Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

But other comments reflected a view that today’s young adults should just grow up.

Hmmmm. Bullshit alert going off.

Every generation needs to come of age, get their education, look around in the world, and fit in. Many times this involves a lot of protesting and asking for change, complaining about the way things currently are, and experimenting with various alternative lifestyles. This is good for everybody.

What some observers see -- probably because of the way the press reports it -- is a lot of kids who are ass-deep in debt, lack the education (even though they've graduated from a nice college) to be employable, and instead of adapting to the world as they see it, are stuck in a mode of complaining and waiting around until something comes their way. This is by no means all of them, but kids like that make for a good newspaper story: "Still living in his parent's basement at 35, Joe Smith emails out 100 resumes per day before going to the Starbucks and playing MMORPGs all day. 'I'm just not sure where the management jobs are,' the Art History major says...."

To a story like that, sure, people will say something like "perhaps instead of insisting the world conform to your ideas, you should learn to like the world as it is and adapt. Many have found that this leads to a happier life." or the shorter form, "grow the hell up, kid!"

People who offer this advice are not trying to be callous, cruel, or insensitive to the plight of the young. Nobody is saying to give up on your dreams. It's just that big goals like being an astronaut often begin with flipping burgers down at the Mickey D's, even for people with 4-year degrees.

Like I said, I blame the press for setting up this "fight". If you ask me, most college grads already have this figured out.

You seem to be railing against a straw man - the article is not your typical sob story about people who have degrees and can't find jobs.

In fact, the author at no point in the article brings up anyone who fits that mold: degreed but can't find a job.

Can we, like, talk about the topic of the article instead of making up straw men (like your fictional Art History major) to attack? It does no good except to stroke the already massive egos of everyone here.

What the article does actually talk about is that, for a range of things such as housing and education, the cost has far, far outpaced inflation (or income growth), and is considerably harder to afford for this generation than the last, and presents numeric evidence of this.

This is about the fact that, as a relation to income, college has become much more expensive, to the point where loans are unavoidable, where they could be realistically worked off before with part-time jobs. To be fair, Canadians still have vastly more affordable tuition than most Americans.

This is about the fact that, beyond college, home ownership is a pipe dream - housing prices as a multiple of income has jumped from 1.6 up through to a national average of 6. For major Canadian cities, the multiple drifts up to 8-9.

This is about stagnant wages in the face of rapidly rising everything.

So even for our fictional Hacker News hero - the one who got a "useful" degree, the one who has figured out the job market, the one that freely scoffs in the face of pathetic liberal arts Untermensch, even he faces slim to nil odds of ever owning a home, massive debt out of college, etc etc. Growing the hell up doesn't seem to help his case.

It's just that big goals like being an astronaut often begin with flipping burgers down at the Mickey D's, even for people with 4-year degrees.

Interesting sentence. Flipping burgers will not lead a person toward becoming an astronaut. Studying science and engineering will. The career problem is that a lot of people don't have good information regarding which entry level jobs are like flipping burgers and which are like learning science.

The ones who live with their parents because they can't get management jobs are probably having far too many false negatives (or just attempting to excuse laziness) and thereby overlooking jobs that will lead to where they want to be. But there are people who got caught by false positives and end up in dead end jobs.

Flipping burgers at McDonalds is a good way to get your foot in the door if you work at it. Shift managers can make $50-75k, and location managers frequently top $100k. Given the high rates of turnover, such positions can be earned in 2-3 years (for college graduates).

Moreover, McDonalds has an extremely generous education assistance program, including full-ride scholarships to business schools for employees who qualify for its executive training program. A high percentage of McDonald's executives are promoted from within. And like Dominos, a vast majority of McDonald's franchises (which clear >$1 million/year, on average) are owned by former employees. (Don't remember what the % is for McDs, but for Dominos, their pizza box claims >95% of their franchises are owned by former employees.)

When I worked at Hardees (mid-90s, but inflation hasn't been so high since then), I happened to see my shift manager's paycheck. She was making like $20k/year.

Perhaps shift managers can make $50-75k, but I'd be surprised if it's common. If you have a reference that shows otherwise, I would be very curious to see it.

I did specify "McDonalds" for a reason. McDonalds has always had great employee relations. In-n-out is even better than McD's in this regard, but the total opportunity for growth is limited because of the smaller footprint.

Hardees (Carl's Junior in the west) is almost the polar opposite of McDonalds. Its founder was a vocal opponent of labor laws, and for a while in the 1990s was one of the principal financial backers of the effort to repeal the minimum wage and overtime laws.

I don't know what shift managers you know, but the ones I know don't pull much more then what the standard employee gets.

I know/knew shift managers in the Los Angeles area (Downtown, South Central, Beverly Hills/Century City/Westwood, and West LA), Oakland/Berkely, Cleveland/East Cleveland, and Atlanta.

They make good money, especially considering that many of them never went to college and some did not finish high school. A lot of them have been promoted into restaurant or regional manager positions.

Salaries at the managerial level start of lockstep but quickly become merit-based, that is, in order to earn substantially more than a standard employee, they must prove that they are substantially higher performing than a standard employee (in the managerial sense, not on an hours basis). A good manager is like a multiplier on his/her employees' work output, so the salaries for managers generally reflect the multiplier they generate.

> big goals like being an astronaut often begin with flipping burgers down at the Mickey D's

And end there, because you can't pay down your debt load with that kind of a job.

Remember: Student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy.

People want to talk about investment bubbles or the national debt, but here's a topic I don't see enough of: by subsidizing investment in college education for everyone without some feedback loop to make sure grads have employable skills, we've created a huge debt burden of people owing college loans for skills the marketplace isn't valuing. And it's just getting worse. And to "fix it", just like the way we fix all these other bad policies like taxes, we'll just tighten the screws on some minority of the population that people will accept.

Quite frankly I'm disgusted at the whole thing, and I blame both political parties for it. The young are getting screwed over royally by previous generations who knew economics but failed to apply it in their policy decisions. You can't pay for something for somebody else without a very detailed and tight feedback loop. You'll only end up driving up prices and getting less value.

But to your direct point: I can't play the hypothetical game here. It has no end. I'll propose a counter-argument and you'll shoot that down, and on we go ad infinitum. My point was that it is critical to view yourself as adapting to the market, wherever that is, not the other way around. If you sit in your figurative parent's basement waiting for that management job, it's not only bad for you it's also bad for the rest of us. You have to accept your role is adaptation, and the even more bitter truth that you might have spent four years gaining nothing but a bad attitude and a boat load of debt. Blech. Not a good place to start. But for some, that's the reality of where they are.

You have to make decisions and baby steps toward adaptation. What those decisions are and what those steps are is going to vary from person to person.

ADD: Note that this is the very definition of a startup. Go find something people want and give it to them. Adapt and pivot based on what the market wants, not what you want (or have been trained) to do.

In what ways is a college loan a subsidy? ("by subsidizing investment in college education" ...) Who's doing the subsidizing?

Am I missing something?

The interest on college loans in the US is largely subsidized through the government while students are in college.

They are providing low interest loans for people who wouldn't otherwise qualify. The extra risk that the government takes on (that private banks otherwise wouldn't) is the subsidy.

Basically they are making money available that wouldn't be there without government intervention.

Not to mention that they are directly subsidizing the interest in many cases.

Who is the "they" here? Unless the govt. is doing it, it doesn't count as subsidy.

Also, I thought govt. loans were much smaller in total than private loans. Is that incorrect?

The government made student loan debt not dischargable through bankruptcy; that's basically a loan guarantee, hence a subsidy.

Except the government doesn't guarantee that they'll pay it off; they're just forcing it onto the student.

To put it differently, if the government announced that failed startups could not discharge their debt through bankruptcy and that the founders would be held responsible for paying off the debts, would you call this government subsidization of small business?

Yes, it would encourage banks to start lending because they have you for the rest of your life to force you to pay. Those kids get loans they couldn't otherwise get because banks know they have them by the balls.

But I wouldn't use the word 'subsidy' to describe that situation.

Maybe you wouldn't, but many people would. The government is encouraging behavior with law and giving the banks something that drastically lowers the risk of lending; that something is guaranteed access to a persons future earnings. I call that a subsidy, even if it's not a direct cash payment.

Yes, they do. Just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guaranteed "qualifying" loans the government guarantees some portion of student loans, e.g. Stafford loans, through Sallie Mae.

Yes, the government massively subsidizes student loans, both directly, and through guaranties. See http://www.direct.ed.gov/

Ok, I got downvotes instead of clarifications to my question about the market share of the govt. in student loans. :(

It appears that the direct and indirect (i.e., backed by the govt.) loans by the federal govt. account for 80% of the market.

So yes, the relaxed standards for govt. backed loans is keeping college costs high. And the word 'subsidy' can be reasonably applied to the current situation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020344010457440...

The most obvious answer would be to talk about Federal Subsidized Student Loans (like the Stafford). Additionally though, while not a subsidy, per se, there's also the fact that when you take out a student loan, you typically don't make any payments until six months after you stop being a full time student. This feels a lot like a subsidy.

Although I agree with most of what you are saying, I disagree that most grads are capable of using a startup mentality to adapt themselves to the market.

In fact I would go as far as saying our public schools and universities actively discourage independent thinking and creativity. When we graduate, we are thrown into a world that we aren't prepared for. We have been prepared to memorize facts and follow routine, now everything is the complete opposite of that?

Even assuming I'm wrong and most graduates can adapt to life after graduation, it still takes a while to mentally pivot. Six months is not long in the scheme of things, but when it happens to lots of graduates, articles like this start to pop up; occupy movements start to pop up; etc.

If you actually want to be an astronaut and to pay off your student debt, your best bet is to join the US Navy or the US Air Force, and become a fighter pilot who is also a technical and scientific genius.

They will, however, start you off on doing things which are far more demeaning, gruelling and uncomfortable than merely flipping burgers, before you ever get to fly a goddamn fighter jet or a spaceship.

Flipping burgers isn't a particularly good pathway to anything, but all the good pathways to anywhere start off just as shite.

You're missing the point by focusing too closely on a specific, unrealistic example.

The point is that flipping burgers can't be a path to anywhere because once you graduate college, your debt load is so high that a minimum-wage job can't possibly help you pay it down. Especially if you need to live on that wage, too.

Getting a government job (including something in the Navy or Air Force) is a different matter entirely, due to massive amounts of tax money being poured into the military (which implies massive amounts of tax money not being poured into anything else). It is a world unto itself.

Flipping burgers can be a damn good pathway to an executive position in the fast food industry, as long as you actually put the effort into it. Turnover is high in the fast food industry, so promotions are rapid. College graduates who stick it out are frequently offered full-ride scholarships to business school on the company's dime, with managerial and executive-level positions (in either cases paying >$100,000) afterwards.

From a career perspective, starting your career by flipping burgers at McDonalds can yield greater dividends (in the long-term) than being a programmer.

Good to know folks aren't afraid to be contrarians around here.

There are a few programmers who have become managers and executives too of course. But yes there are executives who would sooner bring in a graduate of Hamburger U than promote talented technical people.

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