9 ms·

This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have

This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have a college degree to get a job, you're willing to make sacrifices to do it. So what is someone to do? The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive. I run a computer science academy that's free until you get a job (https://lambdaschool.com https://lambdaschool.com), and I can't believe how many people we talk to that just $1,000 of tuition would be a deal-breaker for. I was talking to one of our best students last week and learned that she was living on the floor of a relative and trying to use a touchscreen and some half-working cloud editor to code because she couldn't afford any type of computer, even the cheapest $50 version. It was really slowing her down, but she had no other option, and didn't know what to do. (Don't worry, we shipped her a computer.) I hadn't even thought to ask. The crazy thing is the value of taking someone from unskilled to skilled is enormous; we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary all the time, and they get that for the rest of their lives. So say they work for 40 years, that's a $2m increase in lifetime salary pre-tax. The cost of us training them to get there is <$10k. But we frequently ask people to either go into an amount of debt or to try to cashflow on minimum wage. It just doesn't work.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
It is a broken system but community colleges are made for people like this. It doesn't take 40k in student loans, it takes 2.5k in funds over 2 years which you can piece together at a minimum wage job or if you really need to take out as a loan. Then you've got an associate degree and half of a bachelor. How expensive is community in Cali? It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.
- bsamuels 9y ago
  cali community college is around 500-600/semester in tuition. you can get the tuition waived completely if youre from an economically disadvantaged background.
- austenallred 9y ago
  I was thinking for a bachelor's degree, and in that instance at the community colleges + cheap state school you're looking around $10-20k for tuition plus ~four years of living costs (assuming full-time). You could do it for less, but there's no question it's a lot if you're making minimum wage.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Does the Pell Grant cover people in this case? I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      Some, not all
    - muninn_ 9y ago
      Full Pell Grant was $5,500 when I received it. And with that being said, it's not necessarily a good thing if people end up using it to go to college to get a degree in an art that they can't use for a good job. (Although I still largely disagree with universities being a vehicle for job training).
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  I did 3 semesters of community college. Calculus 2, 3, DiffEq, physics 2, 3, chem 1 and 2... It was pretty rigorous, and dirt cheap. Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?
  - nolepointer 9y ago
    I don't know if this is unique to Florida, but most of the community colleges here became state colleges, thus enabling them to provide certain bachelor's degrees.
- pdeuchler 9y ago
  People know their options. Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job. In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.
  - Retric 9y ago
    That would just make a masters the new collage degree. The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.
    - pdeuchler 9y ago
      That's an impossible problem though, isn't it? Reputation was used as a proxy for ability until it became an end itself, but until we can correctly attribute some metric of ability (which sounds slightly dystopian) before hiring people we will continue to rely upon proxies to inform our decisions. Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...
      - Retric 9y ago
        IMO, it has to do with how zero sum much of the economy is. A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.
- Z-Widwil 9y ago
  It may be different for each state, but the cost of even Community College has increased quite a bit in the last decade. I'm attending one of the cheaper colleges in my state and tuition costs alone are about $4,000 for a full credit year. This does not include things like books or transportation. I'm now going part-time and still have another year and a half to go, but the total cost for me so far has been about $7,200. The doesn't even take into account the return in education you're getting which I believe to be sub par compared to University courses I've taken. While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.
  - pkaye 9y ago
    In California Community Colleges, tuition is about $46/unit or $500/semester for a typical workload. Plus the community colleges have fee waiver for low income individuals. Books can be expensive but from my experience, I could get a semester bus passes for students quite cheap. Cal grants may cover the rest if you are low income from my own experience they are quite generous.
anotheryou 9y ago
How do you inforce the "only pay once you got a job" model and what do people have to pay? Sounds great!
- austenallred 9y ago
  There's an income share agreement and you submit forms to the IRS that lets us see your taxes. So it's a legal agreement. You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.
  - pattisapu 9y ago
    This is great. I wish vocational / professional schools in other fields did this!
    - austenallred 9y ago
      We'll just expand :)
    - larrywright 9y ago
      I believe that at least in the US, lots of hospitals will underwrite your nursing degree in full or in part, as long as you agree to work there for some period of time. Different than this, but along the same lines.
    - nsgi 9y ago
      That's how student loans work in the UK.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Fixed percentage until when? Fixed percentage forever? Fixed percentage of only the first job? Fixed percentage until a certain amount has been paid?
    - austenallred 9y ago
ben_jones 9y ago
As a member of this demographic I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet. I feel like I'm so close to the promised utopia upper class lifestyle of a full-time software engineer that taking extreme measures like the women described in this article seem justified. But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?
- austenallred 9y ago
  > But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? She isn't close to one. And I don't know of many libraries that are cool with you videoconferencing with instructors and pair programming 8 hrs/day.
  - brandall10 9y ago
    Interesting you say that. I happen to live 5 blocks from the new central library in San Diego. It's huge and very expensive (nearly $200M). It also has what appears to be 100 or so public computers that are pretty much used non-stop by the large homeless population which borders the area to the east of downtown. Look at some of the more negative yelp reviews for it: https://www.yelp.com/biz/san-diego-public-library-san-diego-13?osq=library https://www.yelp.com/biz/san-diego-public-library-san-diego-... Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      That is interesting. She's in rural Texas, so obviously pretty different, but I didn't know there were libraries like that anywhere.
      - brandall10 9y ago
        I don't think think legally there are libraries not like that anywhere. To be removed, someone has to be committing a crime. In most cases with homeless people that aren't actually committing an obvious crime it's loitering (or solicitation if panhandling). In a library if you're actually reading a book or using a computer you're not loitering any more than anyone else there.
aphextron 9y ago
>The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive. This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Your post is informative, thanks for taking the time to write it. Minor nit: It would have been better if you dropped the aggressive opening sentence, and let your well-written depiction of the facts stand alone, especially as it seems the other poster was operating in good faith. FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days.
  - aphextron 9y ago
    >FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days. Agreed. It was an emotional response to a subject of personal issue.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      I'm curious - I haven't met many people who were unable to obtain any type of student loan. Was that the case for you?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - 9y ago
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
> This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have a college degree to get a job This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields. There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high). I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0]. [0] http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/ http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/
- austenallred 9y ago
  > We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage > There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. We don't disagree
  - tcbawo 9y ago
    It seems more and more the case that employers are not willing to train employees. This is not surprising given the trend away from long-term obligations. Although, I wonder if this is reinforced in some way (employment/tax policy, law, etc.).
- watwut 9y ago
  "Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area," Keywords being experienced and bay area which is super expensive to live in. Non experienced wanna be workers in bay area have hard time to pay rent.
  - 9y ago
dba7dba 9y ago
> we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor. This IT career track is pretty amazing to me. You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.
larrywright 9y ago
Anyone poor enough to be homeless or food insecure should qualify for a Pell grant, which should largely pay for community college. We just need to figure out how to solve the other problems.
FT_intern 9y ago
Meta: What do we think about this type of native advertising? Is this allowed on HN?
- frankc 9y ago
  Yes, it is. This is a forum run by a startup incubator. People are encouraged to promote their work, within reason.
moomin 9y ago
I was talking about this at work today, that we expect things with huge societal gains to be entirely handled by individuals despite the fact that a) it obviously doesn't work and b) we never used to do it like this. College education in the US and the UK used to be heavily subsidised. Now it isn't and we wring our hands at all of the downsides saying "but what can we do?"
- austenallred 9y ago
  Yeah, the solution is pretty clearly to shift the risk/expense to some other party. There seems to be zero political will to have the government do any of that (or anything, really), so it is really up to the private sector.
  - moomin 9y ago
    Problem is, it's not clear it's possible to shift the benefits to the private sector as well. The government just gets to ride free on the societal benefits. This is why all the decent railways in the world seem to be publically owned. (Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)

aaron-lebo 9y ago

It is a broken system but community colleges are made for people like this. It doesn't take 40k in student loans, it takes 2.5k in funds over 2 years which you can piece together at a minimum wage job or if you really need to take out as a loan. Then you've got an associate degree and half of a bachelor. How expensive is community in Cali? It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.

bsamuels 9y ago
cali community college is around 500-600/semester in tuition. you can get the tuition waived completely if youre from an economically disadvantaged background.
austenallred 9y ago
I was thinking for a bachelor's degree, and in that instance at the community colleges + cheap state school you're looking around $10-20k for tuition plus ~four years of living costs (assuming full-time). You could do it for less, but there's no question it's a lot if you're making minimum wage.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Does the Pell Grant cover people in this case? I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Some, not all
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    Full Pell Grant was $5,500 when I received it. And with that being said, it's not necessarily a good thing if people end up using it to go to college to get a degree in an art that they can't use for a good job. (Although I still largely disagree with universities being a vehicle for job training).
nsxwolf 9y ago
I did 3 semesters of community college. Calculus 2, 3, DiffEq, physics 2, 3, chem 1 and 2... It was pretty rigorous, and dirt cheap. Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?
- nolepointer 9y ago
  I don't know if this is unique to Florida, but most of the community colleges here became state colleges, thus enabling them to provide certain bachelor's degrees.
pdeuchler 9y ago
People know their options. Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job. In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.
- Retric 9y ago
  That would just make a masters the new collage degree. The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.
  - pdeuchler 9y ago
    That's an impossible problem though, isn't it? Reputation was used as a proxy for ability until it became an end itself, but until we can correctly attribute some metric of ability (which sounds slightly dystopian) before hiring people we will continue to rely upon proxies to inform our decisions. Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...
    - Retric 9y ago
      IMO, it has to do with how zero sum much of the economy is. A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.
Z-Widwil 9y ago
It may be different for each state, but the cost of even Community College has increased quite a bit in the last decade. I'm attending one of the cheaper colleges in my state and tuition costs alone are about $4,000 for a full credit year. This does not include things like books or transportation. I'm now going part-time and still have another year and a half to go, but the total cost for me so far has been about $7,200. The doesn't even take into account the return in education you're getting which I believe to be sub par compared to University courses I've taken. While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.
- pkaye 9y ago
  In California Community Colleges, tuition is about $46/unit or $500/semester for a typical workload. Plus the community colleges have fee waiver for low income individuals. Books can be expensive but from my experience, I could get a semester bus passes for students quite cheap. Cal grants may cover the rest if you are low income from my own experience they are quite generous.

anotheryou 9y ago

How do you inforce the "only pay once you got a job" model and what do people have to pay? Sounds great!

austenallred 9y ago
There's an income share agreement and you submit forms to the IRS that lets us see your taxes. So it's a legal agreement. You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.
- pattisapu 9y ago
  This is great. I wish vocational / professional schools in other fields did this!
  - austenallred 9y ago
    We'll just expand :)
  - larrywright 9y ago
    I believe that at least in the US, lots of hospitals will underwrite your nursing degree in full or in part, as long as you agree to work there for some period of time. Different than this, but along the same lines.
  - nsgi 9y ago
    That's how student loans work in the UK.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  Fixed percentage until when? Fixed percentage forever? Fixed percentage of only the first job? Fixed percentage until a certain amount has been paid?
  - austenallred 9y ago

ben_jones 9y ago

As a member of this demographic I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet. I feel like I'm so close to the promised utopia upper class lifestyle of a full-time software engineer that taking extreme measures like the women described in this article seem justified. But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?

austenallred 9y ago
> But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? She isn't close to one. And I don't know of many libraries that are cool with you videoconferencing with instructors and pair programming 8 hrs/day.
- brandall10 9y ago
  Interesting you say that. I happen to live 5 blocks from the new central library in San Diego. It's huge and very expensive (nearly $200M). It also has what appears to be 100 or so public computers that are pretty much used non-stop by the large homeless population which borders the area to the east of downtown. Look at some of the more negative yelp reviews for it: https://www.yelp.com/biz/san-diego-public-library-san-diego-13?osq=library https://www.yelp.com/biz/san-diego-public-library-san-diego-... Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    That is interesting. She's in rural Texas, so obviously pretty different, but I didn't know there were libraries like that anywhere.
    - brandall10 9y ago
      I don't think think legally there are libraries not like that anywhere. To be removed, someone has to be committing a crime. In most cases with homeless people that aren't actually committing an obvious crime it's loitering (or solicitation if panhandling). In a library if you're actually reading a book or using a computer you're not loitering any more than anyone else there.

aphextron 9y ago

>The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive. This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.

dwaltrip 9y ago
Your post is informative, thanks for taking the time to write it. Minor nit: It would have been better if you dropped the aggressive opening sentence, and let your well-written depiction of the facts stand alone, especially as it seems the other poster was operating in good faith. FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days. Agreed. It was an emotional response to a subject of personal issue.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    I'm curious - I haven't met many people who were unable to obtain any type of student loan. Was that the case for you?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - 9y ago

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

> This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have a college degree to get a job This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields. There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high). I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0]. [0] http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/ http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

austenallred 9y ago
> We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage > There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. We don't disagree
- tcbawo 9y ago
  It seems more and more the case that employers are not willing to train employees. This is not surprising given the trend away from long-term obligations. Although, I wonder if this is reinforced in some way (employment/tax policy, law, etc.).
watwut 9y ago
"Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area," Keywords being experienced and bay area which is super expensive to live in. Non experienced wanna be workers in bay area have hard time to pay rent.
- 9y ago

dba7dba 9y ago

> we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor. This IT career track is pretty amazing to me. You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.

larrywright 9y ago

Anyone poor enough to be homeless or food insecure should qualify for a Pell grant, which should largely pay for community college. We just need to figure out how to solve the other problems.

FT_intern 9y ago

Meta: What do we think about this type of native advertising? Is this allowed on HN?

frankc 9y ago
Yes, it is. This is a forum run by a startup incubator. People are encouraged to promote their work, within reason.

moomin 9y ago

I was talking about this at work today, that we expect things with huge societal gains to be entirely handled by individuals despite the fact that a) it obviously doesn't work and b) we never used to do it like this. College education in the US and the UK used to be heavily subsidised. Now it isn't and we wring our hands at all of the downsides saying "but what can we do?"

austenallred 9y ago
Yeah, the solution is pretty clearly to shift the risk/expense to some other party. There seems to be zero political will to have the government do any of that (or anything, really), so it is really up to the private sector.
- moomin 9y ago
  Problem is, it's not clear it's possible to shift the benefits to the private sector as well. The government just gets to ride free on the societal benefits. This is why all the decent railways in the world seem to be publically owned. (Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)