Isn’t it great, Summer is finally here. School is out and everyone is heading for the beach. In spite of the season, I can’t help but think about all the new graduates.
How many young people you know graduated from college with huge debt? Do you believe what’s happening there?
At a time when society seems to be telling young people that they can’t make it in life without a college education, so many of those kids are leaving college with unbelievable debt and very questionable employment prospects. You have to wonder what kind of education they got if they were gullible enough to indebt themselves for life to pay for it.
My dad was a child of the depression so just going to college was still a privilege. After WWII, going to work was a high priority and getting a better education was desirable but not necessary. When my generation of baby boomers came along in the sixties, a college education was more attainable and employment opportunities seemed endless.
My dad always said that if we worked hard and saved our money we could go to college and be anything we wanted to be. I have two brothers and a sister so with a big family, he told us early on that he would help us go to college but he wouldn’t carry the biggest burden. Growing up, he was determined that I be prepared when college came so I worked from the time I was ten years old making money to pay for college. He made me save half of each “pay check”.
When I was a freshman at UW in the late sixties, going to college cost a lot less money and seemed to take less time. We were expected to complete our fifteen credits per quarter and graduate in four years. It seems to me that tuition at the University of Washington was about $450 per quarter in 1968. If you add in the books for another $100 per quarter, rent off campus was $80/month and then there’s food and other miscellaneous expenses, the number is still much less than a thousand per quarter.
I remember that I quit a union sawmill job that paid $2.895 per hour to go to school in the fall of 1968.
So here we are in the 21st Century and in-state tuition cost has gone up almost ten-fold to $4200 per quarter while housing costs have risen about 800% and food is ten times as much in some areas. I remember eating a lot of Chef Boyardi Spaghetti in a can. It cost a quarter a can at the Safeway on Brooklyn.
Looking back, college was a steal when I was a kid compared to the screwing kids take today.
Nostalgia is great, but if we’re trying to figure out how we drove off into the ditch, we have to peel back the onion a little.
I’m sure that before kids go to college today they sit down with their guidance counselors to talk about career paths with corresponding job prospects offering decent entry level pay and opportunities for advancement so when college is done there’s a logical next step.
If you told your counselor that you wanted to be a physical therapist, there was an educational track to get you there in four years. If you said you wanted to be an electrical engineer, a software engineer, a mechanical or aeronautical engineer, there were tracks for you too.
When I went to college in 1968, being there served two purposes; to get an education and to keep you from being drafted into the View Nam War. A lot of us knew we needed an education but we really didn’t know what we wanted to be so we didn’t declare a major at the start. That made the job of setting up a 4 year plan more difficult but it kept us out of the war.
At some point you have to look at education as a tool to get you to a better life. But the tool has to have a purpose. If you have a tool that doesn’t have a productive job to do, it’s not much of a tool. Generally speaking we go to college to prepare us to get a white collar job that can provide a comfortable living but there are some who go for the pleasure of learning without an economic component.
I appreciate the fact that a music major may provide a person with superior skills or knowledge of music, either performing or theory and the endless pleasure of playing an instrument, but there aren’t many jobs for musicians.
The fact that many businesses required all applicants to have a college education but not one related to the work they did suggested to students that a history degree might be useful in some capacity. Many liberal arts graduates became salesmen/people for the guys who got engineering or business degrees.
Currently we are cranking out thousands of college graduates per year who have undergraduate degrees in programs so obscure there is only one job they are qualified for and that is a volunteer at a homeless shelter.
I know that’s not altogether true, but this whole Wall Street protest controversy is driven by young people who paid exorbitant amounts of money for an education knowing full well there were no jobs when they were done. You don’t have to have a degree in rocket science to know better. The counter person at McDonalds or Burger King ends up being a college graduate feeling underappreciated and betrayed.
I only have so much sympathy for them.
I have been a lifelong learner. I take classes in subjects that interest me for the pleasure of knowing the material. I know going in that it’s not about a job. For others like me, we have no illusions about who is entitled and who is going to pay.
Nobody is entitled and we are going to pay. If I borrow the money so I don’t have to work while I am going to school, then that’s a bargain I have to deal with. It’s a choice I willingly make.
An education is an investment we make in ourselves. We are not entitled to a free college education. You can work for it early like I did and pay as you go or you can borrow the money and get stuck with the debt.
It’s a choice you get to make. But whatever choice you make, it’s yours.
Posted on June 1, 2019 at 11:08 am in Political commentary | RSS feed
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No Loss for Words
Student Debt: Required or Optional
by Steve DanaIsn’t it great, Summer is finally here. School is out and everyone is heading for the beach. In spite of the season, I can’t help but think about all the new graduates.
How many young people you know graduated from college with huge debt? Do you believe what’s happening there?
At a time when society seems to be telling young people that they can’t make it in life without a college education, so many of those kids are leaving college with unbelievable debt and very questionable employment prospects. You have to wonder what kind of education they got if they were gullible enough to indebt themselves for life to pay for it.
My dad was a child of the depression so just going to college was still a privilege. After WWII, going to work was a high priority and getting a better education was desirable but not necessary. When my generation of baby boomers came along in the sixties, a college education was more attainable and employment opportunities seemed endless.
My dad always said that if we worked hard and saved our money we could go to college and be anything we wanted to be. I have two brothers and a sister so with a big family, he told us early on that he would help us go to college but he wouldn’t carry the biggest burden. Growing up, he was determined that I be prepared when college came so I worked from the time I was ten years old making money to pay for college. He made me save half of each “pay check”.
When I was a freshman at UW in the late sixties, going to college cost a lot less money and seemed to take less time. We were expected to complete our fifteen credits per quarter and graduate in four years. It seems to me that tuition at the University of Washington was about $450 per quarter in 1968. If you add in the books for another $100 per quarter, rent off campus was $80/month and then there’s food and other miscellaneous expenses, the number is still much less than a thousand per quarter.
I remember that I quit a union sawmill job that paid $2.895 per hour to go to school in the fall of 1968.
So here we are in the 21st Century and in-state tuition cost has gone up almost ten-fold to $4200 per quarter while housing costs have risen about 800% and food is ten times as much in some areas. I remember eating a lot of Chef Boyardi Spaghetti in a can. It cost a quarter a can at the Safeway on Brooklyn.
Looking back, college was a steal when I was a kid compared to the screwing kids take today.
Nostalgia is great, but if we’re trying to figure out how we drove off into the ditch, we have to peel back the onion a little.
I’m sure that before kids go to college today they sit down with their guidance counselors to talk about career paths with corresponding job prospects offering decent entry level pay and opportunities for advancement so when college is done there’s a logical next step.
If you told your counselor that you wanted to be a physical therapist, there was an educational track to get you there in four years. If you said you wanted to be an electrical engineer, a software engineer, a mechanical or aeronautical engineer, there were tracks for you too.
When I went to college in 1968, being there served two purposes; to get an education and to keep you from being drafted into the View Nam War. A lot of us knew we needed an education but we really didn’t know what we wanted to be so we didn’t declare a major at the start. That made the job of setting up a 4 year plan more difficult but it kept us out of the war.
At some point you have to look at education as a tool to get you to a better life. But the tool has to have a purpose. If you have a tool that doesn’t have a productive job to do, it’s not much of a tool. Generally speaking we go to college to prepare us to get a white collar job that can provide a comfortable living but there are some who go for the pleasure of learning without an economic component.
I appreciate the fact that a music major may provide a person with superior skills or knowledge of music, either performing or theory and the endless pleasure of playing an instrument, but there aren’t many jobs for musicians.
The fact that many businesses required all applicants to have a college education but not one related to the work they did suggested to students that a history degree might be useful in some capacity. Many liberal arts graduates became salesmen/people for the guys who got engineering or business degrees.
Currently we are cranking out thousands of college graduates per year who have undergraduate degrees in programs so obscure there is only one job they are qualified for and that is a volunteer at a homeless shelter.
I know that’s not altogether true, but this whole Wall Street protest controversy is driven by young people who paid exorbitant amounts of money for an education knowing full well there were no jobs when they were done. You don’t have to have a degree in rocket science to know better. The counter person at McDonalds or Burger King ends up being a college graduate feeling underappreciated and betrayed.
I only have so much sympathy for them.
I have been a lifelong learner. I take classes in subjects that interest me for the pleasure of knowing the material. I know going in that it’s not about a job. For others like me, we have no illusions about who is entitled and who is going to pay.
Nobody is entitled and we are going to pay. If I borrow the money so I don’t have to work while I am going to school, then that’s a bargain I have to deal with. It’s a choice I willingly make.
An education is an investment we make in ourselves. We are not entitled to a free college education. You can work for it early like I did and pay as you go or you can borrow the money and get stuck with the debt.
It’s a choice you get to make. But whatever choice you make, it’s yours.
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Posted on June 1, 2019 at 11:08 am in Political commentary | RSS feed | Reply | Trackback URL