STRAPPED: Why America's 20- and 30- Something's Can't Get Ahead

it would be great if they'd offer more grants for out-of-state students, since it's hardly unusual these days for applicants to look at programs in other parts of the country. what's the benefit of staying within your state if your local schools don't offer the programs or faculty you want?

Soul-crushing debt. Sweet.

That sounds like a good plan.

seriously, my finances are such a disaster. it'll take me over a decade to pay off student loans. everything is so expensive, and I feel like what's the point in trying to put away $$ for buying a house or something - I live in DC, I'll never have that kind of money.

pell grants are just for undergrads and the maximum amount is frozen at $4,050 per student.

so do i -- i went to a public college in-state and it was dirt cheap. no way i'm doing it again for grad school though... the two SUNYs that offer my master's program are in awful, depressing places (albany and buffalo).

i make less than $20,000/year, i think.

You also have rich parents.

Thanks goodness the housing market in TX is still relatively accessible.

xpost that's kind of OTM, they have to clean up lower level before they go cleaning up higher level IMO though, yeah, it'd be nice if they were at a point where actually fixing anything with the grad system would be reasonable (esp since I'm already done and well fucked from undergrad anyway, what do I care now ha ha fuck u grandkids)

See, Jon, these are the comments that make me hit you.

Too busy dropping $$$$$$$$$ on iraqis.

Also, is "gaywad" one or two words? Tell me! I will paypal you 25 cents.

in a field like urban planning (which is hardly basket-weaving; a lot of city governments are heavily invested in planning issues right now), you need a master's degree to even be considered for most entry-level positions, and the majority of schools don't even offer a bachelor's degree in it.

the truth is that unless you live somewhere with a high dropout rate, you're not really that competitive with just a bachelor's degree. america needs people with practical advanced degrees as much as it needs working-cass backbone-industry type personnel.

Here's an emoticon of me being skeptical about the Slate article, which has a couple mindbendingly bad chains of logic: ;:/=(

i know, but not everyone wants to do that (or has those skills).

Yeah, OTM. This was one of the major reasons I chose the private I attended, the NYC public schools just didn't have the degree I wanted*. There were several out-of-state schools that had it but I mean there was virtually no price difference between attending Columbia v. the others I was looking at, esp when you had to factor in that I would HAVE to quit my job immediately, move, etc etc.

* Ha ha neither did Columbia in the end since after I paid up for first semester they suddenly dropped the opening of the program--which was supposed to be new the year I started--only to open it, finally, the year I graduated. I hated that place so much.

what i keep hearing about columbia is that their professors are ancient old-guard guys who haven't read any book or article published after 1970 and are proud of how out-of-touch they are.

I also think this is a low number

xpost jbr actually that's not true, it just depends on who you study with and what you're going after. It's like 60/40 split between old-guard Ivy stereotypes and young 'uns. Are you considering them for urban planning? I didn't do that but I know some of the profs in city history if that'd be helpful for you to know about.

Nothing spurs young people to anger about this stuff so much as hearing certain older generations talk about their expectations for people, economically: it's almost ridiculous now to think of quite how easy a particular generation of white people had it for a while there. Not that no one was economically miserable around the middle of the century, but for a big post-war run there, living middle-class was less of a struggle than ever.

nah, i didn't like the description of the program from some of the people who went there/know the profs. not crazy about any of the nyc programs, but i applied to nyu because it's more professionally oriented and their capstone sounds cool.

It's just as cost-effective to go to NYU than it is to go to an out-of-state state school (unless I'm seriously underestimating graduate rates) so unless yr itching to move that might be yr best bet. Don't grad students get a (slightly) larger pell grant tho? Considering if you qualify yadda yadda yadda.

Unless you want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a teacher, you're better off just getting a CDL license.

I'm aware of the uselessness of the bachelor's. Seven out of the ten years I've worked since graduating have been in web design/programming. I learned none of that in college and don't doubt I could have gotten those same starting jobs with or without a degree. The three years I taught I had to pay $4000 out of pocket for the extra training to get certified. My boyfriend, who has no degree, worked his way up from the warehouse of a major computer manufacturer to an office job making more than me. I still like my degree though. I didn't go to college just to get a job.

The career I want to go into, counseling, requires a Master's in order to get licensed. Fortunately for me though my cheapest option there is also one of my best (UT).

xpost

yeah, it's one of the biggest scams going. you've really gotta study up on the different interest rates.

You know, I think the real money anxiety for today's twenty-somethings is actually a fear that their wages and salaries won't rise as time passes. Part of this is just a failure of the imagination -- it's hard to get it through your head that aging in itself moves you up the ranks. But it's also the market. Instead of the old model of working in one spot and moving your way up, people bounce from job to job without much sense of progress -- and maybe without really realizing that they're still picking up years of experience in a field along the way. There's also the anxiety that since so many of those other givens are evaporating -- e.g. health insurance, or even proper "employee" work, as opposed to contracts -- then what if wage progress itself somehow started slipping?

I assume part of the answer here is that at some point, possibly concurrent with marriage/children and other settlings, people start angling more seriously for positions that offer that sense of advance -- even if it means locking in to an industry or salary that's not entirely satisfying.

as for those of us already in the soup (esp. re educational debt) -- WHAT'S IN IT FOR US?!?

OTM. i like studying and reading and writing papers, i like being around "ideas," and i think if you're smart you can find a way to do that AND eventually make some dough off it. this is a world that's desperately in need of good ideas (in politics, science, business), so i take issue with people who don't believe higher education is important or useful.

Because really the one thing Americans still do best is sell to other Americans, and if selling to other Americans stops being the most profitable business on the face of the Earth then you can say goodbye to, well, a whole lot of jobs, for starters.

Colleges: An Endangered Species?

The Truth About the Colleges

From the second one, there is this passage on why college costs so much these days:

Since 1980, average tuition at private colleges has more than doubled, rising from $10,954 to $23,505 in today's dollars. Schools charge what the market will bear, and since applicants seem willing to pay, enrollments haven't dropped. Boston University is asking $28,906 and Southern California $28,827— about the same as many more famous schools. But how much of this money is applied to undergraduate teaching? Will every student be able to take part in a seminar each semester?

What can be shown is that much tuition money is allocated to expanding the top tiers of the faculty, both in numbers and in what they are paid. During the last twenty years, Harvard's roster of full professors has grown from 533 to 777, Columbia's from 462 to 589, and Duke's from 284 to 399, while student enrollments have remained essentially the same. Table C gives examples of how salaries of full professors have risen in real terms, and how much they take of their faculties' budgets. Nationally, at 115 colleges and universities, full professors are paid on average more than $100,000 a year, including at small schools like Hamilton and Colby.[16] Indeed, forty-one public institutions pay full professors more than $100,000, despite cuts in legislative funding. While salary increases at the state schools in Table C are below those in the private sector, full professors there are still receiving the biggest share of their institutions' budgets.

As matters stand, one measure of a university's prestige is how little teaching is asked of its tenured professors. Although there are more endowed chairs at the top, more undergraduates are now taught by graduate assistants, adjuncts, and part-time faculty who will never be promoted. Some even handle full loads for a third of the $100,000 that professors get even if they don't teach. Unfortunately, that saving is what makes the six-figure salaries possible.

Princeton's mathematics department may be an extreme example, but it offers a glimpse of academic priorities. It has fifty-six professorial-rank faculty, who supervise fifty-five graduate students and thirty juniors and seniors majoring in math. Simple arithmetic suggests that even if courses are added for students who do not major in mathematics, some professors will not enter a classroom in a typical semester. Doubtless they will say they are engaged in research. But even esteemed faculties have members who have essentially ceased publishing since receiving tenure.

While other organizations such as corporations have fewer people at the top of the hierarchy, senior ranks at colleges outnumber those lower down, often by a large margin, and are paid a high proportion of the total payroll. At the schools cited in Table C, full professors absorb upward of 79 percent of overall instructional budgets. In fact, at most of them, full professors exceed assistant professors by greater ratios than they did twenty years ago. Legally, full professors who wish can stay on with full salaries as long as they want. In 1983, the campuses in North Carolina's system reported that only 34 percent of their regular faculty members were under the age of forty. By 2003, the proportion had fallen to 18 percent. Of twenty-two professors in one economics department, just one was under forty.[17]

(my dip.arts in editing/multimedia cost me less than $1000. My doctor is free. My meds are capped at $20 no matter what I need to get on scrip. Yes I know I am being pompous).

I wouldn't say that the trades are always preferable to 4 year colleges, but telling kids that there are in fact other ways to make a living than going to college and studying something for a BA or Masters wouldn't hurt. I mean, a ton of kids came out of college in the late 90s with computer degrees that turned out to be fairly meaningless after the IT crash, and lots of them turned to the trades to make a living. Besides, as bachelors degrees become, increasingly, the high school diploma of yore, its only going to put people further into debt and shorten the period of time in which they can actually make the money back. So yeah, maybe telling everyone about the opportunities college can create is good, but we shouldn't be scaring people away from being able to do trade work either (which is ostensibly what the current education system does).

(btw, I always did find it odd that high schools have become solidly entrenched in college prep work and standardized testing as the price of state run college shoots through the roof. I know there's probably no legit conspiracy, but still kinda funny how that worked out)

haha high schools these days are grateful enough if they can get kids to graduate.

I am debt free, except for student loans, and those are manageable. I hope to keep it that way, but I don't care how many I have to take out, I'm going to grad school and I'm going to do something besides work in IT for the rest of my life.

I think the fact that high schools don't offer any actual job skills that could concievably help any kid doesn't help the graduation rate in the inner city.

There's nothing wrong with having kids read 18th century literature or discussing European History. There's just a disconnect with a lot of kids (particularly those who are poor) who don't see a connection between reading Chaucer and putting food on their plate and a roof over their heads. And really, don't they have a point, to some degree?

Also, its not as if EVERYONE can go to college. That's completely unreasonable. There's not enough professors or college classrooms for it, and all that would do is glut professions requiring a degree. As is, your local garage/dealership, machine shop, hospital, trucking companies, and many other rather important services in our country are SCREAMING for qualified employees because so few are currently being produced. Its not as if they pay shit cash.

Go apply for a job with a carpentry or masonry company, tell them you have no experience whatsoever doing either job, but that you can read. See how far you get.

i dunno if they're SCREAMING. there's no shortage of nascar-loving autogeeks out there, and apparently the classes in nursing schools are so full that new students end up being shut out of required courses for a year or more.

Go apply for a job with a carpentry or masonry company, tell them you have no experience whatsoever doing either job, but that you can read. See how far you get.

you wanna be able to read your paycheck. you wanna be able to write work orders and stuff.

If you don't think there's a desperate need for either, you're crazy. Hospitals, nursing homes, etc. really badly need nurses. Really really badly. Not just in the US, but worldwide. If I wanted to leave the US, I could get my immigration expedited if I was a registered nurse in the UK or in Europe. The hospital I work at has 20 open positions for full time staff nurses right now. There's a lot more than than nursing too....respiratory therapists, X-Ray Techs, Surgical Technicians, etc. Trucking companies are putting people through the 6 month CDL training just to have live bodies. That's why so many people with shoddy driving records are on the road.

you wanna be able to read your paycheck. you wanna be able to write work orders and stuff.

I'm not advocating releasing tons of illiterate people onto the street. I'm advocating using high school to train people for more than standardized tests and college. You need those people. Matter of fact, they're needed right now. Telling people that trades are of a lower caste or pushing college as the only solution isn't going to help things get better.

Then let me ask you: Do you think the free public education system currently in place (K-12) is giving people the ability to compete in the real world and get jobs that they can support themselves/their family with? Because I don't. And if its not, then its failing.

I wish, now, that I had been exposed to a wider variety of experiences (specifically in high school) along the lines of wood shop and metal shop (oh, and art). All those AP classes were fine, they got me out of some stupid classes in college, but they're mostly irrelevant to what I want to do now and some don't even count toward my (alleged) degree plan.

I know some tradies rort the system with side deals and cash in hand, but who can blame them really.

When I see managers and salesguys and CEOs getting literally millions for doing fuck all it makes my head spin.

The nurses and plumbers I know make goooooood money. Making 80K a year as a nurse isn't exactly outrageous. Teachers are underpaid in most of the US though.

depends on the people, and depends on the schools (and the teachers, and the bureaucracy). there are obviously people who are competing just fine in the real world with their free public education.

do i think education is failing across the board? yes i do. do i think there's room in the curriculum for people to learn JOB SKILLZ? there can be, but deciding what to cut to fit that in could prove controversial. i'd love to see a curriculum that's broad enough to include job readiness AND english AND a foreign language AND something creative AND math and science and history. even if you're going to become a mechanic there's no reason why you shouldn't be a WORLDLY mechanic.

Given the figures on how high school diploma/GED only folks do, how realistic do you think that is?

do i think education is failing across the board? yes i do. do i think there's room in the curriculum for people to learn JOB SKILLZ? there can be, but deciding what to cut to fit that in could prove controversial. i'd love to see a curriculum that's broad enough to include job readiness AND english AND a foreign language AND something creative AND math and science and history. even if you're going to become a mechanic there's no reason why you shouldn't be a WORLDLY mechanic.

I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be preferable to have a mechanic that speaks a second language (poorly) and has perhaps had some overviews on literature, science, and mathematics, but does using grades 7-11 to prepare kids for college prepratory courses/SATs/entry exams really help the large numbers of students who do not plan on going to college?

Hell, as great as college is....

http://www.air.org/news/documents/Release200601pew.htm

Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees – have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The study was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Most public schools I am familiar with spend these years getting kids to read at a 4th or 5th grade level and making them basically fuctional in math. there is no college prep going on.

The voucher system is better than nothing but not something that can really be utilized as heavily as it should be because it makes the presumption that people can actually manage to travel out of district on a daily basis to attend a different, better-in-some-way school, which is unrealistic, especially in a country where the majority does not have access to public transit.

Not to mention that Alan is right about the poshier schools, and not just for the reason that some kids aren't going to want to head off to college and won't need that preparation: what good does it do ANYONE if the only thing courses are teaching is prep for AP/SAT? Memorization of rote facts that are likely to appear on a standardized test and classes that don't progress significantly from year to year--and these are the schools that have lots of money?? It seems incredibly wasteful, and negligent to both less intellectual children as well as very smart children. Regardless of financial privledges.

I'm not just talking about poshier schools too. Poorer schools, where kids typically go home to a beat up apartment/housing project and scrape by on cheap food and Koolaid, also breed a similar mentality, though its mainly driven by the home life. Its not easy to tell a 15 year old that a seemingly unconnected class/study is going to help him out...after he goes to college with money he doesn't have and won't have until he's 40. In the meantime, he's thinking about the *NOW* (and wouldn't any of us?) and thinking about how he can get a car that doesn't break down all the time, putting food in his stomach, and having a roof that's not infested with roaches over his head. You gotta make sure people have the basic needs for living before you can anticipate them holding an interest in more abstract subjects.

And teaching kids 5-11 years in age is a whole different ballgame and fixing that system is ridiculously difficult.

(btw, about foriegn languages; I think its fine and nice to ask kids to go to class for them, but no one ever really learns anything from foriegn language classes (as a whole). now, having mandatory service in or offering a optional, free, pre-college, non-military Peace Corps like system that put young Americans overseas would do a LOT more good .)

By "poshier schools" I basically meant suburban ones, wealthy or no. It's my code word for suburbs these days because people get offended but I'm not sure what to call schools that are not urban and are not rural if not "suburban."

Regardless, there are poor kids in posh (meaning posh, not suburban this time) neighborhoods as well...part of the people who get lost in the pile between "bad urban school" and "SAT-obsessed suburban school."

Shocking Exposé Reveals the False Job-Creation Promises of
Many of America's Largest Companies

It’s an all-too-familiar story: a large company is in the news, promising to move in or expand operations and create good paying jobs, or threatening to leave and lay off workers. In each case, the price demanded is huge tax breaks and other subsidies from state and local governments.

In a blistering new exposé about corporate tax chicanery, The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation, author Greg LeRoyshows how in case after case, these promises—of good jobs and higher tax revenues in exchange for massive taxpayer subsidies—prove false or exaggerated. Instead, LeRoy argues, companies are using the sheep’s clothing of “jobs, jobs, jobs” to fuel bidding wars between both states and localities. The end result: a massive drop in corporate taxes and a burden shift onto working families and small businesses.

These state and local job subsidies—the average state now grants more than 30 different kinds—cost states and cities some $50 billion a year. But the system is rigged, LeRoy documents, and lacks accountability. Companies are routinely getting subsidies of more than $100,000 per job to do what they would have done anyway. In some cases, companies even downsize or outsource after getting subsidies—or relocate existing jobs and call them “new.” The other promised benefit—increased tax revenues—often proves false or exaggerated as well.

LeRoy cites dozens of companies and episodes, revealing scams such as “job blackmail” (Raytheon in Massachusetts), “payoffs for layoffs” (IBM in New York State), “exaggerate the ripple effects” (Illinois for Boeing), “stick taxpayers with hidden costs” (Wal-Mart in many states), “soak the taxpayer” (Dell in North Carolina), “ride Enron’s coattails” (ConAgra in Nebraska), and “take the money and run” (Sykes Enterprises, shutting down call centers in several Plains states).

LeRoy also explains, in plain English, arcane tax-rule changes—such as “Single Sales Factor”—that companies demand in the name of jobs. Such giveaways, he documents, are costing states such as Massachusetts and Illinois billions of dollars in lost revenue—with no guarantee that even one job will be created or retained.

The Great American Jobs Scam also reveals that corporate subsidies are a significant cause of runaway suburban sprawl, paying companies as they leave urban areas to pave farmland and other natural spaces. LeRoy gives examples of massive subsidies that lead to retail sprawl, such as $1 billion benefiting Wal-Mart facilities and an absurd $31 million subsidy to reduce “blight” in an affluent St. Louis suburb, when an upscale mall decided it needed a Nordstrom store.

Besides failing to deliver good jobs or rational development policies, these tax-scams have led to a gigantic shift of the tax-burden away from large corporations, and onto small businesses and working families. For the first time anywhere, the author assembles a mountain of evidence from national and state sources proving that corporations are paying far less towards public services than they used to—and that in many cases they are paying zero income taxes, or even getting negative income tax rates and state tax refunds!

Behind it all, LeRoy argues, is an orchestrated 30-year drive by many of America's most prominent corporations to confuse the taxpaying public about how companies actually decide where to expand or relocate. By dissecting the site location system, he reveals that taxes are actually an infinitesimal cost factor that rarely influences location decisions. He reveals the rise of highly publicized “business climate” studies and the secretive “site location consulting” industry as key players in this mass deception.

The Great American Jobs Scam concludes with a series of simple, common sense reforms to make the job-subsidy system more transparent and effective. By popularizing these grassroots reforms—most of which are already on the books in some states and cities—The Great American Jobs Scam showcases a movement that has been percolating in the states and places it on a national stage.

****

Dubbed "the leading national watchdog of state and local economic development subsidies," and "God’s witness to corporate welfare," author Greg LeRoy directs Good Jobs First (www.goodjobsfirst.org), a national resource center he founded in 1998 to promote corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families. LeRoy is also the author of the 1994 book No More Candy Store: States and Cities Making Job Subsidies Accountable and winner of the 1998 Public Interest Pioneer Award.

BK Currents titles advance social and economic justice by exploring the critical intersections between business and society. Offering a unique combination of thoughtful analysis and progressive alternatives, BK Currents titles promote positive change at the national and global levels.

I actually wish someone who had a better grip on the rural school situation would show up on this thread to chat, because that is something I know next to nothing about, and it really is rarely discussed.

Our school was located in a rural community that was populated mostly by retirees from other areas. Needless to say, whenever a millage increase to help school funding came on the ballot, the measure would be voted down by those seventy-something's since their children had long since graduated from their faraway schools. Fortunately, my grade never had to worry much about overcrowded classrooms, but there were problems elsewhere.

Imagine my surprise when I finally transferred to a large, urban school for my senior year. Not only did they offer other foreign languages besides Spanish, but they were offered during any period of the day! At the rural school, you had to basically time and schedule your high school career by thinking ahead with things like "Okay, I'll take Spanish in tenth grade because I will have already used up my fifth period for P.E." It was also the first time I ever saw A.P. courses being taught, something that I was far too late to utilize.

The rural school didn't even have a football team. We did have a basketball team, and the all-white enrollment really identified with Hoosiers when it came out.

I couldn't imagine going to a school an hour away, that's amazing to me.

The neat part to all of this was that Central, the public school located in the inner city, has had all of these National Merit Award winners and A.P. classes that attract everyone from around the country to it. It all stems back to 1957, but the end result has been really something that I think no one would've pictured.