STEM-kids aren't struggling to pay off their college debts. Liberal art degree holders, however.
> My personal experiences highlight the magnitude of the problem. Upon graduation from medical school in 2013, I owed approximately $180,000 in student debt — what might seem an outrageously high number that is actually about $10,000 less than the average for today’s medical school graduates. I scrounged and saved during residency, living in a tiny Chinatown apartment, riding my bicycle to work every day, and sneaking expired patient sandwiches for lunch so that I could make my monthly $700 debt payment. Yet upon completing residency, the amount I owed had, to my disbelief, increased to $188,000 — all my efforts had not been enough to cover even the interest accumulating on my loans.
> I am far from alone. A mentor in residency, several years my senior and making over $200,000 per year, once revealed that she had moved back in with her mother just to get a handle on her student loans. Another colleague had a marriage proposal rejected because of his mortgage-size debt.
I'm really skeptical of these types of articles because they don't tell the complete story about their finances and how they're spending money. In 2013 the median rent in Chinatown was ~$600, and the average salary for a resident was $55,000. After taxes that's roughly $3k/month.
Debt itself isn’t bad if it’s taken on as an investment.
You have to make allowances for things like starting a family. Otherwise we're not going to have enough people to create the expected economic value in 20 years. That will come with economic and political consequences that no one likes, and of course, the people who earned a retirement off of such short-sighted policy will be either dead or too frail to face the consequences.
If the cost of college or students loans is reducing the population, it’s hard to be too afraid of it.
EDIT: Do you have data that's not anecdotal and shows that residents/doctors are struggling to pay off that debt?
> The average medical school graduate owes $250,995 in total student loan debt.
> The average medical school graduate owes 4 times as much as the average college graduate
> In 1978, the average medical school debt in the U.S. was $13,500. That’s $53,648 when adjusted for inflation.
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/radiologist... The median radiologist is making $459k. The bottom 10% is still making $344k. So you could finish med school, be the lowest-paid radiologist in your class, and pay off your debt in like 2 years if you wanted.
A less lucrative specialty still makes the debt no big deal. If you're making $250k as a family doctor, you're still living comfortably after making your debt payments.
- teachers and childcare workers
- special education and/or disability workers
- librarians
- social workers, therapists, mental health workers
- cnas, medical billing, and other heathcare admin
- and many more not listed above
People often seem to assume "liberal arts" translates to a fake profession, like "underwater basketweaving" or "economist" or something "silly". And while that's occasionally true, most folks with a Liberal Arts degree are hard-working career-oriented people, who society just pays terribly, arbitrarily, because they can. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/03/19/teacher-s...
I kind of get it. The english words "liberal" and "arts" used to mean entirely different things for hundreds of years, and have been redefined into something else only recently (past ~30 years) via common usage.
My degree program was in "Liberal Studies", and my parents consistently assumed it meant "studying how to become a Democrat voter", when in actuality, what it meant was "if you can justify it well, we give you permission to merge two-or-more different degree paths into one"
The university eventually had to rename the program to "Integrative Studies", because too many people simply don't know what "Liberal" means in an traditional academic context, and couldn't shake the modern-political framing of the word.
As for a CNAS or medical biller, those jobs don't even require a bachelor's degree. They can get trained more cheaply in community college.
Low pay in many of those fields you listed is only arbitrary in the sense that much of the funding ultimately comes from governments. Voters are already struggling themselves and seldom vote for tax increases.
Many careers requiring hard science degrees have dreadful pay.
What you said used to be true, it's no longer true.
Let me say here I know three chemist undergrads that have been in the industry for 5-8y+: none are happy or over six figures.
I am an ex-biochemist and trust me, PhDs in academia are not making six figures.
There is a divide there between tech and science for sure. Of the maybe 25 or so younger people I worked with in the lab, the ones that did very well moved to tech. The ones that did ok were either from other countries, or their parents paid their way. Very few US people from the lab that stayed in science that had loans, paid off their loan. I can think of one.
Lab work is super underpaid, and you need every degree in order to even get your foot in the door.
For reference, I have a degree in history that I paid (ending in 2014) 30k in 2024 dollars for over the course of six years. Even with current price, that same degree at the same institution would be ~60k over the course of four years. Inflationary and gouging - sure, but still rather affordable.
The current system that perpetuates "college for everyone" along with a governmental debt guarantee to the universities leads to incessant price jacking. No, Boston University is emphatically not worth 63 thousand dollars a year. No state school is worth 30-40k/year.
For folks who don't know, would you be willing to elaborate? Is it a real degree (fully accredited, so you can actually use it?).
Even using residency status at a community college for your first two years, and then transfering in to a public state university, still puts the cheapest bachlors degree around here at close to $40k (not including room and board). (And for maybe half of the careers, you can't do this, and it costs even more)
E: Also in your post, 40k, not 40k/year. A lot of these (domestic to the US at least) also assume that you're working part or fulltime through it. Having done it, have to say proto-SRE work and full college load is hell, but a doable hell.
A lot of this hinges on "worth".
Are you trying to make some kind of purely financial investment and show in an Excel model how it improves the overall financial outcome?
Or are you trying to equip your offspring to maximize their enjoyment in life? I got a lot of education at university that will never show up in a cell in a spreadsheet and I'm forever grateful for that, even though that it that subset had a negative RoI.
Side note: If a student chooses to saddle themself with that level of debt to attend Berkeley, I think that's still a good decision for the vast majority of students who will make that choice.
That's borderline not believable. Somebody should probably take a closer look at where that data comes from. I went through the UC system, filling out the FAFSA every year, and had one parent who _partially_ supported me financially. I had that average amount of debt in two years. This was many years ago, and yes, I did work as well.
>For those who borrow the average debt at graduation is around $18k.
The debt specifically for tuition? What about housing? August to May is 10 months. It's easy to find studios that charge at least 1000/month. Assume rent is 900$. How does that housing cost calculation square with your average debt figure of 18k? If you're not including it, why not?
You’re delusional to claim that state schools “aren’t worth it”. There are cream of the crop state schools.
And if it's just for "an degree", the reality is most HR departments in the US could give two shits about you having anything but an degree.