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I feel a lot of sympathy to kids graduating in this decade in most careers. Tons of debt, ever increasing asset prices, and terrible job market with stagnating

I feel a lot of sympathy to kids graduating in this decade in most careers. Tons of debt, ever increasing asset prices, and terrible job market with stagnating wages. If you don't have rich parents, you are in a terrible spot.

seibelj 5y ago
The job market is insanely competitive for hiring managers. I agree with the other stuff but being able to land a job is not an issue.
- jonathan-adly 5y ago
  Tech job market is a bad proxy for the job market as a whole. The whole job market is basically completely broken now - tons of terrible jobs with no career prospects, but very little progress on "career" jobs unless you are in tech and graduated from a respectable university (which becoming more and more equiv. to having rich parents).
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    Eh. At least a few years back you could get in as long as you could code. I got to 6 figures without a degree, it might be harder now, but you don't need to attend a top school to become a programmer.
    - bumby 5y ago
      They were saying you shouldn't generalize the "job market" by taking anecdotes from "the tech job market." Responding with another tech market anecdote doesn't refute their claim.
      - 999900000999 5y ago
        >unless you are in tech and graduated from a respectable university I was refuting this. I've never heard of anyone needing to attend a prestigious University to become a programmer?
        bumby 5y ago
        Ah, sorry. More to your point, there's a debate (particularly among economists) how much of a degree credential is "skills" vs. "signaling". The proportion of the latter would indicate how much a prestigious degree status matters. As a side-note, I don't think "respectable" and "prestigious" are synonymous, so you might be reading too much into their claim.
        999900000999 5y ago
        From my experience a BA in anything just proves you can read. Most employers, aside from I guess a few select fields, don't care what you majored in. My degree's in some non sense, but I know it helps me get past automated filters. My first decent job was with a startup which are easier to get into.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Are these proper graduate jobs, though? I mean, I've heard that shitty customer service jobs with abusive customers, abusive bosses and terrible pay are having a lot of trouble hiring right now - but you can get customer service jobs without a college degree.
Invictus0 5y ago
2008 called, they want their comment back
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Good god. I was going to say how familiar that all sounded. This time seems worse in ways. I can’t imagine having to have been locked down at that age. It felt stunting and anemic enough as it was. The good news is that when you’re broke, you don’t have any material reasons to shun exploring personal philosophy in earnest. You’ve got nothing to really lose. The hard part is staying fed and paying rent at the same time. I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to that last one. For me, I paid my rent by working as much warehouse overtime as I could and stripped my grandmother’s soda bread recipe down to flour, soda, salt, water and a sliver of butter. Tempus fugit, kids. Life is rich in spite of any dysfunction. Time will keep moving, and nobody gets to stop it. As Neil Young aptly put it: “don’t let it bring you down, it’s only castles burning”
yojo 5y ago
FWIW inflation is great for existing debt holders - you get to pay back that $1 you borrowed with $0.93 worth of inflation adjusted earning. If this keeps up for 5 years your effective debt burden drops 30% This all assumes earnings rise with inflation, which does seem to sort of be happening.
epistasis 5y ago
High inflation and rising wages is a great time to have lots of debt! Certainly much better than the past two decades of debt-saddled college graduations.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  I’m pretty sure real wages are falling for the lower class
  - jonathan-adly 5y ago
    Yeb.. real wage growth is down 2.4% on average YoY[0]. Given how much raises the tech sector is getting, it means everyone else is getting absolutely crushed. 0. https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-consumer-prices-soar-fastest-39-years-real-wages-tumble-9th-straight-month https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-consumer-price...
  - 0xB31B1B 5y ago
    Real wages for working class folks are rising at the fastest pace in 40 years. It’s middle class folks who have stagnant wages.
    - raziel2701 5y ago
      This[0] shows an overall 4% wage increase for all employees compared to last year, while inflation is up 7% year over year. Wages are not keeping up with inflation. [0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003#0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003#0
  - bequanna 5y ago
    Actually, the opposite. Wages for low level jobs have risen the fastest. All other categories have only a slight increase or flat.
- hiram112 5y ago
  > High inflation and rising wages is a great time to have lots of debt! Yes I know there are a lot of progressives / young people who were hopeful the current administration would "cancel" their student debt. While the idea that the executive can simply erase a few trillion of gov't owned debt with an executive order was and is legally dubious, I think a lot of folks aren't aware that the administration is, in fact, wiping out almost 10% of their existing student loans per year via inflation. Meanwhile, the admin has continued to extend the moratorium on student loan payments and interest accumulation, so they are, in fact, fulfilling that campaign promise, at least partially. Though I'm not sure they want to advertise that, lol.
dandanua 5y ago
Nah, they'll just take credits, which are supposed to be returned by their grand grand children. /s
asow92 5y ago
All of the people I went to school with who are struggling with debt and jobs today are those who picked terrible majors or shouldn't have been in the major in the first place. They knew that it would be bad going into it and still went ahead with it anyway. We need to figure out how to stop these people from committing these mistakes earlier on in the process. There is no shame in going into less technical trades—especially since they are in high demand.
- bumby 5y ago
  The narrative for decades has been "if you don't graduate from college you might be destined to be a loser." I think that's part of what needs to change. But I also think the student debt problem is more nuanced than just "terrible majors". Tuition has increased faster than just about anything (sans healthcare, I believe) while wages were mostly stagnant. Previous generations could largely get through college debt-free working part-time at minimum wage, regardless of major. So I don't think the student debt crisis can be chalked up to "terrible major" selection. The level of student debt is, in part, driven by the way universities spend money to attract "customers" err...I mean students. I think we need to find a way to mitigate colleges being run like businesses in that respect.
  - asow92 5y ago
    Yep, agreed, and that's why they're terrible majors if you account for the ROI on them.
    - asow92 5y ago
      We don't need hundreds of English and Humanities majors—we need them, yes, but not as many as are enrolled. There is a supply and demand imbalance.
      - bumby 5y ago
        This is only if you view college as a vocational endeavor. I know that's the current prevalent thought, but it hasn't always been the case, and I'm not sure it should be a given. Just the nature of this thread (cost, ROI, supply & demand) shows how much of college is thought of in a business mindset which is a departure from how it used to be viewed. I would also argue that while the economy may not need humanities majors, society probably does. E.g., An engineer can tell you how to do something (e.g., develop facial recognition for public cameras or develop attention maximizing social media algorithms) but an engineer with a grounded understanding of philosophy can help determine if that's the right thing to deploy as policy and whether they, at the individual level, wants to support that with their career choice.
dml2135 5y ago
It was pretty rough last decade as well.
xkbarkar 5y ago
I don’t think we’ve still payed for 2008 tbh. It seems like healthcare was axed in many countries to pay for the bank blunder. Did not backfire at all. Poor next generation. I at least got the 90s. Anything after 2001 has basically been one crapload after the other in mass surveillance and debt collection for the masses. Uff
mlindner 5y ago
Inflation is actually really good for debt as it tends to erase it or make it cheaper to pay off in the future.
- landemva 5y ago
  This is why the poor, who don't have assets that get the inflation-induced debt destruction benefits, are harmed by price inflation. On a country level, political and monetary policies don't seem to actually benefit the poor.

seibelj 5y ago

The job market is insanely competitive for hiring managers. I agree with the other stuff but being able to land a job is not an issue.

jonathan-adly 5y ago
Tech job market is a bad proxy for the job market as a whole. The whole job market is basically completely broken now - tons of terrible jobs with no career prospects, but very little progress on "career" jobs unless you are in tech and graduated from a respectable university (which becoming more and more equiv. to having rich parents).
- 999900000999 5y ago
  Eh. At least a few years back you could get in as long as you could code. I got to 6 figures without a degree, it might be harder now, but you don't need to attend a top school to become a programmer.
  - bumby 5y ago
    They were saying you shouldn't generalize the "job market" by taking anecdotes from "the tech job market." Responding with another tech market anecdote doesn't refute their claim.
    - 999900000999 5y ago
      >unless you are in tech and graduated from a respectable university I was refuting this. I've never heard of anyone needing to attend a prestigious University to become a programmer?
      - bumby 5y ago
        Ah, sorry. More to your point, there's a debate (particularly among economists) how much of a degree credential is "skills" vs. "signaling". The proportion of the latter would indicate how much a prestigious degree status matters. As a side-note, I don't think "respectable" and "prestigious" are synonymous, so you might be reading too much into their claim.
        999900000999 5y ago
        From my experience a BA in anything just proves you can read. Most employers, aside from I guess a few select fields, don't care what you majored in. My degree's in some non sense, but I know it helps me get past automated filters. My first decent job was with a startup which are easier to get into.
michaelt 5y ago
Are these proper graduate jobs, though? I mean, I've heard that shitty customer service jobs with abusive customers, abusive bosses and terrible pay are having a lot of trouble hiring right now - but you can get customer service jobs without a college degree.

Invictus0 5y ago

2008 called, they want their comment back

52-6F-62 5y ago
Good god. I was going to say how familiar that all sounded. This time seems worse in ways. I can’t imagine having to have been locked down at that age. It felt stunting and anemic enough as it was. The good news is that when you’re broke, you don’t have any material reasons to shun exploring personal philosophy in earnest. You’ve got nothing to really lose. The hard part is staying fed and paying rent at the same time. I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to that last one. For me, I paid my rent by working as much warehouse overtime as I could and stripped my grandmother’s soda bread recipe down to flour, soda, salt, water and a sliver of butter. Tempus fugit, kids. Life is rich in spite of any dysfunction. Time will keep moving, and nobody gets to stop it. As Neil Young aptly put it: “don’t let it bring you down, it’s only castles burning”

yojo 5y ago

FWIW inflation is great for existing debt holders - you get to pay back that $1 you borrowed with $0.93 worth of inflation adjusted earning. If this keeps up for 5 years your effective debt burden drops 30% This all assumes earnings rise with inflation, which does seem to sort of be happening.

epistasis 5y ago

High inflation and rising wages is a great time to have lots of debt! Certainly much better than the past two decades of debt-saddled college graduations.

oneoff786 5y ago
I’m pretty sure real wages are falling for the lower class
- jonathan-adly 5y ago
  Yeb.. real wage growth is down 2.4% on average YoY[0]. Given how much raises the tech sector is getting, it means everyone else is getting absolutely crushed. 0. https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-consumer-prices-soar-fastest-39-years-real-wages-tumble-9th-straight-month https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-consumer-price...
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  Real wages for working class folks are rising at the fastest pace in 40 years. It’s middle class folks who have stagnant wages.
  - raziel2701 5y ago
    This[0] shows an overall 4% wage increase for all employees compared to last year, while inflation is up 7% year over year. Wages are not keeping up with inflation. [0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003#0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003#0
- bequanna 5y ago
  Actually, the opposite. Wages for low level jobs have risen the fastest. All other categories have only a slight increase or flat.
hiram112 5y ago
> High inflation and rising wages is a great time to have lots of debt! Yes I know there are a lot of progressives / young people who were hopeful the current administration would "cancel" their student debt. While the idea that the executive can simply erase a few trillion of gov't owned debt with an executive order was and is legally dubious, I think a lot of folks aren't aware that the administration is, in fact, wiping out almost 10% of their existing student loans per year via inflation. Meanwhile, the admin has continued to extend the moratorium on student loan payments and interest accumulation, so they are, in fact, fulfilling that campaign promise, at least partially. Though I'm not sure they want to advertise that, lol.

dandanua 5y ago

Nah, they'll just take credits, which are supposed to be returned by their grand grand children. /s

asow92 5y ago

All of the people I went to school with who are struggling with debt and jobs today are those who picked terrible majors or shouldn't have been in the major in the first place. They knew that it would be bad going into it and still went ahead with it anyway. We need to figure out how to stop these people from committing these mistakes earlier on in the process. There is no shame in going into less technical trades—especially since they are in high demand.

bumby 5y ago
The narrative for decades has been "if you don't graduate from college you might be destined to be a loser." I think that's part of what needs to change. But I also think the student debt problem is more nuanced than just "terrible majors". Tuition has increased faster than just about anything (sans healthcare, I believe) while wages were mostly stagnant. Previous generations could largely get through college debt-free working part-time at minimum wage, regardless of major. So I don't think the student debt crisis can be chalked up to "terrible major" selection. The level of student debt is, in part, driven by the way universities spend money to attract "customers" err...I mean students. I think we need to find a way to mitigate colleges being run like businesses in that respect.
- asow92 5y ago
  Yep, agreed, and that's why they're terrible majors if you account for the ROI on them.
  - asow92 5y ago
    We don't need hundreds of English and Humanities majors—we need them, yes, but not as many as are enrolled. There is a supply and demand imbalance.
    - bumby 5y ago
      This is only if you view college as a vocational endeavor. I know that's the current prevalent thought, but it hasn't always been the case, and I'm not sure it should be a given. Just the nature of this thread (cost, ROI, supply & demand) shows how much of college is thought of in a business mindset which is a departure from how it used to be viewed. I would also argue that while the economy may not need humanities majors, society probably does. E.g., An engineer can tell you how to do something (e.g., develop facial recognition for public cameras or develop attention maximizing social media algorithms) but an engineer with a grounded understanding of philosophy can help determine if that's the right thing to deploy as policy and whether they, at the individual level, wants to support that with their career choice.

dml2135 5y ago

It was pretty rough last decade as well.

xkbarkar 5y ago

I don’t think we’ve still payed for 2008 tbh. It seems like healthcare was axed in many countries to pay for the bank blunder. Did not backfire at all. Poor next generation. I at least got the 90s. Anything after 2001 has basically been one crapload after the other in mass surveillance and debt collection for the masses. Uff

mlindner 5y ago

Inflation is actually really good for debt as it tends to erase it or make it cheaper to pay off in the future.

landemva 5y ago
This is why the poor, who don't have assets that get the inflation-induced debt destruction benefits, are harmed by price inflation. On a country level, political and monetary policies don't seem to actually benefit the poor.