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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

This article mentions changing demographics, aging population etc.

While the number are out there, I've always found the below story (to the best of my recollection), illustrates what life was like for someone born in the early 1950s:

- "I went to brand new schools built during the start of the baby boom. All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"

- "I got into an Ivy League school b/c acceptance rates were around 50% due to the Eisenhower funding getting cut so the schools needed more students to cover the lost funds"

- "I got a job from looking in the paper and started a few weeks after graduating from college"

- "Six months after I started, my boss retired at 55. So there I was at age 22 with a management role and a secretary"

I think about this story often whenever someone mentions demographics and/or the economy and why young people are spending more time living at home after college.

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I know several people who finished grad school and entered the workforce in the 1960s. Compared to later generations, they do seem to have lived a charmed life.

I think your points dont sound quite right. * Yes there were lots of new schools in the suburbs but does that make education better? Were men better teachers than women of today? * Ivy league were much easier to get in if you had the right background, but very few poor/middle class people applied or could afford it. * The last two years are tough but still most grads work after graduation * The retirement age was much higher in the old days. https://www.statista.com/statistics/319983/average-retiremen.... People are promoted much more quickly now, in the old days you had to work your way up over time.

> Were men better teachers than women of today?

OP is saying that teaching (at primary / secondary level) was one of the few professional jobs available to women so women teachers in that era were more likely to be overqualified.

Or simply ... qualified?

No, overqualified. At least in comparison to their pay.

Which, I guess, contributes to school's problems today.

Underpaying when you have many excellent applicants may be a problem for the employees, but not for the organization. If you get used to underpaying and the supply of excellent candidates dries up, the organization has a problem.

I think the point being made is that we need genius level people working in education. Literally what else is more important than forming the next generation?

Making profits this year go up!

Quite literally no. the whole argument is they were well overqualified. A women teacher of today is qualified with high likelihood a genius women of today is working in a field that suits her genius. A genius women of that time could rarely work elsewhere.

>Were men better teachers than women of today?

The teachers weren't men, they were all women. Back in those days, educated women had only 2 professions available to them: nurse or schoolteacher. Anything else was basically off-limits. So schools were full of very smart women who didn't want to be a nurse and didn't have any other career opportunities.

Programming was a popular profession for women back then also, ironically enough, although not in the quantity of nursing and teaching.

No it wasn't, there were barely any female programmers because there were barely any programmers at all. Number of programmers has been exponentially increasing for a really long time, there weren't many of them before it became male dominated.

Programmer was also a different job then, which no longer exists.

How large part of this was actually secretarial work? Which has very largely disappeared with advent of personal computer in business. Lot of typist and such positions were women too. Not just teachers and nurses.

This isn’t what “life was like for someone born in the early 1950s.”

This is what life was like for privileged white men born in the early 1950s.

I can confirm through my family’s history that coming of age in that era was also life on easy mode for very-poor white men who moved to the city early and were willing to able to show up to work consistently. No degree needed. Everyone who fit that description did really damn well, often despite multiple mistakes the presence of which in a bio would mean fucked finances for life for someone today.

Pensions were magical and housing was cheap. Powerful combo.

> All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"

Additionally and probably more important it was before the takeover of the teaching academies by political activists who have turned these institutions away from a) teaching and b) subject matter into activist training camps churning out missionaries for the cause. It takes a strong character to survive there without being turned into a minion.

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