What kind of idiot puts themselves $125,000 in debt to get a theater degree?
Alfred said he owes more than $125,000 for his degrees in theater when he’s not even working in that field.
“I work at a call center, and I make $10 an hour,” he said. “It’s surreal. I feel like a loser.”
I continue to think that academia is the next big bubble waiting to pop.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Another reason to think that college degrees are a bubble waiting to pop: a goodly amount of the email spam I get is hawking them, with subjects like “Get the degree you need,” and “Nominate for the degree” (what in the world does that even mean? I’ve never heard of “nominating” for a degree). The latest one is “Get any degree you want.” If that doesn’t devalue the notion of a degree, I don’t know what does.
Odd. My ROI on Year 1 alone was 600% of total university cost basis. Engineering vs. theater arts, maybe?
And what kind of idiot loans a kid $125,000 for the purpose of collecting theater degrees?
Not someone who took any kind of serious look at the odds those degrees would help that kid pay off the loans.
Yup, all the classic bubble ingredients – wildly overpriced assets being bid ever-higher with too-easy money.
I got a valueless degree too, but I didn’t take out any loans to get it. Of course, I completed my degree 19 years ago…
I probably spent $15,000 (counting books?) over 5 years to get a BS in Molecular Biology from a very highly-regarded school. In-state tuition, lived at home, rode the bus. I even spent a semester abroad — I had nearly enough credits for a minor in Russian.
A decent grad school will pay around that per *year* for a good molecular biologist working towards a PhD. I’m betting our theater major couldn’t find a $125,000 a year job out of college.
(And silicon valley paid more than that for an intern writer. :D)
A related ill effect is that high school is now all about college prep, for the most part. The number of AP classes is ballooning, and AP US History, AP Government, and AP Art — I do not jest! — have become essentially de rigeur for those seeking the highest social regard, while courses in practical stuff like home ec, shop, welding, auto repair, and household finance have vanished.
Additionally, the modern teenager is less and less likely to spend any time in his high-school years gainfully employed. In the first place, new mandates on minimum wages (and coming soon: health benefit mandates!) mean employers are reluctant to hire teenagers for entry-level jobs, and more likely to hire older (typically Hispanic immigrant out here) workers who are less flaky and likely to be full-time year-round. Related recent headline: unemployment among teenagers is well over 50%, and that’s among those who are actually looking for jobs. Thanks Democrats!
But in the second place, the college-educational industrial complex says that flipping burgers, mowing lawns, babysitting, or waiting tables for mere cash is not what “college bound” high-school students do. No, they take unpaid “internships” or work on “public service” projects of this or that highly moral type. In short (as I remarked to my daughter recently, as she was anxiously totting up her “community service” hours to see if they were enough to graduate), today’s high-school students are told forcefully that the kind of work they should be doing is the kind for which no one is willing to pay them, i.e. something utterly useless to anyone.
I don’t wonder at all that the generation now in their teens and twenties are both deeply narcissistic — having only worked on Very Important Things like global warming or race relations — and profoundly insecure, having rarely if ever held down a steady paying job.
The last lasting legacy of the Boomer generation, I guess: a stunningly incompetent training of the next generation.
And what kind of idiot loans a kid $125,000 for the purpose of collecting theater degrees?
A non-idiot who knows that the government will guarantee the loan. See what I mean about another bubble in the making…?
“I feel like a loser.”
Maybe that’s because you are a loser, Alfred. And an idiot.
Carl, you said a mouthful.
I have a college degree (I have no skills or talent, so what else could I do?), so I can honestly say it’s not the be-all and end-all of the universe. I have the greatest respect for people who know how to do things – plumbers, electricians, car mechanics, etc. (And since I learned how to do some simple household/auto repairs, I have even more respect, if that’s possible.)
When Clintoon was President, I remember him making a comment about how everyone should have a college education. That’s idiotic, but typical for him and others of his ilk. My response at the time was, if that’s the way he feels, he should call a Ph. D. the next time his toilet is stopped up. đ
“community service”
I must be getting old, as I still associate that phrase with guys who go out every Saturday to pick up litter on the the median strips so they can avoid jail time.
Heh, they aren’t getting a lot of sympathy in the comments to the story either. My view is that this is a colossally stupid practice on the part of the federal government. There’s no way a dumb college student should be able to pick up more than a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt. The terrible thing is that this isn’t a traditional bubble. It can go on for a while longer. It’ll only end when the federal government finally shuts off the spigot.
Don’t forget the old standby spam ad, “Obama says Moms should return to school”.
Another reason to think that college degrees are a bubble waiting to pop: a goodly amount of the email spam I get is hawking them….
Umm, does that mean the ‘sex’ bubble is about to pop? I get a lot of spam ads hawking Viagra….
BBB
I fearlessly predict that the s3x bubble will never pop, unless the government subsidizes it…
One thing I’ve always wondered about: What are supposed to be the possible career outcomes for things like Hispanic Studies, Feminist Studies, Native-American Studies, or any of the various victimology majors? What are your career prospects? By comparison, something like Theater Arts suddenly resembles Chemical Engineering or Computer Science.
Bruce, Bruce, Bruce. Who do you think is needed to staff those $120,000 a year Federal jobs in the new Department of Health, making sure there are no secret racist clauses in the nation’s health-insurance plans?
Bruce, there’s a lot of money to be made in non-profit non-governmental agencies. The salaries for “volunteers” are pretty mind blowing.
I worked some years back toward a degree in History, as I have had a lifelong fascination with medieval Europe. But then I got into drafting to pay the bills while taking history classes, and found that I was(and still am) pretty good at it. I was unable to find design work a few years back so I took a few classes toward my BA. My desire to become a history teacher/professor faded while I was taking these classes, as I saw first hand how much the history field has deteoriated since the bulk of my studies in the early 80s. I also saw how much competition there is for the few openings, as well as the mind-numbing PC attitude of far too many of my would be peers. I came to the conclusion that it would take far too much money to get my advanced degree in history, and I could make only a small fraction of what I can as a designer. I study history on my own time; my medieval library is better than some colleges, and I can focus on what interests me, rather than say, “Attitudes Toward Homosexuality in Aquitaine During the Post Joan of Arc Period”. I don’t want to incur a 50k debt for student loans at this stage of my life, since there is a decent chance that I won’t live to pay it off.
I see little value in most of the social science classes out there, other than for the fact that they keep a lot of people employed who would otherwise be on the corners begging for Thunderbird money.
I do think that everyone should have a grounding in our culture, the “melting pot” ideal.
One further point, Rand. I respectfully disagree with the idea that kids should work after hour jobs. When I was in high school during the mid 70s, I was college bound, as were most of the kids at my school, which at that time was outstanding academically(not any more, but I won’t offer that rant). We were buried in homework, with only a few AP classes offered, which my blue collar parents couldn’t afford. I shared the housework with my brother, and had a Pennysaver route for extra book money. Working retail didn’t really seem to be something that would help me get into the school that I wanted for entymology. I already had good study habits, and my parents believed that getting a good night’s sleep was important. Since it was rare to have less than 4-5 hours homework per night, plus extra study time, a part time job would have meant shorting myself on sleep. My peers that worked after school did not do as well on the SATs, etc. Too many of them eventually settled for permanent low paying retail jobs. I recently saw a woman that I went to school with 35 years ago is still working just retail sales in a mall clothing store, when in high school she scored in the upper part of the SATs, but her grades greatly suffered because of her retail work after class. And she dreamed of being an architect…
The one thing that working the retail jobs does have in its favor is that it teaches time budgeting, as one tries to juggle school work, after school activities, employment, homework, and just relaxing time, which IMHO is still very important. I struggled with that for some years after high school, until I went into the service.
Lastly, Mr. Pham is absolutely correct about both the unpaid internship cr&p and the loss of practical value classes. While I am very good at mechanical design, I have little to no practical skills of any sort, and have to rely on either my wonderful wife or pay someone else.
It’s not that the AP classes are crowding-out the practical ones, it’s that their non-AP counterparts are worthless. I agree that there should be more practical classes, but if anything it should be at the expense of watered-down science classes and not genuine college prep. So yes, more âshopâ classes, more leveraging of the early enthusiasm and translating that into a pattern of success that will motivate kids their entire career.
Don, then what were you doing in school, if you had so much homework outside of class? Here’s my view, school already sucks up 40 or more hours a week. Your homework is another 15-35 hours a week (depending on what you do on weekends). And you studied on top of that. That’s too much time merely to get a high school diploma. At current minimum wage and assuming the lower number of hours, that’s almost $20,000 a year in labor.
My view is that if you had worked a paying job for those four years and those hours. And if you saved most of the money you made, you’d make up the income difference between having a diploma and not having a diploma. Similarly, an additional four years of this sort of work, if saved, would make up the difference between having a college diploma and not having one, especially if you picked up a big student loan in the process of going to college.
There are a number of intangible benefits to graduating from high school and going to college. But collecting more net wealth over your total career is not necessarily one of those benefits. I think that’s a serious problem with the current education system from K-12 on up to post-graduate education.
Don-
Working evenings during the school year isn’t the only way to be able to have a job while still in high school. When I was in high school, I only worked weekends during the school year, and full-time during holiday breaks and the summer, and it still gave me money and a sense of a work ethic.
In fact, when I graduated and was unable to find a tech job in 2000 (go figure), that same job was a source of income to keep me afloat before I moved on, because I had moved up to a management position with the level of experience that I had from all of my years working there.
Same situation now after grad school. The part-time retail job I had during grad school has kept my mortgage paid since I graduated, and I was moved into a salaried management position with a decent enough salary to keep me afloat until I landed the new job that I start in a few weeks.
Yes, well, the modern unbelievable homework fetish is yet another pet peeve o’ mine. It’s plain nuts. I do not see any reason for regular, i.e. daily, homework until you leave high school, and there should be zero before grade 9, except in the case that some opportunity for learning exists outside the classroom that can’t be given in it (and even then, the kids should get time off from regular school to do it).
It’s another mindless enslavement to an inappropriate “college bound” paradigm. In college it makes sense to have homework. Lectures are by design intense, because the instructors for the most part have their main job elsewhere (research). So you’re only scheduled for 12 to 15 hours of in-class time per week. You need to make up the other 20 to 30 hours of a full week’s work at home, obviously.
But in K-12 education, you’re already in class 30 hours a week. That is more than enough to teach you what you need to know at a reasonable pace. And, indeed, the homework that gets sent home is largely meaningless busywork. Or if it is real learning work, then it’s because the teacher takes time in class to wander off into personal anecdotes or his favorite pet rant, having offloaded the real learning to the poor kids’ home hours.
It’s outrageous. Kids need time to goof off, relax, recharge, hang out with friends, and, yeah, I think it would do them some real good to get a taste of real working life a few hours a week, managing their own cash, showing up on time, and otherwise learning the ropes of the labor market.
But huge gobs of their time are wasted in this asinine squirrel-cage rat-race run after the “college” cachet, where if you’re not slaving away until midnight underlining your notes in five different colors of highlighter, you’re some plebiean loser. Feh.
I have to agree on the homework thing. It is one thing for young kids to practice studying at home with a token amount of skills practice and assigned reading, but I know 5th & 6th graders that do homework on the weekends. What happened to playtime? Family time? Going to church? Going to the park? Walking the dog? Water baloon fights? Boardgames? Riding a bike? Sports? I thought that’s what weekends were for.
The subject of your entry is not a “loser.” You are blaming the victim for major societal problems. In the 1970s, most financial aid for students was in the form of grants and scholarships based on need and merit. Then Reagan came in and changed all the grants to loans. Many of us with good grades in high school who were promised we would get scholarships to college ended up feeling extremely betrayed when these disappeared just as time came for us to enter college. Why was it okay for a secretary in the billing department to threaten me, an A student, with being kicked out because my parents couldn’t pay what the school said they could, yet at the same time, a C student in my dorm never suffered this mistreatment simply because her father made $100,000 a year? Another problem is the cost of a college education is spiraling totally out of control, meaning it is becoming less and less accessible to the average person. My mother went to City College in NY for free, as could any student at that time with a B average or better. That is what we need to bring back. Thirty years of trickle down economics have brought us the worst gap between our richest and poorest citizens since the Great Depression. “Free trade” agreements like NAFTA and GATT have resulted in whole sectors of jobs being shipped overseas. We are in the middle of a serious recession, meaning no matter what someone studied in college, it will be difficult for them to get a job. These are all structural economic problems and need to be addressed at that level.
Why was it okay for a secretary in the billing department to threaten me, an A student, with being kicked out because my parents couldnât pay what the school said they could, yet at the same time, a C student in my dorm never suffered this mistreatment simply because her father made $100,000 a year?
You weren’t paying for a service they were providing. The C student was. Having said that, I think the idea of basing your education cost on what you can “afford” to pay is one of those stupid ideas that you’d expect from academia. When I applied to schools in the late 80’s, one school did that to me (saying I was elegible for X dollars because my parents made Y dollars). I thought about it and dropped them. Never regretted it especially when I read stories like yours. You could have gone to a school where they wouldn’t treat you like a revenue source.
Finally, Reagan didn’t promise you a scholarship.
Another problem is the cost of a college education is spiraling totally out of control, meaning it is becoming less and less accessible to the average person.
The answer is simple. Cut the education subsidies. It’s not magic, it’s a huge pile of government funds loaned out blindly to people with heartbeats and maybe a few without.
Thirty years of trickle down economics have brought us the worst gap between our richest and poorest citizens since the Great Depression. âFree tradeâ agreements like NAFTA and GATT have resulted in whole sectors of jobs being shipped overseas. We are in the middle of a serious recession, meaning no matter what someone studied in college, it will be difficult for them to get a job. These are all structural economic problems and need to be addressed at that level.
Trickle-down economics was just some excuse for cutting taxes on the highest income brackets back in the 80’s. It’s not a real theory that’s been in use for the past 30 years. There is some economic theory backing the idea that cutting taxes boosts economic activity (the Laffer curve, for example). But ultimately, it just wasn’t fair (or in the US interest since we do want to keep the rich guys here investing and paying taxes) to make rich guys pay so much. Seriously.
The reasons jobs have been moved overseas is because US labor in manufacture and elsewhere wasn’t competitive: too expensive and the regulatory environment sucked.
We are in the middle of a serious recession, meaning no matter what someone studied in college, it will be difficult for them to get a job. These are all structural economic problems and need to be addressed at that level.
Having trouble finding a job in the middle of a recession isn’t a structural problem. It’s bad timing. The problems leading up to lack of US competitiveness, things like ridiculously expensive health benefits, too high a minimum wage, bad regulations, these are structural problems that the government can and won’t deal with. NAFTA and GATT simply have hastened the manifestation of these structural problems. Similarly, the problems leading up to the recession (namely the bank and real estate crashes), those too had structural problems.
I’m a bit surprised. I’d have thought that almost thirty years after your college experience, that you’d have grown up by now. I guess some people never let go of their sense of entitlement.
1987 was 30 years ago? I guess your education didn’t teach you how to count.
If “growing up” means giving up my convictions about the need for a more fair distribution of wealth and belief that the more one has, the more one is responsible for giving back, then I will never do it even if 100+ years pass.
Thirty years of deregulation, tax breaks for the wealthy, and erosion of social safety nets have led to the economic crisis we have today. It seems we learned nothing from the Great Depression. It was unrestrained capitalism, monopolies resulting from excessive consolidation, and lack of government protection from a predatory banking industry that led to the Depression. And it was the New Deal, a government program that both jump started the economy and provided that needed social safety net, that saved the capitalist system you so value. Unravel the New Deal, and we’re back in 1929.
When banking, automotive, and other high paid executives come travel in private jets to the federal government with their hands out asking for a bailout, that’s the ultimate sense of entitlement. The reality many don’t know is corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks for big companies and the wealthy far exceed the amount of money going to social welfare and scholarships for college. If anyone is acting entitled, it’s the CEOs with golden parachutes who ask for billions when their predatory practices make them more deserving of a jail sentence.
As for health care, the cost has skyrocketed mainly to fund bigger and bigger profits for drug and insurance companies. The real cost has not gone up by anything near what these companies are charging.
Trickle down economics is a proven failure. It makes the rich richer, but leads to hording, not to creation of new jobs. It makes the poor poorer and decimates the middle class, which is the backbone of our economy.
And if you think there is nothing wrong with threatening an A student with being kicked out of school while doing nothing of the sort to the C student, just because of what their parents were making, as opposed to their individual accomplishments, your philosophy has some very misplaced priorities.
If âgrowing upâ means giving up my convictions about the need for a more fair distribution of wealth and belief that the more one has, the more one is responsible for giving back, then I will never do it even if 100+ years pass.
That’s too bad. Envy and greed are remarkably ugly things when they pretend to virtue. I simply recognize that some people are far more productive and valuable than myself, and hence are paid a lot more.
As for your treatment by your college, I agree that it’s not nice that you had to pay what some bureaucrat thought your parents could pay. But you could have gone to a school that would treat you like something other than a revenue sources that can be extorted for X amount of money. That’s what I did (well, rather I made sure X was low enough that I could easily afford it).
Finally, I consider the policies of FDR, including the “New Deal” to be a greater contribution to the current mess than anything Reagan did. That is why I oppose any action of Obama either to revert to the days of FDR and the Great Depression nor any of the other destructive nonsense he’s tried to push (like cap and trade, universal health care, and of course, having a majority of voters be non-tax payers).
It’s always easy to turn a difference in political philosophies into a personal attack. Opposition to economic inequality has nothing to do with “envy”; in fact; it’s about a worldview centered on meeting human needs. Yes, I want to tax the rich, but to feed the hungry and house the homeless, in this country and around the world. The planet has limited resources, and these need to be shared by 6.8 billion human beings in addition to plants and animals. Some of us believe that by virtue of being human, every person has a God-given right to food, clothing, shelter, education, and health care. I have believed this since age 11 and will do so and fight for this vision until I draw my last breath.
The New Deal is what saved your precious capitalist system. The country was on the brink of revolution; the economy had already collapsed due to unregulated, rampant capitalism. FDR’s policies ended the Depression and ushered in a long era of prosperity where a rising tide really did lift all boats.
Greed is ugly? Then I guess you believe all those super rich CEOs who came to Washington, DC in private jets with their hands out should never have received a bailout. Look at corporate policies over the last 30 years–downsizing, outsourcing, cutting benefits, dumping people who have worked for a company for decades like they’re trash–all so the CEOs can get bigger and bigger salaries and golden parachutes. Now that’s greed.
Lauren, when someone from a highly privileged background whines about hypothetical starving people as some sort of prop for their beliefs, I look for the moral flaws. Society isn’t just about food, shelter, and squeeze (clothing, education, health care, blah blah blah). It’s about enabling us to pursue our dreams. Every dollar that goes to a nonessential “god-given right” (especially when given merely to bribe the recipient) takes away from someone’s dream. It diminishes our society and makes us all poorer for it.
Then I guess you believe all those super rich CEOs who came to Washington, DC in private jets with their hands out should never have received a bailout.
Absolutely. That’s been my position from long before the current bailouts happened. The whole “too big to fail” argument has turned on the argument that rewarding corporate executives for sufficiently large incompetent and greedy behavior is good because somewhere down the road, that bailout will help someone who really deserved and needed the help. The next time a huge market failure and recession happens, we’ll see why the current round of bailouts were completely idiotic.
Pure government-school boilerplate. Please read up on Strauss & Howe if you really wish to understand how these cycles work, why weâre heading for another financial/existential crisis and how those in charge are precisely the sort of incompetents who will usher it in.
The economy collapsed do to greed and foolishness, people chasing after a quick buck. This can be helped by regulations that force full disclosure and limit opportunities to cheat but there will always be people (in all classes) chasing a quick buck.
The thing that saved us was more from our forcing the world to accept the US dollar as the de facto world currency than the specifics of the New Deal. This was done partly by promising that it was equivalent to gold and would always be paid in gold upon demand. This worked well for a couple of decades but eventually our leaders spent way more than we had and this in turn caused us to be unable to continue to pay out an ounce of gold for every 35 dollars. The real cause of our economic downfall has more to do with deficit spending then any thing else. The deficit grew unsustainably big during the ‘guns and butter’ days and we have not had a balanced budget since.
Agreed. The greed and foolishness continues.
Yes. Fairness is a very good idea. Except when enforced by men with guns (government).
If you want to be Robin Hood have the decency and conviction to get your own gun and do the thieving personally. You might not live long but I can assure you that some one will write a song memorializing your efforts. That should be more than enough reward for you.
Losers are adults who stay in there little box and never venture out of it.Yet always rip on people who do.Losers are people who’s idea of fun is to drink daily or smoke weed daily because they seem to feel this makes them more interesting.Humm NOT!!!Finally losers are people who just give up inside and out.We only get one life ladies and gents.