I don’t have a degree. I’m in the top 2%.
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What was the wage at that time?
In inflation adjusted dollars it would be close to that.
Life’s tough but don’t run up debts and then expect others to bail you out.
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We didn’t run up that debt, you did and guess what? Yes, the Boomers were running things when we all tried breaking into the job market too and paid off our own student loans.
I think there is a movement starting that would agree with talent, motivation, intelligence and experience over a degree.
However, with the standards of education coming out of high school today it’s rather a dismal outlook as an employer.
I put myself through college. Usually two or three classes at a time or what I could afford when working full time. I didn’t take out any loans, it was pay as I go as I could afford. My weekends and weeknights were spent studying.
It took me 10 years to get my bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.
I can’t say there is anything I learned terribly worthwhile. Real life and experience is the best teacher of all. But I did learn hard work ethic, having a goal and sticking to it and most of all perseverance.
Quite frankly, I don’t see that in today’s graduates. I see more, “I got my degree now I demand a high paying job”. It doesn’t work that way. You STILL have to work your way up in the world and that takes years, decades.
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Democrats created this crisis by devaluing blue collar workers and exporting high paying blue collar jobs and basically telling the last two generations that if they didn’t get a college degree they were nothing.
Of course the schools bear a lot of responsibility as well for driving up the cost of an education at many times the rate of inflation.
They should all get together and sue their colleges and universities for ripping them off and saddling them with debt that are like an anchor rope around their necks.
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Yes, they did.
They’ve over regulated companies out of business and demand high tax rates. Businesses have had to move overseas just to remain competitive. Better to have common sense regulations and lower tax rates that attract business rather than sending it overseas.
Witness San Francisco. They created a hell hole and now want the Fed to fund their disease vector hell hole. They are literally a pox on this country and the sooner they are regarded as such and lose their power grab, the better for everyone.
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Bush signed NAFTA tho…
The number of “degrees” that amounted to little more than hobbies, unmarketable ones at that, hadn’t yet proliferated into quite the scam where professors who increasingly write papers no one references sell over priced text books no one would otherwise buy.
The reason things have spiraled out of control isn’t just the “schools” because the cheese they’ve been putting in their traps has been plenty attractive to the doomed mice … who in truth should be responsible for their fate no matter how dire.
“Giant sucking sound” was Ross’ best and truest line.
Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are literally driving the economy of the United States. There are wealth inequality challenges to deal with but don’t people who actually care are working on it.
Boomers are the last group of people who should be lecturing anyone about financial responsibility because they created this mess in the first place by defunding public universities after they got theirs and driving up healthcare costs which they force young people to subsidize.
No, Clinton signed NAFTA.
The negotiations had been underway for years but Clinton finalized it, got it through congress and signed it into law.
And he was 100% correct.
I never followed the premise that somehow we’d be better off lowering our standard of living in order to pump it up in Mexico. It sure as hell did nothing to help us economically or with respect to illegal immigration both of which were supposed to be a given within 5 years of it going into effect.
That’s complete BS, public universities haven’t been defunded, they expanded exponentially since the eighties and jacked up the tuition and fees at about 5x the rate of inflation.
I’m actually with the kids on this one and here’s why:
It’s the job of the older generations to mentor the younger generations. It’s our job to provide them with the guidance and direction they need to make the right decisions. Sometimes, especially if the decisions are complicated, it’s our job to make those decisions for them. For those of you who are parents you will know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s parenting 101.
When it comes to college, two generations of parents failed. It was our job collectively to help our kids make informed decisions about student loans, it was our job to be outraged and demand greater oversight when it came to the clearly artificially inflated college education prices, it was our job to help our kids perform market research regarding career paths. I’m sure a lot of great parents out there did all of these things. I know I did it for my kids. In retrospect, there are a lot of things I should have done and didn’t. Thankfully my financial situation and now the financial situation of my kids is healthy. I can’t say the same for a lot of their friends and their parents.
Ultimately I think it’s really messed up to put all of this crap on the kids. There have been a lot of complicated forces in work that caused this current situation we find ourselves in with the cost of higher education and student loan debt. Anyone who expects an 18-year-old kid to put all the pieces together and figure all this out is clueless.
The FED is reading the tea leaves…slow and steady really works for long term consistent growth.
If people never face the consequences of their bad choices they never have a reason to stop making bad choices. Being able to pass the buck, figuratively and not just literally, falls under that heading.
It will take hard times to teach some people lessons they never learned while they were pampered.
Incidentally, this is also why we should have let those banks fail and been cutting the golden parachute strings for bankers.
It appears that way but it isn’t that capitalism has failed. Our priorities have failed.
In countries with high-quality homogeneous populations which still have some level of cultural unity and hegemony, capitalism works fine because people can come to cultural consensus which allows reasonable regulation of the market which allows society to function well.
We just need to make fixing our demographics a priority and capitalism will sort itself out.