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"Overeducated" implies that there is some upper-bound on the appropriate education a person should receive if they have a particular career. It is the sort of
by betterunix 14y ago
"Overeducated" implies that there is some upper-bound on the appropriate education a person should receive if they have a particular career. It is the sort of elitist, aristocracy-favoring view of the world that we should be trying to discourage.
Of course, when going to college means taking on mountains of inescapable debt, not getting a high-paying job afterwards is problematic. That's why we need to change the way we pay for college education, so that we can have a society of well-educated independent thinkers, rather than one where people start out in life just a millimeter away from indentured servitude.
- jeffdavis 14y agoI would add to that: being a cab driver out of college doesn't mean you are making a career out of it. It's called an "entry-level" job for a reason.
- muzz 14y agoOr a stop-gap job being taken on during a period of massive job destruction (something like 7M jobs were lost from 2007-2010)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- larrys 14y agoCould also be an immigrant with a degree from another country that is learning the language or getting situated as well. That said the story doesn't point to the trend from 1970 till now. The data is available I'm assuming. But did this happen evenly over time or in the last 5 or 10 years or?
- adrr 14y agoEntry level job is a job teaches your skills and gives you the experience to get a better job in the same field. Taxi cab driver isn't an entry level job, being an intern or assistant is an entry level job.
- danilocampos 14y agoTaking a data entry gig at a large firm is entry-level. You can grow into bigger things there. Driving taxis is a dead-end job. There's nowhere to go once you achieve mastery.
- Turing_Machine 14y agoIf you really paid attention and grokked the problems with the taxi business on a fundamental level, you might be in a position to launch a competitor for Uber. But yeah, unlikely.
- asdfologist 14y agoYou're taking that word way out of context. "Overeducated" here means getting an academic credential where it isn't necessary. There's nothing wrong with learning a lot, but that doesn't mean you need to pay $200K for a college degree.
- muzz 14y agoAverage student debt is $25K, hasn't been increasing that much, except in for-profit schools like Univ of Phoenix: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/student-debt-isnt-rising-as-fast-as-you-think/267405/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/student-...
- nazgulnarsil 14y agocorrecting rampant old wives tales is pretty much a thankless job, so thank you.
- DannyBee 14y agoStudent debt for bachelors, maybe. Even then this doesn't tell you the cost of education (IE how much you + your parents are spending), only how much money you still owed at the end. If it takes eating your parents 401k to pay for college, that's still very harmful, even if you only have 36k debt at the end. Lastly, all the numbers are normalized to 2009 dollars, which makes them hugely misleading. If you look at the original data source, in original dollars, the debt load has gone up by ~50% in <10 years (They are also estimates, with 2009 being based on 17,000 out of 1.6 million degree earners. i'm too lazy to look up the methodology in the referred report to see if it's sane)
- randomdata 14y agoA student in a four year program will lose about $150,000 at time of graduation by simply not working during that time, never mind any costs that are incurred by the schooling itself.
- betterunix 14y agoThat sounds like an argument for reforming how college is paid for. Like, say, having colleges that people can go to at no cost, without burdensome debts. There are countries on this planet that have managed to do such things...