Hacker News Reader

The amount of people I know with degrees who work in retail, or something completely unrelated is staggering. From my observations, I'd guess "underemployment" is the biggest contributor to the late payments.

This is just another example of why I urge any young people I know (high school age) to think long and hard before choosing to go to a 4 year college. When I graduated high school in 99', we were primed to think "college degree == good job". Of course, that is anything but the truth. And, it only serves to put someone in serious debt without any guarantees.

Hands on technical jobs like electrician, plumber, welder, are many times more lucrative than some bullshit business degree. A friend of mine's son is 22 or 23, and making a hell of a living welding. Granted, he's exceptional at it. But, that doesn't change the fact that his 2-year trade school investment was a good one.

Or, teach yourself a skill. Like lots of us on here, I'm a self taught programmer. It took years of doing small projects in the evenings, but I make a living from it now with $0 in student loan debt.

The key is a marketable college degree. In fields such as aerospace and defense where the credential is the key to open the door, get the credential as cheaply as possible. Do a couple of years at a community college and then finish at a state school. Name-brand degrees bring no extra value. Oh yeah, and get your master’s while you’re still in the zone.

The idea that trade school somehow is lower tier or oppressive is a staggering disservice. Just like every college-bound high schooler is not med school material, not every high schooler is college material. Put a wrench or saw or blowtorch in the hands of a doctor or engineer, and crummy is the likely result. Skilled trades are an honorable, respectable way to earn a good living. Forcing people into tracks for their own supposed good but where they feel hopeless is horrible social engineering.

Not only what you said, trades can also lead you down a path of owning your own business. If that is the direction you go often you can exceed the incomes of the college educated quite handily.

Great point, but for some reason union-protected professional educators who hold degrees from accredited institutions and who control state education monopolies are hostile to this worldview and deride it as “demeaning.”

There are plenty of fields where name-brand degrees mean a crap ton starting out, e.g. finance, law.

In fact, the conventional wisdom these days seems increasingly to be that you should go to a top-tier law school or just not bother. And that seems to be becoming fairly common advice for MBAs as well, although that's not as cut and tried because MBAs cover a wider range of programs than law degrees do.

Law is not a guaranteed payout. The competition is incredible, and if you don't get into those firms, there's a big drop off in what you're likely getting paid. $30k a year jobs for those that didn't make it into the prestigious firms (or start their own practice) is fairly common.

Granted. My comment was in the context of aerospace and defense.

Those are on the higher end of risk (and upside potential). Would only do it if some else foots the bill, eg parents.

think long and hard before choosing to go to a 4 year college

A college degree is still worth a considerable bump in lifetime earnings.[1] Perhaps you should revise your advice to "think long and hard before choosing to go to an expensive 4 year college" or "consider spending the first two years of college at a local community college."

1 - https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-table...

One question I have regarding spending the first 2 years in a CC is how does this impact your ability to get admitted to a 4-year school later on, particularly a top-tier (say top 50) university? Are these schools less likely to admit students who will only spend a couple of years there vs students entering straight out of high school, all other things being equal? I don't know the answer, but given my son is on a track to gain admission to a top university, I would hate to give advice that could hurt him in the long run.

My state has multiple public universities which regularly appear on top 50 lists and for many in demand fields in the top 5 or 10. The CC systems have agreements with the state public universities guaranteeing admission after 2 years attending CC. There are of course requirements that must be met during the 2 years. They vary from school to school, so you do need to target a specific school while attending CC. These requirements generally involve minimum GPA, credit hours earned and required courses. Since the requirements can vary so greatly between schools many of the CCs have counselors dedicated to working with students to make sure they meet the requirements of the specific 4 year school they would like to attend.

The universities were required to enter these agreements by state law. In an attempt to bring in more out of state tuition dollars some have started to voluntarily enter similar agreements with CC systems in other states.

Do some research and see if there are similar arrangements between CCs and public universities in your state or with out of state universities.

tssva is correct, most states have matriculation agreements between the CC system and state college system. So, at worst, you finish your degree at your home states flagship state university (obviously, those vary, but generally, each state has at least one well respected institution). If you're in VA, you "hit the jackpot" and have many choices (UVA, W&M, VT, plus a half-dozen other solid choices).

Locally (VA), students are guaranteed admission to the state university system if they meet a published GPA threshold. That threshold varies by school. The one big caveat - students are not guaranteed placement within specific programs. So, at GMU, an overall GPA of 2.85 is required to transfer, however that is might not be high enough to guarantee placement in their Computer Science program (which is highly competitive and close to fully enrolled).

I don't know how this applies to transferring to an Ivy (or other top-tier private). For the Ivies, I assume the caliber of student who can gain admission is going to figure out the finances (for better or worse). I also assume (big assumption here) that even a "useless" liberal arts degree from Harvard makes one employable at a reasonable salary (vs the same degree from a 2-tier school).

Edit - one "local" private school (Shepherd U, WV) also has a guaranteed transfer program from the local (Northern VA) CC system. They offer a tuition discount to those transfers. http://www.shepherd.edu/nova-transfer-admissions/

Unfortunately, my state's universities are decidedly mediocre. Both flagships sit outside the top 100 nationally. Bordering states do have strong public universities, so I will have to see if there is any reciprocity. Otherwise, it looks like we'll have to do a lot of close examination of the total financial packages being offered when the time comes.

I graduated in the mid-90s with $20k in debt. That wasn't fun but it was manageable. I can't imagine graduating with a mortgage's worth of debt.

VA also has a private college subsidy (effectively brings most private college tuition down near state-tuition rates). Maybe your state offers something similar? And, check other in-state privates, maybe they offer something like Shepherd U.

I would be very, very careful making the conclusion college degree leads to lifetime earnings, it's possible that a third (or forth, or fifth, ...) factor that makes people more likely to earn a college degree is what leads to the bump in lifetime earnings.

It is also completely useless to lump together all college degrees from all schools.

Sure, it's a massive generalization. But, no more so than "college is an over-priced waste of time," which is a claim I see repeated on HN and other tech-centric forums.

This, exactly. I don't know why you're getting down-votes. It's indisputable that both (1) the economy improving on average and (2) the distribution of those gains is highly skewed to the right-side of the income/wealth table.

Stories based on average numbers lose a great deal of the details that matter.

Completely agree, especially when the USA has nearly 330 million people!

Last year according to credit Suisse, the median wealth of the typical American actually /decreased/! And if I remember correctly, it was by quite a sizeable chunk, from 49,000 usd to 45,000 usd.

And the median excludes children, so it is adults only.

I have all the statistics in the world to back up what I'm saying, but even more important for me is anecdotal stuff that inspires me to dig deeper.

When you see the sheer number of young kids working chipotle or retail; when you see the demographics of uber drivers vs big 5 software engineers; when you realize that so much of the wealth in the US is old money that continues to centralize, pool, and grow (much like gravity);

when you realize all that, at the very least, it makes you say "hmmm... I need to rethink and dig deeper into this topic on my own".

Besides all that, I'd add that the unemployment rate is an aggregate measure. There's no guarantee that the unemployment rate for arbitrary subsets of the population (e.g. college graduates) is the same as the aggregate unemployment rate defined over the whole population. So, supposing that college educated workers actually were more likely to be unemployed than the average worker (they aren't), looking at the national unemployment rate would be just ... looking at the wrong place.

But here's a "nice" graph (the graph is nice, but the trend is worrying): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662. Labor force participation for college educated workers fell by 3.9 percent points since 2009. This is rather massive compared with the actual unemployment.

I really wish the people at statistics offices would come up with some new measure of unemployment. Sometimes I feel a scalar doesn't cut it.

Well put.

It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.

It used to be that when someone at the top got a bit richer, they would invest that money. Which meant opening up a factory, creating jobs as a side effect. Now, it seems the better investments happen to be things that don't create as much jobs.

> Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc.

Yes. In most countries I know of, employment statistics are more about making economy/government look good and hitting targets, and less about giving any real numbers that people can use to understand the big picture.

Those numbers are all computed, and they've all been getting better as core unemployment has (that is, they are trending together). The only number that is getting worse is the number of people retiring out at 65/67.

I do agree that we have to look more at wealth equality to see what's going on.

> which means the statistic doesn't count them

They do, they're called "not in labor force" [0]

If you include the unemployed as well as those who want a job but aren't actively looking, it's around 5% which is considered low.

But the point of the article is that the unemployment rate is moving in the opposite direction to the arrears rate. Unless the basis for these figures has changed recently, this would require that an abnormal number of graduates aree becoming less emlpoyed while an abnormal, and larger, number of grads are becoming employed. Seems unlikely.

> ...perhaps are underemployed

Are you sure? I'm not totally familiar with the exact counting mechanism in the US but, in the UK, if someone is in part-time work but is looking for more hours or full-time work, then they count as unemployed, not employed.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat35.htm

For further reading on this, look to articles about how the Phillips Curve (the theoretical link between inflation and underemployment) is broken (if it ever worked).

e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/inflation-canada-outlook-1.4...

The Phillips Curve, at least in it's older formulations, was just a description of a certain regularity in the data. So it isn't a "theoretical" link, strictly speaking.

TFA mentions that underemployed people can get income based payments matched to their earnings.