Poor Millennials
highline.huffingtonpost.com
highline.huffingtonpost.com
The contents of the article, I'm less sure about. This line stuck out to me.
>“I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans.
She works at a dental office, I'm guessing she isn't a dentist or dental hygienist (both careers can expect to make 70k plus). So... Why does she have a lot of student loan debt? What did she go to college for? To become a part time office secretary and a baby sitter?
I'd have more sympathy for millennials if I knew them at a greater distance. As a millennial though, I was not afforded that luxury.
College has many useless subjects and so many more useless students. Why, for example, are you getting an English degree? I enjoyed writing and reading and took many high level English classes in college - but as a degree? To focus on it? Why? What's the point? You can pass an English class without reading the literature, just by getting summaries on Wikipedia and writing about them. If your degree can be obtained reliably by such tricks, how valuable is it?
The change we need to make is removing the obstacles around discharging student loan debt via bankruptcy. Then, I trust, lenders wouldn't lend to students without a good career plan, students who took on too much debt could get out of it, and schools would stop the crazy artificial inflation of their prices.
While I agree with you in principle, I would never take that bet as a lender. What incentive would there be for a 22 year-old graduating college with a heap of debt and no assets to not declare bankruptcy? In 7 years - when they're 29 - they'll have a clean credit record and the earnings and investment on $student_loans worth of money. Planned well, you could easily be in a position to have a huge down payment for a house saved up the minute your bankruptcy falls off the credit report.
You can't (and shouldn't be able to!) repossess human capital. Knowing this, the smart kids would be baking in a high-cost education and bankruptcy as a part of their plan. I think the only way something like that works is if you have someone with assets co-signing the loans - ie, the parents - and that still raises barriers for smart kids whose parents don't have significant assets.
If a student is going to graduate 200k in debt with an art degree, you'd be silly to lend to that student. If a student was going ~10k in debt to graduate in a field with a lot of economic opportunity then that might be a smart choice.
HN recently had an article for educators that basically said they had no idea how to prepare kids for the economy of the future, and if they don't know, how do you expect the kids to?
I don't know about you guys, but I was interested in computers for their own sake rather than the cash, so it's not as if I had a crystal ball that software engineers were going to be rolling in money back in 2007. On top of that many tech communities basically look down on people only in tech for the money.
The article mentions a guy who got a degree in economics with a minor in business - a pretty reasonable choice for someone who doesn't really understand exactly what industry wants but is interested in making money - and he basically got fucked and is driving a bus now.
I don't fully agree with this article, but I don't think framing this as millenials' moral failing is the right one, even if it let's those of us in tech feel superior.
Comically, all previous generations thought they had it way worse than the previous. For a fun time read about how the baby boomers complained about how hard they had it. And GenX. Reading stuff from 95-00 is pretty funny.