6 ms·

> 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

by 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.
        Thorrez 6y ago
        What do you mean by "none of that"? troupe mentioned a lot of things, including ways to educate yourself and ways to get a diploma. Those seem relevant to me in areas besides just software development.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Oh - I may have missed a part of the post but the impression I got was that the resources / actions listed didn’t include the kind of accredited degrees which look good on a resume and that employers often care about. Like the online courses and such - few employers (I think?) put a lot of weight in those, especially relative to a decent college or university. Forgive me if I missed something.
  - inopinatus 6y ago
    This is sheer wealth-class prejudice. Any fee-gated access to higher education represents a detriment to humanity. The notion that it's fine to maintain access barriers to the poor because they might squander their opportunity to benefit society is beyond crass; it is the offensively amoral age-old message to the downtrodden: be grateful for what we let you have at all. What this actually represents: a systemic means to preserve the stratification of power and wealth, and to hell with human progress 'cos I got mine. See also: barbaric healthcare practices, such as individual billing.
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!

by 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.
        Thorrez 6y ago
        What do you mean by "none of that"? troupe mentioned a lot of things, including ways to educate yourself and ways to get a diploma. Those seem relevant to me in areas besides just software development.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Oh - I may have missed a part of the post but the impression I got was that the resources / actions listed didn’t include the kind of accredited degrees which look good on a resume and that employers often care about. Like the online courses and such - few employers (I think?) put a lot of weight in those, especially relative to a decent college or university. Forgive me if I missed something.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  This is sheer wealth-class prejudice. Any fee-gated access to higher education represents a detriment to humanity. The notion that it's fine to maintain access barriers to the poor because they might squander their opportunity to benefit society is beyond crass; it is the offensively amoral age-old message to the downtrodden: be grateful for what we let you have at all. What this actually represents: a systemic means to preserve the stratification of power and wealth, and to hell with human progress 'cos I got mine. See also: barbaric healthcare practices, such as individual billing.

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!