8 ms·

I recently discussed this with a person who was continuing to get student loans after already being under a mountain of debt and recognizing that their job pros

I recently discussed this with a person who was continuing to get student loans after already being under a mountain of debt and recognizing that their job prospects were not as lucrative as they hoped. I asked them why they were doubling down when it was obvious they were in a bad situation and making it worse. They said they had invested too much to choose another path. This person has a bachelor's in economics and is about to finish a master's in finance. We conflate "an education" with "being educated" far too much. I graduated 6 years ago with zero debt and no help from parents, because I actually looked into costs / benefits before starting school, picked a cheap school, and worked the whole time. I really don't know how we think it's acceptable for people to be 18 and not capable of making these decisions. You can vote and join the military, but you can't recognize financial servitude like this. They're being failed long before they get to college.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Perhaps moving too far in the direction of pushing all career training onto universities. Long ago, if you wanted to become an attorney, you could go through an apprenticeship with a practicing attorney. Not many states still allow that, and I'm sure there are good reasons for requiring all aspiring lawyers to go to law school instead. But the old system did have one thing going for it: It kept the supply of lawyers from becoming completely detached from demand. As a great many people who who are trying to pay off their JDs on Starbucks pay can attest, the same is not true under the current system.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > Not many states still allow that, and I'm sure there are good reasons for requiring all aspiring lawyers to go to law school instead. There isn't. Law is the same profession it was 150 years ago. (There are new tools, of course--electronic research, e-discovery, etc.--but you don't really learn to use them in law school anyway.) The JD requirement is just one instance of the larger capture of American society by academia. Your point about supply and demand is astute. The JD requirement didn't replace the apprenticeship requirement, it supplemented it. Today, lawyer supply is still limited by the opportunities for new lawyers to go to trial, handle deals, etc.--nobody would hire a lawyer who has only academic or theoretical experience in those areas. But the winnowing process happens after a whole bunch of people have taken six figures in non-dischargeable debt.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Unless this has changed in the last two years and I've missed the news, Vermont, Virginia, California and Washington State allow anyone holding a BA to study under a licensed attorney for a specified period of time and sit for their respective state Bar exams following that period.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    > There isn't [a 'good reason[] for requiring all aspiring lawyers to go to law school instead.'] In my view, there are two good reasons. First, the legal job positions that only require a mechanistic understanding of the law have been automated. The days of needing a "country lawyer" whose practice consisted of basic family law like wills are gone, thanks to LegalZoom and similar services. The jobs that were best filled by these people have been automated away. In the jobs that remain, it's not enough just to know the law, but you must learn to think in a legal/analytical way. This is not a skill that comes easily just from reading statutes and some case law under supervision. Second, the size and complexity of the American legal regime, including the administrative state, has made it necessary for lawyers to (a) specialize; and (b) be able to issue-spot in areas well outside their expertise, to know when to look for help. Although a mergers and acquisitions attorney might be able to apprentice a young aspiring lawyer in that area, they're unlikely to be able to transfer all the latent knowledge they have of other areas of law. As an example, I have about a decade of experience in my practice areas, and would be wholly incapable of apprenticing an aspiring lawyer in the area of, say, commercial paper to the point of being able to pass the bar exam. The first requirement (depth in a specialty area) makes most practicing attorneys ill suited to train someone to standard in the second requirement (latent breadth).
  - setr 8y ago
    >nobody would hire a lawyer who has only academic or theoretical experience in those areas Given the high cost of lawyers, and the general understanding that you avoid going to court as much as possible, as it can easily bankrupt you before achieving any good, its hard to imagine that's actually true. The current options are to pay a huge amount, or give up entirely; I'm sure there's a market for the middle ground (inexperienced but cheap lawyers), and a reason no one can access (eg regulation)
- nradov 8y ago
  Specifically only 4 states allow taking the Bar Exam without attending law school: California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Only a tiny number of people successfully do that each year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law#Modern_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law#Modern_practice
- lellotope 8y ago
  This is such an unrecognized part of the problem: overcredentialing. It's rampant: it's explicit in areas like healthcare and law, and implicit in the HR practices of many corporations. We bitch about people going into debt, but turn around an are fine with companies being picky as hell about having a specific degree, as if that's everything about a person's ability or background. We also bitch about healthcare costs, but then act like the sky will fall if we start discussing the possibility of pharmacists, optometrists, or psychologists prescribing or offering more services. Your observation about law is equally astute. I'm going to beat a dead horse until it rises from the grave, but this is the situation with liberal arts degrees as well: they're from a time when it was assumed that you could major in, say, philosophy, and take comp sci classes, do work in that area, and build up a career in comp sci without anyone questioning it. Now your local HR department uses that comp sci degree to screen you, as if you are your degree. Everyone knows that these degrees are helpful but imperfect indicators, but we treat them as perfect indicators because it's easier to maintain the myth, and it benefits those who benefit from rent-seeking and overregulation.
zippidydooda 8y ago
Anecdote man to the rescue.
- pc86 8y ago
  What about this topic makes you feel so strongly that you created a throwaway just to flood the comments with spam and derision?
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  Are you saying that most students are critically evaluating their options differently? Because I think the article pretty clearly demonstrates that this problem should be known by any competent adult by now.
  - hackinthebochs 8y ago
    It's the "I did it this way, why couldn't others do it" mentality that's entirely unhelpful in these conversations.
    - TallGuyShort 8y ago
      What I think is unhelpful is the "I have to go to this college on this timetable and I have to get loans and I have to accept the terms that are offered to me and therefore it's everyone else's fault I'm in debt" mentality that persists despite how long it's been generally known to be a problem. If you think there's a better mentality, let's hear it - otherwise it's a known problem and people keep walking into it voluntarily and then calling it a crisis. Either it's worth it financially and it's not a crisis, or people need to stop taking the loans yesterday. No one owes you a degree that isn't worth the money.
      - hackinthebochs 8y ago
        Of course "everyone" knows its a problem, but your anecdote does nothing to help solve it. The issue is the cultural momentum around the idea that college is the first and nearly only gateway into the middle class. We need to be discussing how to correct this pervasive misconception, not patting ourselves on our backs because we didn't fall for it. And blaming students for falling for what seemingly every authority in society was telling them is a grave mistake.
mikestew 8y ago
They said they had invested too much to choose another path. This person has a bachelor's in economics Man, of all people that ought to know about the "sunk cost" fallacy...
- pc86 8y ago
  I would think that says something about the quality of their education[al institution], and perhaps why they're having trouble finding a lucrative job.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Yeah my own experience made me fear that a lot of students are there to pay (loans) and get their ticket punched (diploma) .... I had plenty of experiences where I realized "dude can only do exactly what I say ...". Hard to know if it is any worse or better than in the past, but man, it was disappointing to see.
    - milesvp 8y ago
      When I read the Wealth of Nations I was struck by one of the passages where Smith basically says everyone under the age of 24 is worthless. That it doesn't matter what they do, send them to university, or send them to travel. But that they won't be useful in commerce until they're older. I'd assumed at the time that the lack of maturity was a modern problem problem due to coddling, but it's apparently at least a problem for 300 years (for at least the caste likely to read his book). What struck me again later was finding out that 24 is the tipping point for the brain. That's about when the majority of brain matter is "gray" instead of "pink" (aka the process of myelination), which seems to be a biological rather than an environmental process. So this has likely been the case for a very long time (like 40,000 years or more).
- tvanantwerp 8y ago
  I've worked with dozens of economists during my career, and their inability to recognize sunk costs that are staring them in the face is astounding.
da02 8y ago
How much was it at this cheap school? (Although I think you meant affordable. :) If it's not too personal: Which major/minor did you choose? Which school was it? Year of graduation? Would you recommend it to others? Any downsides to the school?
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  BYU. Current tuition is $5,620 for full-time semesters - it was about half that when I started 10 years ago. Cost of living nearby is also exceptionally low - I paid $600 / month for a 2-bedroom apartment 4 blocks from campus. Heavy discount if you're a contributing mormon, and of course the big down-side for most people is that almost everyone is. You don't have to be mormon, but it's a dry campus and absolutely not a party school. So most of the other non-mormons are either from a similarly conservative culture (muslims, usually, a few christians) or just recognize the bargain. Despite the general religiosity and political affiliation, the science classes were actually religion-free, a pleasant surprise, and treated evolution and climate change the way I'd expect at any other university. Majored in computer science. There's a lot of student-friendly work nearby, especially for software people. I really couldn't stand the local culture and I'm even from a pretty conservative christian home, but I was there to get down to business so I worked as much as I could, maxed out credit hours I could take (12 - 18 credit hours all costs the same), and got out in 4 years with a solid education, no debt and enough savings to comfortably start my real adult life right away. A hard 4 years, but looking back it was clearly the right call compared to my peers. Tuition prices at other colleges have just never seemed worth it. Had I not gotten into BYU I would likely have tried to just get software jobs with no degree, or gone into a trade like welding.
  - msbarnett 8y ago
    > BYU. Current tuition is $5,620 for full-time semesters - it was about half that when I started 10 years ago. Which indicates a huge part of the problem for a lot of people these days. It's a safe bet that the wages at the jobs you worked then haven't doubled in the last ten years, so someone merely wanting to replicate your path would need to work considerably more hours just to make their tuition payments. Reliable, accredited colleges cheap enough that you can realistically work your way through them at the wages paid at the kinds of jobs typically open to inexperienced students are increasingly thin on the ground.
StreamBright 8y ago
Same here. I went for a 3 years engineering study at a cheap as uni and worked the whole time. It taught me valuable lessons about personal responsibility.
camdenreslink 8y ago
You would hope an economics major would have learned the sunk cost fallacy.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Given the jobs situation without a diploma, perhaps we should also consider their alternatives: cost of not continuing - very large chance of being screwed from that point for the rest of your life cost of continuing - student debt, which at worst gets you into the above situation So clearly, continuing is the better choice. Secondly, as they say, when people have to choose between death now or death later, they choose later. No matter the strings attached.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > as they say, when people have to choose between death now or death later, they choose later. No matter the strings attached. This is only even plausibly true for people who have no family members. That's nearly nobody. Consider a traditional Chinese or Japanese official who is ordered to commit suicide. Generally the command is obeyed. On your model, such a command would never be obeyed -- you can always just not kill yourself, in which case you'll still die, but later than you would have.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      I am almost reluctant to say this, as I'm almost jealous that you're able to think that. But fact is ... this is extremely naive. Good on you that you think like this. Try to hold on to it and enjoy it, it won't last.
btilly 8y ago
I know a guy in his 40s who works part time and goes to school part time because as long as he is still in school, his loans don't come due. He has no way to pay his loans, never will, and is unable to discharge them in bankruptcy. Yeah, there is a "poor me" element to this. However bankruptcy laws exist for a reason, and denying people like him access to bankruptcy forces them into unproductive lives. That non-productivity makes all of us worse off in the long-run.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  The lack of defaults on loans also takes away much of the incentive for the lenders to due any due diligence on the viability of your decision. They can lend and will get their money one way or another (except in extreme cases like your friend).
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The lack of defaults on loans also takes away much of the incentive for the lenders to due any due diligence on the viability of your decision. Since private government-guaranteed loans were discontinued, most private student lending dried up, so “lenders” here basically refers to the federal government.
- smcameron 8y ago
  I've also heard of people staying in school like this for the health insurance.

bunderbunder 8y ago

Perhaps moving too far in the direction of pushing all career training onto universities. Long ago, if you wanted to become an attorney, you could go through an apprenticeship with a practicing attorney. Not many states still allow that, and I'm sure there are good reasons for requiring all aspiring lawyers to go to law school instead. But the old system did have one thing going for it: It kept the supply of lawyers from becoming completely detached from demand. As a great many people who who are trying to pay off their JDs on Starbucks pay can attest, the same is not true under the current system.

rayiner 8y ago
> Not many states still allow that, and I'm sure there are good reasons for requiring all aspiring lawyers to go to law school instead. There isn't. Law is the same profession it was 150 years ago. (There are new tools, of course--electronic research, e-discovery, etc.--but you don't really learn to use them in law school anyway.) The JD requirement is just one instance of the larger capture of American society by academia. Your point about supply and demand is astute. The JD requirement didn't replace the apprenticeship requirement, it supplemented it. Today, lawyer supply is still limited by the opportunities for new lawyers to go to trial, handle deals, etc.--nobody would hire a lawyer who has only academic or theoretical experience in those areas. But the winnowing process happens after a whole bunch of people have taken six figures in non-dischargeable debt.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Unless this has changed in the last two years and I've missed the news, Vermont, Virginia, California and Washington State allow anyone holding a BA to study under a licensed attorney for a specified period of time and sit for their respective state Bar exams following that period.
- torstenvl 8y ago
  > There isn't [a 'good reason[] for requiring all aspiring lawyers to go to law school instead.'] In my view, there are two good reasons. First, the legal job positions that only require a mechanistic understanding of the law have been automated. The days of needing a "country lawyer" whose practice consisted of basic family law like wills are gone, thanks to LegalZoom and similar services. The jobs that were best filled by these people have been automated away. In the jobs that remain, it's not enough just to know the law, but you must learn to think in a legal/analytical way. This is not a skill that comes easily just from reading statutes and some case law under supervision. Second, the size and complexity of the American legal regime, including the administrative state, has made it necessary for lawyers to (a) specialize; and (b) be able to issue-spot in areas well outside their expertise, to know when to look for help. Although a mergers and acquisitions attorney might be able to apprentice a young aspiring lawyer in that area, they're unlikely to be able to transfer all the latent knowledge they have of other areas of law. As an example, I have about a decade of experience in my practice areas, and would be wholly incapable of apprenticing an aspiring lawyer in the area of, say, commercial paper to the point of being able to pass the bar exam. The first requirement (depth in a specialty area) makes most practicing attorneys ill suited to train someone to standard in the second requirement (latent breadth).
- setr 8y ago
  >nobody would hire a lawyer who has only academic or theoretical experience in those areas Given the high cost of lawyers, and the general understanding that you avoid going to court as much as possible, as it can easily bankrupt you before achieving any good, its hard to imagine that's actually true. The current options are to pay a huge amount, or give up entirely; I'm sure there's a market for the middle ground (inexperienced but cheap lawyers), and a reason no one can access (eg regulation)
nradov 8y ago
Specifically only 4 states allow taking the Bar Exam without attending law school: California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Only a tiny number of people successfully do that each year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law#Modern_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law#Modern_practice
lellotope 8y ago
This is such an unrecognized part of the problem: overcredentialing. It's rampant: it's explicit in areas like healthcare and law, and implicit in the HR practices of many corporations. We bitch about people going into debt, but turn around an are fine with companies being picky as hell about having a specific degree, as if that's everything about a person's ability or background. We also bitch about healthcare costs, but then act like the sky will fall if we start discussing the possibility of pharmacists, optometrists, or psychologists prescribing or offering more services. Your observation about law is equally astute. I'm going to beat a dead horse until it rises from the grave, but this is the situation with liberal arts degrees as well: they're from a time when it was assumed that you could major in, say, philosophy, and take comp sci classes, do work in that area, and build up a career in comp sci without anyone questioning it. Now your local HR department uses that comp sci degree to screen you, as if you are your degree. Everyone knows that these degrees are helpful but imperfect indicators, but we treat them as perfect indicators because it's easier to maintain the myth, and it benefits those who benefit from rent-seeking and overregulation.

zippidydooda 8y ago

Anecdote man to the rescue.

pc86 8y ago
What about this topic makes you feel so strongly that you created a throwaway just to flood the comments with spam and derision?
TallGuyShort 8y ago
Are you saying that most students are critically evaluating their options differently? Because I think the article pretty clearly demonstrates that this problem should be known by any competent adult by now.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  It's the "I did it this way, why couldn't others do it" mentality that's entirely unhelpful in these conversations.
  - TallGuyShort 8y ago
    What I think is unhelpful is the "I have to go to this college on this timetable and I have to get loans and I have to accept the terms that are offered to me and therefore it's everyone else's fault I'm in debt" mentality that persists despite how long it's been generally known to be a problem. If you think there's a better mentality, let's hear it - otherwise it's a known problem and people keep walking into it voluntarily and then calling it a crisis. Either it's worth it financially and it's not a crisis, or people need to stop taking the loans yesterday. No one owes you a degree that isn't worth the money.
    - hackinthebochs 8y ago
      Of course "everyone" knows its a problem, but your anecdote does nothing to help solve it. The issue is the cultural momentum around the idea that college is the first and nearly only gateway into the middle class. We need to be discussing how to correct this pervasive misconception, not patting ourselves on our backs because we didn't fall for it. And blaming students for falling for what seemingly every authority in society was telling them is a grave mistake.

mikestew 8y ago

They said they had invested too much to choose another path. This person has a bachelor's in economics Man, of all people that ought to know about the "sunk cost" fallacy...

pc86 8y ago
I would think that says something about the quality of their education[al institution], and perhaps why they're having trouble finding a lucrative job.
- duxup 8y ago
  Yeah my own experience made me fear that a lot of students are there to pay (loans) and get their ticket punched (diploma) .... I had plenty of experiences where I realized "dude can only do exactly what I say ...". Hard to know if it is any worse or better than in the past, but man, it was disappointing to see.
  - milesvp 8y ago
    When I read the Wealth of Nations I was struck by one of the passages where Smith basically says everyone under the age of 24 is worthless. That it doesn't matter what they do, send them to university, or send them to travel. But that they won't be useful in commerce until they're older. I'd assumed at the time that the lack of maturity was a modern problem problem due to coddling, but it's apparently at least a problem for 300 years (for at least the caste likely to read his book). What struck me again later was finding out that 24 is the tipping point for the brain. That's about when the majority of brain matter is "gray" instead of "pink" (aka the process of myelination), which seems to be a biological rather than an environmental process. So this has likely been the case for a very long time (like 40,000 years or more).
tvanantwerp 8y ago
I've worked with dozens of economists during my career, and their inability to recognize sunk costs that are staring them in the face is astounding.

da02 8y ago

How much was it at this cheap school? (Although I think you meant affordable. :) If it's not too personal: Which major/minor did you choose? Which school was it? Year of graduation? Would you recommend it to others? Any downsides to the school?

TallGuyShort 8y ago
BYU. Current tuition is $5,620 for full-time semesters - it was about half that when I started 10 years ago. Cost of living nearby is also exceptionally low - I paid $600 / month for a 2-bedroom apartment 4 blocks from campus. Heavy discount if you're a contributing mormon, and of course the big down-side for most people is that almost everyone is. You don't have to be mormon, but it's a dry campus and absolutely not a party school. So most of the other non-mormons are either from a similarly conservative culture (muslims, usually, a few christians) or just recognize the bargain. Despite the general religiosity and political affiliation, the science classes were actually religion-free, a pleasant surprise, and treated evolution and climate change the way I'd expect at any other university. Majored in computer science. There's a lot of student-friendly work nearby, especially for software people. I really couldn't stand the local culture and I'm even from a pretty conservative christian home, but I was there to get down to business so I worked as much as I could, maxed out credit hours I could take (12 - 18 credit hours all costs the same), and got out in 4 years with a solid education, no debt and enough savings to comfortably start my real adult life right away. A hard 4 years, but looking back it was clearly the right call compared to my peers. Tuition prices at other colleges have just never seemed worth it. Had I not gotten into BYU I would likely have tried to just get software jobs with no degree, or gone into a trade like welding.
- msbarnett 8y ago
  > BYU. Current tuition is $5,620 for full-time semesters - it was about half that when I started 10 years ago. Which indicates a huge part of the problem for a lot of people these days. It's a safe bet that the wages at the jobs you worked then haven't doubled in the last ten years, so someone merely wanting to replicate your path would need to work considerably more hours just to make their tuition payments. Reliable, accredited colleges cheap enough that you can realistically work your way through them at the wages paid at the kinds of jobs typically open to inexperienced students are increasingly thin on the ground.

StreamBright 8y ago

Same here. I went for a 3 years engineering study at a cheap as uni and worked the whole time. It taught me valuable lessons about personal responsibility.

camdenreslink 8y ago

You would hope an economics major would have learned the sunk cost fallacy.

candiodari 8y ago
Given the jobs situation without a diploma, perhaps we should also consider their alternatives: cost of not continuing - very large chance of being screwed from that point for the rest of your life cost of continuing - student debt, which at worst gets you into the above situation So clearly, continuing is the better choice. Secondly, as they say, when people have to choose between death now or death later, they choose later. No matter the strings attached.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > as they say, when people have to choose between death now or death later, they choose later. No matter the strings attached. This is only even plausibly true for people who have no family members. That's nearly nobody. Consider a traditional Chinese or Japanese official who is ordered to commit suicide. Generally the command is obeyed. On your model, such a command would never be obeyed -- you can always just not kill yourself, in which case you'll still die, but later than you would have.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    I am almost reluctant to say this, as I'm almost jealous that you're able to think that. But fact is ... this is extremely naive. Good on you that you think like this. Try to hold on to it and enjoy it, it won't last.

btilly 8y ago

I know a guy in his 40s who works part time and goes to school part time because as long as he is still in school, his loans don't come due. He has no way to pay his loans, never will, and is unable to discharge them in bankruptcy. Yeah, there is a "poor me" element to this. However bankruptcy laws exist for a reason, and denying people like him access to bankruptcy forces them into unproductive lives. That non-productivity makes all of us worse off in the long-run.

TallGuyShort 8y ago
The lack of defaults on loans also takes away much of the incentive for the lenders to due any due diligence on the viability of your decision. They can lend and will get their money one way or another (except in extreme cases like your friend).
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The lack of defaults on loans also takes away much of the incentive for the lenders to due any due diligence on the viability of your decision. Since private government-guaranteed loans were discontinued, most private student lending dried up, so “lenders” here basically refers to the federal government.
smcameron 8y ago
I've also heard of people staying in school like this for the health insurance.