Higher education at a crossroads? I don't know

Miscellaneous
24

I do, and we don’t have kids. I’m bothered by the minimum that there is, at the least a perception that you can only have 1 view, and anything deviating from it is heresy.

I tried to have a discussion on this and a few other political things with someone. I was called a racist, and a neo-nazi; all because I disagreed with his views on things. I wanted to understand why he believes what he believes.

Anyway, to say the least, I’m disturbed by the trend and perception on “non-conforming” views in all aspects of life. Schools, where free thought should be expected and praised seemingly acting like indoctrination centers really bothers me. IMO it’s one thing for a private entity, a la BYU to limit speech. It’s another for a public entity to even have that image.

25

This is a very interesting conversation. As a millennial, I think it is crazy how different two generation’s realities are. School debt is so high, wages are stagnant, benefits are low…

I know my group gets crapped on a lot for not being loyal or getting training then bailing, but it is frustrating for us as well.

We get out of school, in debt to our eyeballs (for example, a co-worker I work with was able to graduate in 1984 with student debt 1/2 of his first year’s paycheck. We just had a new hire come on with student debt 5x’s his first check) with not a lot of affordable housing. We go to apply for a job, but everyone wants more experience than is realistic with low wages. We finally get a job, get trained and a year goes by and we are competent in our job, but our pay sucks and student loans just came due.

Mom and Dad want to know when you will “grow up” and buy a house, get married, have kids, etc when you can barely make ends meet. You try to talk to those you work with and all you get back is “when I was your age I worked through college and paid my way, you should have done that” or “buy a smaller house and go from there”.

There seems to be a real disconnect between the two generations.

Then you get a job offer for a 30% raise somewhere else…you go to your current employer and ask for a raise and they offer you 2% if even that…

So you leave, take the new job and are called un-loyal and a waste of time and “we invested so much in you and now you are leaving us high and dry, you millennials are the worst” and so on.

You get jaded really quick. Really quick. Then you find out that grandma helped dad and mom out with a down payment on a house or a car when they graduated high school/got married and when you bring that up to dad/mom they talk about how they have no money and no retirement and they can’t help you out as they talk to you in their luxury car pulling into their 4,000 sq ft house that they live in with no kids anymore…

So, it appears I have issues…lol. Anyways, the whole system is broken.

I can see why they say my generation will be the first to not end up better off than my parents. It is a mess right now and you get the attitude of “I need to get mine, because no one else out there is going to do anything to help me if I don’t”.

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26

Couple that with no pensions being offered and companies pushing high deductible health care plans and it’s tough to blame “kids” for jumping from one job to another.

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27

Totally agree. I’d be completely open to lower wages if that was made up with a great healthcare plan and pension and vacation time off.

My wife and my parents all have healthcare plans that they’ve had forever and pay <150/month for. They have pensions. They have 5 weeks off. Pay isn’t everything to us. BUT when it’s the ONLY thing we get from an employer…It kinda becomes everything.

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28

Sorry, but wages have been stagnant for quite sometime, depending upon your industry. I get how you feel, and employers stopped being loyal to employees long before employees stopped being loyal to employers. If you want some form of loyalty that goes both ways, work for a small company, or start your own.

You mentioned debt. IMO most degrees are worthless, not all, just most. Those that aren’t worthless require a ton of dedication. My suggestion is look at what you want to do. Whether it’s own a small manufacturing company to creating the next big tech giant. Do you need a degree to get there? If so, what type?

You also said that the system is broken. Yes, it is. I may be wrong here, but the debt and creation of bad degrees coincided with the increase of Federal backing of student loans, so late '80s to present (IMO).

This may not sit well with many but I’m going to use an axiom from Dave Ramsey. Live like no one else, so you can live like no one else. It is possible to get a degree and be debt free. It’s hard, but doable. It requires a ton of research to find grants, scholarships, work, etc. But the crippling debt that so many students have now, will not be there if you can find a way to pay for it yourself.

I’m not going to say that I have the answers. I just have suggestions that can work.

29

Possibly, but companies expect degrees. The company I worked for (I did finance stuff) required degrees, preferably MBA’s. I don’t think the MBA’s were necessary, but I didn’t get to make the decision.

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30

Degrees are mostly a credential, IMO.

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31

Ugh. Reality sucks, right? It’s frustrating because the realities are different for us then our parents. Take my dad and FIL. My dad graduated school with debt of $X. My dad’s salary his first year out of college was $2X. His first house was $X. So, for my dad to get started, he needed one year’s salary to pay for school and a house.

My FIL’s student loan debt was $X. His first year salary was $4X. His house was $2X. So, to get started he needed $3X and made $4X.

Me? I worked through undergrad and graduated with no debt. I went into similar fields as my father and FIL. Post graduate? We were not allowed to have jobs (but I still worked 10-15 hours per week) and tuition went up every year (I did get a $100,000 scholarship for grad school). So I graduated with student loan debt of $X. A house that was comparable to my father’s first (and not as nice as my FIL’s first) costs $X. So, to get started I need $2X.

My first year’s salary? $0.25X. Now, my degree is not in a worthless, poor field. It is the same as my FIL’s.

So, while my parents needed 1 year’s salary to “get started”, I needed 8 year’s salary to “get started” in a comparable lifestyle.

I worked harder than they did in undergrad as I had 30 hours of a job in undergrad and was single and they took out loans and had wives pay for their living expenses. Post grad was comparable.

My generation is not afraid of work. In many instances, we’ve worked just as hard as previous generations. We just don’t get affordable housing and well paying jobs with minimal debt waiting for us when we graduate.

It’s just a different world now. And yeah, at the end of the day all we have is the reality we have to work with, but it sucks big time that I have to work 8 times as hard as my parents to have their life. It’s nuts.

I hope this isn’t coming off as confrontational. It’s a great conversation and I appreciate your advice. It’s good to hear and to reflect on ways that I can incorporate it into what I am currently doing.

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32

All of my thoughts aside, the older I get the more I realize everybody has that “if things were more fair to me it would be awesome” thoughts/feelings.

At the end of today, all we can do work hard, spend less than we make and try not to be too big of a jerk to everyone around us.

:joy::grin:

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33

My two cents:
I know that just about everyone feels that the reason to attend university is to get a higher paying job. I won’t argue that topic. It is what it is.
I long for a day when the general populace aspires to become educated, not for material gain, which brings with it terms like customers and cost-benefit analysis, but for the betterment of individual and community. The “ridiculous fields of study” mentioned above are most probably the ones I would prefer to elevate in this scenario, while moving dollar pursuits like Business, Engineering, Medical, etc. to trade school status.

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34

I still believe in a liberal education. It should teach people to problem-solve and to understand the world around them. Those are foundational skills for anyone, whether they’re coding software or becoming a CPA, lawyer, physician, schoolteacher, engineer, or plumber. I graduated college in 1980 and many of us were sure the real estate market would leave us behind. It hasn’t happened that way, and I’m grateful for that. My 3 kids are all millennials and The team I work with and mentor is 50% millennials. I know it’s a different reality for them. That worries me. A lot. But the only thing to do is to accept that reality and to hustle. I know it’s easy for me to say, but the fact is that generation upon generation have had to do just that.

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35

I also graduated from college in 1980. I remember that the interest rate for mortgages was about 13%. So yeah, we surely thought the real estate market would leave us behind.

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I graduated in 1994 and had no notion of the interest rate for mortgages.
I was focused on Warner Creek, myself.
warner_blockade

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My two cents…

Went to college (JUCO) and paid out of pocket from my work part time. Drove a land yacht “piece of crap” to get around. When the money ran out for college, I enlisted in the Army for the GI Bill. Did my service, came home transferred to the U and graduated - no debt…but the US was in a recession, so no real jobs were out there. Many of my unmarried peers went back to college and got graduate degrees; and by the time they left school, they had good careers waiting. I had a wife and kid to support, so I couldn’t go back. I had to grind out a living. Eventually we bought a house using my GI Bill benefits to secure the loan. I made maybe a little more than what I needed because I could put money in my 401k. Until I went to work at Salt Lake County, the longest tenure I had working in any company or job was 5 years. I ended up spending almost 10 years working for SLCO.

As my job was on a 2 year wind down from the County, and 25 years after I graduated with my Economics degree, I went back to get my MPA. During that time back I college, I cut every “first world want” out of my life. Because I was a non-merit exempt person, I did not qualify for any tuition assistance from SLCO. Because my wife and I scrimped, I was able to simply pay my tuition for grad school out of pocket.

I guess what I am saying is if someone really wants the education (or in my case really, really wants it) they can find a way to make it happen.

On the soapbox, I will say the costs for a public university education have gone way too high, making it so the working classes who want a different path have to either 1) Eat a big piece of student debt, or 2) Go on the 8 to 10 year plan for a degree - not a path I would recommend having walked it myself. Regardless of what some may say About a lack of value, what college did for me was give me the tools to adapt to a changing workforce and keep myself relevant. I haven’t gotten rich and powerful, but I ain’t broke either. What I learned during my MPA experience has helped me do my job better. Yes, the COVID whack has required many to re-examine how a service is delivered. It is not surprising college is being forced to do the same. But don’t discount the value of the experience of learning to adapt and grow that you learn in college. It is a difference maker.

Ok, rant over.

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38

I understand what you guys are saying and why. They show that you know how to stick to something, etc. But really, unless you’re a teacher teaching English do you need an English degree? Same for French, or History, etc. I do think STEM degrees carry more weight in the world than social sciences.

When I graduated, MBAs were coming into fashion. Eventually they’ve become the equivalent of what the bachelor’s was. The bachelors degree, across the board, seems to be the equivalent of a HS diploma or GED. HS diploma gets you almost no where now days. This is why I tell folks to look into the Trades. They pay well, very physical work many times, but the career path is pretty clear. Most eventually own their own businesses. Places still need to be built and maintained, so the trades aren’t going anywhere.

So, yeah, I’ll get of my soap box. Degrees have their place, but are most really worth the money? How many jobs have been replaced by tech? I realize that there are no simple answers. Things have changed so much over the last, well pick your timeframe. In my grandparents lifetime, they went from just after the Wright Bros to the beginnings of AI. In our lifetimes, we now have computers more powerful than anything that sent man to the moon, in our pockets.

Alright, really, I’ll step down now.

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I agree about looking at the trades as an option. When I said a degree was a credential, I meant that the holder went through a program and met its requirements. By itself that is all the degree means. The back story is what matters. The degrees @Greginslc earned impress me a lot more than most other degrees.

I once was looking through a pile of resumes of highly-qualified applicants to my law firm. I was frustrated because it was so hard to pick three people we would interview. I came across the resume of a woman who went went to night law school while she worked full-time during law school. She did that for 4 years and graduated with good grades. It was also clear that English was not her first language and that she was probably the child of immigrants who came to the USA when she was a young child. (This turned out to be true.) I pulled her resume out of the stack. We hired her and she has been a partner in that law firm for 25 years, and is, not surprisingly, a wonderful person. That’s why I like to hire people, not degrees.

I have an old acquaintance who went to Harvard College because his father was a donor there and best friend of the admissions director. My acquaintance is a very unimpressive person with very modest accomplishments. In contrast, the plumber we use is an amazing person who runs an impressive business that he built himself. He provides great service and knows what he’s doing, and he has a great life.

OK, off my own soapbox now.

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40

I think there is a lot of truth here. The problem I see is that my generation wasn’t told any of this. We were told school, school, school = success. Without school, there isn’t success. We were given salaries of people with high school degrees, college degrees, etc and shown how the only way to success is this path.

Then, we were put on that path, sold overpriced pieces of paper, milked for every dollar available and shoved into a market with overpriced housing, cars, and lower wages with no benefits and told to quit being a snowflake and if we were smarter we would not have listened to our parents, teachers, church leaders, civic leaders and done the opposite of what they were all saying.

The whole system from top to bottom is just messed up.

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41

Are you saying you hired someone for—let’s say—$40,000 and he carries $200,000 in student loans? If so, that’s probably not a “systems” problem, that’s a “him” problem. There are many ways to get a quality education without racking up that kind of debt.

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43

Well if we are going to throw out anecdotal evidence about college education take a look at my son: Had a good scholarship at the U as well as some grant money. He worked part time the entire time through school and had a summer job every year. We also helped him out a bit, he was able to live at home as well as his grandfather was able to provide some money via a small ESP account. He graduated from Engineering at the U in 4 years while being on the Dean’s list all but 3 semesters and still $30K+ in student loans!! Luckily he managed to get a well paying job as an engineer with a large corporation which will allow him to manage his debt without too much trouble but compared to most of his peers he is an outlier. The system is broken and very much stacked against the current generation of students compared to previous generations.

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44

You missed the point. The point was, why does it cost so much more for him to get started than it did for the boomers?

That’s the point.

For the record, the kid is a medical professional and his student loan debt was roughly $500K. It’s nuts. Again, the system is broken. This kid worked hard his whole life, top of his class, did what every parent dreams of and becomes a Dr.

What’s his reward? Not nearly what someone 50+'s reward was for the same amount of work (and honestly, with the additional requirements at school, much, much, much more work than the previous generation’s).

The system is broken. And taking on another part time job or eating out once or twice less isn’t going to fix the problem.

Why is it this generation is expected to work so much harder for so much less and when they fall short of that, you are told you shouldn’t have done it that way?

Rocker’s example of a kid who hadn’t even gotten into post grad work who already had $175,000 in debt? That’s immoral. Yeah, the kid is probably a dope. BUT, to take advantage of his naivete…that’s a problem. Especially when it comes from an institution that had a HUGE part in indoctrinating this kid into the idea that going to school and getting good grades (which we can assume he has done if he is on his way to medical school) was the path to a good life.

The whole system is broken.

You buy into a system. You pay capital into it your whole life. You are told that if you do that, you will get rewarded for doing that. You are shown all the numbers that show how doing this task will pay off. You are told by the system (and the school financial aid counselor) that the costs will be fine because the reward is so big now, you’ll be glad you did it. When you finish and go to get your reward, you are told, “sorry kid, you should have been smarter.”

It’s messed up.

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