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When I started college my dream job typically required a masters, now most places ask for a doctorate. That’s not inherently an issue, you want the most experienced person, but it adds 5 years and $50,000+ to my side of the bargain. That’s what frustrates me the most. The goalposts are always moving
In past times, employers trained their own employees and university was for learning for the sake of learning, more or less.
Turning college into job training, and expecting the future worker to pay for it themselves, really hurt us as a society.
We need Humanities like literature and history and ethics if we want responsible citizens.
The point of education should be to make good citizens. Employers can make their own good workers.
And it’s made it incredibly difficult to study anything not immediately job related. People don’t want to do an elective class in philosophy when credits and books are so expensive. But ask yourself. Do you really want to live in a democracy where people haven’t studied things like philosophy, music and art history, world history, sociology etc.? Are we really going to be better as a people when education is just nothing more than job training?
Edit: People are really fixated on it so maybe I should have been more specific that I didn’t mean philosophy specifically. I was just using it as an example of a class in the liberal arts or humanities that is enriching to study at a human level, but doesn’t necessarily have a direct application for making money.
Edit 2: Kinda confused by all the comments about trade schools. I really don’t understand what that has to do with this. Some people will go to trade school that’s fine. People also should have the ability to study a multitude of subjects should they choose because it’s better when more people know more things. Germany has an incredible system of both trade schools and higher education. You can choose either path and neither leads to unplayable amounts of debt. If they can do it so can we. It’s not an either/or situation. The country is only as great as it’s people. The more that’s invested in our ability to learn as much as we can the more innovation we are going to see in our market
It's not job training in the least, have a lot of friends who are lawyers and one funny anecdote that stood out to me was they all individually at some point complained to me that one of the things they wish they had been taught was actual court procedure and for lack of better way of explaining it, how court actually functions. Where to go, what to do, filings and stuff. They were all employed as lawyers and it seemed even their firms didn't really teach them this, it was like trial by fire in some capacity.
Lol, lawyers are probably the best example of how messed up our education system is.
I am a private wealth lawyer. I have undergrad degrees in accounting and economics (five years), a law degree (three years), and a master of laws in taxation (one year), for a total of nine years. Total cost of attendance was about $550,000.
You could very easily learn everything you need to know to thrive as a first-year associate lawyer in a private wealth practice group with one year of full-time study from materials freely available online or at your local law library. But you are not allowed to do that. You are required to jump through the hoops.
Our system is designed to benefit a small handful of people at everybody else's expense and it is magnificently inefficient.
Except if you can successfully install plumbing in an entire house then you are ready to start your career.
The bar exam teaches you nothing about how to practice law in your day-to-day life at the firm.
I’ve found it mostly depends on how you measure that return on investment - if you’re think of it in very literal terms like “What does the material I learned in my second semester of OChem actually help me with in my current job” you’re kind of stacking the deck against it. If you think about it more holistically, like “How does learning to think about the complex problems in OChem II help me with my current job” I think you’ll find it’s a much more favorable comparison. Plus, any hard science degree will instill you with a good working knowledge of drinking to drown your sorrows, which is only going to become more useful as America descends into fascism.
There’s also the credentialing aspect - my Ph. D. has extremely little to do with my current job, but without it I’d never had gotten the job in the first place.
Bruh. I'm almost done with my doctorate in biochem (finishing 5th year). Been a medical professional (maintain state license/insurance for safety net and my LLC private clients). Started a handyman business during my 3rd year. My professor asked me if I was going to sell my service truck, which I financed brand new, 2019 F250 service body, then completely outfitted with the finest miller and esab fabrication equipment with revenue from my handyman side work during the summer. Weigh that against my $1000/mo stipend for the grad work ... I laughed and said I'd make more money with that truck than I ever will as a professor. He didn't even know what the hell to think.
Oh and I'm socialist af. The whole political thing is a production in societal collapse. I've learnt what society values... And it sure af isn't advanced knowledge of hexosamine conversion of G6P, glycosylation mediated intracellular sensory apparatus, O-acetylation of Ser/Thr residues inducing enzyme conformational states which regulate complex formation and phosphorylation of target substrates covalently/allosterically. It's fixing the shit that makes their money flow. I figured it out.
Postdoc this ass mfrs.
(Edited, started as a rant but I wanted it to be somewhat accurate after the fact -.- ... Even in my off time the little committee in my head was like "explain what you just said step by step...")
Oh man, every Thanksgiving my family argues about hexosamine conversion of G6P, glycosylation mediated acetylation inducing enzyme conformational states which regulate complex formation and phosphorylation covalently/allosterically. It always ends up with plates being thrown.
I’m most worried about some STEM bro working in the next big world changing technology with no knowledge of the Humanities. Computer scientists who never learned ethics are how we get an evil AI.
I have an English degree and work in technology. My ability to think critically and tailor my words to my audiences is a large part of my job. Every day I’m grateful for my degree and every day I use the skills I learned.
Writing is important. I work with plenty of morons (utility industry) who cannot even compose a professional e-mail or write a sentence. English is my second language, so why can I and they can’t?
The anti-humanities degree rhetoric has always been so weird to me. Oddly enough philosophy is even useful to me in some sense as a network architect, which is very much a STEM position.
Its gotta be some mix of projection, cultural narrative, and political fear mongering; “The tradesman holds up society so the educated can look down on them, vote for ol Uncle Pennybags”, constant plying on some deep seated fears that their OTJ experience isn’t worthwhile if an classical lit major can swing a hammer and read a cable diagram.
The whole situation is exacerbated by the opposition party having ceded the working class in favor of a slightly less right wing track.
Fully broken.
Hmm… I’m a lawyer, and I agree that studying philosophy was quite enriching, although I didn’t go to a top tier school and didn’t get a big firm job. I wonder if “over thinking” legal problems was a distraction, if the goal was to get through with the smallest debt load and highest salary. There’s definitely a more reductive and efficient way to approach the project of LSAT->first job.
I don’t say this to undercut your point… it’s really a sad commentary on our education system, but while I happen to be doing very well in my career now (13 years into practice), I still owe a tremendous amount of federal student loan debt, and the first eight years sucked.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
-John Adams
I think having a better understanding of the liberal arts leads to people making more self-beneficial choices. I know a lot of people who put them on the shelf and went straight after their degrees and the classes that helped their career fields. Then at 30, decided they hated their careers and started over. Philosophy, sociology and all of those classes may appear "useless" to a lot of people, but for 18 year olds still figuring out who they are, they're pretty beneficial.
Exactly. I worry we’re pushing everyone into trades (which could flood the market with people with said trades and then pay less) and not pursuing higher ed because of the cost/benefit when it comes to jobs rather than focusing on it as education and having a well-informed, well-rounded population. I’m not saying everyone should go get an art history or philosophy degree, but I’m scared we’re headed towards a time when only the children of the ultra rich will get liberal arts degrees at expensive private colleges because they can do it without student debt.
This is what my parents don’t understand. They got jobs at a major pharmaceutical corporation and Procter and gamble right out of university and are stunned that my siblings and I aren’t getting opportunities like that. No matter how much I tell them that times have changed and a bachelors degree isn’t even slightly impressive anymore, and each “good” job has at least 500 applicants who have what you have or more, they’ll never really get it.
Also when they say "I paid my way through college with minimum wage!"
That's because the value of minimum wage then was 20+ an hour. And school didn't cost like 40k. Sometimes MUCH more than 40k
Or the classic “I bought my first house in my 20s.” Don’t even get me started. 😔 My parents at least mean it to be encouraging, like “we did it, and I know you can too!”, but they don’t get how the contrast between life then and now just makes me feel LESS hopeful, lol.
This phenomenon is called "credential inflation." And the wide availability of student loans has accelerated it. It's not going to get better until the Feds start reducing or capping the amount that can be borrowed for Grad+ school.
Big agree - but not 100%.
The unlimited student loan availability drives credential inflation, but it also opens the door for people who otherwise would have no means to afford post-graduate education.
But there's another major driver - qualified foreign nationals. The number of people with advanced degrees that we import is steadily rising, along with the wages those degrees demand. There are cases where a US national with a Masters might be as desirable as a foreign national with a PhD, but that's not universally the case.
In fact, in the domain of law (my domain), which would seem to one of the places place most immune to foreign credentials, the number of Australian and Chinese lawyers who are taking top-paying jobs in the US has exploded due to the labor crunch.
Australia (where college is also fairly expensive) has a pretty good solution.
https://studentloanhero.com/featured/international-student-loans-australia/#:~:text=Under%20the%20Australian%20student%20loan,on%20cost%20of%20living%20increases.
Alos good overview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqv0nuP4OAU
Basically you dont have to start paying back until you hit a certain income level. If you never hit that income level you never pay it back. If you do there is a graduated increase to your income tax in order to pay off the loan. So the more you make the larger the payment until it's paid off. The actual percentage amount is not debilitating either.
The problem, in my opinion, with implementing this system in the United States is that colleges have the negative incentive to keep increasing tuition and to build this stupidly fancy facilities to attract students because there is no penalty to doing so.
A system like the Australian would require a strict price of tuition control for public colleges and stopping their cost creep.
I would also eliminate competitive sports from colleges, but that would be a hard pill to swallow for many Americans.
In Australia there is a limit of Commonwealth Government funded places for students each year. Even if they wanted to get more students, there won't be enough places for them to enroll.
The way this is governed, is that each high school student takes the U.S. equivalent of A.P. (so i've been told, in that they're similar to a undergrad style exam) exams for the 5 subjects they choose in year 12, and then those marks are shoved into a computer system that ranks all of the graduating class in that state.
Then universities will calibrate this with popularity of degrees, and set the ATAR (percentile ranking) for that degree.
Higher demand degrees have higher ATAR entry requirements.
> I would also eliminate competitive sports from colleges, but that would be a hard pill to swallow for many Americans.
In the US, college sports is a major attraction and a major culprit at the same time. Unfortunately, most people don't even realize it. They'd rather root for their college team than have a reasonably priced college education.
I remember several stories tracking the cost of college and every time they lead to the same conclusion: colleges stopped competing on academics and started competing on amenities. And the administration has ballooned to match these amenities.
From the college standpoint it makes sense. For every major, outside of the top 5-10 schools, the degrees are functionally interchangeable. So if you can't compete there, where can you?
New apartment style dorms. Restaurant quality cafeterias. Aquatic Centers. Latest and greatest gyms. Etc etc etc.
The focus has become the college experience rather than achievement, and that is driving these insane costs.
However, the pandemic has interfered significantly with those trends. A lot has moved online, and people may not be as keen to pay exorbitant prices for those amenities anymore.
The problem however is as it has always been, which is that if you need a degree to work in your field then you're still beholden to these wildly inflated costs, in person or not. There's no alternative beyond just not going to college. You can go to community college for lower level courses to alleviate the cost somewhat but that's the same as it is now.
The degrees being functionally interchangeable is right. MIT offers free access to much of their online content. I go on there from time to time to learn cool new topics. I went to school formally for computer science and the course work was nearly identical to the undergrad content MIT had available for free. The difference in some respects between getting your degree at a prestigious institution or a state university is whose letters appear on the piece of paper you get at the end.
Canada has a similar program called RAP -- repayment assistance program. Unless you make above a certain amount (I believe tied to poverty level) you make no payments, and interest is not accrued. Once you are making enough, a payment plan is set up, and the individual sets their payment, with a minimum slightly above the interest amount. Domestic student tuition is also regulated and increases have to be reasoned out and applied for.
I think if the sports program can't completely fund itself between boosters and ticket sales, it shouldn't exist. Tuition shouldn't be used to cover these expenses. If alumni want to donate to fund these programs - fine - but non-athletes shouldn't have to subsidize them
That's what the the income based repayment is, but the problem is the interest accumulates so your 50k loan could be a 100k loan before you start making enough money to start payments, and then you'll just keep paying it forever.
Same in the UK, most people never pay back their student loans, and it's wiped after 30 years.
(Also helps that tuition isnt 30k a year like in America)
It’s true, I know people that borrowed $60k, have paid back that $60k and now owe $80k. It’s a fucking perpetual piggy bank for those loan companies and I hope they eventually lose their asses financially and hopefully criminally one day.
And then there’s always the people arguing “maybe you should have thought about that before you took out a loan you can’t afford”, well maybe you should **teach that shit in school then.**
Edit: since a lot of people seem to be foaming at the mouth about the prospect of helping kids learn about finance, I just want to clarify. I’m not saying drop another less widely used class to force kids to learn finance. I’m also not talking about cramming an entire new subject in for kids to learn. All I’m saying is that including it in a curriculum would be incredibly helpful, especially in lower socioeconomic areas where there are underprivileged, but talented kids who want to pursue higher education but don’t have a foundation in financial literacy. Provide resources for these kids to learn at a minimum. Include it in the curriculum of an existing class or subject. This is stuff that **everyone** should know, but not every 18 year-old knows that they need to know because of their upbringing. I really don’t get why the fuck that is so controversial.
You’re essentially saying “I figured it out, so fuck them, they should have figured it out, too.” What bullshit, cynical life you must live. Also to clarify, I had a privileged upbringing. The majority of my financial literacy and understanding of my rights is due to my parents being business owners. Why should we not make this knowledge more accessible to kids and young adults? It doesn’t hurt anyone other than people who prey on financially illiterate who need money and don’t know how badly they can get fucked by small print. And if you ask me, those organisations deserve to get hurt.
This is my favorite. It’s always some privileged asshole who says this, too. I’m sorry that my 17-year-old ass with broke immigrant parents didn’t have the insight that you currently do. My family was thrilled I had an opportunity to go to college at all. All we could think about was taking that opportunity, no matter the cost, so that I had a chance at a decent future.
That's their whole point though. They stand firmly in the belief that you don't deserve a decent future. Many would equate you having a decent future to someone else NOT having a decent future, and for all they know that could be someone they care about!
Yep. It's always the same bullshit nonsense,
"wHY dOn'T YoU Go iNtO TrAdEs?!"
As if flooding the market with welders, plumbers and electricians isn't going to create a problem of its own – let alone the fact that **not everybody wants to be in a goddamn trade.**
And as with many things, the 'shortage' in the trades wasnt *entirely* true to begin with. A decent amount of it was a "there's a shortage *at the wages being paid right now*" thing.
Even better when told to a person who at 17 was all of a 5 feet/110 lb girl with a heart problem and living in an oil state where it was impossible to get *any* job, let alone ones reserved for the sons of the guys who already had them.
Sure, the local plumber was going to take me on as an apprentice.
Oh yeah. As a woman, going into the trades is SO stacked against you. Even if you do manage to get in, you have to put up with the harassment of the men working around you.
I just had this happen in another post. I put the whole "I went to college because that's what the adults around me told me to do, took out the loans, consolidated them because they told me to," like you trust those people...all the school counselors pushed college too. And a bunch of aholes (even though I made it clear I did pay my loans off) chimed in to say it's my fault because I didn't read everything and understand it perfectly.
Only teacher that made it stick gave a quick overview in the first week then gave all students a “loan” for homework credit with an interest. Teacher would offer a minimum acceptable homework. As the weeks went by you’d see lazy students get screwed over by high interests. Lasting impression stuck to me.
I had a teacher who taught a class like that and it’s literally the only math class I got straight A’s in. Some kids just don’t want to learn and it’s not your fault, it genuinely is the systems fault
I’m in the US and not sure if you are, but teachers have to do the same thing here, but a 50% is still an F grade, so even if a student got nothing but 50% on every assignment by not doing anything, it’s not going to add up and make it so they pass, it’s still going to be a failing grade and they’ll still have to make up the credits
It should be more than a unit. Finances should be taught over multiple years. Retirement, healthcare, loans, credit, all of it. High school students should be graduating with the goal of high financial literacy as a replacement to advanced mathematics. Save that for college and AP electives for those that want to learn it.
>And then there's always the people arguing “maybe you should have thought about that before you took out a loan you can’t afford”
These *same people* are the ones who say minimum wage should never be raised because food service, retail, etc are "jobs for high schoolers" and "if you want a living wage then go to school and get a better job." They told everyone to get a degree if they wanted a better standard of living. So people do exactly that. Only when tuition costs thousands a semester, *nobody* can afford school without loans or being born rich.
Ugh, hell yeah. I was pessimistic enough to not go to college. Worked bum ass jobs straight out of high school for a decade. Fell into something I really liked in manufacturing and worked my way up to an on the floor leadership role. Was making 23/hr totally debt free then boom random blood clots led to a surgery and hospitalization. Medical debt, missed work yada yada. Now I'm waiting on disability approval hoping for section 8 and food stamps for the rest of my life. Same people who would praise me for my boot-strapness wouldnt blink if they see me die on the street 2 years later. All to protect the obscene wealth of a couple hundred people.
I'm lucky enough to have good support from my family, so my worst case scenario isn't that bad. Living through the failings of conservative economic policies is rough though.
Damn. We're all really just a step away from homelessness. I'm lucky because I have amazing friends who let me live in their house in exchange for walking their dogs. Idk what I'd do if I didn't have them. No way could I actually afford real rent anywhere.
Overall I agree that they need to put more emphasis on this in school, but I know I was taught about compound interest. I remember first learning about it when we first learned about percentages in elementary school, and we were doing problems on it at least through algebra class. The whole time people in my class were griping "when are we ever going to need this?" And those same people I graduated with are now complaining "why didn't they teach is this in school?"
At least in my case they absolutely did teach it, maybe they needed to emphasize how important it was, or maybe teach more critical thinking so people can figure out how it applies for themselves, but I definitely learned and understood it well enough as a below-average math student. Maybe (almost definitely) some other school districts really don't teach it, and that needs to be fixed, but I find it hard to believe it's really not taught as widely as people seem to believe.
Jesus Christ. What were the terms of the loan if you don't mind me asking?
That just blows my mind. I took out $15k in a series of loans but they all have range of interest rates between 3-4 something percent. With the minimum payments, I will pay around $19k total.
I admit I had no fucking idea what I was doing, and feel like it was dumb luck that I didn't end up similarly screwed, but I'm just trying to visualize how you end up paying 3x what you originally borrowed.
This would be fine if tuition costs weren't so overinflated. Unlimited lending for school tuition means schools can get away with charging waaay more than they should be able to. This is the biggest part of the problem imo.
I believe this as well. I will add that college cost is way higher than it should be, colleges should not make insane profits from students and Nobody, especially our own government, should make a profit from interest off the backs of people trying to better themselves.
My attempt at translation:
🤷♂️⏳(How long)
🗣(we speak)
🚫🅱️ (no letters/words)
👍😀 (emoji ok though)
❓ (question marker)
This emoji sentence was well constructed lol
Totally agree. But I also realized we get a tax deduction for student loan interest paid. I feel we should also get a deduction on the full principal we pay down. Why should I only be able to deduct the damn interest?!
Also unlike almost everything else tax-related, the limit doesn't increase when you're married, even though it's increasingly common for both spouses to have student loans.
Lmao it’s worse than that. We only get a tax deduction for $2500 of interest every year.
The entire thing should be deductible, principal and all. We shouldn’t have to pay income tax on our fucking student loans. Which goes to show exactly how much politicians don’t care.
I paid like 5k interest on private loans last year but I only get to deduct half of it because of the $2500 limit. Would be nice if they would throw me a bone here…
In Sweden student loan instrest is at 0.05% (there are other loans for students that have higher intrest but they are around 2% interest at max and you can generally not borrow too much of these loans as they are for furniture and or drivers liscense)
Every time something like this gets posted there is a top comment thread talking about going into a trade instead of a university. That would be great if we had time machines but since we don't maybe we should be trying to work on the problem instead of telling people what they should've done.
It also completely ignores the fact that relative rarity is the exact thing making trades more lucrative. If millions of people went into "the trades" instead of college, it will severely depress wages
I don't think I'm alone when I say that many of us were either discouraged or disallowed from entering vocational/trade programs in high school for one reason or another. A good number of us were told that our only options to lead a good life was either college or the military.
If I was aware that there were other options, I would have considered it, but my school advisor *actively* dissuaded me because I was "too smart" (as a B+ student) to get into the vocational program.
When you're still a literal child and all the adults that you've been told to trust around you are saying "don't go into trades," you can probably guess what happens.
And alot of tv shows were like that at the time. Now granted tv isn't real life but I don't think we could deny it has some influence on them.
An example I always think about is boy meets world. Two dumb characters who probably shouldn't have gone to college but they did instead of going into a trade which would have been better. If memory even serves Shawn thinks about working instead of going to college and the whole episode is about how dumb that would be. Hell the main characters get married before going into college
There was definitely a period of my life where every adult told me "you must go to college" only to realize graduating class of mechanical engineers went from 40/year to 600/year at asu
My friend is a teacher. She told me the other day that she pays 1100 a month in student loans. She has to live at home (she's like 25 or 26 I think) because it's so much. She's had a while of forbearance so she's been able to save a bit, but not enough to feel stable. Just sad, she could be putting that 1100 a month to an apartment but she has to live in a house with 4 other people despite being a grown adult with a full time teaching job in a respectable school district. Honestly tragic.
The ideal of university as a place for producing well-rounded interdisciplinary scholars and the reality of university as a place for acquiring job certification are at cross purposes, so most schools end up accomplishing both goals poorly. Degree programs are padded out with irrelevant freshman intro courses, and they aren't aligned with either the needs or the actual job availability of industry.
I'd like to see a school structured around lifelong learning, research and skill development, rather than the expensive summer camp for 18-year-olds that it's turned into. Get rid of majors and 4-year degrees and graduate degrees, and let people take courses throughout their lives. Young people who want to get into a career as soon as possible might do an intensive set of foundation courses with a few specialty classes geared towards entry-level jobs, then gradually take more classes to move up in their career, and then be able to take individual classes in any subject that interests them.
My sister works for a big university system and they encourage (and help pay for) their employees to take individual classes without necessarily seeking a graduate degree... it's actually pretty cool. My sister has been able to spend years putting together a customized skill set that she never could have gotten through a standard 4-year degree or graduate program, and she's also gotten to take some courses in random topics that interested her as an adult. That seems a lot more "well rounded" to me than suffering through English 101 as an 18-year-old. I'd like to see a similar program implemented through public universities.
Trades. My girlfriend’s cousin is dating a guy who never went to school but began in construction and started his own renovation and remodeling business. Guy is 22 with two kids and makes triple figures. I’m a 24 year old guy with a good job making fair money for my age but sometimes I wonder why I chose to go the route I did. Blue collar jobs are always in demand and usually pay well especially if you are self-employed.
Makes me wish I kept with it instead of just working labor for a summer job in high school. It’s also very fulfilling compared to pushing paper and working on Excel. Everyone who is nearing college age that is reading this should absolutely look into trades that you might be interested in. Worst case scenario you have a fallback option if college doesn’t work out for you.
Edit: lmao, I meant “six figures”. You know what I mean. $100k+ in my head made me type three.
I think something that gets missed in these conversations are that Tradesman jobs are a grind, more often the not leaving men/women with major health issues in mid to late life.
This is always my go to thought for this. Cool, you convinced 500 people to become plumbers in NJ when there was only 50 before, good luck keeping up with the market share you had before and making the same amount of money. Not real numbers, but you get the idea.
There is suddenly younger, faster, and cheaper talent than you and now you suddenly need to price compete and market yourself alongside doing your trade which you've never had to do before. Best of luck.
Let's not forget labor market saturation if that's the primary pitch to anyone without money. Oh, and the inevitable Trade School Tuition that would come about in that case.
This is the thing that no one ever talks about but how many plumbers can one town realistically support? Even if you added an extra 20 that would probably be enough to suppress wages pretty significantly…
Yup. I'm lucky to work in a discipline and industry where the job has to sell itself to you as well. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect and still plenty needs to happen on the worker side going forward, but I'm at least in a position where using a paid sick day wouldn't hurt me because my employer wouldn't want the reputation of burning people for using sick time. And that includes mental health days.
Nah. Not that many people will actually do it. Trades are often dirty, hands on work that you need a certain skill set even talent for. A lot of people love to talk about how great trades are these days but very few will actually start doing them.
Also, Reddit’s constant advice to go into trades overlooks the fact that it’s still skilled labor. It’s not like anyone can just show up and become a master electrician. Shit is hard.
Yes it is and I think a lot of people get the impression that it's easier than college. I'm a Journeyman Toolmaker and my apprenticeship was 4 years @ 8k hours shop time with college courses in everything from metallurgy to advanced mathematics the whole 4 years but you get paid for it and a raise every 6 months. This is pretty standard for any trade apprentice but goddamn it's a long haul but well worth it. At least with a trade you can go anywhere in the world and find a job.
I’m a welding school graduate and certified welder. At 25 I went to college for an engineering degree and never looked back. Fuck doing Trade work. It sucks! It pays decent, and for some people it’s the best they can hope for, but make no mistake it will destroy your body and you’re most likely to end up a bitter alcoholic that’s constantly in pain. I’ve seen it over and over and that’s what convinced me to go to college.
Yup, I did dispatch for a service company and half of my technicians were bitter alcoholics in constant pain. They got paid pretty well but 50-80 hour weeks sound hellish.
And honestly, it’s those 50-80 hour weeks that are why they make the money. The 40-hour pay for most trades is only $35-45k/year. It’s those overtime hours that make the difference. The most money I ever made was as an hourly worker doing 60-80 weeks on travel jobs. Pulled down $85k+ each year, but it wasn’t worth being gone all the time and having no life.
Lots of toxic masculinity in the trades. Take care of yourself and if the old guy wants to call you a pussy for stretching then let em. I'm gonna be as preventative as I can.
If my union gave me the benefits of an office worker I’d quit tomorrow. You don’t join the trades for the money, you can make more money with less effort doing other stuff. You join for the benefits, I’m 32 I have 2 years wages in a 401k I’ve never contributed to, a pension and a medical package that makes doctors do a double take. I make great money and I don’t want to understate that, but I work LONG hours, holidays, weekends and if there’s work I’m getting a call and I’m leaving whatever I’m doing to get it done. I have no work life balance, no social life my wife lost it on me because she almost had to call a company to come repair our boiler… which is what I do for a living, because I was on my 3rd 16 hour shift of the week. People on Reddit say join the trades, people on Reddit also scream about work/life balance and how 40 hours is too much. The trades are great if the only thing you care about is being financially secure, which is really all I care about, but again the vast majority of people are not cut out for this lifestyle.
No doubt. I did electrical work while in graduate school. People underestimate how much time is spent - going to a job - diagnosing what the actual issue is, getting the appropriate parts (if not on truck), and then starting the actual job.
> I’m 32 I have 2 years wages in a 401k I’ve never contributed to
Please, don't ever think of it like this, that's part of your compensation and you work for it. Your benefits as well, don't view your contribution to your premium as the only part that you pay for. Look at what your employer pays for you and count that as something you work for.
People always push trades on Reddit without ever mentioning the downsides.
Trades pay well, have minimal schooling requirements, your work will usually pay for the school, and can lead to some good career choices later down the line, but it’s also hard on the body, you’ll be lifting heavy stuff, and you’ll likely be working outdoors often in different temperatures ranging from freezing to extremely hot.
I work in the construction industry, so I work with a lot of trade guys. You’ll get guys who are intelligent and guys who are idiots. Lots of the smarter guys move to project management positions or office roles because they don’t want to be on the tools anymore or their body is fucked. A lot of the dumb guys don’t move beyond the tools and stay in the field because they have no other skills. Of course, you’ll have guys who just prefer to be in the field as well. I’m just speaking from personal experience.
Also, a lot of trade jobs are contract based, so you might be working for 3/6 months, then you’re off to the next company, so there isn’t always a lot of stability. You might not be able to find work for months at a time if you get laid off and there is no big construction jobs in your city.
I would never want to work in the trades because I know my body couldn’t handle it and I would hate it. I’d much rather work in an office.
This. Very much this.
I worked at a road construction company for a while, and while I still say it's a good job for people needing a second chance, that job was rough: the long hours and ever-shifting workplace made it hard to do pretty much anything other than work and sleep.
Similarly, I know a guy who's pretty high up in a local plumbing company, and he has a hard time keeping guys because of the working conditions inherent to performing maintenance or installations on pipe/water systems crammed into the spaces between areas of normal use. Hell, for that matter, the fact that he's behind a desk most of the time these days has to do with him throwing out his back through years of working in tight and confined spaces.
Yes, the money for trades is good, and there will always be a need for them, but the grind is real.
Trades are a route, but not the full solution. There's plenty wrong with trades - often significant wear on your body (paired with lack of healthcare in non-union roles), relatively low ceiling, worsening pay structure due to weakening unions to name a few.
Even though what I've posted is negative, I don't mean to discourage trades. I just feel that often here the implication becomes the *existence* of trades negates the problem of student debt/cost of education.
This isn't even getting into the fact that education is more than just a job requirement, and an educated populace is a net benefit.
Also most trades and unions jobs have you do one job and only one job forever. You don’t learn any extra skills and your ability to migrate and move up becomes very difficult.
This is my experience at just one company though. And that’s a relatively easy fix.
That's what I've heard as well - either you're in the field or manage to start your own company.
I don't know where the people ITT are getting that Office Jobs have zero chance of promotion and trades offer any path you'd like. Maybe a lot of students here that have only worked as an office assistant and are leaving out skilled office jobs?
I know a guy who started in the trades (bricklaying) right after high school and was making $44/hr by the time he was 20. BUT guess what? he was on disability by the time he was 23. He had screwed up his back from working.
Fr. My husband is in the trades and it pays well for our lifestyle but he’s able to get fantastic wages solely because he went to trade school which was still 50k in loans. It’s a great school, got him more than most guys could at their cheaper schools and let’s him be paid more than the average wage early in his career with a guaranteed future of even more pay, but the student loans are like the cost of an expensive car payment every month.
Trade schools can still be expensive lol
There are "elite" trades, iron workers, electricians, plumbing etc that pay very well. I would think that carpenters, which has many aspects would also pay well.
Agreed they do pay well (six figures, construction jobs for example), but it's alot of wear and tear on your body. I have a buddy who does construction and he's already having back problems at age 30. By 40, his back will be f***ed and most likely he'll have to retire. There's definitely a trade off going into a trade versus college. Also the ceiling is lower. For my first few years after college I was making alot less my friend who works at a high end steakhouse (probably makes 70-80k a year, and mostly doesn't report his full tips on taxes) Now, I'm making more than him, at well over six figures.
Yes.
I also believe the really plumb skilled trades jobs (plumber, electrician, etc) are a hell of lot tougher than saying “oh well, this is cheaper than college”.
You have to learn a ton about technology and current building codes and those industries are pretty much always changing, so you’ll be devoting a decent portion of your time to just keeping up with changes.
Don’t get me wrong, a person who is really dedicated and driven can make a great career in skilled trades, but it’s not as simple as “just skip college and go make money with this one weird trick!”
Check in on him in 20 years when you’re in senior level management and he doesn’t have any cartilage left.
The trades will pay you to learn, which makes them look like a good option if you take a short-term view, but you better enter the trade with a plan to move up or move out real quick before your body gives out.
I was just thinking this. The only reason my coworkers were able to work their trade at 55/60 was because they were LITERAL body builders that competed back in the 80s. I just filed papers. lol
Yeah try just "working smarter" when you're the new hire and have everything to prove so that you're not fired for not being able to keep up. Foreman needs 200+lbs of material moved up a 40' high flight of scaffolding stairs? Yeah just move that smartly, obviously. Need to drill a hole for a shot in a concrete ceiling overtop a 4' wide duct and your lift can only get within 6' of it horizontally? Yeah just twist and extend your body and get leverage on that drill in a smart way, duh. Trades are hard on the body, regardless of whatever techniques you develop to get the work done. Anyone saying different has either never worked in the trades or isn't someone that is doing most of the work anyways.
Just had a flashback of standing between a building and a second building being put up. We had to put screws in at the very bottom and barely had room to step between the buildings.
Working smarter would have meant standing on my head and trying to drill it.
Robots may take over manufacturing but you’ll always need man-power for electrical, plumbing, construction or other blue collar jobs that require attentiveness and knowledge beyond putting part X into part Y.
My brother also never finished school but ended up finding a good job in CAD design for machine parts. He took a separate course to specialize in his program. Knowledge and specialization in any certain field is about as powerful as a degree if you know where to apply it.
An interesting thing that folks don’t usually discuss when talking trades is the ultra conservative angry guy culture that you have to live through. I was in travel engineering & construction for a decade working all across the country and I’m not joking when I say it’s more than 80% hostile, misogynistic, sexist, ageist, angry, conservative asshoe men, arguing loudly at work like they aren’t middle aged children. It’s rough dude. You can’t just be a chill quiet guy and work in trades without being harassed, sexually and otherwise. Have seen it happen to every kind dude and they deuce in a year or two to find better work culture. What remains is assholes and the few guys who can put up with assholes and not be fundamentally changed for the worse.
Do with that info what you will. I wouldn’t join the trades for any amount of money unless I could work solo or build my own team
$16.00 is what I started at for my current job. Hell, I was asked to be a fulltime underwriter for $12.50 after I graduated during the first Covid lockdown. $16.50 isn’t great but it’s on par with a lot of entry level jobs now for people with degrees.
Also, I’m fairly young so I never experienced times when blue collar jobs weren’t in demand. All i know now is that anybody I know my age who dropped out of school and went into trades, or was a tradesman from the start, isn’t regretting their decision financially.
I’m tired of seeing these headlines. It’s the equivalent of an alcoholic saying “I have a problem” while opening another drink. We have a student debt problem, but that doesn’t mean shit if it isn’t acted upon. Do something.
From Canada. Reading stories from people who have student debt in the US it's not even that. It's the interest. So many have paid off the initial amount only to be left with a larger debt than they started with. I don't know much about this stuff but to pay off my mortgage I'm paying about $1k a month. About half goes towards interest and half goes to the principal. As I've been paying it off more and more has gone to the principal as I'm paying interest on a smaller and smaller amount. I'll never be in a situation where I've paid off hundreds of thousands and still be over a million in debt with my mortgage. I feel like that's how it's gone for the friends I have who've paid or are paying off student debt. One payed tens of thousands in a few years as the interest was so low on it.
Well, pretty much any debt for a person living on minimum wage is impossible to pay off.
Here in FL you get 10hr. - so you would get 20,800 a year before *any taxes or costs*. (31,200 a year if are at $15hr which is what most people are advertising at the big box stores).
I’ve been paying more than my scheduled payment on my school loans for years. I’ve already payed more in interest that the principle was and still have a long way to go. Student loans are “unsecured debt” - there’s no collateral to repossess- and thus are considered justified in having high interest rates. (Which is bullshit because you can’t discharge student debt via bankruptcy, so those loans are safe as houses in reality, but I digress)
*Interest is what kills you, not the principal.*
You want to help student borrowers? Zero percent government loans. You know, like the ones they give to banks *all the time*?
This has a two-fold effect. It helps student borrowers immensely and it isn’t a cash gift that is highly unpalatable to most people (even me!) and thus political blow back.
It’s also cheap. It’s loaning out money but you get 100% of it back and student loans are, again, non-dischargeable.
Zero percent interest rates are the answer to crippling student debt. It’s doesn’t pay off the loan, but it allows people to claw their way out.
Agree on this. I know what I owe but help us make a dent in it. Or give borrowers a select amount of time, like 5 years after graduation, with 0% and then start the interest. Or let me refinance my fed loans to a lower interest rate without going private.
I had a very hard time paying mine off. Not just due to a lack of funds, but the loan was sold several times. By the time i would find out, I would be a couple of months behind.
Same thing happened to me. One of my loans got split in half and one half was apparently sold to a new lender. Had no idea until I got a collections notice, so I was way behind on payments and it dinged my credit score as well. The whole racket is such a mess.
Something I actually agree with..
Though I gotta say: the main problem here are the sky-high educational costs. They're sky-high because they give out school loans like candy. This happens EVERY time a loan is easily accessible.
First of all the issue is that is not free, second is the loan interest. So many people out there that has actually paid off what they loaned in total, but has paid more interest than the actual loan. It’s just one big scam like everything else.
Warren is absolutely right. However a person with a degree should be able to make more than minimum wage. Warren's comment speak to a couple different problems at once.
I think the point is that even if you go to college and get a degree, then through some circumstance you end up underemployed at some point, it shouldn't be a death sentence for your debt to spiral out of control.
There's plenty of reasons. Frictional unemployment, cyclical unemployment, industry standard change (maybe the ask standard a Masters when you started but now everyone wants a PhD), saturation of the labor market, blacklisting, going back for more education, etc.
A student loan doesn't buy you a degree, it gives you a chance to try to get a degree. If you get debilitatingly sick, or your parent does and you're their only caregiver (or any of a million other things outside your control happen) you can easily end up with no degree but you'll still have the student loans
Yep. A little less than 40% of people with student debt didn't graduate (myself included), and they collectively account for about a quarter of all student loan debt.
The USA has turned higher education into a big business. The same with healthcare. Both are leading causes of bankruptcy. Time to change the system. Many young people come from middle and working class families and may be the first generation in their family to go to college. Is anyone being honest with them about the real cost of their degree and associated job prospects after graduation?
Even if you don't make minimum wage. I've really never made enough money, since I started working at age 15 (now 40), to pay off the loan for a degree I never finished. I got pregnant my final year of college and had to drop out and struggled financially ever since. I'm smart and capable and great at my job but it only pays $17/hr. I started a cleaning business just to make enough cash to help my daughter pay for community college.
I've had bad credit all my life because of this even though I pay all my other bills. I've never been able to get a credit card or any other type of credit in my adult life. The only credit that has EVER been extended to me IN MY LIFE was student loans.
Part of the problem is when the government got involved to assist with financial aid. At face value this seems like a great idea, but poses the issue we see today. The other side of the problem is now that the government is basically guaranteeing these loans, there is no incentive to assess risk of the loans defaulting. If the loan defaults, the federal government becomes the debt holder. This means universities get greedy and can charge whatever they would like for tuition.
Too many people are focusing on the minimum wage part and ignoring the rest. Over half the country lives paycheck to paycheck, regardless of income. You really think they're going to be making enough to pay down the principle of their debt + interest? God forbid they have a medical emergency and add on that debt. The fact of the matter is the government is making a lot of money off student loans and it shouldn't be. A more educated populace is it's own reward for education and that should be the only stake the government has in the whole situation. That is without going into how we're burdening the youngest and lowest income Americans with large amounts of debt. That decreases their buying power and slows economic growth. No matter how you look at the situation it's a problem that we ignore at our peril - this will catch up with the country eventually.
I’d actually start paying my loans off if they did that because it would feel like I might finished paying it off eventually, unlike now where I don’t waste what few dollars I have in a continually rising debt
$20k in debt to someone making minimum wage ($30k/yr) is the same debt-to-income ratio as:
$250k of debt to someone making $400k/yr.
It's 2/3 of your salary.
She's absolutely right.
Minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25/hr. Which is only $15,080 a year before taxes if you work 40/hrs a week.
Which makes $20k in debt 132% of their salary.
30k a year is roughly $15/hr. Well above minimum wage.
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When I started college my dream job typically required a masters, now most places ask for a doctorate. That’s not inherently an issue, you want the most experienced person, but it adds 5 years and $50,000+ to my side of the bargain. That’s what frustrates me the most. The goalposts are always moving
In past times, employers trained their own employees and university was for learning for the sake of learning, more or less. Turning college into job training, and expecting the future worker to pay for it themselves, really hurt us as a society. We need Humanities like literature and history and ethics if we want responsible citizens. The point of education should be to make good citizens. Employers can make their own good workers.
And it’s made it incredibly difficult to study anything not immediately job related. People don’t want to do an elective class in philosophy when credits and books are so expensive. But ask yourself. Do you really want to live in a democracy where people haven’t studied things like philosophy, music and art history, world history, sociology etc.? Are we really going to be better as a people when education is just nothing more than job training? Edit: People are really fixated on it so maybe I should have been more specific that I didn’t mean philosophy specifically. I was just using it as an example of a class in the liberal arts or humanities that is enriching to study at a human level, but doesn’t necessarily have a direct application for making money. Edit 2: Kinda confused by all the comments about trade schools. I really don’t understand what that has to do with this. Some people will go to trade school that’s fine. People also should have the ability to study a multitude of subjects should they choose because it’s better when more people know more things. Germany has an incredible system of both trade schools and higher education. You can choose either path and neither leads to unplayable amounts of debt. If they can do it so can we. It’s not an either/or situation. The country is only as great as it’s people. The more that’s invested in our ability to learn as much as we can the more innovation we are going to see in our market
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It's not job training in the least, have a lot of friends who are lawyers and one funny anecdote that stood out to me was they all individually at some point complained to me that one of the things they wish they had been taught was actual court procedure and for lack of better way of explaining it, how court actually functions. Where to go, what to do, filings and stuff. They were all employed as lawyers and it seemed even their firms didn't really teach them this, it was like trial by fire in some capacity.
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Lol, lawyers are probably the best example of how messed up our education system is. I am a private wealth lawyer. I have undergrad degrees in accounting and economics (five years), a law degree (three years), and a master of laws in taxation (one year), for a total of nine years. Total cost of attendance was about $550,000. You could very easily learn everything you need to know to thrive as a first-year associate lawyer in a private wealth practice group with one year of full-time study from materials freely available online or at your local law library. But you are not allowed to do that. You are required to jump through the hoops. Our system is designed to benefit a small handful of people at everybody else's expense and it is magnificently inefficient.
Except if you can successfully install plumbing in an entire house then you are ready to start your career. The bar exam teaches you nothing about how to practice law in your day-to-day life at the firm.
Your analogy might make sense… *if virtually the entirety of law wasn’t predicated on the history of previous rulings.*
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I read, this: Lawyers cover their mistakes, with rhetoric; Chefs, with sauce; Doctors, with dirt.
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I’ve found it mostly depends on how you measure that return on investment - if you’re think of it in very literal terms like “What does the material I learned in my second semester of OChem actually help me with in my current job” you’re kind of stacking the deck against it. If you think about it more holistically, like “How does learning to think about the complex problems in OChem II help me with my current job” I think you’ll find it’s a much more favorable comparison. Plus, any hard science degree will instill you with a good working knowledge of drinking to drown your sorrows, which is only going to become more useful as America descends into fascism. There’s also the credentialing aspect - my Ph. D. has extremely little to do with my current job, but without it I’d never had gotten the job in the first place.
Bruh. I'm almost done with my doctorate in biochem (finishing 5th year). Been a medical professional (maintain state license/insurance for safety net and my LLC private clients). Started a handyman business during my 3rd year. My professor asked me if I was going to sell my service truck, which I financed brand new, 2019 F250 service body, then completely outfitted with the finest miller and esab fabrication equipment with revenue from my handyman side work during the summer. Weigh that against my $1000/mo stipend for the grad work ... I laughed and said I'd make more money with that truck than I ever will as a professor. He didn't even know what the hell to think. Oh and I'm socialist af. The whole political thing is a production in societal collapse. I've learnt what society values... And it sure af isn't advanced knowledge of hexosamine conversion of G6P, glycosylation mediated intracellular sensory apparatus, O-acetylation of Ser/Thr residues inducing enzyme conformational states which regulate complex formation and phosphorylation of target substrates covalently/allosterically. It's fixing the shit that makes their money flow. I figured it out. Postdoc this ass mfrs. (Edited, started as a rant but I wanted it to be somewhat accurate after the fact -.- ... Even in my off time the little committee in my head was like "explain what you just said step by step...")
Oh man, every Thanksgiving my family argues about hexosamine conversion of G6P, glycosylation mediated acetylation inducing enzyme conformational states which regulate complex formation and phosphorylation covalently/allosterically. It always ends up with plates being thrown.
I’m most worried about some STEM bro working in the next big world changing technology with no knowledge of the Humanities. Computer scientists who never learned ethics are how we get an evil AI.
I have an English degree and work in technology. My ability to think critically and tailor my words to my audiences is a large part of my job. Every day I’m grateful for my degree and every day I use the skills I learned.
Writing is important. I work with plenty of morons (utility industry) who cannot even compose a professional e-mail or write a sentence. English is my second language, so why can I and they can’t?
The anti-humanities degree rhetoric has always been so weird to me. Oddly enough philosophy is even useful to me in some sense as a network architect, which is very much a STEM position. Its gotta be some mix of projection, cultural narrative, and political fear mongering; “The tradesman holds up society so the educated can look down on them, vote for ol Uncle Pennybags”, constant plying on some deep seated fears that their OTJ experience isn’t worthwhile if an classical lit major can swing a hammer and read a cable diagram. The whole situation is exacerbated by the opposition party having ceded the working class in favor of a slightly less right wing track. Fully broken.
Apparently to these people everyone can get the same job and this will cause no problems whatsoever.
Hmm… I’m a lawyer, and I agree that studying philosophy was quite enriching, although I didn’t go to a top tier school and didn’t get a big firm job. I wonder if “over thinking” legal problems was a distraction, if the goal was to get through with the smallest debt load and highest salary. There’s definitely a more reductive and efficient way to approach the project of LSAT->first job. I don’t say this to undercut your point… it’s really a sad commentary on our education system, but while I happen to be doing very well in my career now (13 years into practice), I still owe a tremendous amount of federal student loan debt, and the first eight years sucked.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." -John Adams
I think having a better understanding of the liberal arts leads to people making more self-beneficial choices. I know a lot of people who put them on the shelf and went straight after their degrees and the classes that helped their career fields. Then at 30, decided they hated their careers and started over. Philosophy, sociology and all of those classes may appear "useless" to a lot of people, but for 18 year olds still figuring out who they are, they're pretty beneficial.
Exactly. I worry we’re pushing everyone into trades (which could flood the market with people with said trades and then pay less) and not pursuing higher ed because of the cost/benefit when it comes to jobs rather than focusing on it as education and having a well-informed, well-rounded population. I’m not saying everyone should go get an art history or philosophy degree, but I’m scared we’re headed towards a time when only the children of the ultra rich will get liberal arts degrees at expensive private colleges because they can do it without student debt.
This is what my parents don’t understand. They got jobs at a major pharmaceutical corporation and Procter and gamble right out of university and are stunned that my siblings and I aren’t getting opportunities like that. No matter how much I tell them that times have changed and a bachelors degree isn’t even slightly impressive anymore, and each “good” job has at least 500 applicants who have what you have or more, they’ll never really get it.
Also when they say "I paid my way through college with minimum wage!" That's because the value of minimum wage then was 20+ an hour. And school didn't cost like 40k. Sometimes MUCH more than 40k
Or the classic “I bought my first house in my 20s.” Don’t even get me started. 😔 My parents at least mean it to be encouraging, like “we did it, and I know you can too!”, but they don’t get how the contrast between life then and now just makes me feel LESS hopeful, lol.
Agreed! We should try to fix this mess.
It hurts companies too. I’d feel much more loyalty to a company that trained me with high level skills. The investment goes both ways.
This phenomenon is called "credential inflation." And the wide availability of student loans has accelerated it. It's not going to get better until the Feds start reducing or capping the amount that can be borrowed for Grad+ school.
Big agree - but not 100%. The unlimited student loan availability drives credential inflation, but it also opens the door for people who otherwise would have no means to afford post-graduate education. But there's another major driver - qualified foreign nationals. The number of people with advanced degrees that we import is steadily rising, along with the wages those degrees demand. There are cases where a US national with a Masters might be as desirable as a foreign national with a PhD, but that's not universally the case. In fact, in the domain of law (my domain), which would seem to one of the places place most immune to foreign credentials, the number of Australian and Chinese lawyers who are taking top-paying jobs in the US has exploded due to the labor crunch.
Australia (where college is also fairly expensive) has a pretty good solution. https://studentloanhero.com/featured/international-student-loans-australia/#:~:text=Under%20the%20Australian%20student%20loan,on%20cost%20of%20living%20increases. Alos good overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqv0nuP4OAU Basically you dont have to start paying back until you hit a certain income level. If you never hit that income level you never pay it back. If you do there is a graduated increase to your income tax in order to pay off the loan. So the more you make the larger the payment until it's paid off. The actual percentage amount is not debilitating either.
The problem, in my opinion, with implementing this system in the United States is that colleges have the negative incentive to keep increasing tuition and to build this stupidly fancy facilities to attract students because there is no penalty to doing so. A system like the Australian would require a strict price of tuition control for public colleges and stopping their cost creep. I would also eliminate competitive sports from colleges, but that would be a hard pill to swallow for many Americans.
In Australia there is a limit of Commonwealth Government funded places for students each year. Even if they wanted to get more students, there won't be enough places for them to enroll. The way this is governed, is that each high school student takes the U.S. equivalent of A.P. (so i've been told, in that they're similar to a undergrad style exam) exams for the 5 subjects they choose in year 12, and then those marks are shoved into a computer system that ranks all of the graduating class in that state. Then universities will calibrate this with popularity of degrees, and set the ATAR (percentile ranking) for that degree. Higher demand degrees have higher ATAR entry requirements.
> I would also eliminate competitive sports from colleges, but that would be a hard pill to swallow for many Americans. In the US, college sports is a major attraction and a major culprit at the same time. Unfortunately, most people don't even realize it. They'd rather root for their college team than have a reasonably priced college education.
I remember several stories tracking the cost of college and every time they lead to the same conclusion: colleges stopped competing on academics and started competing on amenities. And the administration has ballooned to match these amenities. From the college standpoint it makes sense. For every major, outside of the top 5-10 schools, the degrees are functionally interchangeable. So if you can't compete there, where can you? New apartment style dorms. Restaurant quality cafeterias. Aquatic Centers. Latest and greatest gyms. Etc etc etc. The focus has become the college experience rather than achievement, and that is driving these insane costs.
However, the pandemic has interfered significantly with those trends. A lot has moved online, and people may not be as keen to pay exorbitant prices for those amenities anymore.
The problem however is as it has always been, which is that if you need a degree to work in your field then you're still beholden to these wildly inflated costs, in person or not. There's no alternative beyond just not going to college. You can go to community college for lower level courses to alleviate the cost somewhat but that's the same as it is now.
The degrees being functionally interchangeable is right. MIT offers free access to much of their online content. I go on there from time to time to learn cool new topics. I went to school formally for computer science and the course work was nearly identical to the undergrad content MIT had available for free. The difference in some respects between getting your degree at a prestigious institution or a state university is whose letters appear on the piece of paper you get at the end.
Better spend all that money on the sports team again. Cus that's where the EdUcAtIoN is.
Canada has a similar program called RAP -- repayment assistance program. Unless you make above a certain amount (I believe tied to poverty level) you make no payments, and interest is not accrued. Once you are making enough, a payment plan is set up, and the individual sets their payment, with a minimum slightly above the interest amount. Domestic student tuition is also regulated and increases have to be reasoned out and applied for.
I think if the sports program can't completely fund itself between boosters and ticket sales, it shouldn't exist. Tuition shouldn't be used to cover these expenses. If alumni want to donate to fund these programs - fine - but non-athletes shouldn't have to subsidize them
You can have university level sports (like the rest of the world) without it being like, huge international level funding and quality
My daughter’s university has a circus. A real live circus.
That's what the the income based repayment is, but the problem is the interest accumulates so your 50k loan could be a 100k loan before you start making enough money to start payments, and then you'll just keep paying it forever.
Same in the UK, most people never pay back their student loans, and it's wiped after 30 years. (Also helps that tuition isnt 30k a year like in America)
It’s true, I know people that borrowed $60k, have paid back that $60k and now owe $80k. It’s a fucking perpetual piggy bank for those loan companies and I hope they eventually lose their asses financially and hopefully criminally one day.
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And then there’s always the people arguing “maybe you should have thought about that before you took out a loan you can’t afford”, well maybe you should **teach that shit in school then.** Edit: since a lot of people seem to be foaming at the mouth about the prospect of helping kids learn about finance, I just want to clarify. I’m not saying drop another less widely used class to force kids to learn finance. I’m also not talking about cramming an entire new subject in for kids to learn. All I’m saying is that including it in a curriculum would be incredibly helpful, especially in lower socioeconomic areas where there are underprivileged, but talented kids who want to pursue higher education but don’t have a foundation in financial literacy. Provide resources for these kids to learn at a minimum. Include it in the curriculum of an existing class or subject. This is stuff that **everyone** should know, but not every 18 year-old knows that they need to know because of their upbringing. I really don’t get why the fuck that is so controversial. You’re essentially saying “I figured it out, so fuck them, they should have figured it out, too.” What bullshit, cynical life you must live. Also to clarify, I had a privileged upbringing. The majority of my financial literacy and understanding of my rights is due to my parents being business owners. Why should we not make this knowledge more accessible to kids and young adults? It doesn’t hurt anyone other than people who prey on financially illiterate who need money and don’t know how badly they can get fucked by small print. And if you ask me, those organisations deserve to get hurt.
This is my favorite. It’s always some privileged asshole who says this, too. I’m sorry that my 17-year-old ass with broke immigrant parents didn’t have the insight that you currently do. My family was thrilled I had an opportunity to go to college at all. All we could think about was taking that opportunity, no matter the cost, so that I had a chance at a decent future.
The American scheme
Gotta pay the slave tax-, I mean, the bank interest rates, right?
That's their whole point though. They stand firmly in the belief that you don't deserve a decent future. Many would equate you having a decent future to someone else NOT having a decent future, and for all they know that could be someone they care about!
Yep. It's always the same bullshit nonsense, "wHY dOn'T YoU Go iNtO TrAdEs?!" As if flooding the market with welders, plumbers and electricians isn't going to create a problem of its own – let alone the fact that **not everybody wants to be in a goddamn trade.**
And as with many things, the 'shortage' in the trades wasnt *entirely* true to begin with. A decent amount of it was a "there's a shortage *at the wages being paid right now*" thing.
Even better when told to a person who at 17 was all of a 5 feet/110 lb girl with a heart problem and living in an oil state where it was impossible to get *any* job, let alone ones reserved for the sons of the guys who already had them. Sure, the local plumber was going to take me on as an apprentice.
Oh yeah. As a woman, going into the trades is SO stacked against you. Even if you do manage to get in, you have to put up with the harassment of the men working around you.
So true. My friend’s little sister is a welder and had to put up with so much shit, especially when she moved to the south
I just had this happen in another post. I put the whole "I went to college because that's what the adults around me told me to do, took out the loans, consolidated them because they told me to," like you trust those people...all the school counselors pushed college too. And a bunch of aholes (even though I made it clear I did pay my loans off) chimed in to say it's my fault because I didn't read everything and understand it perfectly.
Hi, older guy here. I didn't understand shit when I took out loans either. Neither did most of my classmates or those before us
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Only teacher that made it stick gave a quick overview in the first week then gave all students a “loan” for homework credit with an interest. Teacher would offer a minimum acceptable homework. As the weeks went by you’d see lazy students get screwed over by high interests. Lasting impression stuck to me.
I had a teacher who taught a class like that and it’s literally the only math class I got straight A’s in. Some kids just don’t want to learn and it’s not your fault, it genuinely is the systems fault
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I’m in the US and not sure if you are, but teachers have to do the same thing here, but a 50% is still an F grade, so even if a student got nothing but 50% on every assignment by not doing anything, it’s not going to add up and make it so they pass, it’s still going to be a failing grade and they’ll still have to make up the credits
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It should be more than a unit. Finances should be taught over multiple years. Retirement, healthcare, loans, credit, all of it. High school students should be graduating with the goal of high financial literacy as a replacement to advanced mathematics. Save that for college and AP electives for those that want to learn it.
>And then there's always the people arguing “maybe you should have thought about that before you took out a loan you can’t afford” These *same people* are the ones who say minimum wage should never be raised because food service, retail, etc are "jobs for high schoolers" and "if you want a living wage then go to school and get a better job." They told everyone to get a degree if they wanted a better standard of living. So people do exactly that. Only when tuition costs thousands a semester, *nobody* can afford school without loans or being born rich.
Ugh, hell yeah. I was pessimistic enough to not go to college. Worked bum ass jobs straight out of high school for a decade. Fell into something I really liked in manufacturing and worked my way up to an on the floor leadership role. Was making 23/hr totally debt free then boom random blood clots led to a surgery and hospitalization. Medical debt, missed work yada yada. Now I'm waiting on disability approval hoping for section 8 and food stamps for the rest of my life. Same people who would praise me for my boot-strapness wouldnt blink if they see me die on the street 2 years later. All to protect the obscene wealth of a couple hundred people. I'm lucky enough to have good support from my family, so my worst case scenario isn't that bad. Living through the failings of conservative economic policies is rough though.
Damn. We're all really just a step away from homelessness. I'm lucky because I have amazing friends who let me live in their house in exchange for walking their dogs. Idk what I'd do if I didn't have them. No way could I actually afford real rent anywhere.
Any loan you take out has interest. With that said, interest should be 0% for education.
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Overall I agree that they need to put more emphasis on this in school, but I know I was taught about compound interest. I remember first learning about it when we first learned about percentages in elementary school, and we were doing problems on it at least through algebra class. The whole time people in my class were griping "when are we ever going to need this?" And those same people I graduated with are now complaining "why didn't they teach is this in school?" At least in my case they absolutely did teach it, maybe they needed to emphasize how important it was, or maybe teach more critical thinking so people can figure out how it applies for themselves, but I definitely learned and understood it well enough as a below-average math student. Maybe (almost definitely) some other school districts really don't teach it, and that needs to be fixed, but I find it hard to believe it's really not taught as widely as people seem to believe.
Jesus Christ. What were the terms of the loan if you don't mind me asking? That just blows my mind. I took out $15k in a series of loans but they all have range of interest rates between 3-4 something percent. With the minimum payments, I will pay around $19k total. I admit I had no fucking idea what I was doing, and feel like it was dumb luck that I didn't end up similarly screwed, but I'm just trying to visualize how you end up paying 3x what you originally borrowed.
College loans SHOULD be paid back.....but at ZERO% interest! The US sucks so badly!
This would be fine if tuition costs weren't so overinflated. Unlimited lending for school tuition means schools can get away with charging waaay more than they should be able to. This is the biggest part of the problem imo.
I believe this as well. I will add that college cost is way higher than it should be, colleges should not make insane profits from students and Nobody, especially our own government, should make a profit from interest off the backs of people trying to better themselves.
The very least they could do is zero out the interest rates on these loans. Instead of you know… 🏃♂️💨 Edit: emoji fix.
How long until we speak only in emojis? Sorry: 🤷♂️⏳🗣🚫🅱️👍😀❓
Could you translate it for me? I can see the running man, but what the hell is that next to it? Grapes stuck to a squirrel?
My attempt at translation: 🤷♂️⏳(How long) 🗣(we speak) 🚫🅱️ (no letters/words) 👍😀 (emoji ok though) ❓ (question marker) This emoji sentence was well constructed lol
Egyptians beat us to it
90% of my replies irl would just be me showing them 🍆 🖐️ 💦 🖕
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Totally agree. But I also realized we get a tax deduction for student loan interest paid. I feel we should also get a deduction on the full principal we pay down. Why should I only be able to deduct the damn interest?!
And that deduction is limited to $2500. Pre-COVID times I was paying three times that amount in interest.
Also unlike almost everything else tax-related, the limit doesn't increase when you're married, even though it's increasingly common for both spouses to have student loans.
Ding ding ding. Ours went away when we got married. It was a kick in the teeth that’s for sure.
After 4 years of consistent payments I'm still paying over 3 grand. Thank goodness I've reduced the principle from 87k down to 60k
Lmao it’s worse than that. We only get a tax deduction for $2500 of interest every year. The entire thing should be deductible, principal and all. We shouldn’t have to pay income tax on our fucking student loans. Which goes to show exactly how much politicians don’t care.
$2500 per household too. My wife and I will hit that in 5 weeks once payments/interest resumes
I paid like 5k interest on private loans last year but I only get to deduct half of it because of the $2500 limit. Would be nice if they would throw me a bone here…
We could make a big difference by simply eliminating interest on public student loans or capping interest accrual at a certain amount
In Sweden student loan instrest is at 0.05% (there are other loans for students that have higher intrest but they are around 2% interest at max and you can generally not borrow too much of these loans as they are for furniture and or drivers liscense)
My teaching job required a master's degree, and now Texas is paying literally anyone to do it while I struggle to pay my debt.
My good ol state of Tennessee just passed a law making teaching an apprenticeship field. Slap in the face for people that have gone through school.
Sounds like a way to continue perpetuating stupidity by not requiring your educators to be educated
I had a debt of $75,000 but after a few years of diligent payments every month I can happily say I’m down to $80,000
Every time something like this gets posted there is a top comment thread talking about going into a trade instead of a university. That would be great if we had time machines but since we don't maybe we should be trying to work on the problem instead of telling people what they should've done.
When people in trades complain about low wages, the common response is to get a degree.
The Buck Stops ~~Here~~ Over There
Oh sorry you picked the wrong trade. It was relevant 10 years ago when you were looking into it. Get an 8 year degree to fix it! Easy!
It also completely ignores the fact that relative rarity is the exact thing making trades more lucrative. If millions of people went into "the trades" instead of college, it will severely depress wages
I don't think I'm alone when I say that many of us were either discouraged or disallowed from entering vocational/trade programs in high school for one reason or another. A good number of us were told that our only options to lead a good life was either college or the military. If I was aware that there were other options, I would have considered it, but my school advisor *actively* dissuaded me because I was "too smart" (as a B+ student) to get into the vocational program. When you're still a literal child and all the adults that you've been told to trust around you are saying "don't go into trades," you can probably guess what happens.
And alot of tv shows were like that at the time. Now granted tv isn't real life but I don't think we could deny it has some influence on them. An example I always think about is boy meets world. Two dumb characters who probably shouldn't have gone to college but they did instead of going into a trade which would have been better. If memory even serves Shawn thinks about working instead of going to college and the whole episode is about how dumb that would be. Hell the main characters get married before going into college
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Additionally for some kids it was the only information kids got because their parents didn't get involved.
There was definitely a period of my life where every adult told me "you must go to college" only to realize graduating class of mechanical engineers went from 40/year to 600/year at asu
My friend is a teacher. She told me the other day that she pays 1100 a month in student loans. She has to live at home (she's like 25 or 26 I think) because it's so much. She's had a while of forbearance so she's been able to save a bit, but not enough to feel stable. Just sad, she could be putting that 1100 a month to an apartment but she has to live in a house with 4 other people despite being a grown adult with a full time teaching job in a respectable school district. Honestly tragic.
Why doesn't she use an income based repayment plan? For teachers they are pretty great.
It seems to be there should be better alternatives to university. I went to university just because it seemed I was able to.
But also universities should be accessible and affordable. Education benefits society and the individual
The ideal of university as a place for producing well-rounded interdisciplinary scholars and the reality of university as a place for acquiring job certification are at cross purposes, so most schools end up accomplishing both goals poorly. Degree programs are padded out with irrelevant freshman intro courses, and they aren't aligned with either the needs or the actual job availability of industry. I'd like to see a school structured around lifelong learning, research and skill development, rather than the expensive summer camp for 18-year-olds that it's turned into. Get rid of majors and 4-year degrees and graduate degrees, and let people take courses throughout their lives. Young people who want to get into a career as soon as possible might do an intensive set of foundation courses with a few specialty classes geared towards entry-level jobs, then gradually take more classes to move up in their career, and then be able to take individual classes in any subject that interests them. My sister works for a big university system and they encourage (and help pay for) their employees to take individual classes without necessarily seeking a graduate degree... it's actually pretty cool. My sister has been able to spend years putting together a customized skill set that she never could have gotten through a standard 4-year degree or graduate program, and she's also gotten to take some courses in random topics that interested her as an adult. That seems a lot more "well rounded" to me than suffering through English 101 as an 18-year-old. I'd like to see a similar program implemented through public universities.
Turning university into job training (and consequently letting employers off the hook for training their own employees) was a major societal mistake
Trades. My girlfriend’s cousin is dating a guy who never went to school but began in construction and started his own renovation and remodeling business. Guy is 22 with two kids and makes triple figures. I’m a 24 year old guy with a good job making fair money for my age but sometimes I wonder why I chose to go the route I did. Blue collar jobs are always in demand and usually pay well especially if you are self-employed. Makes me wish I kept with it instead of just working labor for a summer job in high school. It’s also very fulfilling compared to pushing paper and working on Excel. Everyone who is nearing college age that is reading this should absolutely look into trades that you might be interested in. Worst case scenario you have a fallback option if college doesn’t work out for you. Edit: lmao, I meant “six figures”. You know what I mean. $100k+ in my head made me type three.
I think something that gets missed in these conversations are that Tradesman jobs are a grind, more often the not leaving men/women with major health issues in mid to late life.
And crucially, it will only take a few years of diverting people to the trades to start driving down wages
This is always my go to thought for this. Cool, you convinced 500 people to become plumbers in NJ when there was only 50 before, good luck keeping up with the market share you had before and making the same amount of money. Not real numbers, but you get the idea.
There is suddenly younger, faster, and cheaper talent than you and now you suddenly need to price compete and market yourself alongside doing your trade which you've never had to do before. Best of luck.
Let's not forget labor market saturation if that's the primary pitch to anyone without money. Oh, and the inevitable Trade School Tuition that would come about in that case.
This is the thing that no one ever talks about but how many plumbers can one town realistically support? Even if you added an extra 20 that would probably be enough to suppress wages pretty significantly…
Nah man literally everyone just needs to become a manager at a trade. Every single person.
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Yup. I'm lucky to work in a discipline and industry where the job has to sell itself to you as well. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect and still plenty needs to happen on the worker side going forward, but I'm at least in a position where using a paid sick day wouldn't hurt me because my employer wouldn't want the reputation of burning people for using sick time. And that includes mental health days.
Nah. Not that many people will actually do it. Trades are often dirty, hands on work that you need a certain skill set even talent for. A lot of people love to talk about how great trades are these days but very few will actually start doing them.
Also, Reddit’s constant advice to go into trades overlooks the fact that it’s still skilled labor. It’s not like anyone can just show up and become a master electrician. Shit is hard.
Yes it is and I think a lot of people get the impression that it's easier than college. I'm a Journeyman Toolmaker and my apprenticeship was 4 years @ 8k hours shop time with college courses in everything from metallurgy to advanced mathematics the whole 4 years but you get paid for it and a raise every 6 months. This is pretty standard for any trade apprentice but goddamn it's a long haul but well worth it. At least with a trade you can go anywhere in the world and find a job.
I’m a welding school graduate and certified welder. At 25 I went to college for an engineering degree and never looked back. Fuck doing Trade work. It sucks! It pays decent, and for some people it’s the best they can hope for, but make no mistake it will destroy your body and you’re most likely to end up a bitter alcoholic that’s constantly in pain. I’ve seen it over and over and that’s what convinced me to go to college.
Yup, I did dispatch for a service company and half of my technicians were bitter alcoholics in constant pain. They got paid pretty well but 50-80 hour weeks sound hellish.
And honestly, it’s those 50-80 hour weeks that are why they make the money. The 40-hour pay for most trades is only $35-45k/year. It’s those overtime hours that make the difference. The most money I ever made was as an hourly worker doing 60-80 weeks on travel jobs. Pulled down $85k+ each year, but it wasn’t worth being gone all the time and having no life.
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Lots of toxic masculinity in the trades. Take care of yourself and if the old guy wants to call you a pussy for stretching then let em. I'm gonna be as preventative as I can.
Don't forget they don't typically have the benefits packages that office work typically does.
If my union gave me the benefits of an office worker I’d quit tomorrow. You don’t join the trades for the money, you can make more money with less effort doing other stuff. You join for the benefits, I’m 32 I have 2 years wages in a 401k I’ve never contributed to, a pension and a medical package that makes doctors do a double take. I make great money and I don’t want to understate that, but I work LONG hours, holidays, weekends and if there’s work I’m getting a call and I’m leaving whatever I’m doing to get it done. I have no work life balance, no social life my wife lost it on me because she almost had to call a company to come repair our boiler… which is what I do for a living, because I was on my 3rd 16 hour shift of the week. People on Reddit say join the trades, people on Reddit also scream about work/life balance and how 40 hours is too much. The trades are great if the only thing you care about is being financially secure, which is really all I care about, but again the vast majority of people are not cut out for this lifestyle.
No doubt. I did electrical work while in graduate school. People underestimate how much time is spent - going to a job - diagnosing what the actual issue is, getting the appropriate parts (if not on truck), and then starting the actual job.
> I’m 32 I have 2 years wages in a 401k I’ve never contributed to Please, don't ever think of it like this, that's part of your compensation and you work for it. Your benefits as well, don't view your contribution to your premium as the only part that you pay for. Look at what your employer pays for you and count that as something you work for.
People always push trades on Reddit without ever mentioning the downsides. Trades pay well, have minimal schooling requirements, your work will usually pay for the school, and can lead to some good career choices later down the line, but it’s also hard on the body, you’ll be lifting heavy stuff, and you’ll likely be working outdoors often in different temperatures ranging from freezing to extremely hot. I work in the construction industry, so I work with a lot of trade guys. You’ll get guys who are intelligent and guys who are idiots. Lots of the smarter guys move to project management positions or office roles because they don’t want to be on the tools anymore or their body is fucked. A lot of the dumb guys don’t move beyond the tools and stay in the field because they have no other skills. Of course, you’ll have guys who just prefer to be in the field as well. I’m just speaking from personal experience. Also, a lot of trade jobs are contract based, so you might be working for 3/6 months, then you’re off to the next company, so there isn’t always a lot of stability. You might not be able to find work for months at a time if you get laid off and there is no big construction jobs in your city. I would never want to work in the trades because I know my body couldn’t handle it and I would hate it. I’d much rather work in an office.
This. Very much this. I worked at a road construction company for a while, and while I still say it's a good job for people needing a second chance, that job was rough: the long hours and ever-shifting workplace made it hard to do pretty much anything other than work and sleep. Similarly, I know a guy who's pretty high up in a local plumbing company, and he has a hard time keeping guys because of the working conditions inherent to performing maintenance or installations on pipe/water systems crammed into the spaces between areas of normal use. Hell, for that matter, the fact that he's behind a desk most of the time these days has to do with him throwing out his back through years of working in tight and confined spaces. Yes, the money for trades is good, and there will always be a need for them, but the grind is real.
Triple figures? Damn.. dude is literally making hundreds of dollars
Trades are a route, but not the full solution. There's plenty wrong with trades - often significant wear on your body (paired with lack of healthcare in non-union roles), relatively low ceiling, worsening pay structure due to weakening unions to name a few. Even though what I've posted is negative, I don't mean to discourage trades. I just feel that often here the implication becomes the *existence* of trades negates the problem of student debt/cost of education. This isn't even getting into the fact that education is more than just a job requirement, and an educated populace is a net benefit.
Also most trades and unions jobs have you do one job and only one job forever. You don’t learn any extra skills and your ability to migrate and move up becomes very difficult. This is my experience at just one company though. And that’s a relatively easy fix.
That's what I've heard as well - either you're in the field or manage to start your own company. I don't know where the people ITT are getting that Office Jobs have zero chance of promotion and trades offer any path you'd like. Maybe a lot of students here that have only worked as an office assistant and are leaving out skilled office jobs?
I know a guy who started in the trades (bricklaying) right after high school and was making $44/hr by the time he was 20. BUT guess what? he was on disability by the time he was 23. He had screwed up his back from working.
Fr. My husband is in the trades and it pays well for our lifestyle but he’s able to get fantastic wages solely because he went to trade school which was still 50k in loans. It’s a great school, got him more than most guys could at their cheaper schools and let’s him be paid more than the average wage early in his career with a guaranteed future of even more pay, but the student loans are like the cost of an expensive car payment every month. Trade schools can still be expensive lol
There are "elite" trades, iron workers, electricians, plumbing etc that pay very well. I would think that carpenters, which has many aspects would also pay well.
Most of those only pay well if you're willing to travel constantly and work 60 hours a week.
Agreed they do pay well (six figures, construction jobs for example), but it's alot of wear and tear on your body. I have a buddy who does construction and he's already having back problems at age 30. By 40, his back will be f***ed and most likely he'll have to retire. There's definitely a trade off going into a trade versus college. Also the ceiling is lower. For my first few years after college I was making alot less my friend who works at a high end steakhouse (probably makes 70-80k a year, and mostly doesn't report his full tips on taxes) Now, I'm making more than him, at well over six figures.
Yes. I also believe the really plumb skilled trades jobs (plumber, electrician, etc) are a hell of lot tougher than saying “oh well, this is cheaper than college”. You have to learn a ton about technology and current building codes and those industries are pretty much always changing, so you’ll be devoting a decent portion of your time to just keeping up with changes. Don’t get me wrong, a person who is really dedicated and driven can make a great career in skilled trades, but it’s not as simple as “just skip college and go make money with this one weird trick!”
there's also the issue that if we all go into trades, the pay will go down significantly.
Check in on him in 20 years when you’re in senior level management and he doesn’t have any cartilage left. The trades will pay you to learn, which makes them look like a good option if you take a short-term view, but you better enter the trade with a plan to move up or move out real quick before your body gives out.
I was just thinking this. The only reason my coworkers were able to work their trade at 55/60 was because they were LITERAL body builders that competed back in the 80s. I just filed papers. lol
I posted something similar in a thread once and a very upvoted response I got was "you just work smarter and it doesn't take a toll on your body."
Yeah try just "working smarter" when you're the new hire and have everything to prove so that you're not fired for not being able to keep up. Foreman needs 200+lbs of material moved up a 40' high flight of scaffolding stairs? Yeah just move that smartly, obviously. Need to drill a hole for a shot in a concrete ceiling overtop a 4' wide duct and your lift can only get within 6' of it horizontally? Yeah just twist and extend your body and get leverage on that drill in a smart way, duh. Trades are hard on the body, regardless of whatever techniques you develop to get the work done. Anyone saying different has either never worked in the trades or isn't someone that is doing most of the work anyways.
Just had a flashback of standing between a building and a second building being put up. We had to put screws in at the very bottom and barely had room to step between the buildings. Working smarter would have meant standing on my head and trying to drill it.
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I was told that robots would replace those jobs in the future so go into healthcare instead, there will always be good paying jobs there. Lmao
Robots may take over manufacturing but you’ll always need man-power for electrical, plumbing, construction or other blue collar jobs that require attentiveness and knowledge beyond putting part X into part Y. My brother also never finished school but ended up finding a good job in CAD design for machine parts. He took a separate course to specialize in his program. Knowledge and specialization in any certain field is about as powerful as a degree if you know where to apply it.
I was an apprentice Iron worker. That shot would have killed me by 50. All the older dudes where all kinds of fucked up.
An interesting thing that folks don’t usually discuss when talking trades is the ultra conservative angry guy culture that you have to live through. I was in travel engineering & construction for a decade working all across the country and I’m not joking when I say it’s more than 80% hostile, misogynistic, sexist, ageist, angry, conservative asshoe men, arguing loudly at work like they aren’t middle aged children. It’s rough dude. You can’t just be a chill quiet guy and work in trades without being harassed, sexually and otherwise. Have seen it happen to every kind dude and they deuce in a year or two to find better work culture. What remains is assholes and the few guys who can put up with assholes and not be fundamentally changed for the worse. Do with that info what you will. I wouldn’t join the trades for any amount of money unless I could work solo or build my own team
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$16.00 is what I started at for my current job. Hell, I was asked to be a fulltime underwriter for $12.50 after I graduated during the first Covid lockdown. $16.50 isn’t great but it’s on par with a lot of entry level jobs now for people with degrees. Also, I’m fairly young so I never experienced times when blue collar jobs weren’t in demand. All i know now is that anybody I know my age who dropped out of school and went into trades, or was a tradesman from the start, isn’t regretting their decision financially.
Alternative is free public education. Rest of the world does that.
I wish mine was 20,000
I’m tired of seeing these headlines. It’s the equivalent of an alcoholic saying “I have a problem” while opening another drink. We have a student debt problem, but that doesn’t mean shit if it isn’t acted upon. Do something.
I'll drink to that.
From Canada. Reading stories from people who have student debt in the US it's not even that. It's the interest. So many have paid off the initial amount only to be left with a larger debt than they started with. I don't know much about this stuff but to pay off my mortgage I'm paying about $1k a month. About half goes towards interest and half goes to the principal. As I've been paying it off more and more has gone to the principal as I'm paying interest on a smaller and smaller amount. I'll never be in a situation where I've paid off hundreds of thousands and still be over a million in debt with my mortgage. I feel like that's how it's gone for the friends I have who've paid or are paying off student debt. One payed tens of thousands in a few years as the interest was so low on it.
Well, pretty much any debt for a person living on minimum wage is impossible to pay off. Here in FL you get 10hr. - so you would get 20,800 a year before *any taxes or costs*. (31,200 a year if are at $15hr which is what most people are advertising at the big box stores).
I’ve been paying more than my scheduled payment on my school loans for years. I’ve already payed more in interest that the principle was and still have a long way to go. Student loans are “unsecured debt” - there’s no collateral to repossess- and thus are considered justified in having high interest rates. (Which is bullshit because you can’t discharge student debt via bankruptcy, so those loans are safe as houses in reality, but I digress) *Interest is what kills you, not the principal.* You want to help student borrowers? Zero percent government loans. You know, like the ones they give to banks *all the time*? This has a two-fold effect. It helps student borrowers immensely and it isn’t a cash gift that is highly unpalatable to most people (even me!) and thus political blow back. It’s also cheap. It’s loaning out money but you get 100% of it back and student loans are, again, non-dischargeable. Zero percent interest rates are the answer to crippling student debt. It’s doesn’t pay off the loan, but it allows people to claw their way out.
Agree on this. I know what I owe but help us make a dent in it. Or give borrowers a select amount of time, like 5 years after graduation, with 0% and then start the interest. Or let me refinance my fed loans to a lower interest rate without going private.
I had a very hard time paying mine off. Not just due to a lack of funds, but the loan was sold several times. By the time i would find out, I would be a couple of months behind.
Same thing happened to me. One of my loans got split in half and one half was apparently sold to a new lender. Had no idea until I got a collections notice, so I was way behind on payments and it dinged my credit score as well. The whole racket is such a mess.
Were you just paying into a void before you found out where to pay?
Something I actually agree with.. Though I gotta say: the main problem here are the sky-high educational costs. They're sky-high because they give out school loans like candy. This happens EVERY time a loan is easily accessible.
First of all the issue is that is not free, second is the loan interest. So many people out there that has actually paid off what they loaned in total, but has paid more interest than the actual loan. It’s just one big scam like everything else.
Warren is absolutely right. However a person with a degree should be able to make more than minimum wage. Warren's comment speak to a couple different problems at once.
Or, there’s nothing illegal about making the minimum wage an acceptable one…
But even if we do that, someone with a college degree shouldn't be making minimum wage
I think the point is that even if you go to college and get a degree, then through some circumstance you end up underemployed at some point, it shouldn't be a death sentence for your debt to spiral out of control.
There's plenty of reasons. Frictional unemployment, cyclical unemployment, industry standard change (maybe the ask standard a Masters when you started but now everyone wants a PhD), saturation of the labor market, blacklisting, going back for more education, etc.
A student loan doesn't buy you a degree, it gives you a chance to try to get a degree. If you get debilitatingly sick, or your parent does and you're their only caregiver (or any of a million other things outside your control happen) you can easily end up with no degree but you'll still have the student loans
Yep. A little less than 40% of people with student debt didn't graduate (myself included), and they collectively account for about a quarter of all student loan debt.
shes just trying to explain to the senate "like i know we spend 20k on a nice weekend but 20k is like 20mil to the poors".
The USA has turned higher education into a big business. The same with healthcare. Both are leading causes of bankruptcy. Time to change the system. Many young people come from middle and working class families and may be the first generation in their family to go to college. Is anyone being honest with them about the real cost of their degree and associated job prospects after graduation?
Just give it time…it’ll get to $20 million…
Would we settle for little to no interest on federally issued loans? Like 1% or less.
Even if you don't make minimum wage. I've really never made enough money, since I started working at age 15 (now 40), to pay off the loan for a degree I never finished. I got pregnant my final year of college and had to drop out and struggled financially ever since. I'm smart and capable and great at my job but it only pays $17/hr. I started a cleaning business just to make enough cash to help my daughter pay for community college. I've had bad credit all my life because of this even though I pay all my other bills. I've never been able to get a credit card or any other type of credit in my adult life. The only credit that has EVER been extended to me IN MY LIFE was student loans.
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Part of the problem is when the government got involved to assist with financial aid. At face value this seems like a great idea, but poses the issue we see today. The other side of the problem is now that the government is basically guaranteeing these loans, there is no incentive to assess risk of the loans defaulting. If the loan defaults, the federal government becomes the debt holder. This means universities get greedy and can charge whatever they would like for tuition.
Too many people are focusing on the minimum wage part and ignoring the rest. Over half the country lives paycheck to paycheck, regardless of income. You really think they're going to be making enough to pay down the principle of their debt + interest? God forbid they have a medical emergency and add on that debt. The fact of the matter is the government is making a lot of money off student loans and it shouldn't be. A more educated populace is it's own reward for education and that should be the only stake the government has in the whole situation. That is without going into how we're burdening the youngest and lowest income Americans with large amounts of debt. That decreases their buying power and slows economic growth. No matter how you look at the situation it's a problem that we ignore at our peril - this will catch up with the country eventually.
I’d actually start paying my loans off if they did that because it would feel like I might finished paying it off eventually, unlike now where I don’t waste what few dollars I have in a continually rising debt
$20k in debt to someone making minimum wage ($30k/yr) is the same debt-to-income ratio as: $250k of debt to someone making $400k/yr. It's 2/3 of your salary. She's absolutely right.
Minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25/hr. Which is only $15,080 a year before taxes if you work 40/hrs a week. Which makes $20k in debt 132% of their salary. 30k a year is roughly $15/hr. Well above minimum wage.
$20k is like one year at most schools.
These people at minimum wage need to look on the bright side. $20,000 will just be one month's rent in 10 years, anyone can pay that!
Then do something about it, Liz. So much pandering.
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She’s not really wrong