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> This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have a college degree to get a job

This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields.

There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high).

I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0].

[0] http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

> We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage

> There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training.

We don't disagree

It seems more and more the case that employers are not willing to train employees. This is not surprising given the trend away from long-term obligations. Although, I wonder if this is reinforced in some way (employment/tax policy, law, etc.).

"Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area,"

Keywords being experienced and bay area which is super expensive to live in. Non experienced wanna be workers in bay area have hard time to pay rent.

Experience here is as little as 2 years as a journeyman. And during that time you're still getting paid a great wage.

Agreed. I know HVAC people rolling in cash. Plumbers cleaning up. General contractors trying to keep up with demand. Ditto electricians.

The consistent trait among all of these guys is that they did good work at a fair price, were pleasant and reliable to work with, consistently communicate and were honest. This results in these guys getting lots and lots and lots of word of mouth referrals, not to mention call backs for future work.

When people are putting up a reasonable chunk of their own after tax money for work like that, 99% of the time it's enough for them that their biggest concern is trust and word of mouth recommendations is where trusted referrals come from. Integrity goes a long way in the contractor world.

>The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive.

This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.

Your post is informative, thanks for taking the time to write it. Minor nit: It would have been better if you dropped the aggressive opening sentence, and let your well-written depiction of the facts stand alone, especially as it seems the other poster was operating in good faith. FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days.

>FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days.

Agreed. It was an emotional response to a subject of personal issue.

I'm curious - I haven't met many people who were unable to obtain any type of student loan. Was that the case for you?

I was denied student loans unless my parents cosigned.

Even federal student loans? I thought most of them don't require a cosigner

IIRC most require a complimentary loan application from parents for PLUS loans... or something like that, at least it used to be so.

It's not a question of obtaining any loan. It's a question of obtaining enough loans.

And at a proper rate. Having a credit cosigner to get you that 4% loan can mean the difference between spending a lifetime paying interest, and paying down your principal in 10 years.

It's not just obtaining the loans but the terms. I know someone who's immediate family doesn't have great credit and/or great jobs. They became a software engineer but had something like an 8.5% interest rate. He worked out of San Diego and hopped on a job in Atlanta because the salary and cost of living was better for paying off the high interest loan.

I'll add in why I dropped out of college (current software engineer making six figures).

My dad made just enough money to get us past the point where Pell grants were denied because of my Dad's income. Unfortunately, my family still couldn't afford it and I was exceptionally weary of taking out 150k in student loans. The most they could afford to offer me was $200/month in rent. After a semester, I just dropped out and got a job at a local ISP as a software engineer.

Would I have went to school? Absolutely, but I couldn't afford it. As a person with Aspergers, it would have also been exceptionally hard for me to work /and/ attend school full-time. I tried that and it didn't work out.

I still have dreams of getting a doctorate. I love school and I love learning. I love being in class and attending lectures. Maybe when I can afford it and do just that, I'll do it.

As a person who graduated three years ago, the education system (even to an upper-lower/lower-middle class kid) is absolutely disheartening and dream crushing. Intellectuals don't speak of social darwinism, but their organizations, fiscally and structurally, still do. I will always feel inadequate for never having achieved a degree that all my friends will soon or now have.

I learned to only rely on myself, though. It's turned me into a very mature and responsible 21 year old. It still feels like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm working on it.

As a member of this demographic I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet. I feel like I'm so close to the promised utopia upper class lifestyle of a full-time software engineer that taking extreme measures like the women described in this article seem justified.

But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?

> But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe?

She isn't close to one. And I don't know of many libraries that are cool with you videoconferencing with instructors and pair programming 8 hrs/day.

Interesting you say that. I happen to live 5 blocks from the new central library in San Diego. It's huge and very expensive (nearly $200M). It also has what appears to be 100 or so public computers that are pretty much used non-stop by the large homeless population which borders the area to the east of downtown. Look at some of the more negative yelp reviews for it: https://www.yelp.com/biz/san-diego-public-library-san-diego-...

Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.

That is interesting. She's in rural Texas, so obviously pretty different, but I didn't know there were libraries like that anywhere.

I don't think think legally there are libraries not like that anywhere. To be removed, someone has to be committing a crime. In most cases with homeless people that aren't actually committing an obvious crime it's loitering (or solicitation if panhandling). In a library if you're actually reading a book or using a computer you're not loitering any more than anyone else there.

But we require our students to talk a lot. At least in the libraries I've been to there's an expectation of noise level. That said, I haven't been to very many libraries.

This is a problem with the design of the system. "Using the computer" just so you can be inside in the air conditioning is definitely not how those resources were intended to be used. The problem is that it's impossible to practically police this behavior individually, but easy to detect in aggregate. If the homeless person just sits around in the library doing nothing, they're loitering, but because they're sitting at a computer eating up a resource, it's not loitering. I certainly don't mean to assume a homeless person wouldn't have a legit reason to use the library computers. That's why I noted the difference between policing an individual is impossible, but seeing the trend in aggregate is easy.

Some of those yelp reviews are amazing - I can only assume they are coming from the same group of people that thinks that the homeless should stop being losers and just get a real job.

They're all written by the people who complain about pit toilets in national parks.

I used to get kicked out of the San Diego library for smelling bad when I was homeless in San Diego. It was a loose interpretation of some rule about interfering with other people's use of the library. I also know of a library system that literally has a smell rule. It pisses me off because it is basically a Jim Crow law. I have serious allergies and respiratory problems and it can literally make me ill when someone shows up stinking to high heaven of strong perfume. But you can bet the librarians would not have thrown them out had I complained.

That "you smell" thing is basically code for "no homeless people." There is no objective smell-o-meter that indicates when someone is actually a threat to public welfare or something. And in settings where people did not know I was homeless, I did not see evidence that I actually smelled bad. They would ask me about my vacation plans while cutting my hair.

Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.

There's lots that can be done. How about more computers, for a start? If they're monopolizing 100 computers then how about 1000? Install public showers and laundry facilities, too. Add in a volunteer job training center. Run free programming classes and job interview tutorials. Resumé review classes would be great, too.

Libraries aren't homeless shelters.

Right. Libraries have the opportunity to help people break the cycle of poverty rather than merely sustain it.

Some libraries are not even open 8 hours a day, every day. In fact, most library systems seem to not be open 7 days a week. Even the ones that are typically have shorter hours at least on some days.

> I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet.

How far in the black will a minimum wage job put you month/month? How long will it take to put yourself up on your feet with it?

>As a member of this demographic I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet

Don't do it. Life is all about priorities and keeping your focus. Once you start mixing work and studies, both will suffer.

Go hungry, sell plasma, visit a food bank, do what you have to do. But keep your eye on the prize.

Studies will suffer even more if you're unsure of where your next meal is coming from.

Tons of students do part time min wager jobs and do just fine. You learn stuff from working those jobs alone!

I got my master's in software engineering half time while working full time as a software engineer. During those four years I was also volunteering once a week, had a few side projects going on, wrote a book that made >$50,000 over the last two years, did freelance work, and maintained a relationship (got married two days after I graduated!).

There were certainly periods of time where I didn't see friends much, and my husband had to (gasp) cook dinner once in a while, but it was doable, and I graduated with a 3.7 GPA. I'm not a genius, I certainly did my fair share of procrastination, it was mostly just about making almost every day a "work day" (at least for a few hours), keeping things interesting by alternating between different types of work, and finding creative times/ways to study (commuting, lunch break, doing class busywork watching TV in the evening, etc)

I don't think I would have gotten "more" out of the program by quitting my job and just doing that full time. If anything, the financial stress would have made things more difficult.

FYI:

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com

How do you inforce the "only pay once you got a job" model and what do people have to pay? Sounds great!

There's an income share agreement and you submit forms to the IRS that lets us see your taxes. So it's a legal agreement.

You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.

This is great. I wish vocational / professional schools in other fields did this!

We'll just expand :)

I believe that at least in the US, lots of hospitals will underwrite your nursing degree in full or in part, as long as you agree to work there for some period of time. Different than this, but along the same lines.

That's how student loans work in the UK.

Fixed percentage until when?

Fixed percentage forever? Fixed percentage of only the first job? Fixed percentage until a certain amount has been paid?

A fixed percentage for a fixed number of years (right now 2 years), unless you meet a dollar cap (right now $30k). Any recruiting fees we get are deducted from what you owe, so they pay for your tuition. And if you make less than $50k/yr you don't pay anything.

> we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary

I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor.

This IT career track is pretty amazing to me.

You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.

Anyone poor enough to be homeless or food insecure should qualify for a Pell grant, which should largely pay for community college. We just need to figure out how to solve the other problems.

I was talking about this at work today, that we expect things with huge societal gains to be entirely handled by individuals despite the fact that a) it obviously doesn't work and b) we never used to do it like this. College education in the US and the UK used to be heavily subsidised. Now it isn't and we wring our hands at all of the downsides saying "but what can we do?"

Yeah, the solution is pretty clearly to shift the risk/expense to some other party. There seems to be zero political will to have the government do any of that (or anything, really), so it is really up to the private sector.

Problem is, it's not clear it's possible to shift the benefits to the private sector as well. The government just gets to ride free on the societal benefits. This is why all the decent railways in the world seem to be publically owned.

(Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)

Meta: What do we think about this type of native advertising? Is this allowed on HN?

Yes, it is. This is a forum run by a startup incubator. People are encouraged to promote their work, within reason.

It is a broken system but community colleges are made for people like this. It doesn't take 40k in student loans, it takes 2.5k in funds over 2 years which you can piece together at a minimum wage job or if you really need to take out as a loan. Then you've got an associate degree and half of a bachelor.

How expensive is community in Cali?

It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.

cali community college is around 500-600/semester in tuition. you can get the tuition waived completely if youre from an economically disadvantaged background.

I was thinking for a bachelor's degree, and in that instance at the community colleges + cheap state school you're looking around $10-20k for tuition plus ~four years of living costs (assuming full-time). You could do it for less, but there's no question it's a lot if you're making minimum wage.

Does the Pell Grant cover people in this case?

I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.

Some, not all

Full Pell Grant was $5,500 when I received it. And with that being said, it's not necessarily a good thing if people end up using it to go to college to get a degree in an art that they can't use for a good job. (Although I still largely disagree with universities being a vehicle for job training).

I did 3 semesters of community college. Calculus 2, 3, DiffEq, physics 2, 3, chem 1 and 2... It was pretty rigorous, and dirt cheap.

Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?

I don't know if this is unique to Florida, but most of the community colleges here became state colleges, thus enabling them to provide certain bachelor's degrees.

People know their options.

Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job.

In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.

That would just make a masters the new collage degree.

The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.

That's an impossible problem though, isn't it? Reputation was used as a proxy for ability until it became an end itself, but until we can correctly attribute some metric of ability (which sounds slightly dystopian) before hiring people we will continue to rely upon proxies to inform our decisions.

Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...

IMO, it has to do with how zero sum much of the economy is.

A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.

I'd rather take it a step backwards. Instead of making college free and standardized, fix high schools so that a diploma means something and your entire populace does have a foundation.

High school already doesn't mean anything, making college free and standardized means that college becomes not just a defacto expectation but something everyone has to do and there's really no point in that when we have the level below that underperforming.

Both are monumental tasks, though.

I'd agree, but don't think that's quite possible. At least with college you can have selection even if it's free, but high school is mostly mandatory, so the curriculums will always revert to whatever shuttles the most kids through the fastest.

I think the real genius of making college free is not making it mandatory (of course, easier said than done). It's there if you need it and want to take the next step in your education, but for those who would rather not be there or would do something else that should be a viable option as well, and then you don't have to marginalize the education across the board.

High school is both mandatory and selective. Most schools have multiple tracks: vocational, general, college prep, honors / ap. Also private and some public high schools, like specialized magnet schools, can be more selective in admissions than many universities.

In small towns the tracks may end up being a couple of different english and math classes, band vs autoshop (if either is funded) and how much chemistry/physics you complete.

That selectivity thing has more to do with how we fund and operate schools and less with the requirements of education.

If you look at NYC, they have a model of neighborhood elementary schools and location based high schools, but also a network of merit based advanced and magnet schools.

When I was in high school in a rural upstate NY town, we had tracked programs with "smart" and "not so much" kids and rarely interacted directly with kids more than one track up or down in school. (There was only 90 kids in the graduating class)

It was a real eye opener when taking some mandatory class as a senior (something like civics) when I discovered that my writing partner didn't really know how to read or write. To me that's the tragedy of schools -- that should not happen.

Just let people stop going to high school at age 16 and make the last 2 years more rigorous.

There need to be other changes to go with that, but the people electing to stop school would be happier and I think wouldn't miss out on much learning.

It may be different for each state, but the cost of even Community College has increased quite a bit in the last decade. I'm attending one of the cheaper colleges in my state and tuition costs alone are about $4,000 for a full credit year. This does not include things like books or transportation. I'm now going part-time and still have another year and a half to go, but the total cost for me so far has been about $7,200. The doesn't even take into account the return in education you're getting which I believe to be sub par compared to University courses I've taken.

While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.

In California Community Colleges, tuition is about $46/unit or $500/semester for a typical workload. Plus the community colleges have fee waiver for low income individuals. Books can be expensive but from my experience, I could get a semester bus passes for students quite cheap. Cal grants may cover the rest if you are low income from my own experience they are quite generous.