I mean, what do you want me to say? We should keep inflating the bubble forever because not everyone in the blast radius has the wit to get out of it?
Even leaving aside the moral repugnance of making it structurally impossible for almost all young people to build lives in this country, so that a few who already have much more than they need can go on accumulating more still - from a purely utilitarian perspective, in what way does this lend itself to building a strong, stable country, one that isn't both constantly riven with internal strife driven by the results of generational wealth extraction, and ultimately unable to sustain itself because it can't develop enough talent to compete at global scale?
Jeff Bezos being a billionaire doesn’t stop anyone else from buying the house in the burbs with 2.1 kids. Is the tech bubble distorting the real estate market on the west coast - yes. But there is an entire country outside of the west coast where two middle class jobs like a teacher and firefighter can live well.
The pie is not static. How many jobs have the five biggest tech companies created either directly or indirectly?
The average starting salary of a college grad is $51K (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...). Knowing that, the emphasis should be on teaching students not to get tens of thousands in debt to get a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History.
Tell that to the "teach everyone to code" people. You know, the ones who have spent most of the last decade claiming that the way to build a solid life is to mortgage your future to whatever extent necessary to get a STEM credential, and once you have that, you're all set.
I know a lot of people who bought into that, got the credential, and are now learning it isn't worth what they were promised it would be. They're furious, and why shouldn't they be? They didn't expect to find they had been lied to, and they're still holding the bag.
I also know a lot of people who either didn't buy into that, or couldn't, because they weren't born into a situation where even as bad an option as mortgaging their future was available. They don't see any better hope in the "economic system" than to spend their whole lives working three shit jobs, never having time to breathe, and never having even the basic level of "I won't be homeless in a month even if I lose my income today" security that you and I have, and you probably take for granted. (I don't; I've been close enough to homelessness to know better.) Those people are furious, too, and why shouldn't they be?
It's not just the West Coast, either, and it's not just tech. I live in Baltimore, and housing prices in this town have more than doubled in the last twenty years, most of the increase occurring in the last ten. As I alluded to before, I've been fortunate enough to stay ahead of that. Most people aren't. And no one should need to be lucky to have a reliable, healthy place to live.
It's not just the single dimensionless number you cite, either. That doesn't account for regional differences in starting pay, or how your imaginary Omaha kid can't expect to make that kind of money starting out. It doesn't account for how that kind of money barely affords a one-bedroom apartment in my own town, to say nothing of in an actual center of the tech industry. And it doesn't account for all the new college grads for whom that number is meaningless anyway, because they can't get a job at all. The article you linked makes mention of that, but you don't. Why is that?
And it's not just about "job creation". Uber alone could be said to have created tens of thousands of jobs, but that, again, is a dimensionless number that explains nothing. Are those jobs worth having? Do they pay enough to deserve counting one-for-one with others? Hell, given the effort and expense Uber goes to to avoid being required to treat its employees as employees, do those deserve to be counted as jobs at all? And where in the tech industry does anyone deserve more favorable consideration? Amazon, another leading light in this sort of discussion, only gives a damn if its warehouse workers live or die inasmuch as it affects DH production targets. If this is the best we can do, we should at least have enough of a sense of shame not to big ourselves up as "job creators". But maybe you'd like to demonstrate, with cited examples, that we predominantly do better. That's what you seem to want to argue, so, okay, argue it.
I mean, I get that you want to blame all these people for the shitty situation they've found themselves in, but what I don't get is why. Why do you want to make it their fault? It doesn't take much benefit of the doubt to assume that they're no more foolish and no more stupid than you and I were when we were young, and that they can't make it the way we did is for some reason other than their own incompetence. But you won't give them that benefit of the doubt. Why not?
That isn't a rhetorical question, either. I really want an answer, because I really don't understand where you're coming from with this stuff. Like, when we were kids the joke was about "underwater basket-weaving", now you're making it about ancient Chinese art history, but it's still basically the same joke, and it already wasn't a good joke even when it still had the virtue of novelty.
So, what? Is it that you think nothing has changed in the decades between our own youth and today? I have a hard time imagining anyone could actually think that, but you're not really giving me a lot to work with here. Will you please explain your thinking, so I can at least understand where you're coming from on this?
Tell that to the "teach everyone to code" people. You know, the ones who have spent most of the last decade claiming that the way to build a solid life is to mortgage your future to whatever extent necessary to get a STEM credential, and once you have that, you're all set.
“teach yourself to code” is about not going to college to learn how to code. It says that right there on the tin. You don’t have to get tens of thousands worth of debt. Go to a local state school.
I also know a lot of people who either didn't buy into that, or couldn't, because they weren't born into a situation where even as bad an option as mortgaging their future was available. They don't see any better hope in the "economic system" than to spend their whole lives working three shit jobs, never having time to breathe, and never having even the basic level of "I won't be homeless in a month even if I lose my income today" security that you and I have, and you probably take for granted. (I don't; I've been close enough to homelessness to know better.) Those people are furious, too, and why shouldn't they be?
Name a scenario where someone can’t go to some college somewhere because of affordability between government grants and loans?
It's not just the West Coast, either, and it's not just tech. I live in Baltimore, and housing prices in this town have more than doubled in the last twenty years, most of the increase occurring in the last ten. As I alluded to before, I've been fortunate enough to stay ahead of that. Most people aren't. And no one should need to be lucky to have a reliable, healthy place to live.
Going by the 30% rule of thumb, that should be affordable by someone making $24K a year. Yeah that’s about how much I was paying when I was making that much.
I mean, I get that you want to blame all these people for the shitty situation they've found themselves in, but what I don't get is why. Why do you want to make it their fault? It doesn't take much benefit of the doubt to assume that they're no more foolish and no more stupid than you and I were when we were young
Unless you are emancipated, you can’t sign up for FAFSA unless your legal guardian sign with you. Yes I was dumb, that’s what adults are for. I told my son that he would have to go to a two year college at first and then he could transfer to a four year local college and stay at home. I also told him that we wouldn’t pay for a degree where the return wasn’t worth it.
Like, when we were kids the joke was about "underwater basket-weaving", now you're making it about ancient Chinese art history, but it's still basically the same joke, and it already wasn't a good joke even when it still had the virtue of novelty.
It’s not a joke. It’s the job of parents to help their children make good decisions. We have the internet now. It’s not hard to research potential salaries based on major.
So, what? Is it that you think nothing has changed in the decades between our own youth and today? I have a hard time imagining anyone could actually think that, but you're not really giving me a lot to work with here. Will you please explain your thinking, so I can at least understand where you're coming from on this?
Yes things have changed. I have children that I have had to guide through the process. It’s called being a responsible adult as a parent.
Okay, so, first off, you're looking at the homeownership rate as a dimensionless number, without any regard for how it's composed. And that, again, is a problem, because if you look at how it is composed, what you very quickly see is that homeownership is strongly concentrated among older people and among married couples, and not among young people just starting out in life. [1] If you want to argue that homeownership as opposed to rentership is significant here, in the context of a discussion around whether young people's prospects and chances are worthy of their outrage, then you need to demonstrate that homeownership is as accessible to that cohort as to any other. Which you can't do, because it isn't.
Second, I didn't say "teach yourself to code", because that isn't what has largely been pushed. Yes, if you're plugged into the tech industry zeitgeist, that's what you tend to hear. But most people aren't, and the people who have primarily been targeted by the "learn to code" marketing extremely aren't. Mostly they've been targeted by bootcamps selling snake oil and pricing it as if it were gold. Even TechCrunch sees this, and has seen it for years. [2] Why don't you see it now?
Third, you're talking out both sides of your mouth when it comes to affordability. You ask me to cite a situation in which someone can't afford to go to college based on grants and loans et cetera, and then you spend a lot of time talking about how it takes a lot of parental support to get access to those programs. As you accurately note, you can't sign on your own for grants or loans; you need a parent to do it for you, or you need to be emancipated, which is itself a complex and often quite expensive process.
It's nice to assume, based anecdotally on the circumstances of your own life, that everyone trying to make a start in life has parents with the requisite knowledge, free time, and goodwill to provide this kind of support. Unfortunately, that assumption isn't very well borne out by reality. A lot of potentially eligible students don't understand the process well enough to get through it [3], and if you don't have the good luck to be white, your odds get a lot worse. [also 3]
Beyond that, FAFSA application rates appear to have dropped significantly [4, "2017-18 Application Cycle"], well before the additional decline in both new applications [5] and renewals [6] apparently caused by the COVID-19 pandemic - both of which also appear to affect primarily students from low-income families, who are most in need of aid. And, in general, the complexity and difficulty of applying for federal student aid, and the consequent difficulty of getting the benefits you so casually assume based on personal experience must be equally available to everyone regardless of circumstance, is well acknowledged in the academic industry and has been for quite some time. [7], [8]
All of that is before we even start to get to the question of whether, and which, college degrees have value as job-getting credentials. You haven't shown anything to suggest I'm wrong in saying, or that the people I'm hearing it from are wrong in saying, that that credential doesn't have the same value it once did. Certainly in the present moment it doesn't seem to be doing a lot of good [9].
Even before COVID-19, the chances for a fresh college grad looked less than rosy, and those numbers probably don't mean a hell of a lot in light of the pandemic, when there's suddenly a glut in the job market of people who already have, not only training, but also the kind of experience that employers preferentially look for. It'd surprise me very much if we didn't, over the next few months to a couple of years, see those people tend much more to get hired back, than see people who as yet have no job experience get hired to fill the roles that do open up. And it would surprise me very much if we don't also see fewer roles open back up, even by comparison with the situation before the pandemic.
And, although I'm aware I risk cliché by saying it, the pandemic changes everything. We're probably all tired of hearing that said, but that doesn't give us a free pass to ignore its effects on our economy, and on the prospects of people who have to start out making their lives in a post-COVID world. (Not that we're anywhere near a post-COVID world here in the US, judging by the latest case rates.) Making favorable assumptions based on last year's situation is dangerously likely to lead to massive error, the way things have gone, to say nothing of making favorable assumptions based on situations a quarter century gone.
Unfortunately, you don't seem to have changed your perspective at all, whether because of the pandemic or for any other reason. You're still doing what you started out doing, namely, blaming young people today for failures that they haven't committed and that are not their fault. Asked to explain yourself, you've narrowed your focus to implicitly blaming young people who fail to launch today for the failures of their parents, in being unable or unwilling to provide the massive amount of support required to ensure they get a good start, from federal aid to college choice to guidance on how to make a reasonably remunerative career.
And that's something I do know a fair bit about, albeit not quite firsthand. As I mentioned, I didn't go to college myself, but I came up among a cohort many of whom did, and I saw how it consumed much of their, and their parents', time and effort during our senior year of high school. And that's for people who already know how to do it - and, on top of that, in a school that at least tried to do a halfway decent job of providing career counseling and support, which isn't something that can be expected of a lot of schools today. [10] dates from 2015, the most recent I could find - what do you have to show that situation has improved at all since then? What do you have to show that any of this has improved since then, or that it will do so in the wake of the worst economic injury our country has suffered within living memory?
I have to admit, I appreciate the effort you've put in to try to clarify your position here. I wish I could say I was less disappointed in the result.
what you very quickly see is that homeownership is strongly concentrated among older people and among married couples, and not among young people just starting out in life.
If you are young and single, it’s dumb to buy a home. You limit your mobility and optionality to move to where the jobs are.
You ask me to cite a situation in which someone can't afford to go to college based on grants and loans et cetera, and then you spend a lot of time talking about how it takes a lot of parental support to get access to those programs.
Have you filled out a FAFSA recently? The only support it takes from parents is filling out their tax information. It’s pushed by every school counselor.
You're still doing what you started out doing, namely, blaming young people today for failures that they haven't committed and that are not their fault
I’m blaming parents. And what massive amounts of support? Filling out a form and actually doing research? The FAFSA process goes out of its way to inform parents.
And that's something I do know a fair bit about, albeit not quite firsthand. As I mentioned, I didn't go to college myself, but I came up among a cohort many of whom did
So you didn’t go to college yourself nor have you recently gone through the process as a parent recently. I have gone through the process as a parent within the last four years.
Everything is crazy now with Covid, we are giving our younger son a year off. But we will be doing the song and dance again.
What do you propose the government do differently?
I see you have taken my advice about how you might argue differently! [1] Granted, it's odd to see you double down on anecdotes in the wake of a comment that gave you the citations you were asking for earlier. But it's not up to me to tell you how, or how effectively, you should support your thesis, whatever that actually is.
If you are young and single, it’s dumb to buy a home.
Yes, I'd agree. So why'd you bring up homeownership as though it mattered? I mean, you did that, and I took it on faith that you had some kind of point to make with that, and I examined it on that basis. Now you're saying you had no point in bringing it up in the first place. So, why did you?
I’m blaming parents.
Are you, though? You haven't explicitly assigned blame to anyone until now, and it's interesting to me that you've waited so long. It's also interesting that you didn't do that in all the time you spent talking about people's Reddit posts about how they feel like they've been screwed and they don't know what to do about it. You seemed very happy then with whatever assumption people made, and you didn't see a need to get specific until somebody gave you real pushback. Why is that?
What do you propose the government do differently?
Solve the problem? Do the job its members, official and otherwise, are collectively paid, forcibly and with remarkable exorbitance, to do? I mean, you're asking a software engineer a question that's far outside his competence, and unlike some, I have the good sense to know it's a question I'm not able to answer in detail. One wonders why you'd ask such a person such a question at all.
But I also know there are people whose profession it is to be able to answer that kind of question. Quite a lot of them, actually, between government service proper, the similarly vast NGO industry, and various policy posts in industries other than that one. If you want a detailed answer for how a problem like this gets solved, ask some of those experts, and I'm sure they'll be able to provide. But I don't have to be one of those experts to recognize that a problem exists and badly needs solving.
Anyway, isn't all of this, that a government exists to identify and solve this sort of problem in order to maintain a stable, livable society for everyone, more or less the basic deal implicit in a phrase like "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"? I don't know, that's just something I remember hearing once somewhere. It's probably not very important.
I mean, you're asking a software engineer a question that's far outside his competence, and unlike some, I have the good sense to know it's a question I'm not able to answer in detail. One wonders why you'd ask such a person such a question at all.
I’m a software engineer. But, I’m also a parent. It’s my responsibility to be informed and give my children advice.
Were my parents better informed than average - especially my mom who was teacher at the time and helped plenty of low income and minority students work their way through the school system - yes. No, this isn’t a “white savior complex”. My mom is Black.
Were her parents who didn’t have even a high school education and grew up in the segregated south “privileged”. Heck no, out of their five kids, two went to college and became teachers, one became a nurse, and one has owned his own car repair shop for over 30 years.
Myself, I went to a local state college that no one had ever heard of and within three years I was making the same amount as people who graduated from college with tens of thousands in debt.
It’s not the government’s job to help young people make good decisions - it’s the parents.
I put the blame and responsibility on parents to comments up.
Unless you are emancipated, you can’t sign up for FAFSA unless your legal guardian sign with you. Yes I was dumb, that’s what adults are for.
I’ve been talking about home ownership and renting since the very beginning.
I’ve also spoken about the other alternative - staying with your parents as part of a multigenerational home until you can afford to move out like much of the rest of the world.
Even leaving aside the moral repugnance of making it structurally impossible for almost all young people to build lives in this country, so that a few who already have much more than they need can go on accumulating more still - from a purely utilitarian perspective, in what way does this lend itself to building a strong, stable country, one that isn't both constantly riven with internal strife driven by the results of generational wealth extraction, and ultimately unable to sustain itself because it can't develop enough talent to compete at global scale?