Obviously, this was a significant milestone for me. So, I took this opportunity to reflect on my journey so far. How I even came to owe that much money, how I overcame this obstacle, and what it all means to me.
That's not what the blog post says at all. The author talked about a bunch of bad choices.
> You spent $200k on a degree which awarded you a job that allowed you (with some expected struggle) to pay it off.
That's not what happened. In short, here is the series of events, that happened over a number of years:
1. Graduated with a double major in economics and environmental studies, plus $150K debt
2. Got a job pulling weeds at the Chicago Botanic Gardens for $12/hour
3. Got a job as an economic researcher at Arity for $50K/year
4. Taught himself data science and machine learning
5. Got a job in data science for >$100K/year
It was only 5 that allowed him to pay off his student loan debt. The undergrad degree did not directly lead to a well-paying job.
And let me just state the obvious: it appears that you are good with words. And the ability to clearly communicate complex topics in writing is a lot less common than you might think. My pet theory is that that's why working remotely didn't turn out well for so many people.
The system works.
It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced by the large number of graduates unable to repay their student loans.
The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway.
Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.
The key element here is to learn the trade but then move up to hiring/managing others who do the actual work --- for a company owned by you.
I think you're over-reacting to some anecdotes.
> The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway.
> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.
To put it bluntly: that's dumb advice that also takes contrarianism to an unreasonable extreme.
IMHO, the more reasonable reaction the situation is to steer your kids towards an affordable college and a degree path that has a reasonable career at the other end. So towards a decent but unprestigious state school, away from no-name private liberal arts schools and famous schools (unless you they can score a fantastic scholarship); way from majoring in anthropology, literature, or music; etc.
Edit: Also it doesn't seem super wise, period, to advise your kid to go into some low skill/low capital business, then expect them to magically make a successful small business out of it. If people actually took your advice in large numbers, the competition is going to be cutthroat.
Any less wise than sending them to some diploma mill and expecting them to make a successful career out of it once they are saddled with debt?
Student loan debt is approaching $2 trillion with over 22 million borrowers. Everybody and his brother has bought a degree which makes one not all that special in the current economy.
Degree or not, success in today's environment is highly dependent on personal initiative. I personally know plumbers and landscapers and roofers and delivery drivers who are *very* successful --- mainly because they multiple their skills by hiring others. I also know plenty of college grads who work low skilled service jobs.
Some fields require a post-secondary education. You can't get around that. If you want to be an engineer or a doctor, you need to go that route. In that case, I agree with you. Look for more affordable options and figure out how to meet the requirements without bankrupting yourself. Understand what you are getting involved in before you make any commitments.
Barring the above, I do tend to side with the OP that it is time for a cultural shift away from college / university for the sake of college / university. I know of a lot of people who really valued "the experience", and felt like they found themselves and made valuable networking connections etc. and value those things above the diploma itself. None of that is a bad thing, but ask yourself what kind of dollar amount you are willing to pay for that. Don't assume that you will be resigned to living under the poverty line if you don't pursue that.
I am undoubtedly biased because I have enjoyed a 25 year career in software engineering and this is a niche field where we see tons of self-taught engineers who, in many cases, have a higher work ethic and measurable productive output than their college educated peers. I don't pretend for a second that that can transfer to every other field.
But does that mean the idea transfers to zero other fields?
You don't have to disvalue higher education to question whether or not traditional formal institutions are providing the value that they promise, or to seek alternative ways of achieving that higher education.
We need to stop making it seem like the "college experience" is worth gobs of student loan debt.
I think #2 is made worse because it tends to be young journalists writing those stories from places like Brooklyn after having graduated from a journalism masters program at NYU or Columbia. Yeah, they’re going to have lots of student debt, high living costs, and low-ish income, and their reporting is going to reflect that.
What I have noticed is that "entrepreneur" in the age of social media has become almost synonymous with scams—doubly so among those without a college degree. I can't even avoid it. Every time I open Facebook or Instagram, every 3rd or 5th post is some kind of scam. The vast majority or reels are scams. People aren't aspiring to be landscapers or start real businesses and a lot of people don't even know the difference between a real business and some kind of scam that they saw on TikTok.
Higher education also doesn't have to be expensive. It can be as expensive as you want it to be, even today. You can get a great education from a state school. You can even offload the first two years to community college if you really want to save money.
I work for an employer because I don’t want to spend time running a business. It’s just not worth it for a lot of us. I don’t even ever want to be a manager.
I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want.
I always see people talking about how brilliant it is to run your own business / be your own boss, but I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day.
I say this as a director of a SaaS company...
If you think like a corporate slave, that is what you will always be --- looking forward to the next layoff.
One of my neighbors runs a landscape business --- no college dregree. He has 8 crews and a manager. I'll bet he makes more than you and spends less time doing it.
He works about 3 hours a day --- which mostly involves riding around to make sure the work is getting done as he talks to clients on phone.
No, it hasn’t, as evidenced by the research on pay differentials.
> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.
Entrepreneurship requires capital, and also has a high failure rate; a business of those types can also lead to failure, a worse than starting position, and being back to being a worker in those industries.
If you actually ran a small business, you would understand that small businesses are exempted from many of these regulations.
For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn't apply until your business has more than 15 employees. Insider trick --- start multiple small companies to avoid many of these sort of regulations.
health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3.
If this is true, you really aren't very successful. Also, health care costs are a deductible business expense.
Sure, that's totally not gonna be another gold rush / pyramid scheme like the student loans were.
Going forward though, I think the combination of AI and extreme degree dilution (everybody has a degree) are going to absolutely railroad a bunch of gen-z kids down the line.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934135
Yesterday this was posted with a lot of commenters agreeing that management wasn't for them. With that in mind, I think presenting "entrepreneurism" as a lucrative and rewarding career is misleading. Many people wouldn't enjoy it, many people wouldn't be good at it, many people will not be successful at it - particularly long term. Entrepreneurs will not have easy access to 401ks and ( in the US ) health insurance.
> landscaping or construction
It is interesting to me how many promoters of blues collar careers overlook these industries historic hostility to female collogues. Women have been doing better in college lately than men, so maybe the assumption is that men will forgo college in droves for these sort of trade careers leaving all the white collar jobs to women. It's a plausible outcome.
For example, people talk about "landscaping or construction" and other trades but don't consider that working as e.g. an economist has a longer expected career longevity than working in construction.
Also remember that the point of college is to broadly educate the individual, not to be a jobs program. That said, there's no reason a college graduate can't start and grow a construction business. A person who makes $200k at a data science job is in some ways better positioned to start a construction business, because they have the ability to accumulate some capital.
The key word is "can". About 20% of businesses will fail in a year; about half will fail in five [1]. That means that unless everyone is a serial entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs will still end up needing to work a "traditional" job for most of their careers.
Well, the CS degree I got in the UK in the 1980s cost me literally nothing - no fees and a full grant for living expenses (which I added to by working in the summer breaks).
Given the amount of tax I've paid, that was an excellent investment by the UK taxpayer!
Honestly, the sense of despair people have in getting jobs is so sad to me. I've interacted with other young adults who are in the same situation. This sense of "I played the game the way I thought I was supposed to and now this??". I do all I can to help them connect them with others, but it's still really disappointing.
I was glad he "made it" in the end, but I'm not convinced that "near mental breakdowns" are healthy and worth it. And then... survivorship bias. For every talented person like this that excels academically and has a flair for long for story telling, there's another 9 or 99, that don't, and are still stuck in the trenches, and they don't even have the time/resources to write their equally emotive but even more shitty story.
If anything, I think that should be the story. You make choices to try to dig yourself out, and you end up digging yourself further down the hole.
I don't mean to suggest you did the wrong thing, but I want to share a perspective from one of my friends. She has a similar amount of debt, and is simply choosing to make minimum payments for the rest of her life, maybe even default at some point. She says that spending her money on herself while she is young enough to enjoy it is more important than living frugally for decades to end up old without any money anyway. But she has also considered marrying, then being a stay at home mom or working under the table jobs so that she can default without getting her wages garnished. I'm not burdened by debt, but I would definitely be thinking of something similar in a case like that. Also reminds me of the credit-maxing meme. While I generally like market incentives, I think student loans are becoming extremely high risk investments. I'm lucky enough to have a well paying job, but I'm still worried about what paying for my child's education will be like. Should I make them take on hundreds of thousands in loans, or should I delay my retirement for a decade? The future seems bleak if we don't get the cost of education under control.
This is not what I would be looking for in a partner. If you brazenly break contracts you willingly entered one day what’s to make anyone believe their contract with you is nonnegotiable.
The denial of emotional toll here is shocking. She has limited her options to decades of a) un-remunerated childcare or (and?) b) being a tax resister.
To drive this home:
* imagine the difficulty of "changing jobs" in either scenario. Especially if you have an abusive boss.
* imagine four years living with your parents, trading chores for ability to work and pay off debt. That's less of an emotional toll because at least there'd be an end-date.
~200k in student debt or other debt? My understanding is that most student debt in the US is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so defaulting and destroying your credit doesn't do you that much good.
Also if it's student debt, seems like a bad plan to incur it in the first place if the plan is not to work.
If it's not student debt, then I don't see how it is particularly relevant to the conversation here.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to graduate debt-free, through a combination of a) attending school in Canada, where tuition costs are less absurd than the US; b) some money my parents saved for their children's education; and c) participation in a co-op education model. Basically, alternating between one semester in school, one semester at a co-op job, and no summers off (though really, how many college students go home for the summer and take a job at Starbucks anyway?). I graduated having financed my education by myself after the first year, and with ~2 years of (relevant) work experience already under my belt. The connections from one of those jobs also ended up helping me get the job I have now.
Like I said, I feel very fortunate, and this approach won't necessarily fit all use cases. But I heartily recommend a co-op education model any chance I get. Even if it could help you avoid taking on $10k in student debt, that feels like a win.
The current system doesn't encourage the institutes to do anything other than spiral costs, burn money and zero responsibility to provide a product focused on making sure that loan is ever paid back.
Say this as someone who managed to pay theirs off, just think "forgiveness" and other ideas are temporary solutions we'll end up having to repeat over and over. Let's just have a permanent solution with accountability for what they are providing for the cost.
Honestly this is the issue. Colleges sell education. People think they are buying a future income stream. I don't blame people, because employers have by and large conflated the two. But this misalignment is at the heart of a lot of the cost discourse.
Stop federal guarantees of loans, and allow loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. Make loans a risk and they won't give $200k to a sociology major with no prospects because they know they won't see a return.
It feels so good. I paid off about $60k of debt in 1.5 years after college while living at home. It was hard but worth it.
Congrats @EconoBen :)
Drawing $17xx bar and slapping $1494,97 onto it... whereas other bars match the label with the height.
I just couldn't parse how $1,4xx - $1,4yy would end up $408,56. And then in the text there is a number not charted: $1902 to just add to confusion, but OK, that's not what you get on hand.
And then "$1106.42 per month, my public loans $387.02. Altogether, I would owe $1493.22" - the sum is actually .44
Author should fix something.
Unfortunately, there are so many "life coaches" that they drown out the people who could have actually been a good coach to this person.
Congratulations on your achievement though! Being debt free is not normal anymore and it comes with a surprising amount benefits in other areas of your life.
