extra £12000 towards a house at some point.)
http://www.studentloanrepayment.co.uk/portal/page?_pageid=93...
My loan balance was $96k when I graduated 4 years ago. I have not made any real payments on it and the balance is now $125k from interest capitalization.
Note, I went to one of the lowest tuition schools in the nation for my grad program and lived at home with my parents the whole time.
Despite the statistics, there is no obvious choice here. Why are the wise old people encouraging young people to choose the path their generation just got screwed out of? This generation of students has only ever heard of our parents longterm careers getting vanished by computers or foreigners.
There are still many state schools w/ scholarships that are low priced; or upper tier schools if the family doesn't make enough money.
It's not like they're taking out loans to buy their way into Dartmouth. They're taking out reasonable amounts of money to go to a reasonable school to get a reasonable job.
The "unrealistic idealists" in this situation are the people who think it's the student's fault for planning on getting the job that was more or less promised to them by society. And when they are woken up by the fact that there aren't jobs waiting on the other end, the rhetoric seems to be, "these stupid kids listened to what every adult in the country told them for the first 18 years of their lives!"
It's shameful to act like kids should've known better than to pay for a quality education. What the hell kind of society actually places that blame on children?
Now, the alternative is the same thing. Now adults are telling kids to go to vocational schools. Okay. By the time they get established in those fields, those jobs will be gone too. Then we can blame the kids for listening to us again!
Thankfully I thought it foolish to put myself in significant debt for an education I wasn't passionate about and a direction I wasn't sure about. The whole "just go and get it done" excuse is thrown at a _lot_ of young adults and those loans are sure easy to get. Just crazy.
Worse, I could if I had spent a year studying or so, join a free university, but even that was unnaceptable, the "right thing" to do was take a loan and dive in a expensive course.
I finished college in 2009, I still don't got my first legal job, and I still have debts, I am struggling to buy medicine I need.
Meanwhile everyone I know that ignored the "adults" and did whatever they wanted, managed to actually start a life, and now have house, vehicle, sometimes kids... meanwhile I just have a stupid piece of paper that is not good even to wipe my ass with (the university diploma they gave me is just a normal A4 paper printed in a normal inkjet).
No seal, also the Rector signature is obviously just a printed JPEG file on what is probably a word document.
This is a profession which needs to be eliminated ASAP. Councilors are absolutely clueless and are misleading millions of youth. They have no experience on the job market and just regurgitate what they are told. They mislead students, have trouble spotting floundering students and are just dead weight in school bureaucracy.
If you graduate MIT with a decent degree in a wanted field you are going in the right direction.
What if they decided they would rather be a teacher? A musician and band director? A serial backpacker? What if they are injured and can no longer take the 40, 50, 60 hours in a chair at the office it would require to maintain the level of salary?
Just because a college degree is often a great ROI doesn’t mean that it can justify the expense for all students, or even for all students with a "wise" career in mind at time of enrollment.
If you want to go into a less competitive career, going into a less competitive school can make a lot sense, often because the less competitive schools can have better programs appealing to less lucrative fields because the pressure is less severe than it is for an MIT undergrad.
Another top-school engineering graduate I know spent 5 years building water facilities (pumps, wells etc) in Africa.
There are literally government-subsidized student loan forgiveness programs for exactly this purpose.
> A serial backpacker?
Most student loans are backed by the government. As a tax payer I have no interest in subsidizing someone's backpacking trip. You can't be a serial backpacker if you have a car payment, rent, or a mortgage either.
> What if they are injured and can no longer take the 40, 50, 60 hours in a chair at the office it would require to maintain the level of salary?
A. Disability insurance exists for exactly this reason
B. You can make the same argument against getting a mortgage. FUD.
I don't know if it worked out for the best or not but it seems insane that university is so money driven here in the US.
- Oh of course you're going to college, only losers don't go to college. + But I have to take out loans. - Yep, par for the course.
So you're getting peer and parental pressure to get higher education, and in effect make a pretty questionable business decision: it's effectively a modern version of indentured servitude.
Maybe, maybe not. University itself is not uncommonly taught in English and English competency in northern Europe is generally high. If you're just planning to stay for the education then learning the language might not be necessary.
To some extent people make their own bad choices. I graduated with 30k-ish in debt (canadian). A reasonable sum considering the job options immediately available that wouldn't have been a possibility without a degree.
On the other hand I have a friend who went to the same school, but stayed to do a masters. He owes over 70. Still possible to pay down. While he's worried about that I'm 4 years out of school, 1/3 of the way through paying my loan off. We wound up with comparable jobs in terms of pay as well.
He's was in his mid-late 20s when he started as well. Not 17.
Never even considered that possibility, because high school had been such a breeze, and now I'm stuck with a huge loan and nothing I can really do about it other than make payments. Minimum wage is difficult enough to deal with when you don't have an extra $200 coming out every month that you can't make go away.
Of course I know about all of this now; in hindsight I would never have made those decisions. So, that's a huge lesson learned. It's something I think society will come around on eventually, but a huge number of students bought into the trap blindly, and are now stuck without a good escape plan.
I've managed to get my life back together and I have things under control, but I'll be paying that loan off for the next 20 years if I'm quick about it. The only thing I've really gained is a strong distaste for the college system. I've had to learn to build my portfolio and sell myself to potential employers based on what I can do for them with my current skills, rather than what I have paid to put on my wall.
I went to college not to terribly long ago, and I remember having conversations with various people (guidance councilors, parents, teachers, peers, etc.) about career prospects and the kind of income one can expect. In fact, I switched to Computer Science precisely because of a conversation with a fellow student regarding future income potential.
I also saw many/most fellow students actively ignore or avoid the issue of future debt. Granted, they were supported in their behavior by various authority figures, but they still had a choice.
Of course, the solution isn't to complain about the stupidity of teenagers. Personally, I think the solution is fixing how the banks give out loans in the first place (i.e. allowing them to refuse to issue loans unless they think they'll get their money back).
Unfortunately, such a system in the US would quickly run into trouble as schools would quickly get accused of funneling 'good' students one way and 'bad' students the other way and there would be accusations of unconscious bias of one type or another.
So we only have the "go to college/university" recommendation, for everyone, even students who clearly don't have the aptitude and would do better in a vocational school.
http://www.payscale.com/college-roi.
As it stands now, the "Brand" of having a university degree on your resume is still one of the signals used in hiring candidates for jobs.
I imagine this will start changing. When I was a kid, that group of adults had the benefit of cheap degrees. Today, now that group of adults is us and we did not go to school cheap (personally I don't fall in to that category out of personal choice, but most of my friends do.)