There’s a difference between “young and naive” and “young and stupidly naive.”
Today’s college jkids thinking they’re automatically going to make six-figure salaries thanks to their college degrees is the latter. Let’s look at this clip from Dave Ramsey’s show:
The top comment on that video:
I’ll never forget a college prep after school program I was in during high school. They were supposed to be telling us how to fill out applications and talking about student loans. The instructors actually said that you won’t need to pay off your student loans; they don’t expect you to. When I told my dad that, he pulled me out of there immediately.
Can you earn six figures right out college? Potentially…if you’re getting a highly technical degree (Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, etc.) and you already have demonstrable mastery of some highly technical skills. Say, you’re getting a CS degree and you already know C and JavaScript, and you have multiple projects on GitHub that demonstrate coding ability, and maybe a desirable technical cert or two, then yes, a six figure salary right out of school is certainly possible.
But if you have a Liberal Arts degree? No. Not unless your last name is “Clinton” or “Biden.”
People who have told kids “Hey, you can party for four years, get a degree, waltz into a six figure salary and have the government forgive your student debt” have done them a grave disservice. Life is hard, and earning a living is work. I worked a lot of crappy jobs immediately after college (retail sales, phone sales) before bootstrapping my way into a technical writing career. (It didn’t help that I’m a smart ass.) There were a lot of post-college roommates, cheap used cars, and pasta, rice and ramen meals along the way.
Earning a college degree does not hand you a “Get Out Of Poverty Free” card, it only gives you a chance to get out of poverty, and not a very good one if you’re dragging a ton of student debt behind. The best way to avoid the boat anchor of student debt is to avoid taking out student debt. And there are a whole lot of decent paying trade jobs out there (welder, plumber, electrician, HVAC, etc.) that don’t require college degrees to get your foot in the door.
College graduates need to avoid the debt trap of a lavish lifestyle. Live modestly, pay off your debts, and build wealth. And realize that it may be many years (if ever) before you’re pulling down a six-figure income.
Live within your means and avoid debt.
Here endeth the lesson.
[Title edited.]
Tags: Democrats, Economics, jobs, student loans, video
Interesting, I’m a field engineer in heavy civil construction, I’ve been in my position since 2005 and (because I have some stereotypical engineering traits) I can look back and see the first year I broke 100k was 2015.
Granted, my career is one with lots of seasonal OT (can’t pave roads in the snow) so the first year I would have made over 100k w/o OT would have been 2018 (142k w/OT). That was with 13 years in that position and 4 years as an intern while in school (and 6 years navy before that).
I live within my means, which means most people think I live far below them as I had no debt far before I ever heard of Dave Ramsey. He has an article from 2021 showing the average household debt (so personal, not business) to be an average of $158k, that means most households are underwater.
The entire proposition of “get a college education” is a filter; if you’re dumb enough to fall for the proposition, wellllll… Yeah. It says a lot about you.
I graduated high school in the early 1980s. Even then, the entire value proposition they were pushing was questionable. I looked at the majority of the programs, and about the only thing I could see going for them was “provides essentially meaningless credential at high financial cost”, and since I didn’t know what the hell I wanted credentials to do, I opted for “Army”, and having the resources to afford to pay for it without loans. Then, after a few years in the service having to work for the products of those credential programs, I started having doubts about the entire proposition.
I think that it is still true that you can get a better education with a library card and your own intellectual curiosity than you can get with any of the “educational institutions”, especially these days. I honestly don’t know how many of the “educated elite” I’ve encountered actually read anything more than a thriller or summer potboiler after they matriculated from whatever credential joint they went to, but it can’t be too damn high, judging from some of the conversations I’ve had with them. I’ve never stopped reading or studying things on my own since high school; I got very used to funny looks from my officers when I’d pull out Vegetius or some other hoary work from the “old days”, and they’d ask me why I was reading “that stuff”.
Honestly, the majority of the contempt I have for today’s “educated” stems from having dealt with their work-product. Majority of the college graduates I run into aren’t people I’d put in charge of anything; they’ve zero intellectual capacity and even less curiosity about the world. I’d be sitting there in a situation, looking around, wondering why the hell things were the way they were, and trying to figure out fixes. The vast majority of them just accept things, never try to understand the “why”, and went on perpetrating the same-old, same-old antiquated and ineffective thinking they’d been exposed to first. “Oh, we’ll never need to do that…” was the reaction I got back in the early 1990s when I was raising questions about the probability of IED and land mine warfare in rear areas that we’d have to overcome… It was like trying to discuss the potential of color with a particularly dumb blind person, who could not see the potential for color-coding things for the sighted.
Somewhere along the line, we lost the bubble on things, when it comes to actually, y’know… Educating people. Most of the poor bastards coming out of the diploma mills are no more suited for actual intellectual endeavors than the most obtuse and backwards Medieval peasant likely was, and I suspect that the harsh conditions of those times would have winnowed the “educated yet idiot” types we are infested with today right out of the gene pool…
Those aren’t millennials. Millennials are in the 30s and 40s now. High schoolers could be the children of millennials, whatever they’ll be called.
One aspect not mentioned in this post is that most of the current crop of grads are women (as they have been for the last 20 years). Feminist ideology tells them that life must be nothing but uninterrupted bliss, so it comes as no surprise that they would expect several job offers on graduation day for positions as “coordinator or diversity, sustainability and inclusion” or some such nonsense, for six figures at a prestigious Fortune 500 company. This, of course, after shelling out (and borrowing for) a $200K degree in something like “critical queer studies” from a small second-rate liberal arts school.
I am lucky insofar as I attended one of the better units of the City University of New York back when it still had a good rep and it was free tuition, and had a good fellowship to get an MA at a solid Big 10 school, so I came out of it all debt-free. Lucky for me because my entire “career” was a checkered mess, punctuated by several extended periods of unemployment. Looking back safely from retirement now, I can honestly come to terms with the fact that I was both cognitively and temperamentally unsuited for the yuppie world. I was The First In My Family To Go To College, and I would have been better off if I had followed my blue-collar roots.
On the other hand, at the rate things are going, starting six-figures salaries might not be that far away, but when that happens we’ll be looking at $50,000 cars (at least those that our betters allow us to buy) $15 Big Macs, and $650,000 starter homes (again, if we are not herded into $1700 rental apartments). Good luck with that.
“I think that it is still true that you can get a better education with a library card and your own intellectual curiosity than you can get with any of the ‘educational institutions’, especially these days.”
The only shortcoming to this approach is that you can’t adequately judge your progress. There still needs to be tests and grades to tell you how others view your efforts. The best “summer school” education I ever got was to make note of the bibliography my professor used to teach his course and immerse myself in the entire corpus.
The following year, the professor expressed his delight at how I managed to be conversant in his field after having taken only one course of study with him.
This indicated to me that I had found the right path forward and gave me the necessary confidence to complete successfully against students with higher IQs but a less well-developed work ethic.
I never viewed my education as being key to the success of any particular vocation; rather I saw it as being foundational to the adoption of my life’s avocation.
The average US income for a full-time employee is $50k/yr. Since this average includes all vocational callings, including those that require a college degree, it is folly to believe a freshly minted degree will allow you to earn 2x the national average. If you are convinced of this in spite of all statistical evidence to the contrary, your education has served you poorly.
“The only shortcoming to this approach is that you can’t adequately judge your progress. There still needs to be tests and grades to tell you how others view your efforts. The best “summer school” education I ever got was to make note of the bibliography my professor used to teach his course and immerse myself in the entire corpus.”
There are other shortcomings for the autodidact; you don’t go into things with a curriculum, you find you have holes in your understanding of the subject. However, what you also find is that while you may have holes in your knowledge, you also have the benefit of having approached the question without preconceived notions and that may give you insights that the curriculum-bound never achieve. You also find things that have been forgotten or sidelined that are suddenly of merit because of new knowledge or approaches in the field.
I value education and scholarship. I value intelligence. What I don’t value at all are the things we’re doing today in most of academia that are termed “education” and “scholarship”, and I strongly suspect that our root definition of what actually constitutes “intelligence” is highly flawed.
Anyone caring to argue my position on that need first look at the world around us, and somehow manage to convince me that the demonstrated work-product of what we’ve been doing is actually working. From where I sit, it ain’t. I’d be highly entertained if someone were to try and convince me otherwise…
“ I’d be highly entertained if someone were to try and convince me otherwise…”
I’ll take a hard pass on the offer. Most of what I’ve seen in academia is students tongue bathing their professor with the expectation that their sycophantic efforts will be rewarded with stellar grades.
I routinely argued with my professors, not to be an obstructionist but to defend unpopular but ethically sound and logically plausible positions. I did this in the firm belief that truth is invariably held by a minority.
Defending unpopular ideas often places you against a tidal wave of opposition but makes your wits keen and your battle nerves steady.
“I’ll take a hard pass on the offer. Most of what I’ve seen in academia is students tongue bathing their professor with the expectation that their sycophantic efforts will be rewarded with stellar grades.”
And, that’s the root of the problem with the credential mills masquerading as “institutions of higher learning”. It’s not about truth; it’s not about being right, it’s all about being able to ape the forms and mouth the platitudes.
I come from a long line of highly educated people. My grandmother was Phi Beta Kappa, as were many other women in her line. I don’t think any of them would recognize today’s academic world as what they knew and respected.
Personally, I’d put up with so much bullshit in the classroom by the time I was out of high school that the idea of another four years in still more classrooms with the sort of person tending to infest those locales? More than I could tolerate. I respect education, but what they’re passing out these days is anything but. It’s indoctrination; the products of these courses are afraid, literally afraid, to think for themselves. If you so much as suggest that something they learned was in error, they look at you horrified, as though the thought police were going to come and take you away. It’s amazing to observe; their teachers and professors were all from the hippy-dippy Vietnam protestor generation, and instead of independent though being inculcated, they got “fear of transgression against the party line”. They’re more constrained and bound-up than a slave was, back in the Old South. You almost expect to hear “Oh, de massah wouden lahk that, you shoudn’t say those things…” from them, like some Antebellum Stepin’ Fechit character from a minstrel show. It’s amazing to observe, and I’ve no idea how the hell the people that did this pulled it off, but the entire zeitgeist of this age of ours is entirely 180-degree the opposite of the stated belief system of the men and women who proudly put it into place in our school systems.
I just looked up my alma mater, the state school here in Silicon Valley where everything is expensive, and it appears in-state full time undergrad tuition is about $4k per semester. I am sure the crazy expensive textbooks I had to buy way back when they were printed on stone tablets and we dodged dinosaurs on our way to class are vastly more crazy expensive now, and you gotta eat and have a place to sleep, but if one did the work and completed the degree in 4 years, that’s 8 semesters or about $32k tuition today. If, as I have heard from EE coworkers, bumping up to a MSEE is pretty much the minimum expected now, that’s four more semesters for a total of $48k tuition today.
I worked part time on campus most semesters I was there, full time off campus in the summer, drove an old car, and I paid for my BS degree on my own dime with no loans. Looking back, if one lived off campus in someplace pricey, never worked to generate any income while enrolled, and jetted off to spring break and year-abroad-in-Europe instead of working full time in the summer, just being a spender rather than an earner for 6 years, I can see how one could rack up a fair debt finishing an MSEE, though not the MD-level loans I read about. But every halfway competent MSEE I helped interview when we were hiring in my time served as a manager in semiconductor cubeland got a good job offer. And if a new grad MSEE rolled through who concentrated in analog rather than the vast hordes of digital engineers, or an RF design person, those could indeed start well into six figures.
But all of those EE grads would have solid prospects because they put in the work on something of actual value to hiring companies.
When a company wants to hire six figure worker, candidates need to have six figure skills. Intersectional Mumbo Jumbo degrees, or even English Lit or Business, are really not that.
My current advice to any callow yout’ silly enough to ask me for career advice is #1 Nursing as long as you feel the calling, lots and lots of nursing demand going forward if you deal with the job, or #2 Accounting, they’ll always need CPAs to count up the sheckles. If they gotta be engineers, see above, analog circuits or RF.
You can draw 6-figures in a year, but not a salary. Not something like $50/hr for (40×52) 2080 hours a year. But you can get a blue-collar job that requires a skill most don’t want to obtain (welding, plumbing, electrician, commercial truck license), get a job making something like $30/hr and then work (60×52) 3120 hours a year and maybe a little overtime pay will get you there. More often than not, you’ll get a salary equivalent of less than $30/hr and still work 3120 hours in your first couple of years with no pay pass 2080 hours because “salary”. You can complain about it, but then it will take even more time for you to reach the apparently coveted 6-figure salary.
I do agree with Lawrence. I knew someone in college that got a job in Oil and Gas with a ChemE and an undergraduate degree pulling in a salary in the high 90’s (in the 1990’s), but she also interned there for 2 summers and was top of her class in a high technical degree.
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It’s just going to get worse. AI is mooting most of what the professors provide through their teaching. PECS (Physics, Engineering, Computer Science) is different in that PECS teaches problem solving as the base product.
A very good observation on the state of college:
“But, I want to go to the other end of the spectrum, which is intellectual services. It used to be, if you wave your Bachelor’s degree, you’re going to get a great job. When I graduated from college, it was a sure thing that you’d get a great job. And, in college, you’d basically learned artificial intelligence, meaning, you carried out the instructions that the faculty member gave you. You memorized the lectures, and you were tested on your memory in the exams. That’s what a computer does. It basically memorizes what you tell it to do.
“But now, with a computer doing all those mundane, repetitive intellectual tasks, if you’re expecting to do well in the job market, you have to bring, you have to have real education. Real education means to solve problems that the faculty who teach don’t really know how to solve.
“And that takes talent as well as education.
“So, my view is we’ve got to change education from a kind of a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested, into one which is more experienced-based to prepare a workforce for the reality of the 20th century. You’ve got to recognize that just because you had an experience with, say, issues in accounting, doesn’t mean that you have the ability to innovate and take care of customers who have problems that cannot be coded.”
–Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
Being a smartass was my biggest handicap. I can relate. I was in my early thirties before I realized that.
My oldest son is about to start a job out of college making well over 100k. But he also had a 3.9 in a top 10 finance program and busted his rear to find a job in the field he wanted. It certainly is possible to make six figures out of college, but it’s not easy and it won’t be handed to you.
Want to make 100K become a plumber.
Speaking as someone who hired some CS students fresh out of college: They had absolutely no idea what they were doing BUT THOUGHT THEY DID and were laser-focused on massively overengineering everything and had zero willingness to consider the voice of experience when it came to what would and would not work in a practical sense. I made the mistake of saying “okay, I’m willing to learn, we’ll try it your way” and the result was a set of overengineered disasters that were about ten times more work to implement and fifty times more work to maintain than should have been necessary.
I am also reminded of a CS professor I encountered once who, on his faculty page, made a statement roughly along the lines of “We frequently get students who have worked in the software industry and think they know what they are doing. It is important to remember that whatever seemed like it worked in business, what we are teaching is the correct way, and you need to put aside what you think you know and accept what we tell you.”
University CS departments are NOT producing value. If I were ever to be in such a situation again, I would start off by informing the graduates point blank that everything they were taught about software architecture in school should be set aside as pure thought experiments and as likely to be wrong as anything else, and that they first need to look at existing code and see how things are actually done and imitate that.
I also want to note that far too many of the CS professionals I have encountered have absolutely no background in mathematics. I am convinced this is dramatically harming the quality and efficiency of the software being produced. When programming was the domain of logicians and mathematicians, the thinking behind it was a lot clearer.
When I was in my senior year (1985), I’ll never forget a classmate that was graduating in communications (wanting to go into radio) finding out that entry level radio stations paid slightly above minimum wage. He had no concept of what his major was worth. I found most classmates were in the same boat.
Say, you’re getting a CS degree and you already know C and JavaScript, and you have multiple projects on GitHub that demonstrate coding ability, and maybe a desirable technical cert or two, then yes, a six figure salary right out of school is certainly possible.
That should read “C# and JavaScript”. As much as I love C, knowing it will not get you six figures these days.
That should read “C# and JavaScript”. As much as I love C, knowing it will not get you six figures these days.
It wasn’t until I was 45 years old when I first grossed a six-figure income, after about 10 different jobs, going back to school to get a law degree, and still having to practice law for nearly 14 years. Even when I got to that point, I was still carrying a heavy debt load despite living quite frugally and having not financed a dime of graduate school. I look around now and shake my head at the kids asking me for jobs, 99.9% of which are not worth anything close to $100K / year or more.
I am a recently retired economics professor. Every semester I told my students to check out job listings for the starting salaries and skills required of the jobs they might be interested in on graduation. Find three people who have the job(s) they want and ask them how they did it. Sounds basic, doesn’t it? You’d be surprised to know that hardly anyone gives them this type of advice. College administrators are interested in warm bodies in seats, not in what happens to them after graduation. For some reason, students don’t think of this themselves. Reality avoidance?
My son just finished his BS in Electrical and Computer engineering. Has one more year to complete his masters and has had scholarships the whole time. Hes now in an internship tied to a scholarship that will pay for his phd and give him a decent ($40-50k) stipend the whole time. He’s doing pretty good for a 23 year old and has saved up quite a bit of money in his 4 years of undergrad. He will start at low 6 figures with a phd and coding experience when he is done.
The value proposition for college hasn’t been there for a long time. Ask yourself what utility an education is, when you’re told “Yeah, forget everything you were taught in school… We don’t do it that way, out here…” and when you ask credentialed people how much of their ohsoveryexpensive educations that they’ve actually used, and they’ll get a funny look to their eye and say “Well, to be honest… Not a lot…”
The academic world is a con game, I fear. Most graduates are victims of a vast swindle, one that leaves them with heavy debts and no way to repay them. I recall a peer of mine who I went to high school with, and who went on to get a degree in Medieval French Literature, including some very expensive time at a prestigious French university. She was outraged, outraged I tell you, to find out that my heathen ass was making rather more money than she was as an enlisted man in the Army, and that my entire compensation package was a lot better than hers as an adjunct part-time college instructor.
I honestly don’t know why the hell she had ever expected anything different… The pay charts were right there, all through high school. You just had to bother reading them.
I can only recall a couple of fields that would have really paid off, and when you looked at the debt some of my peers racked up compared to what the actual market-value of those educations obviously was, it was insane. I mean, OK, great… You have a Master’s in English, and your chosen career field is teaching: What are the average salaries of teachers where you want to live, and what will you have to pay back…?
Most of them were, I fear, essentially innumerate and all too trusting when someone told them “Get a college degree…”
When I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, I made $13,900/yr (avg $12500/yr in 1976).
When I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, I made $18,300/yr (avg $12,500/yr in 1979.
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