generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

because you gotta decide somehow

KATHRIN 3 days ago
This is interesting and well written. Find yourself a grad student in Math and you’ve got your job. I want more articles of a “pop math” variety exploring the numbers of everyday life. Not only are they interesting and engaging, these types of stories provide the groundwork for helping “us” (entrepreneurs) know what industries we should be attacking.

i should unbookmark this thread. every time it's updated, ten minutes later i'm depressed

MATH GRAD STUDENT INTERN NEEDED FOR ONLINE STARTUP

I think that's a spam bot

http://gawker.com/5933249/even-the-well+off-find-college-unaffordable-now

http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegeadvantage/

the problem w/ the articles like this is that they don't highlight the credentials inflation that's been going on. that's not the whole story, a lot of jobs do require more education ie the types in that manufacturing article, forget what thread that was. but 'you need a BA to get a retail/sales/caretaker job' doesn't really highlight the benefits of education, it highlights the benefits of having jumped over the BA bar in a period of 8% unemployment + continually increasing educational attainment %s.

http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/CollegeAdvantage.FullReport.081512.pdf
pg 31 mentions it - "low, middle and high education occupations are all hiring more educated workers in the current economic recovery than before the recession."

two pages later they counter w/ the stat that on a national level people w/ BAs make more than people w/ the same job and lower education = higher value than employers are willing to pay for. but that logic doesn't square w/ 'across all occupations, more educated workers are being hired'.

rereading that 'ie' = 'eg' (goes back to college)

more on this
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/17/education-and-the-recession-continued/
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-recession-for-college-grads

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/how-young-homeowners-lost-out-by-buying/261612/

I've started to think people buying now are losing out too - rates are so low that long-term price appreciation is going to be dampened.

well, as jj said in the suburbs thread, houses are for living in, not for long-term price appreciation

http://www.economist.com/node/21563725

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/degree-inflation-jobs-that-newly-require-b-a-s/

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21567373-american-universities-represent-declining-value-money-their-students-not-what-it

reposted from quiddities, just to keep it all in one place: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html

it's a really good article. like shockingly good for the nyt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/education/parents-financial-support-linked-to-college-grades.html?hp

Parents saving for college costs, take heed: A new national study has found that the more college money parents provide — whether in absolute terms or as a share of total costs — the lower their children’s college grades.

Students from wealthy families are more likely than those from poor families to go to college, and those whose parents pay their way are more likely to graduate. But according to “More Is More or More Is Less? Parent Financial Investments During College,” a study by Laura Hamilton, a sociology professor at the University of California, Merced, greater parental contributions were linked with lower grades across all kinds of four-year institutions.

hahahahaha

lol w/e

http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-has-alarming-level-of-pride-in-institution-tha,30853/

something something correlation causation

http://andrewgelman.com/2013/01/that-claim-that-students-whose-parents-pay-for-more-of-college-get-wors-grades/

wow that study is worse than i could have imagined.

Good postings.

I guess this is the rolling internship thread as well, right?

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/unpaid-internships-are-a-rich-girl-problem-and-also-a-real-problem/273106/

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/opportunity-costs-the-true-price-of-internships

I think the comparison w/ housework is a little forced

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324432004578306610055834952.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#project%3DBORROW021620130216%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive

Okay, this is starting to get to "Vinyl Lives!" levels. Is "people with arts degrees made bad life decisions" just the default slow day story now?

a 0% graduation rate is pretty damning

I mostly just linked it for the interactive chart

the historically black colleges have pretty bleak numbers. 27% default rate at morehouse, which is a fairly well-respected college.

How can anywhere have a 0℅ graduation rate?

well the requirements for graduation at devry university-oregon include solving the p vs np problem

negative-20k/year net cost at Berea College, nice...

I'm curious about why art colleges seem to be so expensive - are their fees really higher than everyone else, or is it just that they don't offer much financial aid? Can only rich people afford to attend?

depends on your definition of 'afford' but those schools are often for-profit / don't have endowments / are small enough to not really have the economy of scales that big universities have

sorta case by case tho and you don't want to lump Berklee College of Music in w/ "International Academy of Design and Technology-Nashville"

Yeah I figure a lot of the outliers are just that and Berklee etc. obviously have prestige but then there are "Southwest University of Visual Arts-Albuquerque" and "Ringling College of Art and Design", who are presumably (? idk really) not giving you a guaranteed money-spinner of a degree for your 40k per year.

yep

I think a study showed that something like 20% of Juliard grads wound up earning a living from music.

"Graduation rates include first-time, full-time undergraduates who began at the institution and completed a bachelor's degree within six years or associate's degree within three years."

I'd imagine a huge proportion of students at some of these schools aren't on degree tracks at all, so depending on how they calculate things this could be just asking the entirely wrong question.

Ringling is actually a pretty well-respected school, for an art school.

yeah the 6-year graduation rate statistic is unfair to some institutions but it's a standard metric that every four-year college reports

also it's a relief that those people with six-figure debts from attending NYU or whatever are outliers…

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html

We had articles last week on postgraduate degrees being the new undergraduate degrees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/feb/07/rising-number-postgraduates-social-mobility?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/opinion/dont-judge-a-colleges-value-by-graduates-paycheck.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

lol. this dude is so out of touch

The phrase 'Don't piss on me and tell me that it's raining' comes to mind here

talking about money is just so gauche

university presidents being out of touch with everything all the time is all-time classic

dayo, Drew Faust is a woman, of "Woman to lead Harvard" fame (actual headline!)

when colleges go back to charging $7000/year in tuition, I will go back to not judging colleges' value by graduates' paychecks