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One of my best friends in college was in the same position as the guy at the start of this comic: he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year

One of my best friends in college was in the same position as the guy at the start of this comic: he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year (restaurant jobs) to pay for each semester of college. When I met him I was sitting in a diner bummed that I hadn't met any futurists at the college I just started, and I was amazed to suddenly find myself having a deep conversation about such topics with my waiter. Even though I started several years later than he did, we graduated the same year. We got computer science degrees not art degrees (though we both are equally interested in art) so we didn't graduate into poverty like the guy in the comic. We just had to live through poverty to get our degrees. But it's such a societal waste: this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's, if he hadn't had to work low wage jobs to pay for his own school.

troupe 6y ago
> this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  It wasn't a personal waste, but it was an inefficient allocation of our overall resources. There are a lot of kids who don't care about college at all but don't have to work through it either. In an ideal world, the people who would work the hardest in college would get the free rides, because not only do they benefit from it the most, we all benefit from them the most.
  - troupe 6y ago
    I think you are assuming that the person in question having a PhD would be better for society as a whole than the path he chose. I don't think that is necessarily a given.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      The amount of extra money you can make, and by extension the value you create, by entering the workforce four years earlier dwarfs the value created by the four years of restaurant work.
      - teachrdan 6y ago
        > he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year (restaurant jobs) to pay for each semester of college. It wasn't four years, it was eight! The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college. The amount of value lost to society due to a lack of affordable education is unbelievable.
        troupe 6y ago
        > The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college Is it unusual for people to pay off their college loans over 8+ years? It sounds to me like he prioritized avoiding debt. Education is absolutely affordable. You can take all kinds of college courses for free online from sites like EdX, Coursera, MIT's Open Courseware, etc. What is not free is a diploma. You have to pay for that. If you want an affordable diploma, you can go to schools that have low tuition in a lower cost part of the country. Last time I ran the numbers it wasn't hard to find a school where you could work part time during the year and full time during the summer and pay for tuition, books, and living expenses while graduating with $0 to $2000 in debt. You can do even better by starting at a community college or if you have some skill that is worth more than minimum wage. Education is more affordable now than at any point in history because so much of it is free. Diplomas can be expensive or they can be less expensive depending on how much you want to pay.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Aaaaand none of that matters when it comes to getting a job, except, maybe, for certain areas of software development. And yeah he prioritized avoiding debt the same way a hungry animal prioritizes avoiding starvation.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  It also doesn't take into account all the people who might have spent all that money and time and still not ended up with an education or a piece of paper, if the education were just handed to them for free. This isn't so far from home for me because I had a niece community college scholarship and then my parents' money to pay for my college, and I ended up not getting that degree. Years later, I got serious about it and took out my own loans to get a degree and a job. The first time around I had no plans and no idea what I was doing, but the second time I had a plan and a goal, and I achieved it. And I paid off my debt myself. The initial money wasn't entirely wasted, but most of those credits didn't transfer towards my degree. That was just a CC, but imagine if it was a 6 yr degree at a University instead. It'd be vastly more costly.
  - troupe 6y ago
    I've definitely seen a difference between college students who are there because they are paying their own money to make an investment in themselves and kids that feel society owes them a degree. Congratulations on having a plan, following it, and then paying off your education. It is good to hear people saying that when so many stories are of people who never had a plan that are now complaining it is too hard to pay off all the debt they took on.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  I think waste is a bit strong, but our society is closer to an oligarchy than a meritocracy, and a side effect of this is that we have many talented people doing menial work so they can afford to better themselves because they don't have the wealth and connections of someone from a different social class, even if some of the people from that other class are less talented. With that said, it is a meritocracy to some degree, but it's only that for the very best, who also conform to other (arbitrary) standards. Everyone else has to grind through. I think the worst part is that it's presented as something else, which a lot of people buy into.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    I think this response and some others vastly underestimate the value and complexity of „unskilled“ or „menial“ work. I ultimately respect middle class nerds with a sense for abstraction and upper class leaders with fine manners and so on. But the worker, who had to make hard tradeoffs, learn to serve and deal with having little, is naturally on a different level. You don’t know the value of work, if you never _had_ to work. And I think the world would be a better place if the most powerful understood that.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      I think that's true. But nevertheless it's not right that those from certain backgrounds should have to do this work while those from others do not.
    - thevardanian 6y ago
      I mean if that were true then he could afford rent, clothing, a $10 library card, healthcare, education, etc. Like there's this peculiar mentality in America that is absolutely psychotic. While those so called "menial tasks" are no doubt important, rather invaluable to functioning of society, we should not imply let alone pretend, that they provide enough. So in terms of sheer economic value, if we believe our current way of measuring labor, those "menial tasks" are in fact not valuable. Because if they were they could provide a decent life, let alone being able to provide roof over your head. What I find bewildering is how so many Americans, even here, can justify the sheer waste of time, and psychological trauma, with "If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste". Such justifications either feel like exuding gross privilege or worse a result of some mass Stockholm Syndrome.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  What if was Stephen Hawkins?
  - troupe 6y ago
    His SAT or ACT score would have been high enough that schools would have been offering him scholarships to attend. It doesn't take Hawking level intelligence to get a full ride scholarship.
    - kubanczyk 6y ago
      I think parent is after Stephen Hawkins, not Hawking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawkins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawkins
      - quickthrower2 6y ago
        With a g, sorry!
specialist 6y ago
How to pay for higher ed breaks my head. So many variables. While listening to this podcast, I had two crazy notions. The Next Four Years: Beyond the student debt debate The Weeds New America’s Kevin Carey explains loan forgiveness and the deeper problems with American higher education. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-four-years-beyond-the-student-debt-debate/id1042433083?i=1000502774813 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-four-years-be... #1 Government underwrites student loans based on projected life time earnings. Actuaries are smart about this stuff, right? Figure out someone's future earnings to determine their "credit worthiness". Just like buying a house. And the student's collateral is the future labor. So assess how the loan will be used. Just to be sure everyone's committed, pick a fraction that is repaid directly. Say 50%. Then plug in the numbers. Someone going to community college to get an AA to work as a dental hygienist will need X dollars and likely earn X' over the next Y years. Another person is getting an MD PhD, who will earn 10x the future hygienist. So future doctor is eligible for a proportionally larger loan. Tweak the incentives to encourage people to choose more needful professions. Like we may need more electricians, nurses, or language teachers for a spell. Ya, this is how student loans kinda work now, indirectly. I just want to formalize and daylight the calculus. I also want it to be more explicit that governments are making an investment and expect a reasonable return. #2 Institutions are cosigners for all student loans. Fraud has been a huge problem. So if an institution loses it's accreditation or goes kaput, they assume the full value of the loan. It's unconscionable that the students carries all that risk.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  This kind of makes sense for the vocational courses you mention but only when students follow the expected path. If a medical student fails out, they may struggle to pay back the large loan taken out against their future earnings. The same is true if they pass but don’t want to be a doctor. I studied mathematics at university and if you look at the typical student entering undergrad at my university, there was a high chance they would go into further education after the degree, and a somewhat smaller chance they would become an academic (though this is the outcome the university was focusing on). There was a reasonable chance they would go on to a reasonably ordinary middle class job, and a small but significant chance they would go into a highly paid field like investment banking. It seems it would be terrible for those incoming students to take out loans against their expected future income because the average is pushed up by a small proportion of high-paying careers, while many students may choose to go into lower paying jobs (e.g. being phd students). The problem is that the greatest burden falls on those who fail to meet the income expectations. I think such a system is regressive, at least in the technical sense. Obviously with the hind sight of being someone with a reasonable amount of success, one might want to have had a system like the one you describe, but I think I wouldn’t want my friends who e.g. went on towards academia to have suffered such a system, and perhaps the pressure of needing to find work to repay loans would have led to a worse outcome for me. I think I would want a system where the risks are socialised to at least a large extent. But I sympathise that some people don’t like the idea of others going off to get certain degrees that don’t really lead to improved financial outcomes, and the more serious issue of not having a way to incentivise certain courses[1]. In the uk we have a bizarre system of “loans” where if you are from a wealthy family you pay upfront for university, if you are not so wealthy the government pays for your tuition (for a certain amount of time) and provides money to cover living expenses as a “loan”, and if you are more poor the government (and if you’re lucky your university) will provide extra money towards your living costs as a grant. The “loan” accrues interest at a somewhat high rate (that depends on how much money you make) but isn’t really like a loan because it is paid back based on income (one pays 9% of gross monthly income above a threshold of about £20k/12) and written off after 30 years. This means that while people who don’t earn so much money don’t have an impossible burden after university, it is people with middle incomes who end up paying back the most in absolute terms (e.g. getting the balance down to 0 just before the 30 years is up and paying a lot of interest) while those with high incomes can quickly pay off the loans without paying so much interest and then enjoy an effective 10% pay rise. It seems this system is also somewhat regressive.

troupe 6y ago

> this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste.

whatshisface 6y ago
It wasn't a personal waste, but it was an inefficient allocation of our overall resources. There are a lot of kids who don't care about college at all but don't have to work through it either. In an ideal world, the people who would work the hardest in college would get the free rides, because not only do they benefit from it the most, we all benefit from them the most.
- troupe 6y ago
  I think you are assuming that the person in question having a PhD would be better for society as a whole than the path he chose. I don't think that is necessarily a given.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    The amount of extra money you can make, and by extension the value you create, by entering the workforce four years earlier dwarfs the value created by the four years of restaurant work.
    - teachrdan 6y ago
      > he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year (restaurant jobs) to pay for each semester of college. It wasn't four years, it was eight! The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college. The amount of value lost to society due to a lack of affordable education is unbelievable.
      - troupe 6y ago
        > The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college Is it unusual for people to pay off their college loans over 8+ years? It sounds to me like he prioritized avoiding debt. Education is absolutely affordable. You can take all kinds of college courses for free online from sites like EdX, Coursera, MIT's Open Courseware, etc. What is not free is a diploma. You have to pay for that. If you want an affordable diploma, you can go to schools that have low tuition in a lower cost part of the country. Last time I ran the numbers it wasn't hard to find a school where you could work part time during the year and full time during the summer and pay for tuition, books, and living expenses while graduating with $0 to $2000 in debt. You can do even better by starting at a community college or if you have some skill that is worth more than minimum wage. Education is more affordable now than at any point in history because so much of it is free. Diplomas can be expensive or they can be less expensive depending on how much you want to pay.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Aaaaand none of that matters when it comes to getting a job, except, maybe, for certain areas of software development. And yeah he prioritized avoiding debt the same way a hungry animal prioritizes avoiding starvation.
wccrawford 6y ago
It also doesn't take into account all the people who might have spent all that money and time and still not ended up with an education or a piece of paper, if the education were just handed to them for free. This isn't so far from home for me because I had a niece community college scholarship and then my parents' money to pay for my college, and I ended up not getting that degree. Years later, I got serious about it and took out my own loans to get a degree and a job. The first time around I had no plans and no idea what I was doing, but the second time I had a plan and a goal, and I achieved it. And I paid off my debt myself. The initial money wasn't entirely wasted, but most of those credits didn't transfer towards my degree. That was just a CC, but imagine if it was a 6 yr degree at a University instead. It'd be vastly more costly.
- troupe 6y ago
  I've definitely seen a difference between college students who are there because they are paying their own money to make an investment in themselves and kids that feel society owes them a degree. Congratulations on having a plan, following it, and then paying off your education. It is good to hear people saying that when so many stories are of people who never had a plan that are now complaining it is too hard to pay off all the debt they took on.
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
I think waste is a bit strong, but our society is closer to an oligarchy than a meritocracy, and a side effect of this is that we have many talented people doing menial work so they can afford to better themselves because they don't have the wealth and connections of someone from a different social class, even if some of the people from that other class are less talented. With that said, it is a meritocracy to some degree, but it's only that for the very best, who also conform to other (arbitrary) standards. Everyone else has to grind through. I think the worst part is that it's presented as something else, which a lot of people buy into.
- dgb23 6y ago
  I think this response and some others vastly underestimate the value and complexity of „unskilled“ or „menial“ work. I ultimately respect middle class nerds with a sense for abstraction and upper class leaders with fine manners and so on. But the worker, who had to make hard tradeoffs, learn to serve and deal with having little, is naturally on a different level. You don’t know the value of work, if you never _had_ to work. And I think the world would be a better place if the most powerful understood that.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    I think that's true. But nevertheless it's not right that those from certain backgrounds should have to do this work while those from others do not.
  - thevardanian 6y ago
    I mean if that were true then he could afford rent, clothing, a $10 library card, healthcare, education, etc. Like there's this peculiar mentality in America that is absolutely psychotic. While those so called "menial tasks" are no doubt important, rather invaluable to functioning of society, we should not imply let alone pretend, that they provide enough. So in terms of sheer economic value, if we believe our current way of measuring labor, those "menial tasks" are in fact not valuable. Because if they were they could provide a decent life, let alone being able to provide roof over your head. What I find bewildering is how so many Americans, even here, can justify the sheer waste of time, and psychological trauma, with "If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste". Such justifications either feel like exuding gross privilege or worse a result of some mass Stockholm Syndrome.
quickthrower2 6y ago
What if was Stephen Hawkins?
- troupe 6y ago
  His SAT or ACT score would have been high enough that schools would have been offering him scholarships to attend. It doesn't take Hawking level intelligence to get a full ride scholarship.
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    I think parent is after Stephen Hawkins, not Hawking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawkins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawkins
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      With a g, sorry!

specialist 6y ago

How to pay for higher ed breaks my head. So many variables. While listening to this podcast, I had two crazy notions. The Next Four Years: Beyond the student debt debate The Weeds New America’s Kevin Carey explains loan forgiveness and the deeper problems with American higher education. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-four-years-beyond-the-student-debt-debate/id1042433083?i=1000502774813 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-four-years-be... #1 Government underwrites student loans based on projected life time earnings. Actuaries are smart about this stuff, right? Figure out someone's future earnings to determine their "credit worthiness". Just like buying a house. And the student's collateral is the future labor. So assess how the loan will be used. Just to be sure everyone's committed, pick a fraction that is repaid directly. Say 50%. Then plug in the numbers. Someone going to community college to get an AA to work as a dental hygienist will need X dollars and likely earn X' over the next Y years. Another person is getting an MD PhD, who will earn 10x the future hygienist. So future doctor is eligible for a proportionally larger loan. Tweak the incentives to encourage people to choose more needful professions. Like we may need more electricians, nurses, or language teachers for a spell. Ya, this is how student loans kinda work now, indirectly. I just want to formalize and daylight the calculus. I also want it to be more explicit that governments are making an investment and expect a reasonable return. #2 Institutions are cosigners for all student loans. Fraud has been a huge problem. So if an institution loses it's accreditation or goes kaput, they assume the full value of the loan. It's unconscionable that the students carries all that risk.

dan-robertson 6y ago
This kind of makes sense for the vocational courses you mention but only when students follow the expected path. If a medical student fails out, they may struggle to pay back the large loan taken out against their future earnings. The same is true if they pass but don’t want to be a doctor. I studied mathematics at university and if you look at the typical student entering undergrad at my university, there was a high chance they would go into further education after the degree, and a somewhat smaller chance they would become an academic (though this is the outcome the university was focusing on). There was a reasonable chance they would go on to a reasonably ordinary middle class job, and a small but significant chance they would go into a highly paid field like investment banking. It seems it would be terrible for those incoming students to take out loans against their expected future income because the average is pushed up by a small proportion of high-paying careers, while many students may choose to go into lower paying jobs (e.g. being phd students). The problem is that the greatest burden falls on those who fail to meet the income expectations. I think such a system is regressive, at least in the technical sense. Obviously with the hind sight of being someone with a reasonable amount of success, one might want to have had a system like the one you describe, but I think I wouldn’t want my friends who e.g. went on towards academia to have suffered such a system, and perhaps the pressure of needing to find work to repay loans would have led to a worse outcome for me. I think I would want a system where the risks are socialised to at least a large extent. But I sympathise that some people don’t like the idea of others going off to get certain degrees that don’t really lead to improved financial outcomes, and the more serious issue of not having a way to incentivise certain courses[1]. In the uk we have a bizarre system of “loans” where if you are from a wealthy family you pay upfront for university, if you are not so wealthy the government pays for your tuition (for a certain amount of time) and provides money to cover living expenses as a “loan”, and if you are more poor the government (and if you’re lucky your university) will provide extra money towards your living costs as a grant. The “loan” accrues interest at a somewhat high rate (that depends on how much money you make) but isn’t really like a loan because it is paid back based on income (one pays 9% of gross monthly income above a threshold of about £20k/12) and written off after 30 years. This means that while people who don’t earn so much money don’t have an impossible burden after university, it is people with middle incomes who end up paying back the most in absolute terms (e.g. getting the balance down to 0 just before the 30 years is up and paying a lot of interest) while those with high incomes can quickly pay off the loans without paying so much interest and then enjoy an effective 10% pay rise. It seems this system is also somewhat regressive.