The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt | Hacker News Reader

The Lasting Consequences of Student Debt

npr.org

112 pointshappy-go-lucky199 comments

The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women's studies or a wide number of other things you might just spend the next 20 years figuring out how to live with debt you can't pay off.

I was brought up under the faulty assumption that if you graduate from college you get a promising career, so pay whatever that takes. Full stop. My entire generation was. Not one teacher or counselor or advisor ever mentioned anything about cost relative to career prospects, and now it's my smart friends who are getting kicked in the teeth, while the kids like me who didn't listen and dropped out and played with computers are richly rewarded.

I can't even count the number of friends with six figures of student debt and no career on both hands.

I think Peter Thiel was right: for some time Americans believed in a college education so fully, so completely that we ignored the cost, even as it skyrocketed. Couple that with federally-backed loans, and no one even considered the risk. 100% of the risk was put on 18-year-old kids, many of whom had never seen a day in the workforce, paid a bill, or had a job.

A lot of people will make it out unscathed, but for those that don't we lived through (or are living in) a giant secondary education bubble. But this time it's one that you can't bankrupt your way out of.

I'm part of that generation and made that mistake for sure.

> The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most.

The takeaway here is, in part: don't do something just because you're told to. If our generation stops doing what we're told (which seems to be the case), then this will be a small price.

Agreed, though if the incentives weren't so misaligned it wouldn't doom you to 20-30 years of struggle if/when you didn't think for yourself.

For example, if the loans weren't backed by Uncle Sam there would be some threshold at which the loan providers would say "OK people studying this aren't getting jobs." Or if the universities that were promising careers had their feet held to the fire somehow before it had to reach ITT Tech billions of dollars.

I've been thinking a lot about a model in which education is extended as credit. If students paid back a percentage of income how would that change colleges? I don't have all of the answers, and bootstrapping that kind of thing is rough, but I'm trying a few experiments along those lines that could be very interesting at scale.

I generally agree that you should think about what you're doing even if you're told to do so.

That said, for someone 18 years old without a lot of life experience, when you're being told to go to college, that you need a college degree to succeed by just about everyone, and being bombarded from all sides with that message...might be a little difficult to really think otherwise.

I'm fortunate that I went into a good field and didn't come out with too much debt, but I don't even want to think of what my family would have said if I questioned the need for college my senior year of high school.

Didn't people try placing the blame on that during the last housing bubble?

"You're throwing money away renting, buy a house! The value will only go up!"

>The takeaway here is, in part: don't do something just because you're told to.

Perhaps children shouldn't go to school at all then, seeing as how the mantra of the classroom is sit down, shut up, and do what you're told or else you are likely to be labeled with a mental disorder and drugged with amphetamines.

How is someone 18 years old supposed to figure out what to do? At that age I had no idea how the workplace works or how to get a career, don't event talk about a career I like. Some people have parents with insight or they just have luck but without guidance what do you do?

I think that 18 year-olds today are quite a lot more sophisticated than I was at 18.

But yeah, it's tough; you need to survey multiple sources.

With all the sources telling you different things?

Growing up on the farm, I had more than a decade of workplace experience, marketable skills, and exposure to life lessons like learning how to learn by the age of 18. In fact, I started my current career when I was 17. To just start thinking about those things after the age of 18 is difficult to imagine.

What I wonder is why we find it acceptable – desirable even – to shield children under the age of 18 from the reality they will face after that age? How did we reach a point where 18 year olds find themselves in your position? Historically, my experience would have been common. I think it is a travesty so many miss out in modern times. Learning about life has proven to not be a suitable replacement for engaging in life, in my opinion.

I think they shouldn't be sheltered from learning but we also shouldn't rub it in when they make a mistake. With the high cost of college I would argue making mistakes has become much more expensive than it used to be.

I agree, but it is funny you say that because I (and I imagine many others who didn't go to college) received my fair share of having people drive home the point that I was going to be a failure in life. How I was making the mistake. I knew better, but still, having to listen to it constantly through my younger years was not exactly a pleasant experience. I distinctly remember a few well intentioned lectures about how I needed a degree to get a good job, even though I was making a six figure income while they were telling me that! In hindsight it is kind of funny, but being flat out told you did it wrong, as you point out here, is still not a nice feeling no matter how you slice it.

> With the high cost of college I would argue making mistakes has become much more expensive than it used to be.

I don't know. The biggest cost of college is still, far and away, the time cost. I don't think that is getting any more expensive in the average case. A degree still roughly takes about the same amount of time as it always has. Other associated costs have definitely risen, but are a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost.

"I don't know. The biggest cost of college is still, far and away, the time cost. I don't think that is getting any more expensive in the average case. A degree still roughly takes about the same amount of time as it always has. Other associated costs have definitely risen, but are a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost."

From what I hear from my young coworkers they often owe 40k after two years of college. If you realize then that you took the wrong major switching is difficult with that debt load. That is, unless you have a rich dad...

Exactly. The lack of full time income for two years is a sizeable expense. Instead of being $40k in the hole after two years, they could have had $40k in the bank. At an average 5% rate of return, that is almost $300,000 after 40 years. That is loss of about $7,500 per year until retirement simply by spending time in school instead of at work for two years. You don't even need to get into tuition and other costs.

It was once promised that getting a degree would increase your job income by more than that $7,500 (or whatever number fits the situation). But incomes have been stagnant for 40+ years, with no sign of that changing. Without rising incomes, incomes simply aren't rising to compensate for the growing postsecondary educated populace.

yeah, it was an expensive lesson in the downsides of uncritically accepting large scale social narratives

Which, conveniently, most children and young adults are not taught (unless their parents are intelligent).

How is "did exactly what they were told" different from "did not think for themselves" ? Any kind of large decision demands a cost-benefit analysis, including opportunity costs, time value of money, etc.

The labour market does not change that much in 4-5 years (barring something like the 08-09 financial meltdown). It should be straightforward to check whether a degree is necessary in order to land a decent job - apply to those jobs without a degree and see what they say.

That's easy to say in retrospect. But when you're a naive and scared 18-year-old trying to navigate a life you don't understand you may not be thinking quite so clearly.

For example I have one friend who was an immigrant. First generation college graduate, parents don't speak English, and his parents take home more working construction than he does. That wasn't what was sold to him, but he bears all of the risk and all of the responsibility.

For those that aren't immigrants your most likely source is parents or counselors or advisors, nearly all of which were encouraging the same thing.

You've just had "college is the only way" drilled into your head for the 13 years. You've been told and conditioned to understand that if you do not go to college, you will be flipping hamburgers for minimum wage. The people telling you this are your parents, your friends' parents, your teachers, your principals, your guidance counselors. All of these people are supposed to help you, right?

Of course, you've also go to contend with the fact that it's culturally acceptable for your parents to toss you out on your ass the day you hit eighteen. So you're faced with the prospect of having to go it your own, at eighteen with no life experience and probably very little savings. There's probably very few jobs in the area, and it would be hard to live off them. Or you can just sign your name on a piece of paper and be whisked away to the mythical land of college. Who knows, you'll probably get to drink with your bros and get laid. Sounds like a great time?

At a certain point this stuff stops being "think for yourself" and is just straight up indoctrination. Maybe you're lucky and your school district has some kind of alternative program for trades, or maybe JROTC and you figure out the military isn't a horrible option. For most? It's not even a consideration, it's college or a life of failure. I can't really blame a lot of folks for not realizing how shit things would be. They were brainwashed.

You're assuming a proper amount of intelligence/decisiveness at ~18 years old. I was a fucking airhead at 18 (11 years ago) and, like most kids, listened to my parents as I thought they knew best. They were not financially intelligent and as a result, put me on a precarious path with the best intentions of me having what they understood as a better future.

I also chose a path back then (working in television) that has nothing to do with what I ultimately developed an interest in (software design/dev) later into college (when changing majors would have racked up even more debt).

It's sort of sad how much we have infantilized ourselves in this generation. We're almost to the point where somebody who is turning 30 is less mature and capable than someone 100 years ago was at sixteen.

100 years ago, manual labor was still a dominant slice of the economy; a sixteen-year-old who uncritically followed the advice of their parents would probably not be screwing over their career.

And if they could attend college 100 years ago, it was worth the investment.

I still find it disappointing how dysfunctional we expect people to be these days. My grandfather had four children at my age, and had fought kamikaze pilots off Okinawa.

At age 9, Abraham Lincoln's father left for half a year. Abraham had to take care of his sister, hunt for food with a rifle, and chop wood to stay warm. This was in a 1-room house with no running water, no electricity, a dirt floor, and no privacy.

He turned out OK with that parenting, even elected president. Modern social services would have put him in a foster home.

> You're assuming a proper amount of intelligence/decisiveness at ~18 years old.

18 year olds don't lack intelligence, they (in general) lack impulse control and the practical ability to effectively weigh consequences of concrete decisions (evaluating them in the abstract is not a problem.) This ability generally isn't fully fenced until the mid-20s.

Assuming that 18 year olds should be capable of calculating cost-benefit analyses and execute long-term planning en masse is entirely too optimistic. Our schooling is way too bad to expect that, and our brains aren't even fully developed until the age of 25.

The fact that so many young people feel the need to go to college to get a career in the first place is a sign that our economy is highly imbalanced right now. People shouldn't need degrees to live a comfortable life, yet here we are, completely thrown off due to an extreme drop in demand for labor.

One of my favorite things to knock on about is how we live in a capitalist society but our compulsory education doesn't ever address basic finance & economics. Most of these kids have no idea what interest is or what their post graduation payments are going to be like unless they've had the fortune of a knowledgeable parent or teacher taking the time to explain things.

It's kind of shameful to me that I was 30 years old and getting an engineering degree before I ever encountered the idea that money has a time value, hence interest.

I agree 100%. Out of my 4 years of high school, which included several AP classes, the best class I ever took was personal finance. It taught me how to manage money, calculate the cost of retirement, and think about what money is in the first place. Without the class, I would have severely suffered once I got on my own. The year after I graduated, the school removed the class because they felt it was irrelevant.

The cynical side of me tells me the system is made this way so the rich stay rich. Seeing the direction this country is going in isn't doing anything to change that idea for me.

I really doubt there's some cabal of rich people that don't want others to understand interest. If anything, it would be to their advantage to have more potential business partners floating around out there.

I think the reality is more likely that people working in schools are public employees, they tend to be apathetic or hostile towards capitalism, and not terribly interested in boring business stuff. These are the people who set the curriculum.

Public employees in most other developed countries seem to do a pretty good job, though. Why do you think they succeed where America fails?

You think they're doing a good job of educating the public school students, particularly in terms of money? I don't think I've got the information to agree or disagree with that. I'm inclined to say they're not succeeding where the US fails, but, again, not really qualified to say.

Major citation needed on that one i'm afraid. Pretty much worldwide, the public sector and government are regarded by many as slow, excessively bureaucratic and failing the youth.

What is interesting is that, for many people, it doesn't really become a capitalistic society until they turn 18. That compulsory formal education you mention, and the social norms surrounding it, often shields the youth from the real world, taking the lessons the real world can provide them away until much later in life, as you experienced.

It seems like at this point at lot of the education we feel is necessary exists simply, and perhaps ironically, to make up for the lack of that exposure one has to reality because of the heavy focus on formal education through one's formative years. I would even suggest that we've created a situation where the more formal education one receives, even more formal education is required to make up for what what education was lost in the process.

Interesting points. I think there's definitely something to be said for education curricula having lost the plot. It seems more and more to me that a lot of the first few years of college is really just teaching things you should have already learned in high school.

I also think we've drifted towards thinking that all education takes place in a school. Things like parental mentorship, working a job while in school, extracurricular reading or building things for fun are falling a bit by the wayside. Education is (or should be) a lot more than attending lectures in a classroom, even at the middle school and high school levels.

My GF is a school counselor, and one of her constant sources of frustration is how much stuff is getting pushed onto schools to do which really isn't in their provenance.

>>One of my favorite things to knock on about is how we live in a capitalist society but our compulsory education doesn't ever address basic finance & economics.

That is largely high school math + common sense.

They actually do teach a lot of life skills at school. One just needs to pay attention.

The true reason why people take personal finance later in life is because they burn their hands, and learn the lessons the hard way through some failure.

Just a side note: I always take issue with the "brains aren't fully developed until 25" factoid. What does "fully developed" even mean? We certainly learn things after the age of 25...isn't learning brain development?

I've put a link down below, and you can find many more if you google "brain development 25". Basically, in adolescence people go through a phase of synaptic pruning, where the brain rewires and gets rid of a lot of unnecessary connections. During this time, certain parts of the brain involved in long-term planning, repercussion prediction, impulse control, social status, and a lot more don't function nearly as well as normal. This process continues up until about age 25 and ends with the prefrontal cortex, which handles some of the more complex computations like planning and long-term goal attainment. Many consider this the reason why people in their late teens and early twenties are goobers who are more worried about social status and having fun than meeting long-term goals.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...

You're right

One aspect that supports useless degree seekers is that it's not about "today's" job market, its about having the degree forever to give an advantage in any job market

Oops!

The first thing the mob will do is come for the intelligentsia so no use telling people that their parents were wrong or that they were gullible

We need the state to do all that hard thinking for us. That is why we (millennials) were so enthusiastic for Sanders. We were duped when it came to education but, let me tell you, our political intuition is right on target.

Society and the state have decided that people this young can't think for themselves. We already have stuff like drinking laws which say you cant handle alcohol till youre 21, but here please decide the course of your life and if you want to get into 10's of thousands of dollars of debt right now. We also tie Fafsa money to your parents with little recourse to do anything if they don't decide to help you out. Society expecting 18 year olds to follow these rules, but also be responsible and critical thinking adults is just being hypocritical

I made that mistake as well. Did what people were telling me to do and it got me nowhere. Got a useless university degree in something I liked because I thought having a degree would help, and was told by everyone that I was too "gifted" not to get one. Found out it just makes you super pretentious at retail jobs while you struggle to pay off the debt.

I managed to pay that debt off, and 5 years ago I figured out what I should actually do, went back to school yet again, and again I've spent the last 3 years again paying off the exact average amount of student loan debt in a job that seems to pay about $100k less than what the valley pays.

Just payed off the last of my student debt in one big lump sum on Sunday. I was super aggressive paying off my loans and I'm so very thankful they are done. Now in my mid 30's, used to living like a pauper but entirely debt free, and I can finally start putting my money towards things that matter. I really wish I'd gotten good advice about where I should probably head a decade and a half ago, when I still had savings and a larger support network. I would have only had to go through this once, though I know I'm one of the lucky ones in that I've been able to pay it off at all.

I'm not against student debt in general, schools unfortunately cost money, I just wish the guidance counselors talked about the ROI of particular degrees and pushed the trades and technical colleges harder. My ability to talk about the socioeconomic results of the black plague doesn't enhance my employability. Thankfully I figured out that SQL, Python, and C# does on my own.

Did what people were telling me to do and it got me nowhere

There will always be people who give you bad advice. I know it's cliche to beat up on the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality that has grown in dominance, but maybe this is a legitimate beef against it. If kids grow up thinking that there are no winners and losers, how do they learn to discriminate when it comes to important matters like college, degree, and career choices?

I just wish the guidance counselors talked about the ROI of particular degrees

My guidance counselor in the 1980's told me to stay at an in-state school in Louisiana with a recommendation, "Why are you applying to Georgia Tech? That's so far from home." I ignored her. She meant well, but I didn't trust her to tell me what was best for my future.

Thing is, of all my peers, all of us share that same experience.

I think it's great that some folks here either didn't receive that bad advice or ignored it, but the reality is, lots of people have gotten screwed with a lot of debt, by listening to their elders.

And I personally kinda hate that "everyone gets a trophy" mentality, because you know what? It was never us kids who were asking for trophies. It was always the adults coming up with that goofy shit and foisting it on us. And yet, somehow, my generation's the one accused of being a snowflake generation...

Yeah, unfortunately I was a dutiful kid who trusted and listened to the advice to those who offered it. Made that first round of bad choices pretty devastating. Which is why I'm only finally crawling out of the flaming wreckage that was my initial career trajectory now.

Perhaps one of the silver linings of growing up poor was that I, and my friends, were conscious of money, or its lack. I wanted to pursue a writing degree and knew I shouldn't spend a ton of money on it, so I stayed local and worked to mostly pay my way through my first degree. My friends went to fancier schools, but did it in pursuit of business degrees, looking to get a good return on their education.

The point being, because we maybe understood money a little better, we made more practical decisions with regards to education. We certainly didn't get useful advice from our parents or school.

You make a good point. Yet the entire time I'm reading it, the main thought going through my mind, is people shouldn't have to make choices like this about education. And definitely not in a democracy.

100%. It's a broken system with misaligned incentives. The college doesn't have to care if you get a job, the loans are backed by the federal government so there's no risk there, and 100% of the risk is placed on the shoulders of the student.

Even if we didn't have government sponsored education straight up, if any of the money involved were dependent upon a student's career success I believe we'd see a very different educational system.

Are you saying to get rid of the federal government backing of the loan? Let the banks making the loans sink or swim based upon the success of the students and their ability to pay it back?

In my ideal world (I'm trying to start a company that will eventually do this, but hard for obvious reasons) college would be a place where you "just show up," you learn what you need to, then you pay back the school with a percentage of income. The percentage piece aligns incentives, because the school is now invested in you earning the highest income, and it's now in part the school's responsibility to make sure it's providing skills that are in-demand in the workforce.

I also think a system like this would help a lot of the social divide; right now it's much more risky for poor people to go to college (or trade school), so many opt out. I'm obviously biased and could be wrong, it's just a problem that's been eating at me for a long time.

I like the idea in general, but a few issues seem problematic to me.

The school would seem to have a strong incentive to only accept applicants who they are pretty sure will make a lot of money. The incentive isn't to teach anyone who shows up.

The school would also seem to have a strong incentive to control the life decisions of students after they leave. i.e. they won't want to let students switch careers after they discover they weren't cut out to be whatever they trained for.

Collecting a percentage of income seems like it might be difficult to enforce. People are eventually going to decide they've paid the school enough and want to stop paying. Is the school going to constantly face legal costs trying to recapture it?

Furthermore, legally, can you sign a contract that permanantly grants a percentage of your income? I'm wondering if that would be declared invalid by the courts.

> The school would seem to have a strong incentive to only accept applicants who they are pretty sure will make a lot of money. The incentive isn't to teach anyone who shows up

That's true at first, but at a certain point the incremental cost of each additional student gets really low. Consider existing scholarships and financial aid - you can work in a level of "default" or "higher risk" into the student "portfolio".

> The school would have a strong incentive to control the lives of students

That's true

> Collecting a percentage of income might be difficult to enforce

Not sure how it's more difficult to enforce than any other type of debt, other than if income is misreported. (That's easy: require a W2).

> Legslly, can you sign a contract that permanently grants a percentage of your income?

I don't view it as a "permanently" thing. Just x% for the first y years.

>The school would seem to have a strong incentive to only accept applicants who they are pretty sure will make a lot of money. The incentive isn't to teach anyone who shows up.

They would also have a big incentive to boot you if you had a bad semester or two, like an underperforming stock or race horse.

> I also think a system like this would help a lot of the social divide; right now it's much more risky for poor people to go to college (or trade school), so many opt out.

How does your system address the reduction in capacity that's going to happen once schools start optimizing for highest paid salaries.

Under your system, the first to go will be low paid degrees like women's studies, sociology, etc. and schools are going to optimize for STEM. It's more than probable that they will boost their STEM enrollment to professor/TA capacity, and axe most programs or cut them to make extremely selective.

I guess it's better than having people running in the real world with no skills, massive debt and a useless degree.

To be fair I don't think any new system would replace the current university/college system wholesale, at least for a long time. Honestly I'd take the trade off of being able to study degrees that don't provide careers in my school, but that's just me. Such a solution probably wouldn't be right for 100% of people.

One alternative is to have the college be on the hook for the first 20% of the loan. Now they would have skin in the game. Once 20% is gone, then the federal government could backstop the rest.

People shouldn't have to make choices to get educations that will provide marketable value?

What should drive such an important choice? Pleasure? Fashion? Government quotas?

For better or worse, here in North America the government does mandate and provide, with little choice, the education it deems necessary for its young citizens to become functioning members of society.

If someone chooses to pursue a hobby beyond that, which is what the parent seems to be referring to, why shouldn't they have full choice of what they want to study and how they want to study it? Especially in a capitalistic democracy.

But choices like that are inevitable. There are only so many places available at the top schools. Somebody has to make the choice about which students get to go there. That somebody may be the students deciding whether the cost is worthwhile, or it may be the school deciding which students to accept, but the decision is inevitable.

The large debt is very evitable, in many countries higher education is free or negative cost (=everyone gets a student allowance). This doesn't mean top schools have unlimited admissions.

Did I say anything about debt?

|people shouldn't have to make choices like this about education. And definitely not in a democracy.

With all due respect, that doesn't really make any sense. What about a democracy should keep people from making important decisions?

I think our education of students on the matter needs work, but they should absolutely be making this decision. For a lot of people it's the first really big decision they get to make, and is a good step to taking on the responsibility that comes with adulthood. That coupled with (hopefully) having a part time job through high school puts them in a pretty good position to transition into becoming a responsible citizen. We just need to teach them more about the costs, expected returns, etc. None of it is that complicated, and could be reasonably taught in a high school algebra course. Probably sooner to be honest.

What does the system of government have to do with it?

According to this article, people who went to college still do better then people who did not went to college in terms of home ownership. Which is exactly the same result I have seen in other similar stats.

They are not doing as good as they were expected to and that has consequences. However, the assumption so many people in this discussion take for granted - that young college graduates did overwhelmingly stupid decisions is simply wrong.

Perhaps we're talking past each other here. You'll notice from my example that I and my friends all went to college. I'm not advocating against going to college. What I'm saying is there are a lot of options out there and the financial side should weigh in your decisions. I was getting a writing degree and decided that shooting for a big expensive school was probably a stupid idea. So I picked a far cheaper option, which allowed me to pay as I went, and graduate with ~$10k in loans after I finished.

It's more than just higher education. The previous generation was addicted to easy credit. They used it to enrich themselves and solve every single social problem. That trend will probably continue until millennials take their place running society. I really do think that will be the major shift in American society, way more than Trump.

I fully agree, but this didn't just happen. Cost of college didn't simply explode. There were people on the other side that steered things such that costs would explode, loans would be readily available, people would land in debt they can never escape.

It is very unfortunate that this happened and was a perfect storm. Money for college loans became too easy and too lucrative and made the supply of college educated workers too large for the demand. This also happened at the same time that good paying non-college jobs started to decline, mostly to automation and partly to globalization. Then students said, "Well, I'll invest more and get a Masters" and then there were too many of them, plus all the extra debt. In a lot of verticals, the same has happened with the PhD.

Software really is eating the world and we need to find a solution or it will eventually lead to revolt as people will have no other option. If someone isn't going to college for something medical or STEM, they shouldn't bother. Go learn a trade or start a small sole proprietor business while you live at home.

And as a corollary, the humanities that escape the downsizing can purge themselves of the downward drag of people who aren't cut out for college work, and raise their standards again.

The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in

Huh, I went to college 10+ years ago and it was clear to me then that certain degrees meant a good paying job and some were dead ends.

That's a shame if some students were led to believe something else.

> The thing that irks me about this the most is how it's the people who were doing exactly what they were told that got hurt the most. The good kids who went to the best school they could get in to, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women's studies or a wide number of other things you might just spend the next 20 years figuring out how to live with debt you can't pay off.

Are they REALLY telling kids nowadays to go major in whatever interested them? Because when I went to college (nineties), nobody told me to just go major in women's studies or medieval history. They were telling me, "Study medicine or engineering because that's the only way it'll be worth the cost." The "what does a liberal arts major say" joke was very much a thing back then, as I assume it is today, now that job prospects for anyone not in STEM are even bleaker than when I went to school.

I don't think the guy who took out $100K in loans to study literature for 5 years was really doing exactly what they were told to do.

I graduated high school in 2008 and dropped out of college a few years later. I can honestly say not one person (other than my parents) ever recommended considering cost until after my Freshman year of college. The message that was pounded in again and again and again was "The best college at all costs."

I'm pretty sure that's no longer the case - at least I hope so.

The classic case of "You can totally substitute being part of the capitalist class with education signaling!"

Turns out you can not, at least not in America.

Sorry if this is too personal, but did you think your parents were blowing hot air or something?

This thread has been eye-opening from the perspective of all these comments who (apparently) had negligible guidance from a group of people (parents) who absolutely need to talk about debt to their kids.

Maybe a silver lining in this topic is a generation of future parents who will have better conversations with their kids around going into debt for their college education.

No, I think I swung too far in that direction if anything. I decided not to go to Stanford because it would be too expensive (one semester's tuition at Stanford is about one year of median income where I'm from, and that scared me to death). Only years later did I learn it would have been free because of how much (or little) income my parents had. It still upsets me to think about it.

I now have an almost unhealthy fear of debt, to the extent that I don't even want to own a home until I can pay cash for it. (Though, to be fair, living in Silicon Valley right now with housing prices swinging $500k for what was a $500k house in a few years that fear may be somewhat healthy).

My parents never warned me about education debt. I think it's a common trait among baby boomer parents - they're convinced it'll all work out and that education is worth any cost. Heck, my parents (who are both baby boomers and asian, so double whammy) are disappointed that my brother will not leave his Wall Street job to go to graduate school. They can't even articulate a reason how that would help his career--they're just disappointed that they both have masters degrees and he's just got a bachelors degree.

The culture surrounding education in this country is not rational. It's a soup of optimism, hope, preconception, ignorance, and classism, along with the avarice of those in the educational establishment that prey on the foregoing.

I would add that baby boomers either: a) had parents able to pay for their entire education; b) were able to work their way thru school; or c) used a GI bill.

In other words the market effects of guaranteed student loans that permited colleges/universities to charge any tuition fees they want and still have an endless supply of student with the funds to pay. Baby boomers can't imagine graduating with the equivalent of a mortgage payment and the reality of a non existent job market that might put them in a financial position to payoff their student loans much less pursue the American dream (house, car, kids).

Meanwhile culturally we have a media that pushes the narrative of 4% unemployment; that young people don't want to own a car; young people don't want to own a house; and young people don't want to get married and have families. The whole thing highlights US culture from the individual to the collective willing to lie/embellish finances, which prohibits anyone from having honest conversations about guaranteed loans; actually costs of school; lack of jobs; non existent wage increases since the 80's...it's the culture of lying/masking finances and a debt fueled economy that lead to housing collapse and eventually will lead to a collapse in the student loan market.

My youngest is going to Olin college of engineering next fall and we talk about debt a lot. We had a conversation last night about debt. We are blessed that Olin is a needs based school that provides grants (debt free) for families that can't fully afford college. They want their students to have a little debt (skin in the game) but we are talking a little not a lot.

We talk about personal finance, net worth, investing, saving for retirement and many related topics. I am an engineer by training and a computer scientist by career. My wife has done a lot of accounting most of her life.

Also right now the career prospects in engineering are good.

I work at a university so I see the downside often of student debt and bad major choices.

Highly recommend that your son/daughter cross register for biz classes (negotiations, basic accounting) at Babson and a liberal arts class or 2 at Wellesley in junior/senior year.

The best class I took at Babson was a combination biz/engineering course at Olin called Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship. The lead instructor, Ben Linder, is amazing.

Wrote more about the project/experience here if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312978

Olin is a great school (can't beat the price), and every student I've worked with and learned from at Olin has been great. So congrats, you should be very proud of your kid! Definitely making a smart choice.

@roymurdock Thanks so much. She is planning on taking a class or two Babson and Wellesley. We are pretty excited about Olin. She is doing a gap year this year as an Americorp Vista FIRST Robotics employee. She was mature already but the gap year has really helped her thinking develop in critical ways. So gap years are recommended when it can be worked out.

Edit: added a "Pretty cool"

Pretty cool project. Thanks for sharing.

I graduated from Olin, never took a class at Babson, but would also highly recommend classes at Wellesley.

The major downside to Olin is that it's very small and the humanities offerings are very scarce and not comprehensive at all. Olin has a four class humanities requirement for graduation and you're required to have a "theme" to the classes so that you have a sort of "humanities concentration." Some students don't really think about this until senior year, at which point they panic, take a couple more classes, and submit some sort of hand-wavey statement that tries to tie together all the extremely different classes they took.

I took Russian 101, 102, 201, and 202 over the course of 2 years at Wellesley and it was fantastic. I would highly recommend that she think about, not just her engineering major, but what topic she wants to pursue in the arts or humanities. If you make a decision in your freshman/sophomore year and pursue a specific set of classes it's an amazing opportunity to pick up a new skill/hobby, or expand on an existing one.

Did no one else have boomer parents who refused to talk about finances, even when asked point blank? Mine said it wasn't something you discussed with your children, and that was a common viewpoint where I grew up.

Won't a lot of them be unable to afford kids?

Don't feel bad, this exact same situation happened to me.

I wanted to make a change in my life, and build a better future for myself. Everyone I spoke to said that going to college would be a great idea - there was no way the investment would not be worth it. My parents, my coworkers, my friends, and of course the advisors at my school - they all said it would be worth it. Not a single contradiction throughout countless conversations.

So I went to college, at my own expense. I had no money, so I pulled federal loans like so many others. $25k and 1.5 years later, I realize that college isn't teaching me anything I could not have learned for free on YouTube/Google. Angry at the scores of people who deceived me into believing college was a good investment, and angrier at the institution for acting like predators upon my naive desire to succeed, I dropped out. When I spoke with the Dean of my school about how I was not feeling challenged after paying exorbitant fees, she said these exact words: "Well, maybe college just isn't for you."

Needless to say, I now know more about my chosen career field than most average college grads, due to experience. However, years later I'm still $25k in the hole - the only significant debt I've ever incurred in my entire life.

For me, college was a literal waste of $25,000+ and nearly two years of my life. At this point in my life, I'm telling everyone who asks that college is a complete waste of time, money, and energy.

>>I realize that college isn't teaching me anything I could not have learned for free on YouTube/Google.

And yet not many people train themselves watching just these videos.

You generally need a highly disciplined lifestyle to get your education through these means.

>>Angry at the scores of people who deceived me into believing college was a good investment, and angrier at the institution for acting like predators upon my naive desire to succeed, I dropped out.

They were most likely talking about your job prospects.

Many things in college have gone from 'learning' to 'getting a degree for a job' a long time ago.

> And yet not many people train themselves watching just these videos.

Although not that many go out of their way to train – period. You are already an exceptional case if you are thinking about furthering your education, be it through postsecondary schooling or Youtube videos.

> You generally need a highly disciplined lifestyle to get your education through these means.

More disciplined than than those who do not attain an advanced education at all, but not more than other avenues of gaining the same education.

> Many things in college have gone from 'learning' to 'getting a degree for a job' a long time ago.

The perception has, at least. The outcome hasn't. Job quality has measurably declined with increasing college attainment rates, and incomes have remained stagnant.

I know this doesn't sound that good, but if you learn programming, 25k + 2 years is nothing. All of us have made bigger mistakes in our lives (though not the same) by listening to other people.

Now $250k, that's a lot of debt even for a programmer.

I looked at college statistics once and overwhelming majority of students went for practicaly sounding degrees. Most students wanted study business in various forms. Antropologi and such had small number of students.

Having graduated high school in 2008, I don't quite understand it either.

My school counselors were always saying "School is expensive; you need to apply for scholarships!"

And then there was career day, when you quickly figured out some of the realities of work.

Plus the STEM folks always said things like "The US needs more engineers!", "Math + science is important!".

Perhaps because I lived on Florida's Space Coast (east central Florida, the general vicinity of NASA) my experience was different than most?

I grew up in a shithole slate-mining town of less than 5000 people. Most of the people there couldn't even spell STEM. High school guidance counsellor was still extremely clear. "Do go to college, but for the love of god, major in Medicine, Science, or Engineering. Don't waste your time and money with anything else."

I get the impression that it's mostly middle-class parents who told their kids to 'follow their heart' in this regard. Anecdotally, but very obviously so, both the working class and upper-class people I know were give more strategic advice.

It works if your parents are doctors or dentists or otherwise wealthy. You can start a company with a safety net!

Interesting. I was probably right at tha sweet spot where we were making just enough to dream but not enough to be able to afford it :)

That's really interesting, and I'm not surprised to hear it.

There was a study a while back concluding that it doesn't matter where you go to college - provided you major in STEM. It's a little more complicated than that (attrition rates, quality of curriculum), but overall, there is some truth to this - if you want to get a good job and keep costs down, majoring in engineering at a reputable state school can be a good way to go.

There is an interesting corollary to this, though - it does matter where you go to college, provided you don't major in STEM. This might explain why "elite" US college students are so allergic to engineering. Why go to Harvard if it doesn't provide you with any advantage. If computer science majors from San Jose state have access to the same jobs, what good does Harvard do you?

If you go to an elite college, you can major in economics and go to business school, or hell, major in international relations and go to law school. Jobs prospects for lawyers aren't generally great, but pay and prospects are very good for people who build a network at an ivy and go to a very elite law school.

So your comment about a slate-mining town may be particularly relevant here. People who perceive college from a low income perspective see no point to majoring in Art History, because their chances of becoming a six figure salaried director or an art or cultural institution are basically zero. For a Harvard grad, however, especially one form an upper middle class family with the right connections, it may be a very achievable possibility.

Similarly, why would. a Harvard grad be a senior CRUD bug fixer for 140k a year when he or she could run a nonprofit or cultural organization for a similar salary?

Perhaps the value of elite colleges isn't so much that they can get you a higher salary, but that they can give you a path to a higher salary in culturally interesting job paths that are closed off to most of the populace. Harvard allows you a crack at that salary without having to be a senior CRUD bug fixer.

As an aside, I think one big thing may be overlooked in the "it doesn't matter where you go if you major in STEM" study, because there's a lot under the hood if you only consider salaries. Just as there is a big difference between being a senior CRUD bug fixer for $140k a year and the "director of the American Heritage Film foundation" for $140k a year, there's also a difference between ostensibly similar titles in tech. It could be that elite tech graduates don't show a big difference in salary between grads from less celebrated schools, but do they end up with more autonomy, fewer deadlines, more interesting and exploratory work? "Machine Learning Specialist for Election Results analysis" for the NYTimes is a very different job from "Manager of Payroll and Benefits Data Migration" for a bigco. I'm not 100% convinced where you go to college plays no role in this.

Good points. There's definitely a "class mentality" difference. In my case, it was "engineering school is your only way out of this hole, kid. Don't fuck it up!" It also helped that I, by some miracle, had tiger parents (although not Asian). For Tommy Rockefeller III in his Connecticut private school, it's "Go study whatever you want--it doesn't matter. You were born rich and are going to stay rich no matter what you do."

I got a view of this going to a "reasonably top" (not Harvard or Wharton but close) MBA school. I had lots of classmates I'd describe as "irreversibly rich". Not bad people by any stretch, but just from a different world than I came from. The few of us with blue collar backgrounds kept to ourselves and studied our asses off. Those guys, although they studied too, also socialized and partied quite a bit more. I mean wouldn't you, if your success was a foregone conclusion? If they wanted to, they could[1] go off and direct a non-profit, or run a hedge fund, or take 5 years off to contemplate life and fish. I had to make damn sure I got some kind of job straight away so I could immediately be able to not default on $2000+ loan payments.

1: and by "could" I mean, "have the opportunity to", not "have the ability to". Hell, _I_ could run a hedge fund. Will I ever have the opportunity to? No.

Sounds like the traditional british class system already. Are you sure you dont have a king or queen?

> Are they REALLY telling kids nowadays to go major in whatever interested them?

Speaking for myself and the majority of people close to me (late twenties / early thirties, Dutch, mostly middle-class), that's exactly what we were told. Maybe around one in ten people I know went for STEM taking into account 'worth the cost', but it's hard to tell because most of them were pressured by their STEM-parents, so the reasons could've been different ("everything else is pseudo-science", etc.)

People I know slightly older than me are even 'worse' in this regard and seem to have been raised with the 'keep studying as long as you like' and 'follow your passion above all else' model, which I was most definitely not raised with, so the perspective has been changing pretty rapidly.

looking at the friends of my progressively younger brothers, the advice is more as you say: college is still 'the thing to do - if you can', but there is much, much more emphasis on job prospects. Part of the reason for that might be that the Dutch system has become more expensive though.

This makes me sad and mad. I work at a small liberal arts university in IT and they are still telling the students to take whatever Arts and Sciences major. The school I work at does limit student debt and is a needs based school (they provide a lot of debt free aid in the form of grants), so that is good. But still majoring in the classics or art (especially from a school not known for art), art history and art management is not good for long term career options.

I was in a meeting yesterday where a professor was lamenting that too many students are majoring in business and not arts and sciences. The interesting thing about that is our biggest alumni donors are business school majors and not A&S. If you can't major in a science, CS or engineering then major in business.

I guess you can't fix stupid.

I am so glad my youngest will be attending an engineering school next fall and will get a mechanical engineering degree with an emphasis in systems.

It is not just stupid. It is politically motivated. The idea that people should be responsible for individual decision making is somehow contradict with today's teaching in humanities and liberal arts. It is no coincidence that almost all of those professors are far left and they advocate students should just major in whatever they like, and at the same time they hate business school, and at the same time them agree with free college to everyone, etc.

@xname1 I agree. I see this up close.

>If you can't major in a science, CS or engineering then major in business.

When I was in school, people had the most contempt for business majors.

The engineering people got respect for the technical difficulty of what they did.

The liberal arts folks got respect for the intellectual pursuit.

When we would look at a business major, all we would see was style with no substance. Almost all their education was geared towards appearances. When my undergrad forced all business undergrads to own laptops, the reason was "No one will take you seriously without one". A business professor told me that when students give presentations, he never listens to the content. His feedback is entirely about appearance (suitable clothes, appropriate voice, sexy presentation, etc).

As far as actual content goes, you could more easily learn it all on your own than you could for, say, software or programming (since that is a concern in this thread somewhere).

The primary utility of the business degree is:

1. Learn to look good.

2. Join a somewhat exclusive club.

I mentored two international business majors (from bosnia). They graduated at the top of the class for all business majors. They learned at the school I work at much more than that. But I have heard about programs like you describe.

I think there are a lot of interesting disciplines that make great minors but that are unlikely to allow the recipient to earn a living. If you're independently wealthy, it doesn't matter - otherwise you might find that humanities and STEM create an even stronger career.

I was in high school in the late 90s, and had absolutely no interest in college, at all. Not in medieval history, not in women's studies, certainly not in STEM, nothing. I just wanted to graduate HS and go learn a trade or something, and do music on the side. I never wanted to set foot in a classroom again. As dumb as that sounds, that's what I wanted to do.

I got so much shit from my parents and teachers. Not going to college was unacceptable. You HAD to go, it didn't matter what you majored in or how much it cost. People who go to college get good jobs and join the country club, people who don't wind up in jail or something. I'm not exaggerating, that was the message.

Of course that's just my experience, but for whatever that's worth, OP's experience is definitely consistent with mine.

Uh, as recent as six years ago, the common refrain around the state school I went to was "C's get degrees," and various statements about how all you need is the piece of paper. Hah. Plus, most people in college believe that just having a degree will entitle them to a six-figure job. Seriously. They've surveyed college students and found this to be true. Most don't realize that the average American household income is something like $40K. And even those who do, or who look at the distribution of pay for their chosen profession (though most studying English, American Studies, Art, etc. don't have a career in mind), may make fatal errors in evaluating the trade-offs. My wife and I were top of our class, both very bright (if I do say so myself), we knew about the income distribution (etc.) and we still screwed up and took out way more loans than we should have. Oops. Even on IBR our payments are the equivalent of a car loan for something nice.

So now we're living with the consequences and it'll definitely shape how we talk to our kids. We'll lean on them heavily to live at home through college, go to community college for the first two years, and then finish at a state school. The less debt they have out of college the better their choice set.

In the early 1990s at least, high school guidance people in Massachusetts did in fact tell us to study whatever we liked. The claim was that the degree wouldn't matter, because you'd get a job that wasn't really determined by your degree. (in that case why get a degree, hmmm?)

I think it made sense to the people giving the advice. That was how their lives had worked out. They got degrees, then ended up employed to give high school students career advice. (this is a low-paying job) For some reason it never occurred to them to say "Whatever you do, don't go down the path I went down!!!".

Around the time my older sibling got into college, I remember that my parents attitude shifted from "enjoy high school, it's your youth" to "good grades = free money" (ie free tuition)...

So I got lucky, but there's definitely an attitude that needs to be battled.

Beautifully said.

As a follow-up question to your last sentence, do you have any thoughts on collateralization? Not so easy when the asset grown to pay back the debt is social/intellectual capital, but I think we could come up with creative solutions for certain degrees and borrower profiles.

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a simple model that predicts ability to repay and to not give out loans to people who won't be able to pay them back. But that would have to happen at a federal level, and imagine being the politician who pushes that through. Until that happens the universities won't care, so it would have to be a societal shift.

Even if you understand that the system is broken you still have to play along. Suppose you are a regular student who wants a regular job in an office doing marketing or whatever. A huge % of candidates have degrees. So employees start demanding a degree. If your cv has no degree it goes in the bin.

So you pay the piper. The supply of gov credit sets the price of courses. Hand over your labour.

> My entire generation was.

No we weren't. I was definitely encouraged to go to college and study something I enjoyed that was marketable. My parents' first concern when I switched away from pre-med to Political Science was "how will you get a job?"

I remember as a young child hearing my parents make a comment about a degree in "underwater basket-weaving" or similar. Getting a degree in a completely non-marketable skill has always negatively impacted your employability and your earning potential.

Yeah I don't like the generalizations people are making. It's clear each family had different levels of guidance and opinions on career choices.

My parents were like yours. I chose not to go into STEM, and they were extremely worried, especially since the rise of the Internet, web startups, and smartphones were still in its infancy and I was basically studying things that hadn't gone into the mainstream yet. They were supportive but pretty darn skeptical they thought I was just messing around on a computer.

I will say though, I go back and forth on the benefits of University. With the rise of online videos, detailed writeups from people in the field, and scanned copies of textbooks and answers, students who are driven might be able to achieve a high level of education without needing to enroll into a program that costs tens of thousands. I've learned more in a few months of self-training via MIT OpenCourseWare, Coursera, Udacity, Stanford (online materials), Khan Academy vs. one year of studying at my University many years ago. I was even listening to an interview by Ezra Klein with Kara Swisher, who mentioned she wouldn't recommend anyone going to journalism school these days as you can probably get by via practicing things on your own, becoming much b

So I'm sort of in that camp, but on the other hand, her graduating from a University may have helped give her a slight edge in getting even entrance to a first internship/job. Likewise, earning a degree helped me get work visas and gave me access to people who eventually boosted my career and life opportunities.

>, studied whatever they were interested in, and if that thing happened to be literature or women's studies

As some sibling comments noted, this lackadaisical attitude of ignoring the ROI wasn't really true even 50 years ago.

The meme "underwater basket weaving" as a synonym for "unmarketable degree" has been around since the 1960s.[1] Undoubtedly, the GenX, GenY, & Millenials going to college in 1990s & 2000s would have heard of it or similar memes. I believe I first heard of it from a monologue by comedian Jay Leno. (The "uwb" was originally a meme about a specific class but its meaning expanded to entire unmarketable degrees -- which is how mainstream press like NYT used it.[2])

It doesn't mean that "literature" or "women's studies" are unworthy academic subjects. If you're a trust fund baby, you can study whatever you want with no financial repercussions. (The whole philosophy about the pure joy of learning for learning's sake, etc.) However, if one takes out $30k+ in debt, the banks and USA government won't forgive your loan just because you got a degree with no market demand. Therefore, the job prospects of "B.A. in Communications" vs "B.A. in Accounting" has to affect the decision.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=underwater+bas...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/arts/television/and-there-...

In India we chose academic streams purely on the basis future employment and career aspects.

Taking huge loans to study things like literature was either considered a extreme luxury of the rich who wanted a degree just for the heck of it, or those people going to such sciences(Even commerce, accounting etc) are largely considered people who can't do tough things in life(a.k.a losers).

Most people who study things like literature eventually have to go on and get another degree on top of it. Like say an MBA just to get a job.

Never understood why people take huge loans to study non-STEM degrees.

Also there is a lack of youth going into the trades. Welding, electrical, plumbing, appliance repair etc. We have devalued those careers and now they just don't have enough apprentices.

I'm a fan of what Mike Rowe is doing to raise awareness around the trades. http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

This rings completely false to me. I went to college the first time in 2000. At that time, it was common knowledge that a liberal arts degree was a portal to either grad school, professional school (law mostly), or a low wage job, unless you distinguished yourself and made your own way. Law school was already flooded, and graduate schools were already overproducing phds.

I chose to go into graduate school in philosophy, but along the way I also decided to not take out any debt, go to a public university, and to work my ass off. Why? Because I knew I couldn't afford debt of I didn't make it, and I knew I'd have to be summa cum laude with killer letters of recommendation to make it.

How did I know all that? It seemed like common sense to me, but I probably did some research and talked to people. And of course my grandmother wanted to know how I was going to make a living.

And I did make it, but I dropped out of the phd program, took out some loans, and got a freaking csci degree that paid the loans off with a signing bonus, because I discovered that I can't stand academia. Go figure.

This was just... Common sense to me. Don't burn money to do something with low returns. Do burn money to get a valuable degree with returns. Above all, think.

At the time, as now, I feel a great deal of contempt (an ugly, evil emotion to be sure) for people who take out massive debt to be molly-coddled at a private liberal arts college with a sticker price approaching MIT and no connection to the real world, or who fund their entire college degree with loans and no work (i worked through both degrees). I try to convert that into compassion or sympathy, but I haven't found success yet.

That wasn't my experience.

My parents flat-out told me I was going in-state or funding the difference myself (and with UVA, VT, and W&M available, that became a no-brainer).

And counselors, while not actively discouraging applications to expensive private/out-of-state schools, did actively encourage scholarship and grant applications.

Then, during college, my dad did repeatedly ask me my plans. And, when I decided I wanted to pursue a career in computer science, offered to pay an extra year of school so I could transfer to the engineering program (CS was part of the engineering school at UVA). I declined - at the time, the dot-com bubble had not burst, and if you could spell C++, you could find a job that paid $50k+ (in 1999 dollars) - and finished my degree in economics (minored in CS).

This is just simply not true. I know it makes people feel better, but it's nonsense. I started college in 1999. It was plainly obvious to me that some degrees had better prospects than others. People routinely made jokes about majors that had poor career prospects. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that have been around for a long, long time.

This information was available to everyone. If you didn't pay attention to it, then that's on you. This isn't a new discovery.

Well said.

A lot of people still believe that BS. I know people pushing their kids so hard and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars on education bills over a 4 year college. And, for what?

But the important this is that, like with the US health insurance system, all the people completely ruined and destroyed by it had choice and weren't 'forced' into anything by nasty government regulation. After all, that's what really counts. Anyway, lots of insurance and finance companies made millions. That's got to count for something. What are you, some kind of communist?[/sarcasm]

This is the biggest con our capitalist system pulls. People (especially kids) are not rational actors. Our current economic system just doesn't allow for mere emotional humans.

A problem is that many of the higher paying jobs are in cities such as NYC, SF, LA, Boston, DC, (also London, ...) and the housing is expensive in these cities because of "rent-seeking" -- a market failure or market inefficiency caused by an politically induced scarcity of housing through zoning density restrictions. This harms renters and those starting out in life while benefiting wealthy landlords such as President Trump. The fix is a simple one which is to overturn the zoning density restrictions.

In 2002 Japan passed a federal law that gave the federal government control of housing density restrictions: the result is that in 2014 Tokyo built 140,000 homes vs. 20,000 for NYC and less than 90,000 for all of California.

The local politicians are bought off by the wealthy landlords and those just trying to make their life after graduating from college and poor people are paying for it.

I wrote more about this today at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14032591

> a market failure or market inefficiency caused by an politically induced scarcity of housing through zoning density restrictions.

This is true, but it's also a failure of policies that have led to the majority of job growth being in the biggest cities in the country. If we could spread things out a bit and keep smaller cities a viable place to create jobs, the bigger cities wouldn't be impacted nearly as hard.

I think it has less to do with viable job creation than wider political issues. It's cheap to open an office in Iowa, but talent/upper middle class people don't want to move there.

Not simply because of social issues, but because companies don't pay enough. IE if I can save 20% of 150k moving to a cheap location is only viable if I can save 30k not just 20% of a lower salary.

The reason people don't want to move there is because that's not where the money is, which makes sense. But when everyone thinks like that, it causes most of the wealth to concentrate to a handful of areas across the nation while the rest suffers from lack of development. It's not even. There used to be a lot of legislation that prevented that and led to development across the nation, but most of that legislation was overturned by the 90's[1].

[1] http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...

I'm honestly curious -- could you elaborate and perhaps cite some examples of such legislation?

Sorry, I should have added it to my post. I edited in the site that I got my info from.

$100k in Iowa will go a lot farther than $200k in San Francisco, and if you can get $200k in SF you can almost certainly get a similar job making $100k (or more) in rural Iowa.

Now, if you don't want to do that because "gross, it's Iowa" and NYC or SF is objectively a more enjoyable environment for a 20-something single software developer, that's fine. But that's a choice and at that point you're simply deciding to live in a more expensive location because it's more fun.

Source: I live in rural Pennsylvania, and used to work for a company in rural Iowa (remotely).

I can get a job paying >250k in Seattle, but am unable to find six figures back home in the Midwest. There's not enough remote work yet, most companies hiring won't do it :/. Maybe this will change in the relatively near future, but when I look at my in-laws in northern China who have CS degrees and work for like $10k USD a year, I'm thinking maybe remote work will not be upwards lifting to US salaries...

I'm not going back now because I realized that -20F ~ 95F annual temperature swings really suck (I did not realize this until I left).

If I can save X dollars per year in San Francisco then I need to be able to save X dollars per year in Iowa not just live similar lifestyles on less money. Because savings has ZERO cost of living adjustments. Further, Social Security has zero cost of living adjustments so if your making less than the cap that has long term consequences. If your saving 15% at 200k that's 30% at 100k for the same net savings. While a 100k lifestyle in Pennsylvania may be like a 200k lifestyle in SF a 70k lifestyle in Pennsylvania is probably not like a 170k lifestyle in SF.

This is most apparent when you travel as a hotel in Europe does not give a discount because your living in the Midwest. Further, someone may be willing to live in an efficiency when that's saving 10k/year, but not when it's saving 3k/year.

>If I can save X dollars per year in San Francisco then I need to be able to save X dollars per year in Iowa not just live similar lifestyles on less money.

Agreed, and I think that is what people are saying. Also, do make sure you do an apples to apples comparison. In the Midwest, I may pay $1500/mo to live in a 2500 sq ft house (and less with all the tax credits related to interest/real estate). Compare the same cost for a 2500 sq ft house you are buying in SF. I generally see people comparing the 2500 sq ft house in Iowa with the 1300 sq ft apartment in SF, which is not a fair comparison.

Also, consider the age of the house.

How much per month would a 2500 sq ft house built after 2000 in the Bay Area cost you in mortgage + taxes?

Even that's not really a fair comparison. I would be willing to live in an efficiency to save an extra 10k / year because a 1000 sq ft apartment is not inherently worth that much to me. I have a 1br apartment because the cost difference is tiny, and efficiency's are hard to find. Further, I flat out don't want a 2500 sq ft house, but for those people who want that much space sure it's a different cost / benefit comparison.

A fair comparison is based on similar levels of someones personal utility function. If they like green carpets slightly more and they own their house they might get green carpets, but it's not really a large benefit to home ownership for them.

In the end of the day more people live in NYC metro area than live in New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, District of Columbia, Vermont, and Wyoming combined. Largely because they think it's a better tradeoff.

>I would be willing to live in an efficiency to save an extra 10k / year because a 1000 sq ft apartment is not inherently worth that much to me. I have a 1br apartment because the cost difference is tiny, and efficiency's are hard to find. Further, I flat out don't want a 2500 sq ft house, but for those people who want that much space sure it's a different cost / benefit comparison.

Sure, but then compare the cost with the same efficiency in the Midwest. When I lived there, you could get decent efficiencies for under $400/mo.

I am trying to do an neutral analysis not just favor one side.

Importantly, the gap between an efficiency in Midwest vs. SF is much less money than a 2500 sf house which favors SF. But, people would likely not get an efficiency in the Midwest on a 100k salary because the gap between an efficiency is also small. Or as a young friend of mine said, not being in WV is worth having a roommate in Northern Virginia.

Up-sizing lifestyle to compensate for downsizing culture seems very appealing when you have kids. Further, the closer you get to retirement the less important that years savings become. But, at that point you have already got a social circle in _ which biases as does even higher salaries you can get at 40+.

Still, I think based on behavior companies need to offer higher salaries outside of major metro areas before people stop concentrating in those areas. Yokyo Japan and many other major city's show the same trends suggesting it's not just US government policies responsible.

For a company it seems beneficial to draw from a bigger pool of potential workers by having their headquarters in a big city.

For a society, it seems beneficial to spread the wealth out a bit so there's development throughout the country. IMO, our government should be focusing on improving society instead of corporations.

Why is that beneficial for the society? I don't think that's as clear cut as you make it to be. Cities are pretty efficient things.

Wealth concentration to cities has lots of drawbacks. Housing can get incredibly expensive, mental illness rates go up, local government reflects the people less because of the larger population, and people feel like they need to upend their entire family just to live a quality life. There are tons of places in SF, NYC and others where there are 6 men in a 2 bedroom apartment. All that just so that corporations can reap the benefits of a higher worker density. That's no way to structure a society.

The reason that housing is expensive and perhaps that mental illness rates go up is because of politically induced market failure in the form of zoning density restrictions. It is an artificial constraint that is readily fixed. See my post higher up in this chain.

I mean, obviously there are tradeoffs here

your office RE costs are more

your talent costs are more

seems like a function of how price sensitive you are about the talent that exists at your headquarter, and the degree to which the headquarters are the profit generator

" it's also a failure of policies that have led to the majority of job growth being in the biggest cities in the country"

do you have ideas as to policies that would spread growth around the county?

I heard the idea of decentralizing government bureaucracies out of DC, and around the country, do you have other ideas?

Cities such as NYC, SF, LA, DC, Boston, London, (and region of SV)....are very special cities that are magnets of creativity and wealth creation marrying engineering and other creativity with finance. In pre-WWII, Budapest and Vienna were among these cities and outside of US & London, Tel Aviv is also one of these cities. Not only engineers and software and finance professionals but other professionals such as doctors love living in these cities for their cultural amenities. NYC is a center of Judaism and for many Jews, this is where they want to live with all of the specific Jewish cultural amenities.

This is unlikely to change. Author Richard Florida among others writes about the develop of cities.

    in 2014 Tokyo built 140,000 homes

This isn't a net gain of 140k homes, but instead 140k "housing starts". In the US this would translate into about 140k new homes, because we normally reuse houses, but in Japan the culture is generally when you buy a house you tear it down and build a new one. So this 140k is a mixture of building new units and replacing old ones.

Tokyo is a pretty distinct place

while turning our largest cities into Tokyo would have some advantages

I'm a little hesitant to want all cities to resemble it

Re: Japan, I'd be curious how apples-to-apples that comparison is; I read the linked article, but it wasn't entirely clear. At any rate, it seems like NIMBYism would be relatively easier to combat in Japan given that it's generally accepted that houses will just get demoed and rebuilt, period; average house life expectancy, depending on how you calculate it, can be said to be under 30 years.

Looking around my neighborhood here in Portland, OR, though, the number of "no demo" and "stop infill" signs is a little maddening. I have empathy for difficulties caused by rapid development, but the "I don't ever want the neighborhood to change" mentality is horribly lacking in pragmatism. It's a bit difficult to imagine optimally practical political solutions for denser housing in this climate.

Did any of these kids (and I am one of them, graduated in 2013) stop and think that paying 50-70k a year after room and board to attend a university was insane? I had the option to go to a nice university, and maybe my horizons would have been expanded, maybe they wouldn't, but at the end of the day I am happy where I ended up and I went to community college for 2 years, and the public state university, for the remaining two., driving 1 hour to college from my parents house. Crazy I know. I lived at home! I ended up with 1/16th the debt of most of my cohorts.

It's fine if these kids were just doing exactly what they were told or people sold them on the koolaid, but generations prior also had to navigate the diverse world of snake-oil salesmen and people hyping up things and overvaluing them -- you can't beat teaching common money sense. Simple math. Teaching personal finance should be in inserted into middle school and taught all the way to graduation.

I agree, the taxpayers were pretty stupid for taking on the risk that kids wont be able to pay on their student loans. Too bad for the taxpayer!

The government is collecting quite a bit of interest on over $1.4 trillion dollars in student loans.

I was also under the impression that for the vast majority, outside of a few programs, can't get rid of the debt, even with bankruptcy. So overall the money is being made.

The government only took on $32k of the risk, that's where federal aid caps for undergrad.

It's private banks that are more than happy to sink kid's futures prospects by lending them that extra $50, 60, 70 thousand dollars or more (and to take their parents down with them).

College is a positional good, so "Is college worth it" is a question with two answers. Let me explain.

The first question is "as an individual job-seeker, is college worth it to me personally". Which it probably still is - there's very real discrimination against folks without a degree.

The second question is "for job-seekers as a class, does college help them". Which it almost certainly isn't - there's a huge amount of time and money spent on what's mostly a piece of paper that says "I'm smart enough to get into college, not-lower-class enough to spend the time and money, and obedient enough to jump through arbitrary hoops". Employees as a class aren't magically better because they have a piece of paper, they're better because of specific skills and abilities that they learn that enable extra productivity.

People see that college is worth it for individuals, and then they go and shovel gigantic piles of money at college for everyone, and this just pisses me the hell off because it's so goddamn wasteful.

IMO, the only realistic way out of this hole is to make it illegal to ask about college education or verify with an issuing institution whether or not you have a degree. If an employer asks, they get sued or prosecuted. If a job-seeker tells, the employer can't find out if they're lying. Only remaining thing is to screen for actual knowledge, like "are you a good enough engineer to not make buildings that collapse". Professional exams - like the Fundamentals of Engineering or actuarial exams - seem like an appropriate fit for that.

That's a great idea, like the ban the box campaigns to prevent discrimination against ex-con's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_the_Box http://bantheboxcampaign.org/

I bet some sort of uncollege[1] labor group that calls out and rallies/lobbies against discrimination would be effective too.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/UnCollegeNetwork

I like this idea, but I also routinely see criticism on HN of interviews that attempt to determine knowledge level (puzzle solving, programming tasks, and so on). And, of course, you start to wade into the problem of any exam, that it's too narrow, biased, and so on.

I think your point about job-seekers as a class is mostly right, but it doesn't bring into account one of the things college provides you, which is a well-rounded education. Now, this may or may not be worthwhile to you, but my experience is that college is a good shorthand to "will this person be a good coworker". There are plenty of things about that hoop jumping that have value in the working world. They are probably OK in teams, they are probably OK at administrative work, and so on. I had a friend who went to MIT that said "if someone graduated from MIT, at least I know they have good time management skills". This is absolutely not universally true, but a higher percentage of the college graduates I've worked with are good in teams than of non-college graduates I've worked with.

Does college provide it, or select for it? This is extraordinarily important. If it teaches good time management skills, then we can get more of that by expanding college programs. If it merely fails out people who don't have good time management skills, then there are cheaper ways to get a piece of paper proving that the holder has good time management skills.

>This is absolutely not universally true, but a higher percentage of the college graduates I've worked with are good in teams than of non-college graduates I've worked with.

And even if true, this is not an argument to expand college education. Like, I absolutely agree that there's good reasons for individual employers to prefer college graduates. There's also good reasons for individual fishing boats to prefer over-fishing.

Where the overfishing analogy breaks down is that we have the power to provide enough fish. College doesn't have to be expensive. As little as 15 years ago it was quite possible to work your way through college and come out with manageable debt. Something else happened to balloon the cost of education in that time period. Perhaps the increased reliance on loans, cuts in financial aid to students and state assistance to universities, ballooning student services and administration costs, etc. I don't know. But it certainly seems like a problem that can be solved on the supply end.

Which leads me to the other end of the equation, the job market. The distinction between selection and training isn't important to me as an employer. What I as an employer know is that college is a good shorthand for a variety of skills I feel are important. Knowledge testing doesn't cover those skills. It would likely encourage me to disregard entry level candidates in favor of ones with previous work experience or contacts I trust. Right now I'm fairly confident taking a flyer on a young person either in or recently graduated from college that interviews well, but that confidence would decrease without that knowledge and I don't have any shortage of candidates with work experience.

I'm willing to explore new ways of evaluation, but I think over time college became optimized for putting out good white collar employees. And employers have become optimized to working with people that have a certain, homogeneous educational background. Before we cut that wire, we need to have the alternative evaluation pieces in place or the negative externalities, especially on young candidates, would be huge.

College costs are, IMO, entirely because student loans removed the need for colleges to compete on price. Regardless of cost and value, students could get loans to cover it. So in order to compete, institutions branched out into what's basically bling, with sports being a salient example.

There's also a fundamental economic pressure from non-education productivity. It takes just as many man-hours to teach a class, but those man-hours would go further growing potatos or making widgets.

I have a suspicion that the problem can't be supplied out of. Not everyone can have the nicest house in the neighborhood, no matter how many nice houses you build. It wasn't that long ago that high-school education or the equivalent was something that set you apart and ahead. Now it's just kind of an assumed requirement. I'm afraid that making an undergraduate degree ubiquitous would make a master's degree the new bachelor's. In some fields, this is already happening.

That's a fair enough point. You simply keep raising the bar for how much education people need. But I don't think that's a problem of job seeking or education, but of the economy in general. There are simply fewer things for people to do. I'm no Marxist, but it does seem glaringly obvious to me that since the industrial revolution we have made more things with machines, requiring fewer people. For a while increased consumerism meant we could re-purpose people into making new stuff, and when that was automated we could shuffle them into service jobs, but there's a cap on that. Increasingly, only the most qualified people will be able to do the fewer and fewer things there are to do. That's why college is so important. There's no chance without it.

But I do think the supply can be solved. I think "everyone gets loans" oversimplify the issue because most institutions are state run, there isn't really much competition in the free-market sense of the word. Because the government controls the bulk of higher education in the US, we are in a better position to solve this problem than any other discussed. Part of it is to start supporting it again. Return grant programs and create real financial aid so people who need money can get it and people who don't aren't forced to take it.

> So, is college still worth it? In the most simplistic terms, yes.

Not really, college is only worth it if you finish a select number of degrees and are somewhat middle class to begin with.

US education system slowly alienates a large portion of the country putting them in debt forever. It's a stark contrast to Germany and some of the Nordic countries.

But I also believe America is too big to make much changes regarding education.

Even STEM can be a bad investment, depending on what you do. I graduated with a degree in Chem, wanting to do nanoscale computers and -later- optical computing. Found out 3rd year that unless I got a doctorate, I'd be a glorified lab rat. What's worse is that even if I got a doctorate, I'd still be a lab rat while trying to get one and would have a sliver of a chance to get a job anyways. My choice? I graduated, but didn't do grad school. Think of that next to you wonder why STEM jobs aren't being filled. There were some redeeming measures of school. I got a minor in CS, some text on my resume that says I went to school and got good grades - the first step for many companies to even consider you - and learned about a number of really good books I might not have encountered by just randomly exploring the net. Still, I probably would've done better without school. I will now take this opportunity to mention that I'm still looking for work, albeit sunny Cal is too expensive for me to consider jobs out there.

I did an undergrad in biotechnology which was effectively worthless, could barely make a dent on my 20k in undergrad debt.

Now I've got a MS in bioinformatics and while I got a slight raise, I also had to take out more loans for the second degree. So I'm still floundering. If I had known what I know now, I never would have attended college (even though I had 70k worth of scholarships thrown at me).

Would have picked up some programming on my own and maybe taken a few courses at a community college. Feel like I've completely wasted a decade of my life and it looks like I'm about to waste another decade.

My sympathies. We're stuck in the same boat. That said, assuming you have some steady work, have you looked into quicker loan payoff services like Sofi?

I have never heard of that, will check it out. Thanks.

How can California be too expensive to consider a job in? Total comp can be very very high ...

Pay is offset by the cost of living because everyone out there thinks you can afford it. I suppose it would help pay off my bills faster, but that's assuming steady work. That said, I'm so-so as to whether or not to take a job there.

This is a bit tangential to the conversation, but relevant: I have an art degree. I was pushed into getting any degree. I'm a part of that same generation that was told to go to college at all costs, even if you don't know what you want to do with yourself. Fast forward 11 years, and I've just finally paid my student loans off.

Now I'm in this situation: I'm not doing a whole lot with art, and I'm trying to break into software development. Do I need a CS degree? Any opinions? I'm thinking about going back to school but the thought of possibly having more debt is not something I'm interested in. I'm having a hard time finding even junior level jobs that are interested in people without degrees. I'm a fairly competent programmer as-is, self taught.

Freelance? Start contributing to OS projects and consult? I mean, if you're trying to break in without existing credentials or work product, I would have to think you'd need to create some work product and connections.

I have some creds + experience but I'm looking to get more. I haven't cracked freelancing yet. Places like Odesk seem like a mess and I haven't had good results.

Don't go to Odesk. There's plenty of advice on how to freelance here on Hacker News.

I've actually been on both sides of the table - as a freelancer I never got work through Odesk, I was actually hired through Hacker News once, and when it comes to hiring freelancers, I've recruited through my network (recommendations, etc.) and haven't considered Odesk.

If I were to go freelance again I would make it known in the local entrepreneurship community.

Well, I'm looking for some experienced Perl devs, so if that's in your tool box, we should talk.

Give them concrete examples of your work. Why are you being turned down?

Definitely do not need a degree but you will have to change your job-seeking process to account for that fact.

These types of things are always a cause and effect relationship, and I feel we never look at the cause.

This line bothers me in particular:

> So, is college still worth it? In the most simplistic terms, yes.

It is only worth it because we've made it a requirement to find employment with growth potential outside of the trades or sales. Hell, even some sales jobs are requiring degrees now.

If Corporate America was honest with itself about which jobs REALLY required a degree versus just some level of experience, college would become devalued in some respects.

I'm 'one of the lucky ones'. I don't have a degree, I work in a fairly important job for a fortune 100 company. I am paid fairly well for my area and I enjoy my job. My experience built up over time got me to where I am, but I know many others who weren't afforded the same chance just because their resume didn't have a piece of paper and debt attached to it. That being said I'll probably eventually hit a wall where I can't advance anymore, and I'm probably OK with that.

The other cause we've failed to address is the constantly rising cost of going to college. Government programs to increase loan availability (and forgiveness) have just raised the price, because the student can "afford" it.

graduating from college makes you almost as likely to own a home, by age 36, as someone from a high-income family.

I assume they mean "own" in the sense "get a mortgage on" not "have fully paid for", no?

I think they mean paying a mortgage too. Paying off a house by 36 seems to require either a ton of money or a very, very cheap home.

One still owns a home when buying with a mortgage. The lender places a charge on the property while a balance is outstanding, therefore in addition to owning the property you also own the debt secured against it.

That's what "own" means with houses. You're a "homeowner" after closing, and you are the legal owner of the property, even though you still owe thousands to your bank.

That's my point. Debt is not an achievement.

I'd love to know their definition of "high-income family"

Taleb's 2012 book "Antifragility" discusses the state of university education and student loans:

"Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors, In a way it is no different from racketeering..."

On the future of education:

"My answer: BS is fragile. Which scam in history has lasted forever? I have an enormous faith in Time and History as eventual debunkers of fragility. Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse."

- "Antifragile", Chapter 17 (last 2 pages)

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Hey, why the downvote?

I was an idiot, like "Hell yeah give me this money." Only later realizing how long it would take me to pay. Luckily for me what I owe is a mere pittance compared to someone like a doctor. But I also make 1/3rd of a pitance per year... haha I like that word pittance. Tribute to that Futurama episode, "Honking"

Anyway yeap... sucks thankfully I have a somewhat functioning brain, despite the loans, not getting a useful degree/potentially wasting three years of money/life, I have an opportunity to dig myself out. It's my own fault by the way I had a great opportunity and I pissed it away because I was a jackass. But yeah, it's easy to accept this money and not realize the interest like a couple of my loans are 6.8% APR and paying the interest down alone holy crap.

If you're going to university, repeat after me.

"People who loan money to students are dangerous predators, and I am their lawful prey."

That doesn't mean you shouldn't go to university, or that you shouldn't borrow money. Just be careful around predators.

"People who loan money to anyone are dangerous predators, and the people who take the loan are their lawful prey."

> debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home

60k in the hole still from undergrad loans. The thought of taking out a mortage after this debt is finished is not appealing. "hurts my chances"? Sure, that's one way to put it.

it's just boomer re-framing of the issue to make it less clear.

buying a home isn't something that is up to chance. it's not like you are cruising one day, and BANG!, you buy a home. you save up for fucking years, then you put the down payment.

having student loans precludes saving as much each year, making home ownership extremely distant for most.

It may not be to your advantage to buy a home. Once you do, you're tied forever to the local economy. Ofttimes once many people move to an area and buy homes at artificially-inflated prices, the local economy tanks and everyone is stuck with their overpriced home. Look at the people in cities (in Montana, North Dakota, West Texas) caught up in the fracking boom - they're stuck with thousands of overpriced homes now.

If you rent, you can move easily to an area that is growing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=buying+a+home+is+not+worth+i...

>Ofttimes once many people move to an area and buy homes at artificially-inflated prices, the local economy tanks and everyone is stuck with their overpriced home.

At other times, a city grows so fast and rents go up so much in a few years that a house shields you from it.

I bought my house "late" (i.e. when prices were on an increasing curve). Less than 3 years later, too many 2 bedroom apartments charge more for rent than my much bigger house. If I were to sell now, I'd make a profit, even after you account for real estate fees, etc.

Obviously, my case is not the norm. But neither is your scenario.

>https://www.google.com/search?q=buying+a+home+is+not+worth+i....

Oh, please! The first rule of Google searching is: Do not ask it to return what you are looking for!

So, is college still worth it? In the most simplistic terms, yes.

Let's look back at homeownership. Attending a four-year college — even if you borrow, and even if you do not graduate — still increases your chances of owning a home, compared to people who never enroll.

But if the new economy demands that workers have the ability to flow to job opportunities (like dragging-n-dropping them on a spreadsheet) then home ownership is an anchor.

Yea, at this point I'd only get a home if I was comfortable with severely limiting my job prospects. Even in the same metro area I've moved apartments after getting a new job so that my commute is around 30 minutes rather than the 1-1.5 hour commutes a lot of my home owning coworkers have had

I'm in the same boat ... except I ended up buying to insulate myself from a ridiculous housing market since there are lots of jobs within a 30min trip of my place.

The glorification of home ownership really baffles me, although I still ended up purchasing after careful consideration of things like:

http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terrib...

This is the situation my wife and I are looking at as well. We don't have kids yet, we want to put down roots and barring another housing market collapse, the area we currently live in is getting expensive.

We paid off huge student loans first, instead of getting into housing. Housing doubled. We're priced out of our local city.

Also .. I highly suggest that if you want to buy a place, do it before the baby arrives. After the baby, you are so fully absorbed in adjusting to your new life, that taking time out to go house hunting is a herculean task. Every house we bid and lost after the baby represented a much higher cost and led us to bid more than we thought the house were (to the tune of 50K in my opinion - we still lost the bloody bidding wars).

I agree. Most of the high earning young people I hang with basically have to be willing to uproot for opportunity.

However, owning a house (I think the term home is something distinctly different) could be used to facilitate moves though. I don't have to be in the same state/country as my rental property (though countries are starting to crack down on foreign rental property ownership).

Is property management cheap in your area? We rent a couple of apartments, and hiring a property management company would be ruinous, unless both the rent and our personal time was very expensive.

I would pick a rental area which has a college (or colleges) or with a large rental market. In my experience, the presence of a student rental market keeps prices down for property management, but high enough to make rentals viable. However, each person's situation is different.

Remote working needs to become a standard practice. It's the only way to escape the neverending rise in housing in places like SF, and give people the ability and stability to settle down in a place they love, raise a family, and invest in their housing.

Think about all of the coming job losses to automation ... what if high earning tech workers could stay in their communities, and spread some of that SV economy around.

More people need to realize this. Not only does it allow people to put down roots and let local economies everywhere grow, think of the benefit of getting all those cars off the roads. Less CO2, less traffic, less need for new roads (a big CO2 producer on it's own).

If policy makers really wanted to make a dent in fixing our problems, subsidizing remote work positions (within US borders) would be a huge benefit.

This article and thread reminds me of how lucky I was for being a stubborn idiot after graduating high school.

I, too, was told I was too smart to skip college and that I'd be wasting my life. And since I graduated HS at seventeen, my insistent immigrant mother was able to dump me into the local university regardless of my feelings about taking a year off. And, so, I partied my ass off every day and dropped out after the first semester. Mom wasn't happy, so I was allowed temporary quarters until I found a job, and then I was off to find an apartment, and that semester was all mine to pay off.

A year later I found myself with a shitty job downtown (back room at a clothing store) and art school (graphic design). I lucked into a job doing IT and on-site tech support (managing DOS servers and clients), and by nineteen I decided all the adults were full of shit, dropped out of art school and moved to NYC.

It was hard. Lots of work; Lots of hustle; Lots of failures and bad days; All along with the occasional fear that I'd made the wrong choice by skipping college, as I saw a few of my friends who had gone to college get to about where I was in my own career. They'd caught up. My head start was over; But rarely surpassed.

At any rate, I'm 38, back home in Chicago where the price of housing is far more reasonable than the cities I've lived in (NYC, Seattle, Los Angeles), working 100% remotely, and just bought a house. As for the stats mentioned in this article, my wife really made the cut as a 36-year-old bartender who also didn't finish college.

I definitely feel like I missed out on something important by skipping school. But my career hasn't suffered for it, and I'm not sad I missed out on paying for it. And I'm pretty sure spending my twenties in NYC made up for whatever I might have missed, socially.

peep these stats: https://trends.collegeboard.org/student-aid/figures-tables/f...

this is what system failure in the making looks like. look at those percentages who are still in default. even if people aren't in default, the cost of paying off their loans is stifling their economic livelihood.

here is the lasting consequence of student debt: poverty

poverty precludes home ownership, marriage, reinvestment into the economy, and casual consumption. the US has dug its own grave by rejecting its obligation to provide education to its citizenry.

loan forgiveness would solve these problems somewhat, but honestly the ship has sailed. millenials will continue to be poorer indefinitely.

I started at a "small liberal arts school," but had to leave early. I then started an IT career while living at home and somehow had the good sense to pay off the loans from my aborted college career. Then degree requirements started to kick in on IT positions, so I went to night school to finish my B.S. Because I could only handle one class per semester on top of full time IT work, my degree inadvertently ended up being pay-as-you-go. I graduated a bit exhausted, but debt free. Younger friends who did their four year degrees in the same time frame essentially pay an extra rent payment each month. It's crushing them.

The real costs are not even visible, the iceberg of debt is killing other risky behavior (like entrepreneurship). You do not build a company in a garage, if you are already in to your chin with debt. Any risky move, be it political or in your job, will be well thought through and in doubt, be aborted, because you "know" where risky decisions get you.

But what would the lasting consequences of forgiving 1 Trillion US$ of student debt be?

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