This is how it went down for me:
My senior year, they herded us into the auditorium for a 45 minute presentation on how you would be a total failure and will be scrubbing toilets for all of your days if you didn’t sign up for college RIGHT NOW. After that, you were put in line for the recruiter where you’d pick your school and your major. When it came my turn, I told them that I wasn’t sure and was thinking of trade school. The recruiter said “oh.” and sent me back to class. The school seemed to care a lot less about my academic well being after that exchange. The Military recruiters were VERY interested in how I was doing though. Being a teen during the 00’s was wild.
That was similar to my experience. If your parents weren’t providing coaching for what constituted a “good” school or what might be a “good” major you were basically playing roulette.
Jokes on them, not even the state school wanted me because I was such a slacker in highschool. Working a dead end job, waking up after a year, and enrolling in community college was the best thing that could have happened to me.
Flipping burgers for us. There were only the two options. That or college. And a few minutes spent on talking to creditors if you can’t pay the loan but DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT YET just go to school the bills will take care of themselves.
20 years and 50k in as of yet unpaid student debt later for a piece of paper I never and will never use, I ended up going to trade school and getting it paid for by my employer entirely.
Now I have a better job, union representation, and almost no petty office bullshit. Had I entered the field after high school I’d be one of the most knowledgeable people in my field. But, it was college or burgers, they spent a lot of money to send that message as often as possible.
I didn’t have that experience, but it was a given for anyone in honors/AP classes that you’d head to college–they didn’t ask if you wanted to. My grades weren’t that great, but weighted my GPA was still alright. My guidance counselor asked if I wanted in state or out of state; public or private; small, medium, or large; and what I’d like to major in. After I said in state, she talked about a state-funded scholarship that was really easy to get 75% of my tuition covered. So, I went to the local university and majored in the first thing I blabbed about in that meeting. I basically signed my name in a couple of places and I was off to college. Ended up fine for me, but it could have gone much worse if I was a few years younger.
Colleges and universities started jacking up their tuition around 1980, when they realized they could charge far more without losing enrollment. So, being the businesses they are, they kept jacking it up. And the beauty of it is that nobody’s blaming them, it’s all boomers’ fault for encouraging education. Win-win!
In the case of at least one school, the state was also cutting back funding.
I would love for this chart to have two extra lines: the cost of tuition and an inflation adjusted cost of tuition. Without those numbers this chart could simply be “the school spent more while getting constant state funding and made the difference up with tuition”. That wasn’t actually the case here, but the chart doesn’t make it obvious.
Aid has decreased while tuition has increased because the oligarchy presses government to cut everything that doesn’t benefit them personally. Society values education and knowledge. Oligarchs value well educated workers they can make money off but didn’t have to pay to educate. So they import foreign workers, saying Americans are underqualified.
As if it wasn’t boomers running the colleges.
Well I don’t run a college. You might as well say, “As if black people don’t commit armed robbery.”
Also:
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- Don’t rush having children, get some financial stability first!
- By the way, this rule only applied to people of color. By the age of 30, you supposed to have at least 4 children. Now tell me where are my grandchildren?
Where is my financial stability?
You can have it at a later date darling, maybe you have to share a room with the baby in a single room apartment, or can’t afford to buy an Air Jordan or an iPhone for your children, but children are wonderful. Biological clock is ticking away rapidly, but financial success can wait. With Trump coming, your job likely can finally afford to give you a raise after a few tax cuts.
- boomers
Why don’t you have financial stability yet? Go get some financial stability
Yeah, I admit I fell for it too
They talked me out of becoming an electrician because they thought that was a poor person’s job
Same here. I wish the kids that I was in vocational classes with weren’t such meat heads. The smarter kids were all filtered out like I was.
We were sold a false bill of goods and then got blamed for it.
“Go to college” can be good advice. It really depends where you go to school (in state University vs private or out of state for costs) and what you major in (growing fields, salaries of people with that major, etc). Unfortunately, many of us didn’t get any advice on the second bit.
College is worthless unless your degree has a clear path or you have access to a powerful network. I say this as a college graduate lol
I love taking my twice graduated college educated ass to job postings for my field and being offered $60k CAD for highly skilled work that requires both a bachelor’s and about 5-10 years of experience to pay for my $40-50k worth of education. It’s great!
I’ve been in the job market for a while and apart from not having a bachelors degree, I have most of the certifications and experience needed. But I did the math, I am unable to afford my bills (excluding things like fuel for my car and food for the table) on anything less than around $65-70k. I don’t ask for much for everything else, but I generally need at least $75k a year to survive without starving or going bankrupt.
Life is expensive and it keeps getting more expensive, but the wages I saw posted over 10 years ago when I graduated, are the same wages I see now for the same or similar work. Since the cost of everything has increased significantly over that time, I just move on to other job postings.
Don’t mention salary in the post? I’m not interested. Don’t have an option for full time remote? No thanks. I don’t want to spend hours of my life every week in traffic, spending hundreds of dollars a month on fuel, just so you can look me in the face and say “you look tired”… Yeah, because I’m forced to be here and I’m not able to do this work from home.
What is the difference if I go to the office and use these online/cloud tools, versus doing the same from home? I don’t understand.
Americans are the poorest people I know with the most disposable income that seems to buy them nothing.
Come to Europe. You will be poorer and somewhat miserable, instead of regular poor and stressed.
I’m not sure that sounds much better lmao
Its still capitalism, just not in as an advanced stage like we are.
I’d wager they are moving back in the right direction, particularly a lot of anti-monopoly rules enforced by the EU being particularly notable at actually forcing change.
Something the US govt seems incapable of doing these days, tho I’ll give Lina Khan credit, she gave a good fucking effort.
The misery is the other Europeans telling us to stop smiling so much lol
The money I spent on my education could have bought the roof, a ton of bootstraps to pull up, but probably not the electricity. :(
I’m just saying if mortgages were treated like student loans we’d actually be in a better place as a society.
Students would love this, you’d be able to discharge the debt via bankruptcy!
Never felt so targeted in my fucking life.
If somehow I was able to purchase a house where I live (was never possible), it would have gone up in value more then the money I have been earning working my jobs.
You got so woke since going to college!
The extra kick in the teeth is for those that for whatever reason couldn’t/didn’t go to college! All that messaging of “go to college or you’re going to be worthless” just so happens to have the affect of making you feel completely worthless for not having a degree! All those years on online dating I’d pass on people that were educated and/or had good jobs because “why the hell would they be interested in a worthless uneducated factory worker.” It’s fun!
I have no debt, nor a house though, but I do have tons and tons of depression and self loathing!
I too am exactly like you except I own a few homes.
I decided to pretend to go to college in a different country. Seems to be working fine for my career since I started doing that. It didn’t fix the self loathing tho.
I made the mistake of having avocado toast once and now I’ll never be able to financially recover.
sucks to suck, I’ve lived in a shoebox eating dirt for 40 years and I’ll probably own my shoebox one day.
Wow, that’s the dream partner
I actually had avocado toast at a breakfast restaurant once. That shit was amazing. And $18. I finally understand the hype.
Lol same… I’ve had it once and it was awesome.
Still paying off the interest…
Very easy to make. Use good toasted bread, rub one clove of raw garlic on the bread, then use half an avocado per slice, spread liberally. Top with some salt and pepper and serve.
I’m so rarely in the mood for avocado that it usually goes to waste when I buy any. Love putting Tabasco in the cavity left by the pit, and eating with a spoon.
This place served it lightly smashed with diced red onions and sea salt, with tomato slices on top. Would have loved some crushed garlic mixed in but honestly it didn’t need any.
Don’t forget that most highschools also dropped any trades oriented classes too. So now if you want a decently paying career without a college degree then too fucking bad. They’re trying to eliminate any alternative to the college debt shackle to make their worker drones more easy to manipulate and abuse.
Are tech schools still a thing?
The tech schools from my area offered trade focused education paths like plumbing, drafting, auto, hairdressing, and few others.
So you could basically go to them, skip college, and go right into a trade.
I know quite a few people who did that and they seem to be doing okay now.
You’re not wrong about schools, but also it’s not hard to get into the trades. I’m in the trucking industry so easiest example for me, but any of the big trucking companies will (usually) train you with the only cost being to work for them for a set period of time. Others will reimburse your trucking school costs. I make $70k. Could make more, but I like sleeping at home.
My father in law was a Boilermaker and the union offered on the job training. He was making in the $100k+ range before he passed.
May not be able to get a head start in the trades while in high school anymore, but it’s not difficult to join them. All of the trades are short on bodies to do the work, and as a result, are often quite happy to teach you.
Part of the issue though, and the reason trades are currently so desperate for people, is that it’s never even presented as an option to kids anymore. With most trades you’re going to get far more out of on the job training than you would with formal education anyways. But people need to know that it’s an option. The classes aren’t so much about giving kids a head start but rather about presenting them with the option and letting them see if it would be something they enjoy and could do.
I was lucky in highschool, we still had shop classes and a couple teachers that were passionate about the trades. It was presented as an option. But even then it was presented as an option for losers and outcasts. It was presented as something for those people who were too dumb or broke to go to college like a “normal” person. My dad was a tradesman so I personally knew that wasn’t actually the case but many kids don’t have that and go through school seeing trades as being something you do if you fail.
Like you said, you can get into most of trades fairly easily if you just apply at one of the places desperate enough to try training anyone off the street, which is most of them now a days. But people have to actually apply for those jobs. Right now our highschools not only don’t present them as a realistic option, but they are actively hostile towards anything that isn’t college orriented.
But even then it was presented as an option for losers and outcasts. It was presented as something for those people who were too dumb or broke to go to college like a “normal” person.
At the same time as kids were told “go to college or you won’t have a job”, back in the 90s/00s, lots of industrial jobs were either being shipped overseas or swamped with visa workers and gray market migrant laborers.
Pay in fields like construction, plumbing, and HVAC took a huge hit. So did a bunch of back office IT and accounting work. Pure race to the bottom as businesses consolidated and cartelized hiring rates.
Of course, the same thing was happening in professional management and technical careers. But it’s less obvious you’re getting screwed as a Developer earning $60/hr when your parents earned $120, than as a carpenter earning $25/hr when your parents would have earned closer to $80.
