6 ms·

Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

33 points by Vaslo 4y ago

elzbardico 4y ago
Well. They were sold that. They were trapped in unplayable debt because of this promise. Are we going to blame the victims?
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  I'm happy to - SF is trying to lower the local voting age to 16, so being able to do a bit of research shouldn't be too much to ask for an 18 year old.
  - throwaway08642 4y ago
    I have an idea. We make it clear that students can sue educators who do not inform them about the stupidity of taking on too much debt at a young age, and make "An Introduction to College, Adult Life, and Debt" a mandatory semester in all High Schools.
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Not sure that students should be able to sue their high school for something like this. Why aren’t parents stepping in/up? How would you avoid “my guidance counselor mentioned this, but they didn’t stress the importance?” My generation already struggles with the expectation of others to solve an individual’s problem - at the risk of sounding too cynical. Suing your school does not seem like a good springboard into adulthood.
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      Or we just do what we do with other "dangerous" products like alcohol or tobacco and ban it for people under 21. Scary warning labels on all college correspondence would be a nice start. WARNING: MAY LEAD TO A LIFETIME OF DEBT SLAVERY
newaccount2021 4y ago
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
Graduated in 2020, and I was shocked by how few of my peers had done any research into the type of work and compensation that would be available to them upon graduation. No, I'm not referring to the issue of 17-20 years olds choosing a degree path with little awareness of post-graduation opportunities, but for upperclassmen 0-2 years out from graduation. On the other hand, I can report a disproportionate awareness / interest in academia and grad school, but even in these cases I still rarely felt that these peers saw graduate school as a means to an end, looking beyond the masters degree, but more as a funnel, "the next to do I guess, idk."
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  I know a lot of people who go a Masters because they didn't want to get a job, then never worked in their field.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Precisely. I was trying to avoid sounding overly cynical of my own peer group, but there’s a lot of this. And as I was trying to get at in my main comment, I think it has to do with a tendency to avoid looking multiple steps towards questions like “what am I actually going to do with my education?”
  - kurupt213 4y ago
    That just makes the interviewer wonder why they didn’t get the terminal degree… unless the masters is the terminal degree (like an MFA)
retrac 4y ago
> Current graduates are simply asking for their compensation to reflect the cost of living in the United States. If the entire GDP of the USA, after taxes, were simply taken (about $15 trillion) and equally distributed among the ~210 million working age adults of the United States, each would receive about $70,000 a year. If the 70 million university graduates were each paid a handsome and deserved $150,000 (hey, that $100k's only the start, right?!) that would be about 10 trillion for them, and the remaining 140 million Americans would collectively get about 5 trillion, or an average of about $35,000 each. America is not actually infinitely wealthy, and a fair and just society requires some hard thought about how ultimately limited wealth gets distributed.
- AlphaOne1 4y ago
  yes, but I think we need to start discussing what value college is actually bringing to society. Many of these majors do not contribute directly to wealth growth (but teach 'skills' such as critical thinking etc.) Higher education has no incentive to lower prices because they carry none of the risk if a student defaults. Even worse, there is no guarantee that students will be financially successful after graduation and they are still responsible for the debt if they are not successful. I don't blame students for being resentful but I think the resentment needs to be directed at the correct source of the problem: higher education, rather than blaming businesses for not paying enough money to pay off a 100K student loan debt. I think it is a tragedy that we live in a society where you are viewed as 'less than' if one does not go to college. This view takes advantage of our emotions and leads some to go to college without a plan and load up on debt without a clear plan on what they will do with their life. Just to be clear, some people should definitely go to college but the current situation kids being told practically from birth (my evidence is the popularity of 529 funds parents/grandparents set up) that they need to attend college is ridiculous.
  - bennysomething 4y ago
    There's an argument that too many people going to university can destabalise society: (Economist article) https://web.archive.org/web/20220713015644/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/22/can-too-many-brainy-people-be-a-dangerous-thing https://web.archive.org/web/20220713015644/https://www.econo...
helen___keller 4y ago
I think the discrepancy between expectation and reality isn’t too interesting, but what is interesting is that this expectation wasnt there in 2019, so it’s a phenomenon new to the pandemic economy.
3qz 4y ago
> In 2019, the college students surveyed by Clever expected to make $57,964 — about $10,000 more than the average starting salary at the time, which was $47,000. Just three years later, college students are expecting to make nearly $46,000 more. Looks like a bad survey.. I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody in a non-tech or non-professional major who expects to make 100k+ at graduation
rzazueta 4y ago
My town in the Bay Area has always been considered one of the more "affordable" options (which is why we live here). The estimated cost of living to do more than just survive here is roughly estimated to be about $96,000/yr. That factors in rent / mortgage, food, transportation, etc. So who are really the one's doing the poor estimating? The new college grads staring down the barrel of a career that will allow them to just skate by after paying the cost of living on top of their loans, or the companies making record profits but exploiting new college grads by paying less than a thriving wage? "Pay your dues" is the cry of the exploiters who profit more from your labor than you do.
- conro1108 4y ago
  But "relatively affordable in the Bay Area" is still relatively very expensive nationally no? Maybe the gap is just that the people surveyed overestimated their likelihood of working in a HCOL place (or the sample and/or population in question is legitimately biased toward that)
- nradov 4y ago
  I can't imagine why new college graduates would want to torture themselves by moving to the Bay Area. It might have made sense 20 years ago, but now there are better options for the vast majority of people. We can complain about the causes including lack of housing development, zoning laws, infrastructure, progressive politics, whatever. There are some important public policy issues that we ought to resolve. But the reality is that no matter what we do, the Bay Area is going to remain a shitty place to live for most new graduates. Unless you can earn very high pay, or have reliable access to cheap housing, my advice is to move somewhere else where you have a better chance to get ahead. Don't set yourself up for failure.
IceMetalPunk 4y ago
I applied for my first career job (read: first job that wasn't "you don't get a living wage" retail, and which actually used my degree) 4 years ago. It's the job I'm currently still at. When I applied, it was for an entry level position at $35k. After the interview, I was offered a senior position instead for double that salary. Apparently, my current salary after 4 years of $81k is still on the low end for a senior app dev; go figure. So on the one hand, expecting a six-figure job out of the gate is ridiculously naive. On the other hand, over the past few months, I've gotten more and more tired of the very idea of money. Everything from "do you deserve to enjoy yourself?" down to "do you even deserve to live?" (and everything in between) is decided by how much money other people are willing to give you, meaning employers have a massive, slavery-like chokehold on employees. Meanwhile, most people don't even understand what fiat money is, but they're greedy about wanting it because under a certain amount, you suffer and die. Literally. Which only happens... because other people are greedy about money, too, for the same reasons. It's a vicious cycle. (BTW, the answer to "what is fiat money?" is "anything that represents a promise to complete a trade". That's all, it's just promises, but we treat it like it's a deity that we must worship lest it send its wrath upon us and kill us.) Anyway, rant over for now.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Well put. It also makes zero fiscal sense to lose an experienced, onboarded and productive employee due to tiny/non-existent raises, to then have to spend more money finding, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and pay the new person more- but companies seem hell-bent on perpetuating that cycle as well.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I know this is beside the point, but I'd shop around a bit if I were you. It sounds like you're still very underpaid
  - IceMetalPunk 4y ago
    So I've heard. But I don't really care. I'm single. My current salary is enough to pay my mortgage, all my bills, all my student loans, my food bill, etc. and still have enough to not only save, but donate. I give a minimum of $1,200 to St. Jude's every year, plus assorted charities and even random Twitch streamers who make music if I like what they do and they seem like decent people. In other words, despite everyone saying "you should try to get more money!", I'm currently making enough that I'm literally giving large amounts of it away to people who need it more than me. TL;DR: I don't care about making "as much money as possible". I only care about making enough money to survive comfortably and help others when I can, which I'm already doing. In fact, I'm currently working towards switching careers, and in the process I'm more than willing to take a pay cut if the new job is more fulfilling; I can afford to.
notananthem 4y ago
My first salaried job was 34k not that long ago. I make loads more but still. Grads deserve better pay than that especially in M/HCOL cities. Hell everyone does.
alephnerd 4y ago
My 2 cents as a Zellenial: 1. I've spent an hour trying to find this survey but cannot. My hunch is it's an online survey with questionable reproducibility (especially after looking at similar research produced by Clever) 2. I'm not too surprised by my college aged peers overestimataing average starting salaries. With the increase in CS/ECE students and a relatively small but vocal minority talking about 200K TC out of college, the rest of us assume assume this is a common entry level salary, when in reality compensation is well below that (on a separate note - I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting). Heck, the CS program I went to is one of the best programs in the world and even they vocalized that their AVERAGE starting salary was in the 80-90k range, yet most of my peers never realized this.
- acchow 4y ago
  > I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting Can you explain this calculation?
  - kurupt213 4y ago
    He’s saying 60k of the compensation is equity and other fringe benefits
    - acchow 4y ago
      Startup equity can be completely worthless, but shares of Apple/Google? Seems pretty solid...
      - alephnerd 4y ago
        NCGs at Apple are hourly their first year (not sure if they are granted stock on date of hiring w/ a 1 year cliff or if it's granted after the probationary period), and Google has unoffically stopped hiring NCGs w/ stock (almost every single NCG at Google I know who's been recruited since 2018 has been recruited through the ER program)
    - 4y ago
bennysomething 4y ago
It claims salaries have increased only 35 percent. This seems incorrect to me. For example starting salaries for new developers where I would is roughly 30k (British pound) this is pretty much twice what I started on in 2006.
manvillej 4y ago
ah see, the employers underestimating the cost to exist as a human being in today's economy
etempleton 4y ago
To be fair, salaries are crazy out there right now. Companies are desperate and job hopping can net you 30-50% more. I think the other factor is all of these weird TikTok videos that just lie about things for views and clicks. And all of these influencers acting like they are billionaires. I think a lot of teens and college age people have pretty unrealistic expectations for life right now. This generation has been through some things with the pandemic, but there hasn’t been a recession in awhile beyond the Covid blip. When I graduated unemployment was high so the advice was you are probably not going to get a decent salary out of college just be happy if you get anything and work your way up.

33 points by Vaslo 4y ago

Well. They were sold that. They were trapped in unplayable debt because of this promise. Are we going to blame the victims?

throwayyy479087 4y ago
I'm happy to - SF is trying to lower the local voting age to 16, so being able to do a bit of research shouldn't be too much to ask for an 18 year old.
- throwaway08642 4y ago
  I have an idea. We make it clear that students can sue educators who do not inform them about the stupidity of taking on too much debt at a young age, and make "An Introduction to College, Adult Life, and Debt" a mandatory semester in all High Schools.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Not sure that students should be able to sue their high school for something like this. Why aren’t parents stepping in/up? How would you avoid “my guidance counselor mentioned this, but they didn’t stress the importance?” My generation already struggles with the expectation of others to solve an individual’s problem - at the risk of sounding too cynical. Suing your school does not seem like a good springboard into adulthood.
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Or we just do what we do with other "dangerous" products like alcohol or tobacco and ban it for people under 21. Scary warning labels on all college correspondence would be a nice start. WARNING: MAY LEAD TO A LIFETIME OF DEBT SLAVERY

newaccount2021 4y ago

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

Graduated in 2020, and I was shocked by how few of my peers had done any research into the type of work and compensation that would be available to them upon graduation. No, I'm not referring to the issue of 17-20 years olds choosing a degree path with little awareness of post-graduation opportunities, but for upperclassmen 0-2 years out from graduation. On the other hand, I can report a disproportionate awareness / interest in academia and grad school, but even in these cases I still rarely felt that these peers saw graduate school as a means to an end, looking beyond the masters degree, but more as a funnel, "the next to do I guess, idk."

throwayyy479087 4y ago
I know a lot of people who go a Masters because they didn't want to get a job, then never worked in their field.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Precisely. I was trying to avoid sounding overly cynical of my own peer group, but there’s a lot of this. And as I was trying to get at in my main comment, I think it has to do with a tendency to avoid looking multiple steps towards questions like “what am I actually going to do with my education?”
- kurupt213 4y ago
  That just makes the interviewer wonder why they didn’t get the terminal degree… unless the masters is the terminal degree (like an MFA)

retrac 4y ago

> Current graduates are simply asking for their compensation to reflect the cost of living in the United States. If the entire GDP of the USA, after taxes, were simply taken (about $15 trillion) and equally distributed among the ~210 million working age adults of the United States, each would receive about $70,000 a year. If the 70 million university graduates were each paid a handsome and deserved $150,000 (hey, that $100k's only the start, right?!) that would be about 10 trillion for them, and the remaining 140 million Americans would collectively get about 5 trillion, or an average of about $35,000 each. America is not actually infinitely wealthy, and a fair and just society requires some hard thought about how ultimately limited wealth gets distributed.

AlphaOne1 4y ago
yes, but I think we need to start discussing what value college is actually bringing to society. Many of these majors do not contribute directly to wealth growth (but teach 'skills' such as critical thinking etc.) Higher education has no incentive to lower prices because they carry none of the risk if a student defaults. Even worse, there is no guarantee that students will be financially successful after graduation and they are still responsible for the debt if they are not successful. I don't blame students for being resentful but I think the resentment needs to be directed at the correct source of the problem: higher education, rather than blaming businesses for not paying enough money to pay off a 100K student loan debt. I think it is a tragedy that we live in a society where you are viewed as 'less than' if one does not go to college. This view takes advantage of our emotions and leads some to go to college without a plan and load up on debt without a clear plan on what they will do with their life. Just to be clear, some people should definitely go to college but the current situation kids being told practically from birth (my evidence is the popularity of 529 funds parents/grandparents set up) that they need to attend college is ridiculous.
- bennysomething 4y ago
  There's an argument that too many people going to university can destabalise society: (Economist article) https://web.archive.org/web/20220713015644/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/22/can-too-many-brainy-people-be-a-dangerous-thing https://web.archive.org/web/20220713015644/https://www.econo...

helen___keller 4y ago

I think the discrepancy between expectation and reality isn’t too interesting, but what is interesting is that this expectation wasnt there in 2019, so it’s a phenomenon new to the pandemic economy.

3qz 4y ago

> In 2019, the college students surveyed by Clever expected to make $57,964 — about $10,000 more than the average starting salary at the time, which was $47,000. Just three years later, college students are expecting to make nearly $46,000 more. Looks like a bad survey.. I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody in a non-tech or non-professional major who expects to make 100k+ at graduation

rzazueta 4y ago

My town in the Bay Area has always been considered one of the more "affordable" options (which is why we live here). The estimated cost of living to do more than just survive here is roughly estimated to be about $96,000/yr. That factors in rent / mortgage, food, transportation, etc. So who are really the one's doing the poor estimating? The new college grads staring down the barrel of a career that will allow them to just skate by after paying the cost of living on top of their loans, or the companies making record profits but exploiting new college grads by paying less than a thriving wage? "Pay your dues" is the cry of the exploiters who profit more from your labor than you do.

conro1108 4y ago
But "relatively affordable in the Bay Area" is still relatively very expensive nationally no? Maybe the gap is just that the people surveyed overestimated their likelihood of working in a HCOL place (or the sample and/or population in question is legitimately biased toward that)
nradov 4y ago
I can't imagine why new college graduates would want to torture themselves by moving to the Bay Area. It might have made sense 20 years ago, but now there are better options for the vast majority of people. We can complain about the causes including lack of housing development, zoning laws, infrastructure, progressive politics, whatever. There are some important public policy issues that we ought to resolve. But the reality is that no matter what we do, the Bay Area is going to remain a shitty place to live for most new graduates. Unless you can earn very high pay, or have reliable access to cheap housing, my advice is to move somewhere else where you have a better chance to get ahead. Don't set yourself up for failure.

IceMetalPunk 4y ago

I applied for my first career job (read: first job that wasn't "you don't get a living wage" retail, and which actually used my degree) 4 years ago. It's the job I'm currently still at. When I applied, it was for an entry level position at $35k. After the interview, I was offered a senior position instead for double that salary. Apparently, my current salary after 4 years of $81k is still on the low end for a senior app dev; go figure. So on the one hand, expecting a six-figure job out of the gate is ridiculously naive. On the other hand, over the past few months, I've gotten more and more tired of the very idea of money. Everything from "do you deserve to enjoy yourself?" down to "do you even deserve to live?" (and everything in between) is decided by how much money other people are willing to give you, meaning employers have a massive, slavery-like chokehold on employees. Meanwhile, most people don't even understand what fiat money is, but they're greedy about wanting it because under a certain amount, you suffer and die. Literally. Which only happens... because other people are greedy about money, too, for the same reasons. It's a vicious cycle. (BTW, the answer to "what is fiat money?" is "anything that represents a promise to complete a trade". That's all, it's just promises, but we treat it like it's a deity that we must worship lest it send its wrath upon us and kill us.) Anyway, rant over for now.

effingwewt 4y ago
Well put. It also makes zero fiscal sense to lose an experienced, onboarded and productive employee due to tiny/non-existent raises, to then have to spend more money finding, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and pay the new person more- but companies seem hell-bent on perpetuating that cycle as well.
brundolf 4y ago
I know this is beside the point, but I'd shop around a bit if I were you. It sounds like you're still very underpaid
- IceMetalPunk 4y ago
  So I've heard. But I don't really care. I'm single. My current salary is enough to pay my mortgage, all my bills, all my student loans, my food bill, etc. and still have enough to not only save, but donate. I give a minimum of $1,200 to St. Jude's every year, plus assorted charities and even random Twitch streamers who make music if I like what they do and they seem like decent people. In other words, despite everyone saying "you should try to get more money!", I'm currently making enough that I'm literally giving large amounts of it away to people who need it more than me. TL;DR: I don't care about making "as much money as possible". I only care about making enough money to survive comfortably and help others when I can, which I'm already doing. In fact, I'm currently working towards switching careers, and in the process I'm more than willing to take a pay cut if the new job is more fulfilling; I can afford to.

notananthem 4y ago

My first salaried job was 34k not that long ago. I make loads more but still. Grads deserve better pay than that especially in M/HCOL cities. Hell everyone does.

alephnerd 4y ago

My 2 cents as a Zellenial: 1. I've spent an hour trying to find this survey but cannot. My hunch is it's an online survey with questionable reproducibility (especially after looking at similar research produced by Clever) 2. I'm not too surprised by my college aged peers overestimataing average starting salaries. With the increase in CS/ECE students and a relatively small but vocal minority talking about 200K TC out of college, the rest of us assume assume this is a common entry level salary, when in reality compensation is well below that (on a separate note - I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting). Heck, the CS program I went to is one of the best programs in the world and even they vocalized that their AVERAGE starting salary was in the 80-90k range, yet most of my peers never realized this.

acchow 4y ago
> I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting Can you explain this calculation?
- kurupt213 4y ago
  He’s saying 60k of the compensation is equity and other fringe benefits
  - acchow 4y ago
    Startup equity can be completely worthless, but shares of Apple/Google? Seems pretty solid...
    - alephnerd 4y ago
      NCGs at Apple are hourly their first year (not sure if they are granted stock on date of hiring w/ a 1 year cliff or if it's granted after the probationary period), and Google has unoffically stopped hiring NCGs w/ stock (almost every single NCG at Google I know who's been recruited since 2018 has been recruited through the ER program)
  - 4y ago

bennysomething 4y ago

It claims salaries have increased only 35 percent. This seems incorrect to me. For example starting salaries for new developers where I would is roughly 30k (British pound) this is pretty much twice what I started on in 2006.

manvillej 4y ago

ah see, the employers underestimating the cost to exist as a human being in today's economy

etempleton 4y ago

To be fair, salaries are crazy out there right now. Companies are desperate and job hopping can net you 30-50% more. I think the other factor is all of these weird TikTok videos that just lie about things for views and clicks. And all of these influencers acting like they are billionaires. I think a lot of teens and college age people have pretty unrealistic expectations for life right now. This generation has been through some things with the pandemic, but there hasn’t been a recession in awhile beyond the Covid blip. When I graduated unemployment was high so the advice was you are probably not going to get a decent salary out of college just be happy if you get anything and work your way up.