Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and misdirected.

The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same".

Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems, student debt, global warming, etc etc etc.

I agree with avoiding debt - it should be every young persons first priority. Go to college, work on the side, take a year off, work full time, go back etc IF you want an education. Yeah it sucks but its better than coming out and realizing you essentially are enslaved for the next X years of life.

I also feel like these articles always skirt the issue that education has a very strong correlation to earnings - even still today. If you take on huge debt your actual earnings may be different but the macro-trend is that education increasingly correlates with high pay and high employment. At the same time, everyone needs to be realistic - look at the prospects for what you are getting educated in (ex. wanna-be social science majors and prospective law students should look before they leap).

Lastly I feel like everyone needs to get better at doing things themselves and being sustainable. Cant afford a ton of food - start learning to grow a small vegetable garden and cook for yourself - its cheaper and way better than the shit you are going to eat at Chiles. Cant afford a big screen TV - well congrats you dont need one, marketers are just going to tunnel shit to you through it. In other words, a lot of the things and systems that have been setup in US and integrated into normal living are really not needed and sometimes surprisingly undesirable - Im not suggesting we all live in huts but it wouldnt kill us to all be forced to learn skills that fall outside of going to work and swiping our credit cards for everything else.

I agree with avoiding debt - it should be every young persons first priority. Go to college, work on the side, take a year off, work full time, go back etc IF you want an education. Yeah it sucks but its better than coming out and realizing you essentially are enslaved for the next X years of life.

I'm not sure how this makes sense, financially. You'll generally earn much more with a degree, so 4 years of college followed by 4 years of work will leave you with much more money than alternating years of college & work.

It's much more important to focus on increasing your income than decreasing your debt. Negotiating a salary increase once pretty much means an extra $X,000/year for the rest of your life, whereas growing your own food will save you $X00 and you have to do the work again each year. Do it if it satisfies you, but recognize you'll have a much higher (financial) RoI by focusing on earning more.

Your point is correct in many scenarios.

If an engineering major who genuinely wants to be an engineer said should I take time off school to pay for the next year - Id likely point him/her to exactly what you just said. Very much agree

The big problem is that many people do the following... they say say Ill take on debt for undergrad and get paid pretty well so I can pay it off. Then they graduate, work for a couple years, pay a bit off and then say "you know what if I get that professional degree Ill be making even more". So they go back to school and add more debt and then they come out and are making more money. And then they do something similar like say "if I pull out a big mortgage and leverage myself in the housing market I can live well and increase my net worth faster". I know this is hyperbole but its a common path for many many people - essentially trying to use debt as a tool...

And then when they have a lot of debt and are making a lot of money... something "unforeseen" happens. The market falls apart, lose their job, they decide they hate their profession, they get divorced, housing market falls apart, get sick, etc - thats when all the accumulated debt can really run you over.

I agree that debt can be utilized to do good but it can turn on someone real quick if they keep the cycle going.

About two years I broke out the BLS data for US employment % vs level of education into a series of graphs.

Numbers for the non-HS degree went up to about 17% unemployment worst scenario. Grad degrees topped out at 4%.

The biggest differentiator was high school: that dropped outcomes by about 5%, iirc. Some college - not even completed college - dropped about 4% down in the outcome. People with BS+ degrees did quite well.

The big takeaway from that was, "education pays off". Anecdotally, people who are willing to move and be self-motivated could do well even with a Humanities degree.

Of course, I only know one CS guy who couldn't get work.

What I've been always interested in is why people leave school at given intervals, statistically speaking.

If, for argument's sake, 90% of high school dropouts are dropouts because they were too lazy to go to school, it stands to reason that they will also do poorly in the workplace, being too lazy to go to work. That doesn't mean the remaining 10% who had to drop out due to unfortunate life circumstances will also have trouble finding and maintaing quality work the same way.

Because of that, it is really not clear what role education plays. Does the education and degree count for something, or does increasing levels of education just increasingly filter out those who lack the qualities that are appealing in the workplace, placing a bias towards those who have more education with respect to such interpretations?

The answer to that makes a huge difference in determining if education pays or not.

That's a really good question. I don't have a data-driven answer. I think that its a mix, to be honest - you have to have grit to get through education in the US, and success comes via grit quite often. But you can have grit and not an education.

> About two years I broke out the BLS data for US employment % vs level of education into a series of graphs.

I've posted it elsewhere, but CR also had that graph in his blog: http://cr4re.com/charts/chart-images/EducationUnemploymentSe...

I find it quite an oversight that pando quoted the CR unemployment duration, but not the UE by education. The second graph makes the pando article look silly IMO.

Agreed. Unemployment rate for those with at least a Bachelor's degree NEVER topped 5%, even during the depths of the recession in 2008-9.

Pretty amazing stat on its own. And this includes people who graduated with the minimum passing GPA (2.0?) from the worst college with the most useless major.

Maybe it was the people with the minimum GPA and the most useless major that are the 5% of college grads that are unemployed.

Also, you might be a 3.5 GPA Literature major employed at Starbucks. You wouldn't be part of the 5% unemployed, but that huge college debt didn't buy you anything, either. Or you gave up looking for employment, so you don't get in the numbers, either.

Or the sort of people who are more likely to get university degrees are also the sort of people more likely to have connections, money, opportunities, behaviour, etc. that lead to employment.

"I also feel like these articles always skirt the issue that education has a very strong correlation to earnings - even still today."

Unfortunately, only causation will pay back the $200K ;-)

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