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The whole pension situation is going to blow up completely. As a GenX, I fully expect to have to work well into my 70's and then finally get a state pension (if

• castlecrasher2 7y ago
  >Boomers got their education for free I've never heard this before. Got a link that explains it? All I've heard from the few boomers I've talked to is that they generally worked during school and had some loans as well.
  • smcl 7y ago
    This is what happened in the UK, tuition was free until fees were introduced at the tail end of GenX (quickly abolished in Scotland, more or less). I don’t think it was ever “free” in the US but until recently (GenX again?) it could be covered by a summer job in many cases. Obviously now it is absolutely bonkers in the US, and as it stands the more elite universities in England, Wales and NI are rapidly headed in that direction.
    • marcus_holmes 7y ago
      not only tuition. In the UK, students got a grant to cover living expenses as well as free tuition. This ended in 1988 (incidentally the year I went to university), to be replaced with student loans. Boomers are the generation born from 1940-1965, so the youngest boomers turned 23 when the student grant system finished in '88. Exactly the age when a person in a four-year course (and a gap year) finishes university. It's not a coincidence.
      • smcl 7y ago
        Great point!
  • toomuchtodo 7y ago
    https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2019/05/a-look-at-college-costs-across-generations.doi.10.26419-2Fppi.00063.001.pdf https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2019/05/a-look-at-... (AARP: A Look at College Costs across Generations)
  • chongli 7y ago
    They didn’t get their education for free but compared to what people pay now it might as well be free. When boomers say they worked to pay for their education, they mean they took summer jobs washing dishes or waiting tables. Try to do that today and you’d be washing dishes for the rest of your life and never pay off the student loans.
    • throwaway5752 7y ago
      It's compounded by some people not adjusting for inflation. Education was still expensive back then, just not as expensive as it is now. It was also far less universal. edit: "people" -> "some people" edit 2: Trying to reduce a complex situation quickly (so forgive oversimplification): for decades college education was a bargain, the lifetime value of a college degree (average increase in wages) was much higher than the cost of the degree. Ignoring the ethics and rationales for this, price rose to meet demand. At the same time, automation has reduced the number of jobs and the value of a college degree. It is an awful situation. What I was trying to get across, using real numbers, is that Harvard tuition in 1960 was apparently $1500. Inflation figures would tell you that is 8x higher ($12k, affordable but still not cheap) in today's dollars. Actual tuition is $46k. But an average house was $12k in 1960 and so you'd expect $100k today on the same inflation rate. But it's $300k. What you also have is an illustration of the stratification of society (lower/upper middle class gap) where "luxuries" like college, a house, or a car are tracking higher income growth and lower income growth is stagnating because of international and technological trade trends. This is well beyond the scope of this submission, so I'll cut myself off here except to say reducing this to "boomers" isn't helpful.
      • zerkten 7y ago
        People are adjusting for inflation, but the rate of inflation on education has increased significantly without a stepwise increase in income or value from that education.
      • smcl 7y ago
        You’re right that it was less common to go to University but the rise in tuition has outpaced wages by an insane margin. Edit: Apparently Wikipedia has an image that demonstrates this really nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States#/media/File:InflationTuitionMedicalGeneral1978to2008.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_...
  • magashna 7y ago
    If not free, a fraction of what we pay now. I think it used to cost a few thousand for a degree, not the hundreds of thousands that some people have for a philosophy degree.
  • Fezzik 7y ago
    “Free” is only slightly hyperbolic. My mother went to the University of Washington for her undergraduate studies in the 50s/60s and paid $25/credit for classes. She covered that, easily, by working part-time. No loans.
    • authoritarian 7y ago
      Yes, my dad was able to pay his entire way through university (tuition, housing, food, etc.) just with the money he made working part time at the university cafeteria
  • zerkten 7y ago
    It'd be the case for anyone in the UK where fees for education are relatively new. I'm making an assumption about the poster though. I paid a tiny amount in 1999 in the UK, but fees increased significantly since then. Your response is how I understand it to have been here in the US, but I suspect that the rate of inflation in the education market is much higher now than what "boomers" had to deal with. That doesn't change that they had to work during school or take on loans, but it did change their long-term outlook.
  • arethuza 7y ago
    Well, I went to university in the UK in the 1980s and my education there for 4 years was completely free: fees were paid and I got a fairly decent grant. I did work during the summer but focused on academic work (and other things...) outside of that.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    In the UK, I'm ""genx"" and part of the last English (+) generation to both receive a student grant and not pay any fees, for a course 1997-2000. (+) the Scottish system is separate and still subsidised
  • the-dude 7y ago
    In NL they actually got enough money to live on while studying. I still got money while studying in the 90s too.
  • cafard 7y ago
    Boomer here. An exercise for those who wonder: look at historical tuition + fees costs and the minimum wage at that time. As I recall, a summer of 40 hours per week at minimum would more than cover tuition at the University of Virginia in 1970. So, no, the education wasn't free. But it was a lot more affordable.
  • chrisseaton 7y ago
    My parents, and their parents, and all their university peers, got grants to cover all living expenses, and paid absolutely no tuition fees. That's more than free - they were basically paid a wage to be there! None of them worked as far as I know - it was seen as full-time education.
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I'm at the tail end of the boomer generation (although I prefer to think of myself as men-x). When I left school only about 7% of my cohort went to university. Most of us didn't get a free university education, we didn't get any university education.
  • downerending 7y ago
    Another boomer here. I worked half-time throughout my undergrad and grad years, and full-time during the summer. Even then, I don't think I reached net worth zero until my late 30s or so. (This is with a solid tech degree.)
• deleted 7y ago
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• nmeofthestate 7y ago
  This kind of over-generalization based on "generations" is nonsense. I'm technically "a Gen X" (although I haven't developed a bitter "just so" worldview based on having been shafted by the different age group with all the baddies in it) and have got a personal pension that I've paid into.
  • cf141q5325 7y ago
    Its a bit more complex but you can see how OP has a point if you look at countries with a state mandated pension system, Germany for example. While I dont think blame will get us anywhere, the idea that the last generation leaves us a pension system that might have some similarities to a snowball system is hard to argue with, especially if there is no political will to fix this. The last big debate ended with the government making no changes and declaring that pensions is safe till at least 2030. Which is not really that big of a trust boost for someone who is planing to retire a lot later. Not even mentioning for how many its clear that they will get a pension on or under the level of welfare. So despite the knowledge, that me getting a pension from the pension system is lets say unsure, i will keep paying the the pension of the last generation who will be entering their retirement in the knowledge that the system is broken and unsustainable. We dont have a generation conflict yet, but if the government keeps ignoring the issue in the hope of it becoming the next generations problem there will be one. Looking at the debate on climate change, where the question what the current generation 50+ is leaving us behind, I hope we will be talking about pensions as well.
  • jerf 7y ago
    It often is and can be, but since when it comes to "pensions" we are specifically referring to periods of time and demographics, it can be relevant. Although when the bad stuff will happen may or may not align with any particular definition of the generations in question.
  • marcus_holmes 7y ago
    my parents got a free education (with a living allowance), mortgage tax relief on their mortgage payments, a pension based on their final salary, and a state pension that is growing about twice as fast as unemployment benefits. The free education stopped as the last boomer quit university. The mortgage relief stopped as the last boomer paid off their mortgage. The pension was roughly equal to unemployment benefits until the first boomers retired. It's not coincidence.
• wedowhatwedo 7y ago
  It's interesting that "Millenials got shafted". When I went to college in the 1980's, it was much cheaper than now - I admit that. I lived in a very small dorm room with 4 guys in it and one bathroom on a whole floor of dorm rooms. I worked part time during the school year and full time during the summer to pay for it. I had no car, no TV and only ate food the school provided via my meal plan. I now work for a large public university. Let's compare. Most students don't have jobs at all. Most students live in high end apartments (lots of these apartments cost more than my mortgage payment for my 4 bedroom house - per person). These students visit the town restaurants quite often and we have bars that are overflowing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights with college students. When I've asked how this happens, I'm told that college loans let you pay for room and board so they happily get the most expensive housing possible because it's "free". Almost all students have cars and lots of them have a "parking ticket budget" so have no problems parking illegally and paying for it. It's also "free" because of their student loan. Who is shafting whom?
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    A bad loan is actually a disaster for both parties. The borrower gets indentured for life and the lender loses a bunch of money.
    • g2ah5z 7y ago
      Except that student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. These ultra risky loans are being extended precisely because the government essentially removed all of the risk.
      • rootusrootus 7y ago
        And what makes it even more appalling is that you still have to pay interest. A zero risk investment should have zero return.
  • JamesBarney 7y ago
    My father went to college in the 80's and he owned a tv, a car, and went to bars occasionally. He paid for that by working. A large portion of my friends paid for similar lifestyle by working in the mid 2000's. You might be comparing your especially frugal college experience to a different one. But tuition has been the college expense that has sky rocketed and made it difficult/impossible to pay your own way though college. My father paid around ~2,000 for tuition, my little sister would pay close to ~11,000 to go the same college which comes close to doubling the total cost of attending college.
• zackmorris 7y ago
  I upvoted you because I tend to agree. However, I came to a different conclusion as to why benefits like pensions and social security will be underfunded for Gen X. It basically all comes down to tax policy. Boomers voted to cut taxes (especially on the wealthy) to roughly half what they should be, and ran up the national debt to match the GDP when there was no war or other crisis to justify it. The founding fathers warned against that, because if one generation offloads its debt to the next, then it effectively enslaves the next against its will (deprives it of property, and taxes it without representation, among other things). This is self-evidently unsustainable, because any generation could do it at any time. This concept can be trivially extended to all underfunded benefits. Maybe a shark raided retirement funds through legal smoke and mirrors but never got arrested. Maybe bankruptcy was abused multiple times to avoid paying workers, and that person not only didn't go to jail, but ended up a billionaire and president of the United States. You can see that this philosophy runs deep throughout our culture. So I don't buy that pensions are underfunded because a company collapsed due to loss of market or whatever. It's more likely that the funds were raided the same way that congress has been writing IOUs for social security since the 80s. Somebody stole that money. So I'd vote to pay down the national debt by raiding wealth created between 1980 and today. A high inheritance tax would do that. So would raising unearned income taxes (like capital gains) far above earned income tax. Yes, these would slow the economy. But we're all cheating right now, living off the backs of future generations. Growth won't matter if gen X and millennials wake up and decide to throw a jubilee and cancel the national debt (my pie in the sky preference).
  • sjy 7y ago
    > The founding fathers warned against that, because if one generation offloads its debt to the next, then it effectively enslaves the next against its will (deprives it of property, and taxes it without representation, among other things). Enslaved to whom? You can’t send your labour into the past. A huge national debt ‘run up’ by a previous generation just means that the next generation becomes more unequal, as the majority are taxed to fund interest payments to the heirs of the original bondholders. I don’t really see how this is more unjust than the existence of any other law or policy established before I was born, which I had no say in. If the solution is to appropriate the wealth of bondholders, the next generation will be equally able to implement that policy.