7 ms·

I'm one of those people living in poverty that distrusts school institutions. My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your maj

• beebmam 5y ago
  I'm seeing a lot of anecdotal evidence you're using to justify your biases. This isn't an attack on you; I think you would have a tremendous amount to gain from a science education. Please consider it for the future of you and your family.
  • vpilcx 5y ago
    It's anecdotal evidence because I was responding to an anecdote someone else was giving with my own personal perspective.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    Going beyond anecdotes, the data is clear that there is no economic benefit. Wages are stagnant and job quality is in decline alongside the rise of post-secondary attainment. While there is no doubt an entertainment benefit to be gained, that is not likely the best choice for someone without the means to take on nearly a million dollars of opportunity cost.
• candiodari 5y ago
  > My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is That's because (starting in high school) teachers are "assigned" a subject. If they change subjects, they essentially have to restart their career, there is a great personal cost (mostly going back to part-time teaching) for doing that. Plus for a whole bunch of things, from sick days to yard supervision there's a "pecking order". Changing subjects means you go to the back of the pecking order. So if a biology teacher gets hired to emergency fill a math teacher's position, if they're smart they will never give up that math position.
• bko 5y ago
  > My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. Can't you just hack this by going to school for pretty much anything you're interested in and being able to work in an unrelated field? > my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings You've established that education is a good investment. So why not find an affordable college? It's not as important which college you go to or what major you select from your first paragraph. So find a cheap city or state school. Most of the debt comes from people going to private schools. I don't know where you live but NYC for instance is one of the most expensive cities in the world, but they even have a great city university (CUNY) which costs NY State residents around $7k a year, which is definitely reasonable.
  • vpilcx 5y ago
    > You've established that education is a good investment. My friend often comes to me and says, "Hey, man, how come you don't invest your money in <x>?" Because I'm living in poverty. People who live in poverty don't have money to invest. > So why not find an affordable college? So I did a quick calculation. Affordable, meaning junior college and public state college, would come out to roughly $23k for a bachelor. Maybe round it to $30k. When I was paying off my car, which only come out to about a little over $10k. Two years of having to work JUST to pay that off felt really, really uncomfortable. A college infused starting salary would probably only pay about 1 and 1/2 times more than what I was making then and the idea of having to do that for even longer without being able to absolve myself of it through bankruptcy is not something I want to do. > Can't you just hack this by going to school for pretty much anything you're interested in and being able to work in an unrelated field? That particular situation doesn't apply to every job. It seems like its mainly tech jobs I see that in and I'm not 100% certain I'd want to work to be forced into a tech job. So I'm trying to think of the best way to explain this because I feel like I'm going in different directions but it seems like there's two paths: 1) go to college, accrue debt to get a job then work at your job for 5-10 years to pay that debt off Barring someone making sure I have the proper technical bonafides, I'm philosophically opposed to getting a piece of paper for a job that I could do just as easily without a college education as I could with one. I also feel really uncomfortable with debt in general, especially debt that I cannot choose to have absolved through bankruptcy. 2) live at the lowest possible means necessary and eke out a living as best you can As it stands now, my current expenses are no more than $500 a month (including rent). My biggest challenge, currently, to maintaining that type of lifestyle is getting remote work that I can do on an ad-hoc basis that will allow me to stay under the income necessary for government subsidies.
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  "In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through." There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless. "the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves." I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan.
  • vpilcx 5y ago
    > There are certainly a lot of useless majors. But that doesn't imply all of them are useless. It's not so much a critique of the majors but rather the professional requirements of the job listing. For jobs that don't have an innate technical (technical in the loosest sense of the term) requirement, they only want a certain class of person working there and college degrees are just how they do that. > I'm not in the US, but isn't the rationale for that construct to make people more credit worthy? Ultimately you have to convince somebody to give a random person a lot of money on the odd chance that they'll finish their education and earn the money back. I suppose if you don't like "educational debt", you could also try to convince somebody to give you another type of loan. One rationale that I heard that seems reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy. I mean, I could put it on credit cards or take a personal loan, but that just increases the financial burden (via the interest rate), and if I'm not going to do that for the explicit purpose of purposely declaring bankruptcy, it seems unnecessary.
    • thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > One rationale that I heard that seems reasonable at face value is since you can't give back your education, that's the justification for not being able to declare bankruptcy. It goes a little further than that. It doesn't really matter that you can't give back the education. It's that the loan is entirely unsecured - there's no collateral, but also the people who get student loans typically don't have any assets. So it would cost nothing to take out student loans, study, and then declare bankruptcy.
• onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  > Now, obviously, that's not the case with all education, but my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings. Literally, all of my friends that have gone to college are no where near paying their debt off and I'm in my late 30s. I grew up lower middle class - not poor - took on a healthy amount of debt to get a CS degree from a crappy college in West Virginia. Most of my classmates are doing quite well, and I'm working at Google - with a fellow classmate, literally in the 1% now (both of us, out of a class of only 8). I know plenty of rich kids who went to Stanford and studied philosophy or underwater basket weaving, and they're killing it. But that doesn't mean poor people have no opportunity. Sure, it's not equal. But it's far from hopeless. I think there's a lot of people who look at the world and see how unfair it is and think: why even try? The world is not fair, never has been, never will be even close to it. You just have to accept where you started from and try your best. And we can try to push for a fairer world, but don't hold your breath. If anything, inequality is skyrocketing and the world is becoming less fair.
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    I am also bothered by the rise in income inequality. Specifically, in many highly developed nations, the likelihood one can jump up income deciles has greatly decreased generation-over-generation. As someone who grew up lower middle class and leapt many, many income deciles, what ideas do you have to decrease income inequality? For example, you say that you are in the top 1% now. Do you favour increasing your own personal tax burden to help offset income equality?
    • Empact 5y ago
      They are contributing to decreasing income inequality by describing how they increased their income. Why should it follow that people who break from a culture of poverty should be forced to support those who do not? It smacks of the “black tax” described in the article - a response that undermines the good that could otherwise follow from greater employment and productivity.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      I'm of the belief that income is less relevant - wealth is what really matters. My marginal tax rate is ~48%. I think that's already high enough. The idea that there is no wealth tax - and that the Fed arguably gives people a negative wealth tax - that seems a little off to me. The median home owner has about 3:1 leverage on their house - with a home value that's 4x their income. The Fed has been pumping up house prices by a couple percent per year for 13 years. .02x4x3=.24 The average home owner with a mortgage is getting an ~24% negative income tax. The median tax payer has a ~22% federal tax rate. Effectively, this is a -2% income / wealth tax. This seems incredibly broken. We've created a society of haves and have nots. People willing to speculate on government handouts on their mortgage are wealthy. People not willing or unable have almost 0 wealth. I'm in the 1%. Do I deserve to be? I don't know. But by definition, someone does. I make ~4x the median laborer after taxes and transfers. This doesn't seem broken. In my state, I make ~9x minimum wage after taxes and transfers. This also doesn't seem broken. Maybe others think differently? Before taxes and transfers, the numbers seem much more extreme. That seems irrelevant to me. The top 1% in wealth have ~100x the wealth of the median person in my state. That seems broken.
• deleted 5y ago
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• RHSeeger 5y ago
  > the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves The inability to be voided through bankruptcy, as I understand it, was setup so that educational loans would not wind up with insane interest rates. Given that they are unsecured (there's nothing for the lender to repossess if the borrower fails to pay), there is much greater risk to the lender. Being unable to discharge the load in bankruptcy is one way to mitigate this. Raising interest rates on everyone taking such loans (so the people that do pay subsidize the people that don't) is another. Presumably, it was decided that the former was a better option than the later.
  • drdec 5y ago
    > The inability to be voided through bankruptcy, as I understand it, was setup so that educational loans would not wind up with insane interest rates. Given that they are unsecured (there's nothing for the lender to repossess if the borrower fails to pay), there is much greater risk to the lender. Most loans issued before 2010 are guaranteed by the US government. So while they are technically unsecured, the government will cover the lender if the borrower doesn't pay. Since 2010, student loans are actually owned by the government, that is, students are borrowing money directly from the US federal government. So, in most cases, if a student loan were discharged in bankruptcy, it would be the federal government that would eat the cost of the loan.
    • RHSeeger 5y ago
      > Since 2010, student loans are actually owned by the government Federal student loans are owned by the government. Private student loans, of which there are many and more every day, are owned by private (generally for-profit) companies. They're also not covered by the student loan relief efforts of recent times (CARES), if I understand correctly.
• 999900000999 5y ago
  It really doesn't matter what your major is. I went to college mostly as a means to get some distance from my horrible family, and I advise anyone coming from a rough family to go to college just so you don't need to do with your family as much. You don't need to go to a good one, even with a GED. You can always go down to community college a few cities over. That can more than be enough. >Now, obviously, that's not the case with all education, but my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings. Literally, all of my friends that have gone to college are no where near paying their debt off and I'm in my late 30s. I will say this generation is all about complaining and less about hard work. It's about going on Twitter to complain about how hard it is to find a job, instead of going on LinkedIn to actually find one. I can make a single phone call and pay off all my student loan debt today, I just feel no need to since some politician is going to eventually forgive it some of it. I also use having a degree as a filter for who I associate with. In my current city, except for a single person I've never gone out with anyone not either pursuing, or currently holding at least a four year degree. If you tell me your 24 or something and you've never gone to college and you've never worked, I know you can bring harm to me. I'm from a very bad background full of these freaks who don't want to do anything except cause chaos. Hold high standards for both yourself, and anyone else you surround yourself with. For example, on the Tinder TOS thread, I saw a minor debate over if it's okay to exclude people who don't have jobs from your dating pool. I wasn't going to argue with anyone directly, but if you tell me your unemployed and you're still spending all day on match or Tinder, I don't want to be around you. Where I'm from, if someone doesn't have a job particularly they aren't even trying to find one, bad things tend to happen.
  • Dracophoenix 5y ago
    >I went to college mostly as a means to get some distance from my horrible family, and I advise anyone coming from a rough family to go to college just so you don't need to do with your family as much. You don't need to go to a good one, even with a GED. You can always go down to community college a few cities over. That can more than be enough. What major did you choose? How did you manage to find an apartment and the means to pay for independently one at 18?
• eadmund 5y ago
  > My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through. In the U.S., this is due to the fact that employers practically may not use proficiency exams; since they are prevented from testing for actual proficiency, they must use a proxy, and a college degree is a decent proxy for 'reasonably educated enough, exposed to enough general knowledge, knows how to function in a group.' I don't think that class really enters into it. > the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves. More that without the inability to discharge it in bankruptcy interest rates for student loans would need to be sky-high: the smart move for anyone graduating at 22 would be to immediately declare bankruptcy when all he would have is debt and no assets.
  • hallway_monitor 5y ago
    Thank you for pointing out what the consequences would be of allowing student loans to be discharged by bankruptcy. It's obvious this would happen a lot if allowed - I would have done it and would tell my kids to do the same. It turns out being held accountable for the debts you incur is usually a good thing.
  • pnutjam 5y ago
    You don't think class enters into it? Tell us you grew up in an middle-upper class environment without telling us you grew up middle-upper class.
    • thmorriss 5y ago
      Agree. Laughed when I saw that
  • drdec 5y ago
    > In the U.S., this is due to the fact that employers practically may not use proficiency exams What do you mean here? I'm a life-long US resident and I've never heard such a thing. I've also taken exams when applying to jobs. There is also the civil service exam which is a prerequisite for many government jobs. Jobs like the police and military have exams, both written and physical. I can't square my experience and your statement. More likely, employers do not want to pay for additional exams as part of the hiring process and use college-degrees as a proxy. But there's nothing preventing them from using exams if they wanted.
• Kalium 5y ago
  > Now, obviously, that's not the case with all education, but my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings. Literally, all of my friends that have gone to college are no where near paying their debt off and I'm in my late 30s. A solid 31% of college graduates have no loans, and current graduates with loans average something like $30k in debt. With this in mind, it's perhaps worth pausing to consider why the sample that is your social circle suffers from decades of crushing debt. Perhaps your sample is not representative? Or, more insidiously, perhaps debt levels tend to reflect class and class aspirations? Someone who attends a community college likely has little to no debts. Someone attending a local tier two or three public university probably has some modest debt, often below their yearly income after graduation. Someone who goes through a private post-grad program likely has six figures worth. > Finally, that in of itself, ya know, maybe that's like the licks you gotta take when you're trying to rise up in the world, but the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves. What do you imagine the outcome might be if student loans were voidable through bankruptcy? How do you think fresh graduates with loans and no assets would handle things?