@ucbalumnus’s 29% stat is correct; most American’s don’t qualify for enlistment for a number of reasons, but the biggest is obesity. Most don’t meet the weight/height requirements:
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-most-americans-cant-join-the-military-2015-9
@TooOld4School. Your last line says it all. It’s such an important point. I joke with my kids that I love them but since I am “investing” in their future I expect a big payoff… Lol ?. Just had a conversation with my daughter about PhD programs. She said she is only applying to one’s that would fund her, (this is new to me so educating myself). I have a senior and junior in college now and he might do a 5th year for bs/ms. That is fine but I would like to be done soon!
Let me rephrase… I think parents and students need to start to look at college cost as an investment. Take the kid out of it for emotion sake. Would you do this deal if paying $200,000 as a business for a $20,000 salary with the nonability to pay off the loans lay out the payment plans etc. Kids should see realistic information upfront. I think schools should teach it this way. No business would invest that type of money for little payout.
When I talk about college I lump trade school into it. To me, cc, 4 year, trade schools, or other certification programs are all viable paths, but they all also cost money. Our high school is revamping to try to get some of the trade kids certified for things like welding while in high school. That will save those kids some money. Getting things like AutoCad cert will also help because right now those kids pay a ton for relatively low salaries afterward. It’s just as bad as high debt for college when one looks at debt/income potential ratios. Sure they get jobs if they pass, but the salaries they get make it difficult to pay off their loans.
But telling kids what to do is rarely a good idea. The same student who could be a talented plumber isn’t necessarily a good history teacher - and vice versa. Matching the student to their niche works the best. Trying to fit a square peg into a round hole works the worst.
Not being able to afford to get into the hole one needs to fit into is where it’s shameful.
Comparing the earnings of college graduates to the earnings of non-college grads isn’t a relevant comparison. For a macro-economic study, you might compare GDP per capita in the US to that of other countries. To give a concrete example, why might Starbucks hire a philosophy grad over a high school grad to be a shift manager? For one, if you have a lot of resumes for one job opening, you have to come up with some criteria to reject applicants until you get down to a manageable number of people to interview. For another, being admitted to a decent college in the first place usually signifies some baseline degree of intelligence. Graduating from college may indicate a person has at least some baseline of executive function skills, necessary to succeed in the work place.
My question is: why would a graduate of a 4 year college apply to become a shift manager at Starbucks? Is it that this is the Starbucks career path to a better paid management position? Or is it that there are so many college graduates that this is normal?
@roethlisburger Which leads back to my theory that the reason more jobs require college degrees is because high school degrees are meaningless today. Did the school have to bend over backward to get the youngster to graduate (as happens way too often)? Or did the student do the job themselves and has the ability to be decent on the job based upon that history.
Today, college is often that differentiater. If we pull the college path from those who can’t afford it but are still quite capable, their options will be very limited.
I expect a substantial portion of non college grads will exceed college grad salaries soon. Any of the skilled trades-welding, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, have solid 6 figure mid career prospects. Given the plethora of college grads, the value of those degrees isn’t what it once was.
Most skilled tradesmen have always had decent salaries in our lifetimes.
However, just as with engineering, not “anyone” can become a skilled tradesman. There are plenty who try and end up with the bad reviews because it’s really not their niche.
@Rivet2000. Well…
My daughter took a gap year midway through college and is now a junior. Most of her friends just graduated. One with a philosophy degree planning on going into law school couldn’t find a job. A few of her other friends are working these types of jobs. I have told my daughter that I am not paying all this money for her to work at Starbucks. She gave me a dose of reality that the economy sucks for new graduates and there just is not great opportinies right now. Her view not mine, but the reality amongst her friends. All went to good schools and come from good families. So making money is better then not, I guess.
Which makes this all a more important discussion.
There are still great opportunities for those whose skills align with employers’ needs. For others, not so much, and that may not change
It can be a foot in the door, but there are a great deal of under-employed college graduates.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/education/edlife/a-brighter-job-market-for-some.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/well/family/late-to-launch-the-post-collegiate-struggle.html
This is micro, not macro thinking. If fewer college grads were available for hire, Starbucks would hire a hs grad as a manager(they can’t outsource that to China), the government would collect the same amount of income tax revenue, and customers would continue to get their Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccinos.
Regardless of how you spin it, if the less economically lucky students can no longer go to college (including cc and trade schools - all “need money” options post high school), they have little chance for advancement. Adding more high school grads to the already higher high school grad unemployment rate is not going to suddenly give them good jobs compared to what they could have done.
My very successful engineer (H) would have nowhere near the same salary or job satisfaction if he hadn’t had loans available. There are more like him than those who default. Yes, this is micro and not macro, but all of our lives are micro. Macro says let the castes stay as they are. It will work. Micro says lets try to help the most individuals we can.
Agree.
Part of the problem is that it is not necessarily the case that anyone can know what kind of “peg” a middle or high school student will be. Early tracking is based on the assumption that this can be known early, so that high school education can be optimized for the particular “hole” that the student (“peg”) will fit into. But the tracking decisions themselves may be suboptimal in terms of fitting “pegs” into “holes”.
Yes, even if determination of “peg” and “hole” were perfectly known, not being able to afford whatever education, training, certification, or licensing to enter the optimal “hole” means a loss to both individual and society, since the person will either have to enter a less optimal “hole” because it has a lower cost of entry, or become unskilled labor that is of lower value in the economy and could result in greater costs to society than if s/he could become more skilled and valued labor in the optimal “hole”.
Perhaps in your town, but with unemployment rate extremely low, it’s hard to comprehend how the economy sucks for new grads. Turn back the clock to '09/'10, where it really did suck; top law firms were laying off first year associates that they had just hired.
But back to debt – several anecdotes in an article on cnn. GradPlus loans for full COA are a disaster in process; they result in a moral hazard (but make colleges/educators happy). Read some of the stories about colleges encouraging more debt. (Of course they do, its in their personal interest to do so.)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/01/us/student-loan-debt-stories-trnd/index.html
A low unemployment rate doesn’t mean there aren’t a huge number of UNDERemployed college graduates, which was the point of the previous post. Statistically, college grads working at Starbucks are employed — which does suck if you just spent four years in college and probably have a large chunk of student debt. The fact that the overall jobless rate may be low doesn’t make it suck any less.
Except the article clearly said that they weren’t working at Starbucks.
Which is the point of this thread. Debt = bad.
It surely beats the alternative, i.e., no job/unemployment, which is exactly how many were a decade ago. But maybe not for the millennials.
Just as an anecdote, my niece who graduated a year ago and has a good job was telling me that several of her HS classmates who went to decent schools still don’t have regular jobs. In her opinion those friends without jobs thought their college degree entitled them to enter at mid-level in a field rather than entering in at the bottom level of a field. Her opinion was reinforced by her boss who got back from a 10 school job fair circuit and said that out of the hundreds of kids he interviewed, he’d only hire 2, because the rest had expectations outside of reality.
Another anecdote that fits this narrative is a chef I know said he hesitates over hiring kids from the local culinary school and prefers promoting people already working at restaurants because he thinks the culinary school graduates think they are hot stuff and both expect too much at first and are more resistant to being shown how to do things.
I think part of the problem is that kids are being told that if you get a degree it puts you on a whole different trajectory. And the degrees cost so much that they expect or need a certain ROI and don’t want to accept the entry level position.
There are recent graduates who are working at something close to a dream job, or as close as you are likely to get right after graduation, who are not making much money.
Students who major in engineering, computer science, or nursing might be relatively well paid 6 months after graduation. However, students with a very wide range of other majors might be very happy with the job that they have 6 months or a year or two years after graduation, and still not make any more money that the student who is serving coffee at Starbucks.
A lot of very successful people bounced around a bit from job to job after graduating college, before they found the right niche and made their mark. Having no debt at all at graduation makes this “bouncing around” a lot easier to navigate.