This. And article indicates her parents were against it, but author just turned deaf ears. Zero appreciation shown, which makes me sick to my stomach.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people made similar decisions, or much worse, when it came to student loans. She’s not a rare case. The reason it’s a crisis is that so many 17 & 18 year-olds made those mistakes (or, more accurately, were guided into making them by predatory lenders and indifferent colleges) and are now learning just how bad it is.
During the middle of the recession? She was lucky to be employed. Many kids graduating from college and grad school between 2009 and 2014 found that there were zero jobs available in anything near their field. Many experienced professionals were laid off and struggled to find a job in ANY field. I know experienced engineers with a track record of successful projects who worked at sporting goods stores or for the local Parks & Rec during that time. So I think your expectation that she should have been making $60k is lacking the context of the time. The economy was recovering but was far from recovered.
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Oh, no, I imagine I’m doomed. The axe simply hasn’t fallen yet.
Yes, there were many layoffs during this perios, but majority of affected workforce were low skilled workers and those nearing retirement. People with advanced degrees were largely unaffected. By 2013, the economy has pretty much fully recovered, so while I’d understand if it was 2009, it’s pretty lame in 2013. Many peers of mine were able to find 6 figure jobs right out the bat by then.
Uh, she’s made pretty bad decisions considering she went to go get her masters. You are not least bit suspicious what she actually studied?
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That is just utter bullshit. Try learning about biomaterials (or any other cutting edge scientific field) on your own, without expert instructors up on the field and mentoring by same.
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Me too. Those physics textbooks would be even more difficult if written by someone who hadn’t learned how to write well.
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Yup. We’re long past the day when a clever autodidact could achieve a similar education as what universities offered.
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“Many layoffs?” It was the worst recession in almost a century! The unemployment rate was double what it is currently, and, as I pointed out, that number fails to include a large number of people who were drastically underemployed. I’m done. You’re delusional.
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Well, I’m sorry that we don’t fit your “sky is falling view of the world”, but you should note that unemployment rate is still well below 10% around 2013.
And as I said, people with advanced degree was largely unaffected. I was there in job market around that time and there were plenty of jobs because of recovery, just not enough for unskilled workers. Why is this so hard to digest? I get that you think the world is tough, but it’s far from apocalyptic landscape you described. Why are you labeling me as delusional just because it doesn’t fit your world view?
Ok, if you still don’t want to believe me, let’s break down that chart you’ve shown:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20141112.htm
Do you still think I’m delusional? Go check it out yourself:
[Unemployment Rate - College Graduates - Master's Degree, 25 years and over (CGMD25O) | FRED | St. Louis Fed]
(Unemployment Rate - College Graduates - Master's Degree, 25 years and over (CGMD25O) | FRED | St. Louis Fed)
Unemployment rate for masters at 2013 is 3.2%. Yeah, I must be nuts to think job wasn’t hard to find back then 
Oh, and underemployment? Look here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/15/college-degrees-with-the-highest-starting-salaries-3/#48aeadc629b6
Look, if PoC like me that gets discriminated on regular basis says it was easy to find jobs back then with advanced degrees, what do you think this white person’s chances were back then? Tell me: aren’t you even a tiny bit suspicious? Are you still offended?
Oh… yikes… about that. Perhaps the memo didn’t get out, or all that “we don’t read lol” anti-intellectualism is having a bit of an effect… that’s gone now. Social mobility is when more than 50% of the population dies in a different socioeconomic class than their parents did. That stopped happening shortly after the 1980s. Since then, right alongside the dead stop in growth of wages and the stratospheric growth of average worker productivity, the majority of people die right where their parents did. Rich stay rich. Poor stay poor.
The American Dream, on a statistically significant scale, is well and truly dead. And unfortunately, I personally think computers (well, societies reaction to computers that is) are basically to blame. Right around 1980, computers showed up in the workplace and started drastically increasing worker productivity every year. Right around 1980, the growth in wages stopped tracking productivity increases (as it had been doing in the 30 years prior) Between 1950 and 1980 average wage of the lower 90% of the economy in the US rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, that same measure rose 1%. While the average wage of the top 10% of the economy rose by 495%. There was no depression, the gains from productivity were simply too large for those at the top to stomach giving to workers. Society, always reliably repeating history, revived the refrain that led to the pre-New-Deal era situation of whole families, children included, working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely able to feed themselves - “They don’t deserve it! The machine does all the work!” Of course, the New Deal came around before any 6 year old could shut down a discussion about higher wages just by whispering ‘socialism’ in a scary voice.
I think we have a secret weapon though! The same computers that screwed things up by being way too productive. They’re till way too productive! But, while those big companies were rapaciously stripping away pensions, eliminating wage growth, cutting back vacation time, cutting benefits, eliminating positions, and generally destroying each and every single reason an employee would seek out an employer, computers kind of… got cheap. And then this Internet thing showed up. And while only kids who went through puberty in the early 90s seem to realize (I’m lucky enough to be one somehow despite growing up in West Virginia of all places… still managed to get dialup to a university mainframe around 12 years old which shaped my whole life, even got me in the New York Times when I was 15) something so fundamental and which hadn’t changed in over 100 years… changed.
The reason we actually built ‘companies’ in the first place… just disappeared. We built companies because we needed distributors. We needed someone who could take the technological ability to produce tons of things and actually make that valuable by getting it from point A to point B. That’s way harder than you might imagine, and was way harder when there weren’t barely any roads and retail outlets weren’t chains so you have to negotiate with each one individually… it was a herculean task. And companies were able to skim 90% or more off of every sale because they solved this monumentally difficult problem.
The thing is… computers and the Internet… they kind of solve that problem. They make it so anybody can do it. You don’t need a gigantic corporate megabehemoth to make a pair of shoes and sell it to someone on the other side of the world. You have a commoditized global communications network (until ISPs figure this out if net neutrality doesn’t get saved… contact your reps!) and a few commoditized global delivery systems at your fingertips. What does the big corporate employer offer you any more?
Now, I’m not deluded enough to think that society is going to have some ‘come to Cyber Jesus’ moment and start working from home and from leased space in local workshops and the like. But I do think it’s going to happen. Companies aren’t smart enough or nimble enough to be unpredictable. And if you change your perspective, things look pretty encouraging. Start looking at businesses where distribution isn’t the problem being solved. Not manufacturing. Situations where the person producing the product or performing the service literally physically HAS TO be physically co-located to the customer. Hairdressers. Restaurants. Exterminators. Plumbers. Mechanics. There are loads of such businesses. And their industries all have something in common. While there are corporate ‘chains’ in each… none of them have managed to actually eliminate local competition. None of them have managed to homogenize the market the way such was done in distribution-is-the-problem markets. Now, realize that a tremendous amount of jobs don’t actually NEED to be done in offices or by large persistent teams. Lots of work nowadays is mental work. Work that can be done anywhere, without specialized tools (unless a computer counts). Where is the NEED for centralized corporate giants? Maybe in things like resource extraction, mining and the like? Heavy equipment manufacturing where even the individual parts require specialized heavy equipment manufacturing where nothing can be done and shipped to an assembler but has to be done in-place? That’s… a really small subset of the total working world.
While some people fear coming automation will result in millions dispossessed from their jobs - I expect and WELCOME it. Kick all those workers out! Leave them, en masse, desperate and sitting at home. With their PC. And the Internet. And a set of skills. And the desperation to just try offering them online. All the pieces aren’t in place just yet, but it’s really close and the limitations are purely a need for the right software and systems. The kind of thing that springs up overnight out of “nowhere” and spreads like wildfire once it does. Definitely faster than any company who suddenly notices the people they’re currently working to eliminate with automation suddenly start resigning even though they know their competitors aren’t hiring can manage to respond to.
And for those few stuck with an employer with no practical way around that? Well, I don’t think they will find it terribly difficult to get a raise or even a pension when their employers look around and realize their workers could easily just stay home and make twice as much online.
The future is an HR office with a couple pallid, skinny hangers-on checking the resume ‘in’ bucket and not finding a single application.
(Although I do realize we’re talking a shift of fortunes quite a good deal larger than amounts wars have been fought over before though… do it’s not all sunshine. Some of those decrepit empires will quake with fury and lobbyists will draw swords and real blood very well might be shed…)
Ummm… sorry for the rant.
Welcome to BoingBoing!
Lotta newbies lately. Hope you’ll stay to contribute!
Politely.
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Assuming you went to a state school: please never leave out the bit about how the state just paid a large majority of the cost of attendance, before tuition was even calculated.
That’s how all the smug “so why can’t you do it by your own bootstraps like me?” crowd fool themselves and many other people.
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I stated that I was an out of state student. The state I grew up in does not have reciprocity with the state I went to university in. My tuition was about 3 times higher than in-state students precisely because it wasn’t subsidized by the state. Any subsidization of my tuition was care of the federal government, which also no longer spends much of anything on universities.
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Yea, back when I went even out of state tuition was slightly subsidized, but not much. Today out of state tuition is actually about $10000 higher than the total spending the university does per student.
But, yea, somewhat different. Back then out of state tuition was pretty much the same as total cost, today its actually higher, the university makes a ‘profit’ on out of state tuition.
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My cynical side says this was the case, even in the early to mid 90’s when I was that out-of-state tuition payer.
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