Have you read _The Cult of Smart_? deBoer writes about spending days struggling with an eager student who simply could not handle long division. The story doesn't have a happy ending--at its conclusion the student still can't do the math and deBoer begins to consider that not everybody is college material.
Somebody who goes to college may well accrue debt regardless of whether or not they're able to graduate. It's not a harmless experiment if somebody who shouldn't be attending college ends up wasting years of their life plus taking on thousands of dollars in debt in pursuit of a pipe dream.
Indeed. I always thought that before any college student is given any sort of loan forgiveness, the university they went to should be forced to cover it out of the endowment they have. I think this would nip it in the bud, right quick.
I get what you mean. It’s one of those tricky situations where I can totally accept the premise in the aggregate – “some fairly stable proportion of people will not necessarily thrive in an academic setting, and there should be other options available to them to build a financially stable and meaningful life“ - but I wouldn’t accept a million dollars to walk through a school and point out the kids who should go to college and the kids who shouldn’t. I was told from a young age that college was the right choice for me, I don’t think those people were wrong, and I never had to fight against anyone suggesting that I shouldn’t go. 
Somebody else has probably coined a term and written a 10,000-word substack essay about this already, but I feel like this aggregate/specific problem runs through a lot of my political/cultural beliefs. Like, I suspect that psychiatric overdiagnosis might be a problem on a national scale, but I would never in a thousand years suggest to any individual person that their psychiatric diagnosis might be wrong, to take just one example. I end up angry about the “experts“ who clearly aren’t doing their jobs in making these distinctions, but then that feels like a total cop-out when I’m willing to imperiously declare from my high horse that the distinction should be made. 
"I would argue that young people were relentlessly told in their youths that education is the only path to prosperity, and I would further argue that a changing economy left them with few stable ways to secure a middle-class existence other than college."
this is exactly what happened, and all the hippie-punching revisionism people do these days, as if the student debt crisis were some entirely frivolous ordeal limited to rich, neurotic gender studies grads who only went to college to irritate centrists and conservatives, and not desperate teens signing six-figure contracts at economic/political gunpoint, is deranged.
As a caveat I know plenty of guys that can work with their hands (mechanics, sheet metal workers, technicians, etc.) who have no aptitude for jobs that require a lot of abstraction.
I think this is at least a little bit of a mirage of hindsight. The significant success available in the trades is due at least in part to the lack of people going into them, and that lack is driven by everyone's push to go to college. Had we not pushed everyone to college, there would be far more competition for those jobs, and by comparison, college probably ends up looking better.
When the public schools got rid of the shop classes, that was the first sign that boomers were trying earnestly to talk their kids out of blue-collar jobs and into white collar ones. I had a friend in HS whose dad was a long-haul trucker and his constant advice to my friend was "graduate from HS and go to college so you don't end up like me."
That's nonsense. First, there's never been a halcyon period of vocational ed in the United States.
Second, old style vocational ed--which wasn't very good so rid yourself of the "shop classes were awesome until boomers killed them" delusion-- was killed deliberately by Nation at Risk, and the belief that we needed high quality education to "beat the Russians". Career tech had to be of superior quality and the courses that came about to replace shop are extremely expensive and competitive. The kids getting these courses are often the same kids going to college, and the ones that are genuinely trades are getting just the best of the rest.
Back in the 70s and 80s it was totally logical to tell kids to go to college. There were all sorts of middle management positions and IT positions that were available. That these got killed doesn't mean it was bad advice.
I always thought of a 4-year degree being as much a class marker as anything else. It telegraphs to people of the educated class that you come from a financially stable enough situation that you could afford to be income-negative for four years. My dad always expressed it to me that you would always be better off making a living with your mind than with your time and your hands, but embedded in there is a very old notion of gentility and what "the right kind of people" do to earn a living.
My brother works in the trades, and an under appreciated aspect of that track is just how brutal the first few years of that job are as an apprentice. Your hourly pay is NOT better than in the service sector (my brother waited tables to pay the rent) and the master tradesguys attempt to give you the most backbreaking possible work. When the union maintained their benefits and pay during the pandemic (even if they couldn’t work), that was obviously a much better situation than in the restaurant industry, but absent the pandemic he probably would have quit the trades. Most of the other apprentices already had family in the trades and were living at home and really felt like they had no other options, especially because they were kind of bad at talking to people.
Back when I worked for a startup I compared it to a cult. You show up early, you get lunch with the same people, you go back to work, you get dinner with the same people and maybe goof around a big (bars, building electronic toys, running RC cars in the parking lot), you go back to work. You often sleep under your desk. Then you come in on Saturdays.
Respectfully, it is *your* idea that's deranged, that "desperate teens were signing up for six-figure debt under economic/political gunpoint". I agree with Freddie's article, but this is simply false. Since you are talking about "teenagers", you can only be thinking of undergraduates, who are not anywhere close to borrowing six figures, on average.
If you haven't looked at the data, this 2020 piece by Adam Looney is among the best I can find: https://www.brookings.edu/research/ed-depts-college-scorecard-shows-where-student-loans-pay-off-and-where-they-dont/. Here's an abbreviated version of the final table, which shows the share of debt and share of borrowers by degree earned for the 2014/15 and 2015/2016 graduating cohorts. (I've broken the table out into two groups: programs "teenagers" might sign on for, and everything else.)
Degree (% of Borrowers) - Median Debt
Bachelors Degree (51.5%) - $23,236
Associate's Degree (15.6%) - $16,665
Undergraduate Certificate (12.8%) - $10,719
Master's Degree (16.2%) - $45,499
Professional Degree (2.6%) - $149,508
Doctoral Degree (0.8%) - $81,664
Gradual/Professional Certificate (0.6%) - $48,144
So the maximum median debt for the presumptive "teenager" group is $23k. I daresay the hippie punchers have a more accurate grip on reality than you.
Justin's post contains two claims, which I'll try to paraphrase:
1) There are people out there that argue the student debt crisis only affected rich people with (in their view) useless humanities degrees. These people are wrong.
2) What actually happened was teenagers desperate to secure a future for themselves took the only route open to them: six-figure loans.
The first claim could still be right, but his second claim does not substantiate it because it is false.
*Your* claims are a step in the right direction. I agree that if you're poor, repaying student loans will be extremely onerous, bordering on impossible. But I think you're badly mistaken about how many people are in that situation. Granted, it depends on what you think "poor" means, but I don't think you're very well calibrated. I myself took $25k in undergraduate loans ... in 1990 (higher than today's median). I didn't miss a payment during a period in which I was living on $30-35k/year.
The picture for borrowers is probably worse in some ways now - I think the loan terms are less favorable. But it seems like inflation makes it a wash: inflation since 1990 is estimated at 128%, so it's more like I borrowed $50k in todays terms.
I realize my history isn't the only data point and it shouldn't be the final word, but it makes me deeply skeptical of your claim that this is a widespread problem. (And really, this isn't just based on my own experience, but my broad observation of huge numbers of college graduates.) What are the absolute numbers here? Why should this be a policy priority?
I think your basic point, that almost no one completes an undergrad degree with owing many hundreds of thousands of dollars, is sound. I guess the question is how many grads with a bachelors degree have an “unmanageable” level of debt (a level that is debateable). What percentage of recent grads owe more than $50k? $75k? $100k? It’s not a majority, but could still be a large group of people.
The rich gender studies grads who went to Brown are not the ones failing to get jobs and pay off their debt. Those students likely have less debt in the first place, because their parents could pay their tuition or because they went to schools with massive endowments that give generous aid packages, and they're not failing to get jobs because with a prestigious school on your resume you can walk into a decent paying white collar job in pretty much any industry regardless of your major. Most of those gender studies grads are working in tech or consulting. The ones that go into journalism and piss off the conservatives are usually independently wealthy and/or have zero student debt, which enables them work in a poorly-paying culture industry in the first place. It's the middle and working class kids who are taking on massive debt to attend Eastern {Insert State Here} State University and majoring in vaguely vocational-sounding things like "criminal justice" and "business management" who are getting absolutely fucked by this system.
But the rich kids that spent 4 years at Brown doing gender studies don't pay for their PhDs. They get into other Ivy League programs and get paid to get a doctorate.
I'm in a humanities PhD program at a super expensive (if I had to pay) school. Almost none of my colleagues has student loans and they certainly don't have them for their doctoral program, where tuition is waived and everyone gets a stipend. The person I know who does have 6-figure debt is my cousin, who attended mid-tier schools, some for-profit, as she tried to figure out what would get her a better paycheck. Sure, you can say it's her own fault, but she only ever tried to learn practical things that would get her a job and there are a lot of predatory colleges out there that teach very little and promise a lot while charging you all the way.
Yeah, they're typically expected to teach. Some schools do some maneuvering so that your stipend is technically not contingent on your teaching, but on your academic progress, which includes your teaching (essentially, they don't want grad students to be employees who can unionize/have actual contracts).
I really enjoyed Trade Wars are Class Wars by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein. They argue persuasively that there are 2 more causes of the decline in manufacturing.
1. The post-Bretton Woods trade system forces every country to hold dollar denominated assets. This creates a trade balance where the US sells financial services to other countries in exchange for physical goods. This is extremely good for US finance, and really bad for blue collar workers, who face the double whammy of fewer manufacturing jobs and all the money in finance bidding up the price of assets like housing. They have a really provocative theory that the "Bancor" system proposed by Keynes could rebalance international trade.
2. China and Germany suppress domestic consumption, which allows those countries to run huge trade surpluses, which further throws the trade balance out of whack. Trade policy for the American working class is often presented in an pseudo-xenophobic terms, but "support workers in Germany and China fighting for a higher share of their firms' profits" is a great win-win policy, although it is bad for Chinese and German capitalists :).
Yeah it will be interesting to see. I think part of the problem is that there is not a big reshore button Congress can press but chooses not to. Trump and Biden have both taken some aggressive actions, but I think it still remains to be seen how much reshoring will ultimately occur as a result. Trump opening a Foxconn Factory or Biden passing the CHIPS Act is splashy but has a pretty small impact imo. The Plaza Accord had a giant impact and really helped manufacturing for a decade, but the mainstream media does not cover trade policy so it's not even on the policy menu for most voters, and so many countries buy dollar assets today it's debatable if it's even possible to devalue it anymore.
Klein and Pettis's prescriptions - force Chinese and German firms to pay their workers more (when we lack the political will to gently nudge American firms to do so), and retool global finance so the dollar isn't the reserve asset - are way more difficult to achieve than anything Bernie was talking about, so I'm not holding my breath.
I don't think anyone's blaming young people for signing up for (often pointless) college degrees. The shame - if that is the right word - is that so many signed up with seemingly not a jot of thought to the expense. And, in many cases, they made no attempt to reduce costs by eg starting in community college, attending a state rather than private college, working while studying or taking a gap year to save money.
You’ve missed the point entirely. They didn’t worry about the cost, by and large, because every single adult in their life (parents, relatives, teachers, the media, etc) told them over and over again that going to college ensured them a relatively high middle class lifestyle and that they would be able to pay the loans back.
Let’s not forget we are talking about 17 and 18 year olds, whose brains are still forming and who are not really in the best position to do actuarial analysis about their future earnings.
Reminds me of homedebtors who bought in 2004-2007, only to get whipsawed in 2008-2011.
In the runup to the GFC, everyone was screaming "buy!" Buy!" "BUY!", doesn't matter what real estate you buy, don't look at the loan terms, it's gonna be big, BUT YOU GOTTA BUY NOW!
Not to mention that, unless you happened to be a hedge fund billionaire, the average frustrated chump was going to have to take out some insane neg-am loan, at least if he wanted to be able to buy a home in a semi-habitable school district.
Then, when the bottom fell out of the real estate market, and the easy refi was no longer so easy, or even possible, and Wall Street lined up at the bailout trough, those same homedebtors got finger-wagging lectures about The Importance Of Paying One's Debts.
Even most 17 and 18 year old's are smart enough to limit the amount of debt that they take on--and keep in mind that about 45% of college grads have no debt whatsoever.
Most 17 and 18 year olds do not have the knowledge to read a dense financial contract, on which their parents' names are the operative signatures as co-signors.
I'll also stick up for those with post-bachelor's debt - I got a full ride to undergrad. I did a 5-year set of degrees in 4 years to avoid having to pay tuition on that last year. Everybody lauded my financial savvy! Until I got to senior year, realized I had no idea what I wanted to do with the degrees I'd gotten, and went to law school instead. With significant scholarships, I still took on six figures of debt. That was, in the end, the better financial decision, because the result has been a job that pays not just the rent but the mortgage and the student loans on top of that. But it was originally a move I made to try to credential my way into the kind of income my undergrad work was never going to give me. I don't see myself as so different from someone who got a Masters of Public Administration to try to add $10K a year to their bureaucratic job, just luckier.
For medical and law school? It's absolutely worth it. But if you are going to take $100,000k in additional debt to try to get a $10k a year raise?
From what I recall the worst return on investment is getting an English degree from an elite private university. But how many students actually do this? I think 17 and 18 year old's are probably getting a bad rap here because most actually do display fiscal responsibility in taking on college debt. Given that isn't it plausible that the outliers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no real way to pay them off are a fiscally irresponsible minority?
I think it’s important to return to your earlier point about the average debt being much smaller than this. I agree with you that far fewer people are in a position of having taken on massive debt for a useless degree. But I see loan forgiveness programs as having mainly benefited people who took on less debt, that they nevertheless cannot pay back. $15,000 might as well be $500,000 if you’re working a job you got because you couldn’t complete your degree, with no real prospects of financial advancement over time. The degree might have been a great idea in terms of future earnings, but that doesn’t matter if you never finished it, which I think applies to a lot of people in the “average debt“ bucket. Or they got a solid associate degree to get a job whose wages have not kept up with the cost of living. Or they belong to the group I mentioned above, who succumbed to the teenage pressure to get into college, and were smart enough to back out before they got four years in the hole, but still have to pay those first two years with all accrued interest.
So, on the one hand, from my own position, I’m happy to stick up for the small group of people with the useless public administration degrees who didn’t do the smartest thing possible with their money at a time when every job in their field demanded expensive credentials. But on the other hand, in terms of supporting loan forgiveness policy, I don’t actually care if a few arguably financially irresponsible people benefit if we pay down a gigantic proportion of the debt burdening people who made what was at the time a perfectly rational choice for them, in an environment that made irrational choices seem obligatory. 
Look at the building spree that colleges and universities have embarked upon in the last couple of decades. Large public and private universities, flush with cash, have constructed enormous edifices. How much of that wealth is due to government subsidies?
Paying off student debt is simply going to exacerbate that situation. At one level it's a regressive transfer of wealth from waitresses and janitors to college grads who not only earn more but will live longer and healthier lives than the people who will now subsidize their middle class lifestyles. At a societal level it's pumping even more money into a bloated college/university system that literally has more money than it knows what to do with and consequently embarks on a program of building modern day colosseums.
When I was 17 I made $200 babysitting for a weekend and I considered that an unfathomable sum of money. Teenagers who work might understand the value of a dollar but there are practically zero teenagers out there who understand the value of $100,000. Any teenager who is unusually good with money was probably either born rich and took up investing as a hobby or born poor and had to financially support their family. It's not reasonable to expect an average teenager to understand what it's going to feel like to be in debt while fully supporting yourself and your family.
I’ve seen people blame young people for this in every discussion of debt forgiveness I’ve participated in. I’ve had the argument several times in several places.
As others have said more eloquently - this was the only option presented as available. I went to a public school with the relentless, single-minded focus on college that FdB describes. Plenty of students did start out at community college, but this was seen as the embarrassing, a second-rate option. Surely those kids could have just worked harder and gotten a scholarship! Many students worked jobs and we knew the value of a dollar - but we didn’t know the value of $100,000, because we were 17 and that money and the reality of what we could buy with it were (1) still unreal to us and (2) being presented by every single adult in our lives as not to be counted as a prohibitive expense.
Basically, if any of us had had the wherewithal to turn to our parents, grandparents, teachers, educational counselors, etc., and say “I think this is too expensive and I’m not sure why I’m doing it,” we would have been immediately shouted down. Doing it was the reason for doing it. I knew plenty of people in my hometown who got a year or two in and realized college was simply not for them - their parents often treated the ensuing years of paycheck-to-paycheck poverty as their comeuppance for having been too stupid to just grind through.
Average college debt in the United States is less than $29,000 and only about 55% of students leave college with any debt whatsoever. Debt in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is a relative rarity. It may be justifiable for somebody who gets into medical school but somebody who gets a master's in public administration?
Keep in mind $29k is the average amount for the student loan. If you are only making the minimum payments you will be paying a hell of a lot more than that. The total cost of debt can be multiple times the initial loan value. I don't know how US federal student loans are structured, but I don't believe the average person is only paying $29k.
Aside from that I think you touch on the main problem. A Software Engineer and a Theatre Major are given the same type of debt. This is utterly insane. It's like giving the same type of loan to Apple and your friend who sells knitted hats.
As somebody else here pointed out a few articles ago what would happen if student loans were vetted based on future earnings? You would probably see a lot fewer theater majors taking on debt versus software engineers.
There just *aren’t* that many theater majors, or the oft-sneered-at “gender studies” majors -- they are an extremely tiny fraction of the bachelor’s degrees awarded each year. They just show up in articles about the college debt crisis because it makes for good clickbait, and because journalists are more likely to frequent the kinds of coffee-shops where underemployed liberal arts majors work and hang out.
Plus, theater and gender studies majors tend to do fine. Largely because only fairly elite schools offer those and you get a bump from going to a good school and (probably) from already being from a decently well-off family.
Yep, I remember kids sneering at peers who went to community college. The idea that it was a financial decision never entered my mind. You ended up at community college if you had bad grades. (Now I know there are many colleges that accept everyone -- it probably was a financial decision for those families.)
The experience of living on campus was such a huge part of it too. Everyone dreamed of going away to college and having a blast--parties, sex, football games. College seemed like the only way to live apart from your parents at 18, to finally feel like "an adult" with freedom.
I mean, who wants to be stuck at home until you're 20 or older? That's another consequence of the decline in wages for working-class jobs. People who are emotionally ready to be adults can't afford to move out. College allows you to have freedom 9 months of the year on your parents' dime (and loans) and then when you graduate, you can get a job that supports an apartment.
Why, sure, I understand why it is very pleasant to go to big name colleges and party for four years, there's no mystery to that. "Kids sneering at peers who went to community college..." - sure, but everything comes at a price. Plenty of immigrant families figured out that two years at CC, then straight into top state university (UC Berkeley or UCLA in California) saved thousands and you ended up with the same degree. "Parties, sex, football games ..." well, yes, very jolly, but who pays? "College allows you to have freedom 9 months of the year on your parents' dime (and loans) ..." and now subsidized by tax payers, most of whom never got to party nine months a year themselves and never went to college.
`now subsidized by tax payers, most of whom never got to party nine months a year themselves and never went to college.'
The top 25% of income earners account for 86.6% of income taxes paid which, since no new taxes have been levied, will be used to pay for loan forgiveness/subsidies for student loans. To be in the top 25% income should be about $87k, which basically requires a Bachelor's degree these days (unfortunately). So in terms of percentage of individual income and overall `subsidy' amount, the burden of loan forgiveness/college loans is falling squarely on persons with a college education.
It's not getting paid for out of income taxes. It's getting paid for out of deficit spending. This has both inflationary effects (which hurts lower-income people the most) and systemic risk effects (which affects everyone...maybe...someday). I won't pretend the impact of this is more than a relatively small piece of deficit spending, but it's not accurate to pretend that taxes are paying for this. The fair faith and credit of the US government is paying for it. The more we trade on that, the more systemic risk we introduce.
Agreed that deficit spending will be used to finance student loan relief. But it's deficit spending because the amount of funds the government expends is greater than the amount flowing to it, some of which comes in the form of income taxes. If we keep the notion alive that we will eventually have balanced budgets and we repay the debt, then we will do so in large part through income taxes (hence the connection between relief and income taxes).
Again no new taxes have been levied so the critique you're leveling is valid for all deficit spending. Why are people not upset that military expenditures increase every year and are a pretty blatant subsidy to defense contractors and well-paid engineers who work for them?
I'm of two minds on this. Part of me wants to almost entirely excuse students, and part of me wants to hold them somewhat more accountable. But in both minds, I think the adult guidance around these decisions is terrible.
1) I think expecting 17-year-olds to make good economic choices at a strategic level is absurd. There are individuals capable of doing so, but when taking into account the broad swath of people, it will ultimately fail. Young people need guidance, and the powers that be providing that guidance often don't have to shoulder the burden (at least not directly...though the graduates who stay at home much longer rather than striking out on their own suggests that parents did absorb some of those costs anyway).
2) When choosing colleges, my first choice was one of the more expensive schools to which I was accepted. My family was able to cover the cost of my education (I am supremely lucky in that), and my family never pressured me to choose the less expensive options, but I still went with my second choice which was about $10,000 per year less expensive. Choices *are* there (for some more than others); it seems like, with effective guidance, students *could* make better decisions. And having students get price-conscious advice *might* even make schools start to consider addressing the cost of tuition.
I went to college and graduate school for English degrees. Clueless. John Mulaney has a great bit about this that says it better than I ever could. https://youtu.be/aiqKK4ysI7g
I think there's a "different worlds" phenomenon afoot: as Tardigrade_Sonata pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the US is only at roughly 36% four-year degree attainment. College clearly isn't the "only option" for most people, whatever your experience has been, to say nothing of going _immediately_ to college after high school.
My own (fairly affluent, public) high school saw huge chunks of students start jobs, join the military, begin vocational schooling, etc..
Oh, we had kids who did all those things, too! It was just very clear to all of us that college (and the military, that was a big thing when I was in school too - but still better if you were going to ROTC in college than merely *enlisting*) was the only good option. If you had to do something else clearly you simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or you had some fundamental immaturity that prevented you from going right away. But surely you would still go later.
I knew a guy in school with a pretty pronounced intellectual disability - we were in music courses together. He was motivated and driven and social and really loved school, but even the remedial version of the standardized tests, shortened to accommodate him, took him many, many tries to pass. Didn’t matter: He was going to college, too! Everyone told him so! He was really looking forward to it. Because no adult could admit aloud that perhaps continued academic achievement was not going to pan out for every single student.
I know the situation most familiar to me is not the only one. My friends who attended big-city public schools had much different experiences from me in my suburban public school system. But I think the point still stands that for a lot of people and especially a lot of the middle class, this college-at-any-cost culture was pervasive. (This is not a counterpoint to you or the person you’re citing, but I’d also be interested to know how many of the people who don’t have 4-year attainment have 1 or 2-year attainment for degrees that they never finished.)
`I went to a public school with the relentless, single-minded focus on college that FdB describes.'
I wonder how prevalent this type of school really is? Is this something new and/or regionally isolated?
In the late 90s/early 2000s in the part of the midwest I grew up in (rural), community college was not `seen as the embarrassing, a second-rate option.' The students who went to CC classes while still in high school, particularly trade/vocational classes, were seen as quite canny as 1) they had someone else paying for their education and 2) they got out of boring high school classes.
Heading to CC after HS was similarly viewed as smart either because people knew they were just not going to take things too seriously for two years, and didn't want to overpay for that, were financially strapped, weren't sure about what they wanted to do, or were very sure what they wanted to do and saw CC as a cheap way to get the prerequisites out of the way.
Being in a relatively affluent suburb known for its school system, with a very high-achieving local immigrant population, definitely drove my perceptions. Honestly, this is one of the biggest bummers about it to me - our local CC was excellent and a great financial choice (I ended up taking a couple of courses there later to save on a semester’s tuition at my big state school) and it’s embarrassing to me now to look back and understand how cloistered I was.
But I also recognize the remnants of having grown up that way among many people in the field and professional class I occupy. People still talking about “gifted kid burnout” into their 30s, people still obsessed with diversity initiatives at their alma mater, people allergic to discussions of how class relates to educational attainment. It’s not a huge part of the overall population, maybe, but it certainly skews our national conversation about the necessity of college.
I agree, Freddie’s experience sounds like a middle class suburban phenomenon to me - which admittedly is a lot of America. I went to an city public high school in the Midwest. About one third of the class didn’t even graduate. Probably 40-50% started at a four year college, mostly because there was an educated affluent enclave right by the school skewing the numbers. The rest went into the military, trade school, or just got jobs.
kids did think about the expense. but they thought about it in the terms presented to them at the time: a bachelor's degree from a good college will easily pay for itself.
note, "good." the message (to teenagers, remember) often wasn't just, "go to college," it was more like, "go to the best college that'll have you." parents with kids who had a shot at elite universities weren't exactly encouraging their kids to attend community college.
in present-day politics there's just a total misapprehension of the context in which a lot of families made a lot of these decisions.
yes, obviously there are lots of people who were confronted with similar pressures in the same period who still didn't/couldn't take on (as much) debt as others did. but the point is that we're not really talking about a situation where one kind of person behaved reasonably and another kind of person behaved recklessly.
I feel like there is one important piece missing from this analysis. The invention of the programmable logic controller (PLC), in 1968. Here is a link talking about this history and what it changed in detail - https://library.automationdirect.com/history-of-the-plc/ Prior the invention and mass marketing of the PLC, industrial control was done entirely through logic circuits, where engineers and electricians would have to create networks of relays, hard wired PID loops for analog control, physical timers, and other devices instead of simply programming them. After 1968, the technology to automate most parts of the industrial process became much more efficient in almost every way (time, money, and physical space) - this is the point where automation became cheaper than skilled laborers. I know Reagan had something to do with this, but none of the policy matters if we don’t have the technological base to support deindustrialization and automation in place beforehand.
1. Much higher quality manufacturing of all goods than could ever be achieved without automation, at a lower price to the consumer.
2. Many more firms that could automate, keeping them competitive with manufacturers from overseas that had substantially lower labor costs and overhead.
3. Lots of electricians (and other workers without a college degree) transitioning to being PLC programmers, resulting in them getting better pay. This dynamic continues today; a significant percentage of the PLC programmers I work with started out as electricians, and figured out how to program on the job, and have much higher salaries.
And in 10 years or so when machine learning modeling takes the place of PID loops (because they are more efficient, enabling energy and material savings) and younger engineers start using python instead of ladder logic, this happy story about electricians upskilling is likely over.
Edit: My point? Technology is good. But the structure of capitalism, with wage labor it’s defining characteristic, means that it will always leave some people worse off even when leading to improvements on the whole.
Oh, don't I wish - I've been selling against ladder logic for over 30 years. There have been better, non-ladder logic options out there forever, even simpler than Python.
But, all it takes is one old, grumpy ladder logic programmer/former electrician, to put that idea to rest. And these guys become old and grumpy at the age of 28. And they have a lot of sway with their boss and their boss's boss, because they keep things going.
All of the PLCs now have machine learning modules, that allow the final program to still be realized in ladder logic. The fancy AI engineers do their modeling in the module, the ladder logic guys still make all the lights go blinky blinky and the pumps go whirrr.
Well, somehow I made it well past 28 without joining the generally old-and-grumpy ranks of our profession. I might be off with 10 years, but grumpy will eventually lose to efficiency; always does in the end.
We've had the technology to replace PID for decades now, e.g., MPC, and yet it endures because it's very understandable and predictable (failure mode analysis is a mature topic for PID).
We'll see about ML-based control. Currently it's too slow, not terribly robust outside of its training data, tends to break things during training, and, largely, unexplainable (as in we can't predict the decisions so failure analysis is currently, outside certain settings, impossible). I know that the videos of ML-based control look impressive but remember they're generally put together by graduate students who only show you the one time out of 20 when the algorithm worked!
Also, RE: upskilling. Just have to train those PLC programmers to tune hyperparameters and select from the many models/architectures available. =)
For my boomer parents, they grew up in a world where a degree was a golden ticket. This they conveyed to me: the expectation was simply that I would go to university. To study what? didn't matter. Just graduate.
Of course, by the time my generation were graduating, it was no longer a ticket because so many people now have degrees. There's the basic market economics of something dropping in value as it is produced in surplus.
There's also the fact that just as factory jobs are diminished, a lot of white collar jobs have been removed too. The admin support jobs that used to make up many offices (secretarial pool, mail rooms, etc) have vanished. Executives type their own emails.
And the middle management jobs that once existed - many of them at the factories - have also gone.
As a counterpoint: to what extent does the PMC work to ensure that people with the right fit--college educated, white collar, upper middle class or better--are not subject to the whims of economic fortune?
In 2008 the highest unemployment rate for college grads was something like 5%. The demographic that really suffered was blue collar laborers.
I would argue that "we are ALL on devastating diagnosis, one car accident, one lost job, one economic downturn away from financial ruin" is applicable to the blue collar class. To people who work as software architects? Not so much.
I think that class solidarity (or the lack thereof) is precisely the point. David Brooks wrote that the PMC--after achieving economic security--has busily embarked on a program of pulling up the drawbridge to deny the same security to everybody else. To my mind the issue is that not only are the pressing needs of the two classes distinct (one worries about financial survival, the other about virtue signaling) but there is an active, concerted effort on the part of the top 20-25% of the economy to safeguard their own interests regardless of the costs to the rest of the country.
"My husband is a senior software architect at a large company. His work/life balance is totally out of whack because, even at his level (directorial) there’s no support staff. He gets a hundred emails a day and attends back to back meetings, while still being expected to deliver on extremely complex projects. He’s not an executive because he’s still creating applications, writing code, etc. But the demands on senior level employees like him are very different from 20 years ago."
In describing your husband's experience, it's like you're channeling my experience (save that I'm a line manager rather than a director): tons of "collaboration" activities (emails and meetings) and precious little time for actual work...but still having to complete projects as a primary contributor at the same time.
As a university professor I've seen the same thing. I've lost almost all support staff and now spend 40%+ of my time doing secretarial work that that staff used to do...
I'd go a step further and say that it wasn't just the secretaries, mail room staff, etc. In tech, at least (and I'd bet in many other "knowledge" work jobs that do not require physical presence), many of the actual workers who produce the products are being outsourced as well; offshoring manufacturing is happening today in the knowledge economy.
Globalization was never going to be kind to the labor markets of the richest country in the world save at the highest levels of ownership.
Looking at the "mass slaughter" going on at Twitter and Amazon right now, I don't think those jobs were outsourced to other countries but allowed to bloat new industries in the same way they bloated legacy industries, or other, similar employment sectors.
Indeed, this is true. But it is also true that many companies get bloated when fat with cash, so to speak, and later need to trim the fat. There is a strong tendency to attempt to solve problems with cash, and the most obvious sign of this is the hiring of additional people, as opposed to optimizing workforces.
And who do college people want to hire? More college people.
I believe you and Jolly are both making the mistake of conflating the likes of Twitter and Amazon with "the tech industry." The tech industry is much, much larger than a few highly visible firms. There is undoubtedly bloat in some companies. There is very little bloat in others. But there is considerable outsourcing going on, even in companies who serve primarily a North American market. I know companies who have 95+% of their customers in North America, and yet hire 60% of their engineers in India and 35% in Mexico. They are going where the labor is less expensive. It was insanity to think that globalization would be anything but negative for the US labor market.
This is just not what I see in the industry. There were numerous layoffs during the aughts and early teens. During the 2008 crash, many companies had to lay people off because of horrible debt covenants they signed *even while they were highly profitable.* I know companies with a >25% EBITDA that laid off 10% or more of their workforce because they had debt covenants that required them to maintain a high EBITDA or pay huge rates, and at that time, the companies couldn't simply renegotiate the debt because no one was offering credit at all. Your understanding of this industry, if you're looking at the news, is very limited.
Those companies outsource one class of professional, coders (for lack of a better term) while bloating up on middle management of various stripes: DEI, HR, etc.
Those are the jobs that will never be outsourced, as they are the bread and butter of the upper-middle-class college crowd.
Again, you're conflating. Yes, top visible companies have bloated up on DEI and the like. The middle of the market companies frequently have not and are in general a bit more conservative than the Twitters and Apples of the world.
And in terms of middle management: my observation is that the tech industry has worked harder to *decimate* middle management than any other industry. Tech companies for many years were notoriously flat in their hierarchy. I do not see this "bloat" among my peers in tech, but my peers in tech are not working at Apple or Twitter or Amazon; they are working at companies that have typically been in operation since the '60s or '70s, have gone through multiple technology transitions, (mainframes to Windows-based to web- and phone-based, in the software world), and as of the late aughts until now have been outsourcing engineering jobs steadily.
So, who are all these DEI employees subjecting to their DEI on, if everyone else is in another country? Do they have a "white people bad" struggle session at the factory in Vietnam?
Experiences vary. Go to any of the big campuses on either coast (or in the DFW/Austin corridor) and the technical roles are dominated by Asian immigrants from India and to a lesser extent China. Even with all of the offshoring and the imported labor however salaries and perks have continued to grow and grow--at least over the last couple of decades.
I certainly agree that the salaries have gotten better, even as the work force shrinks. I think the remaining US workers tend to be fiscal beneficiaries of the outsourcing. The tech firms *do* still want to retain many of the existing US employees; they simply rarely hire more workers there, and when layoffs come, they tended to impact the US first / most (although that is fading as the balance of the labor is now elsewhere).
I might humbly suggest that any company that cannot turn a profit more than twice in ten years is experiencing SOME kind of cost bloat. And payroll always being the biggest cost, it would seem sage to look at making cuts there first. Not to get into the ham-fisted disaster that was the Twitter RIF, but the core concept has some merit.
I can't tell you if Twitter was bloated or not because I'm only cursorily familiar with the company. However, it was never my contention that Twitter was not bloated.
I would also go a step further and say that undergrad degrees are no longer a golden ticket, but rather graduate degrees are. In an insanely saturated market of undergrad diplomas, most of the 'good' jobs require a post-secondary degree to get. And while the ones that didn't ever go to college may be saddled by low-paying jobs, a lot of the ones that only got a bachelor's degree are also somewhat saddled by low-paying jobs...except they also have the added weight of tens of thousands of dollars to pay back. I'm almost wondering who's better off between the two.
I agree on your second point, but I'd add a bit here too. Admin support jobs are still around, they are just fewer in number, many are outsourced, they have a much higher workload, and the pay is lousy. Support staff jobs, like manufacturing jobs, used to be regular careers with which you could buy a home and raise a family. Now they are little better than working at Target...except a crapton of them now require a bachelor's degree to get. At least the non-entry level ones do. It's a lose-lose scenario.
I don't know if this is empirically true or not, but a graduate school degree in media and communication is an absurdity. Take a look at the partners at, say, Sard Verbinnen and tell me which is the more obvious correlation to success in the field: (i) quality of undergrad degree or (ii) existence of post-grad degree. Lot of Ivy degrees, fewer M.A.s than law degrees.
My masters degree in clarinet performance’s only practical use is to get me into a doctoral degree.
But at least the stuff I learned during it were practical knowledge and skills for myself, even if the industry I can apply those things in is unadulterated neoliberal culture industry chaos.
My kid doing a masters in music is doing it for the increased time making connections and networking. There's certainly no future chasing the one or two teaching positions a doctoral degree might get you.
This is definitely a field where the institution you're at makes a difference. You'd better be good enough to command a high scholarship and have no debt. Except if you're rich...which a lot of them are.
We're under no illusions that she'll ever do more than make a living wage. That's fine.
What is often not taught in these programs is that there is a huge difference between being a working musician and an artist. It’s normal as a working musician to hold down a steady day/career job outside music, while fitting in your artistic pursuits and other gigs on the side. It’s also possible to focus exclusively on gig working and other performance opportunities, but that may leave little to no time for what’s often presented in school as “cultivating your artistry/artistic dream”.
Having that space to cultivate skills and connections, as well as explore topics of interest to learn/research if desired, is good and reasonable. And yes, these programs should be attended based on financial viability and pedagogical staff.
I hope she doesn’t see it as a fast track into an ensemble, chamber, or solo position somewhere. The contemporary classical “scene” is a right proper mess of too many performers and composers who are stuck in academia all exploiting each other’s labor and vying for attention from wealthy donors and grant offices while trying to edge each other out in competitions/auditions to extremely limited institutional spots.
I think whether or not an undergrad degree is a golden ticket these days is entirely dependent on the prestige of your school. It's still possible to get a degree in underwater basket weaving from Stanford or Yale and get a job in virtually any industry. I know because this is what I did and what the majority of my classmates did. If you have a prestigious enough name on your diploma you are virtually guaranteed a white collar job of some kind. I know people who studied philosophy and now work at hedge funds, who studied art and now work as software engineers, who studied classics and are now consultants at McKinsey, who studied anthropology and are now account executives at massive companies, who studied women's studies and have founded multiple silicon valley startups. No graduate degree or vocational training required. I think the degrees that have been devalued are bachelor's degrees from middling or low-prestige universities, whereas degrees from elite colleges have actually increased in value as they've become more competitive and continue to provide a huge leg up in the job market.
I don't know much about graduate degrees though so I can't comment on that part.
You're probably right about that. I went to a state college and don't really know anyone who went to 'elite' schools, so my knowledge of that prestige jump is almost non-existent.
`It's still possible to get a degree in underwater basket weaving from Stanford or Yale and get a job in virtually any industry.'
This is probably true (and something I believe) but it does not follow that `the degrees that have been devalued are bachelor's degrees from middling or low-prestige universities'.
I've taught in an engineering department that was ranked in excess of 100 in US News and World Report (public, PhD granting university), which is, ah, the opposite of prestigious. The students I have taught have gone on to work for FANG companies, as well as working for automotive OEMs, countless defense contractors, and government labs. They would certainly be at a disadvantage if they had the same resume as someone who went to Stanford but they are in demand and find jobs with relative ease. May take a while to get the dream job but they're still successful by any common definition.
I'll push back against this, slightly. In my engineering field (electrical and computer) the reason that graduate programs are populated mainly by international students is that domestic students receive such good offers from industry, with only a BS, that the long hours, difficult work, and low-pay graduate study requires is not worth it. Their careers are simply not impeded by this relative lack of credentials. We do get a handful of domestic students doing graduate studies part time after a few years in the workforce for advancement/niche purposes.
I agree the specific field of study matters. Tech and a lot of the hard sciences students are still well sought-after as an undergrad. I was meaning in general across the board.
1. Because debt is discipline. It's hard to leave the cubicle farm and set out on your own, much less challenge the system, if you have student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy hanging over your head. (Pace health insurance).
2. Because college takes young people, people at the wildest, most ambitious and most questioning time of their lives, and shunts those young peoples' energy and ambition into goalseeking behavior and socially harmless diversions.
"It’s common for defenders of automation (when not simply repeating the word “Luddite” over and over again) to say that automation creates jobs as well as destroys them. This may be true in aggregate, but when automation creates jobs it doesn’t usually create jobs for the same people."
This also applies exactly to offshoring and I cannot help but wonder to what degree political conflict today has its roots in class conflict between the winners and losers of globalization. When looking at the rise of Trump I would argue that the die was cast when NAFTA was approved in addition to MFN trade status for China and I'm constantly mystified when some argue that the deciding factor was Twitter.
Well, I think the obvious thing this misses is that some defenders of automation are actually on the left and posit that the problem with automation is just the problem with capitalism. If you don’t own the means of production, making it more efficient helps the ownership class, not you. Nobody complains about the efficiency of having automated dishwashing machines because they are something regular people own in their home or apartment. If dishwashing was instead a centrally controlled economic process where people paid for it on the marketplace, now you would have working class people complaining about how dishwashers are destroying jobs. This is where the whole Luddite critique comes in… Do we really want to battle against the technology, which is arguably a good thing, or against the structure that makes it harmful to some people?
My comment was directed at offshoring factory manufacturing jobs. And I think deBoer's original observation was spot on: offshoring and automation may benefit the economy as a whole but there are local winners and losers. As a gross oversimplification if executive A sees his salary rise from $400k a year to $450k a year while worker B is laid off and goes from $50k a year to $30k then the average salary has gone up.
In my experience, offshoring occurs for a number of reasons, and not just to contain costs (though that is certainly a big driver). Another big factor is the need to establish a presence overseas so that they can sell more stuff overseas.
And note, many companies offshore just so they can maintain the status quo. There is a constant drive to contain costs, because there is a constant push by the consumer to drive prices down.
One of the companies I worked for (a large multinational) moved a lot of their operations offshore to both sell more stuff abroad and to contain costs. For the 13 years I worked for them, even as they adjusted headcount in the US and moved operations overseas, even though their revenue grew (because their market grew), their net margins stayed virtually the same (because of consistent downward pressure on prices, offset by continual cost containment measures), the executives bonuses didn't vary much throughout this entire period, we got consistent raises (slightly above the cost of living) every year, and the employee profit sharing payouts stayed pretty consistent.
What would have happened if they didn't contain their costs? Most of the scenarios are less favorable to the worker. There is a good chance they wouldn't have grown, headcount in the US would have probably dropped anyway, and/or we wouldn't have gotten our raises and profit sharing payouts.
People focus on the seen, and not the unseen. What people see are the changes and disruptions that occur as a company struggles (and it is a constant struggle) to stay in business and make a profit. What they don't see is the alternative - a company doesn't contain their costs, become less and less profitable, and then gives up and goes out of business and everyone loses their job.
I am a "lesser of two evils" type of person so I definitely do not believe that there is a fairy tale alternative to offshoring that keeps all the unicorns employed at their blue collar, unionized, manufacturing jobs.
At the same time I was stunned a few years ago when US average lifespans declined due to "deaths of despair" among blue collar whites. That represents a titanic, fundamental upheaval at the societal level that is going to reverberate through this country for generations.
People want easy answers that comport with their pre-existing beliefs. If you believe that NAFTA, etc. were net positives, then you will discount any factors pointing to a contrary issue.
Or, as Menken put it: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
When discussing automation and off-shoring, no one in these threads seem to consider whether the company was going to survive without it. Even with NAFTA and automation, the Big Three automakers essentially went bust-o and had to be rescued. What do you think happens if they had operated even less efficiently?
Hard to overstate the anger and resentment of those that graduated college during the GFC with minimal job prospects. Countless conversations of "WTF-- I borrowed money for a college degree so I could compete for $35K/year sales job that has nothing to do with anything I learned. What was the point??" Many folks I know went into the trades AFTER taking out $50K to get their bachelors degree. It also led to a hardened outlook 10+ years later for those that made it, found a way to higher earnings and have paid off the debt. "If I could figure it out during that shitstorm, why should we give handouts out now." I don't know the answer, but I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.
It's frustrating that the encouragement for taking on student debt is based in economics, while student debt itself is not allowed to operate by any basic economic principles.
In the debt trading world we were always on the lookout for scenarios like this. It usually meant there was an arbitrage opportunity and money to be made. I don't feel bad when corporations and sophisticated investors are involved. But it's terrible that we made young students the sucker in this situation.
Good article, but I think we need another article on what policies might have helped the problem, or would help it now, and why.
I can imagine a world in the Reagan-Thatcher era where a combination of powerful unions and nationalist trade litigation maintained relatively high levels of non-college employment for a while. Maybe that works for something like British Telecom, where there was no right to competition, so phone service in Britain would just stay more expensive and less good than other countries but would maintain employment.
But manufacturing would have been under a lot of pressure as a result of imports from high-automation countries like some of the East Asian countries, or relatively low wage countries like some of the South Asian nations. Is the idea that in the alternate universe, we would have maintained trade walls against any country that didn't have similar wages and anti-automation policies as the US and Britain, indefinitely?
There's also a neoliberal alternative - tax some of the gains that college educated workers are enjoying from free trade, etc., and use it to subsidize wages. It might be that Freddie doesn't have a specific policy in mind, but just thinks we should have done *something* other than more dakka on education to try to help displaced workers.
"I can imagine a world in the Reagan-Thatcher era where a combination of powerful unions and nationalist trade litigation maintained relatively high levels of non-college employment high for a while."
I get that Germany and the United States are very powerful (edit: meant to say different), but isn't this a good description of what Germany has been able to maintain? A vibrant vocational track in their education system, robust unions, and a highly-paid manufacturing sector?
I struggle to define the causal reason, but there seems to be an inverse relationship between the power of a country’s international finance sector (aka “Wall Street”) and the manufacturing sector. Our international finance sector is world-beating, Germany’s is pathetic -- there’s a reason that Deutsche Bank was the last investment bank willing to work with the Trump Organization. It does seem that relative to say Germany our society is unbalanced. What I don’t know: will kneecapping Wall Street (if even politically possible) actually lead to real overall benefits or just a bunch of unemployed people in New York City?
I don't think it's causal, but I don't think it's a coincidence. Have you ever noticed what the largest global financial centers have in common? NY, London, Chicago, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai are all Anglophone financial centers.
Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Madrid, Milan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Seoul are second-rate financial centers relative to the size of their local markets.
Consider the Anglophone countries that don't have tier 1 global financial centers: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and India. Also not world beating manufacturing centers. This is not a fully formed opinion, but I would speculate that it is not so much that being a financial center in particular causes manufacturing decline, but that Anglophone countries have a culture that excels at creating vibrant service economies, whether in finance, IT, advertising, media, entertainment, law, accounting etc., that creates high paying alternatives to manufacturing.
Except that all of those economies passed through an industrial phase. The UK is the birthplace of the industrial revolution and in the post WWII period the US was a manufacturing powerhouse because the rest of the world had been reduced to rubble. At least with China you could argue that it is passing through the manufacturing economy phase that the US left years ago.
In the big scheme of things, the possibility of having a service sector led economy is a relatively recent phenomenon. There were no global financial centers 200 years ago.
I would argue that "200 years ago" is relative though in this sense: not every country passes through the arc of industrial->service->information economies at the same time. Obviously there are humans living on the planet right now who are still in the neolithic stage of human development. Never played Civ and rolled over somebody with tanks while they were trying to build chariots?
I honestly think the seeds of pushing everyone into college happened much, much earlier - though it kicked into high gear around ten years prior to the era you highlighted, in the late 1960s, with rise in mass attendance of college by baby boomers resulting in the increasing "professionalization" of wide tiers of employment.
If you look at college in the early 19th century in the U.S., it was an institution in crisis. Many professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers would earn their certifications immediately after high school, through either mail-order degrees, clerking/apprenticeship, or some mixture of the two. College was basically just a finishing school for the upper classes, and really irrelevant if you were an upwardly mobile person of middle-class background, or even a wealthy businessman who didn't care one whit if your son had a classic education in Greek and Latin.
The "saving" of higher education is classically associated with Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and transformed the school in his 40 years into the first American modern research institution. Most notably, the entire structure of modern educational coursework - standardized testing for admission, undergraduate education as a prerequisite for graduate study, general education requirements, electives, etc. - was more or less created under his watch.
The most important aspect for us however is the idea that a college degree was a "requirement" for certain fields of study began under Eliot's watch. It didn't exist at all during earlier periods, with many leading polymaths entirely self-taught. This only expanded over time.
Take for example a field you have experience in - journalism. Through the early to mid 20th century, journalism was a working-class job that required little other than basic literacy. You graduated from high school, got a job at a local paper as an apprentice/copy editor, and worked your way up over the decades. Woodward and Bernstein were still quite a novelty within journalism at that time because they were part of the first generation of young journalists where a college background was becoming the norm. The educational requirements of journalism rose, the amount of skill required remained the same, and eventually the actual economic standard collapsed. But around the same time all sorts of jobs historically known as "clerks" - random office jobs - also shifted to requiring college degrees, arguably because they were always looking for young people from say the 70th to 95th percentile of aptitude, and now those people almost always went to college.
It's only gotten worse in the decades since of course. Now students fork out cash on degrees for things like being a chef, an x-ray technician, or a CNA. There was a for-profit college in Downtown Pittsburgh for becoming a vet-tech! Capitalism has now outsourced nearly all "job training" onto the job applicant, who also needs to somehow anticipate what sort of jobs will be available decades into the future.
The crucial shift though in the modern era is basically that the low-hanging fruit in terms of college readiness have already been plucked. People in the top third of aptitude didn't really need to go to college in order to get a job - that was a great swindle. But they were plenty capable of going to college. Many of the first-generation college attendees in the 1960s had parents who worked in manufacturing after all. But there was an assumption that we could just keep pushing more and more of the workforce through the great swindle, but that was really unworkable, even after for-profit trade schools created an entirely new second-class level of education even more transparently based upon swindling/empty credentialing.
One reason that jobs shifted to requiring degrees was that it became too difficult/risky for big companies to offer their own aptitude tests to applicants. The differential outcome lawsuits that suggested racial bias meant companies said "hell no", and instead outsourced their assessments to colleges instead. Perfect example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, in order to supposedly avoid discrimination, people now have to get a degree to do a job they could have done out of high school.
And the means of "working your way up" in a firm don't exist anymore either. Half of it is due to outsourcing, some to offshoring, and collapse of unions. But the "entry level" position offering a pathway doesn't any more. This story illustrated it perfectly.
Would add to this important historical framework you present, the Morrill Act and the expansion and proliferation of agricultural colleges that later began to offer more “traditional” fields of study, and these colleges ended up being the backbone of many state university systems.
I’ve been trying to explain to my fellow professionals exactly why we are missing the boat in the “college for all” approach, but I couldn’t quite spit it out. Now I have a post I can link to.
I’ll have to emphasize the status part more than you did here, but that’s cool.
It’s just a shame. My daughter is a perfectly bright person who is going to do something in the sciences in a few years. But she would have also been fantastic with a job where she could simply use er hands to make awesome things, and in a more egalitarian world where it wasn’t pushed into her head that the only way to be of worth was a college degree, she might be happier in that world. (And I did my share of pushing before I got radicalized on the idea, tbh.) But with the world the way it is now, and also the resources to make sure she wasn’t graduating with a crapload of debt, how could I recommend that approach to her?
As a career high school teacher and Californian, I can attest to the overall truth of your sketch of the last five decades. Most of my teaching spots have been in inner-city schools in Los Angeles. My current gig, from which I’ll retire soon, is in a blue-collar ‘burb served by LAUSD. Having also graduated from HS in a nearby town in ‘78, the year Prop. 13 was voted-in, I could offer a tale or two in support of the story of de-industrialization supporting your case. But you’ve missed a facet of the story. A strong contributor to the college-going push, particularly for African-American and Hispanic students, was the desire among educators to compensate for the years of tracking as a standard practice that shunted many into voc. ed oriented courses of study in high school. It was never hard to discern racist intent in that, though it afflicted working class whites to a great extent as well. Hence the devotion by many well-intentioned teachers, counselors and admin. to the ‘college-going culture’. That this dove-tailed w/de-industrialization and the broad demise of voc. ed. is undeniable. But, for many years college costs remained reasonably affordable. I got an MA from a Cal St. U in ‘99. By then I was a father (and FT teacher) and so it took me a while. But I was able to pay tuition with a credit card and was debt-free when, after stretching the process out over extra years, I finally got the degree. So CSU was still relatively affordable then, though not as dirt-cheap as it had been 20 years earlier. (I paid $125 for a full course load at one for the spr. sem. in 1981; 3 years later at a Univ. of Cali campus I finally got my BA having paid about $1200 a year for a full 3 trimesters.) So I was part of a generation that benefited from and was used to thinking of a college education as affordable. The big bump in tuition has come since 2000. My eldest son graduated from a CSU in 2013 owing $15K. FWIW, Reagan had already been dead for awhile by then.
Yeah, Ilived it. My dad was a high-skilled machinist for Caterpiller. Just before he retired in1980theydid some stats and found his production was extremely higher than anyone else and he got an extra $400 a month on his pension. Yes, those still existed for. A lot of people with. union jobs. I went to college in 1964 at the U of Ill.I was the only one of my siblings to do so. I had the really. good federal loan of the time - 3% with a year forgiven for every year teaching. None of this. happens now, and by the 90s they were all gone. I grew upon a village in central Illinois. Only one of my siblings had a well paying job. He was a high- skilled. pipe fitter until COVID when his union jobs stopped. He got his training on the job until the company was bought out. All this is not really possible now.
College did not give me a high paying. job. I was a civil servant working fora state university, and retired with a decent pension, but below our state average. I feel sorry for working class people trying. to make their way in a world structured against them.
Have you read _The Cult of Smart_? deBoer writes about spending days struggling with an eager student who simply could not handle long division. The story doesn't have a happy ending--at its conclusion the student still can't do the math and deBoer begins to consider that not everybody is college material.
Somebody who goes to college may well accrue debt regardless of whether or not they're able to graduate. It's not a harmless experiment if somebody who shouldn't be attending college ends up wasting years of their life plus taking on thousands of dollars in debt in pursuit of a pipe dream.
It is also not harmless when the education system is complicit in bringing in people who are not qualified.
I think "cui bono" is applicable here.
Indeed. I always thought that before any college student is given any sort of loan forgiveness, the university they went to should be forced to cover it out of the endowment they have. I think this would nip it in the bud, right quick.
I get what you mean. It’s one of those tricky situations where I can totally accept the premise in the aggregate – “some fairly stable proportion of people will not necessarily thrive in an academic setting, and there should be other options available to them to build a financially stable and meaningful life“ - but I wouldn’t accept a million dollars to walk through a school and point out the kids who should go to college and the kids who shouldn’t. I was told from a young age that college was the right choice for me, I don’t think those people were wrong, and I never had to fight against anyone suggesting that I shouldn’t go. 
Somebody else has probably coined a term and written a 10,000-word substack essay about this already, but I feel like this aggregate/specific problem runs through a lot of my political/cultural beliefs. Like, I suspect that psychiatric overdiagnosis might be a problem on a national scale, but I would never in a thousand years suggest to any individual person that their psychiatric diagnosis might be wrong, to take just one example. I end up angry about the “experts“ who clearly aren’t doing their jobs in making these distinctions, but then that feels like a total cop-out when I’m willing to imperiously declare from my high horse that the distinction should be made. 
"I would argue that young people were relentlessly told in their youths that education is the only path to prosperity, and I would further argue that a changing economy left them with few stable ways to secure a middle-class existence other than college."
this is exactly what happened, and all the hippie-punching revisionism people do these days, as if the student debt crisis were some entirely frivolous ordeal limited to rich, neurotic gender studies grads who only went to college to irritate centrists and conservatives, and not desperate teens signing six-figure contracts at economic/political gunpoint, is deranged.
As a caveat I know plenty of guys that can work with their hands (mechanics, sheet metal workers, technicians, etc.) who have no aptitude for jobs that require a lot of abstraction.
I think this is at least a little bit of a mirage of hindsight. The significant success available in the trades is due at least in part to the lack of people going into them, and that lack is driven by everyone's push to go to college. Had we not pushed everyone to college, there would be far more competition for those jobs, and by comparison, college probably ends up looking better.
When the public schools got rid of the shop classes, that was the first sign that boomers were trying earnestly to talk their kids out of blue-collar jobs and into white collar ones. I had a friend in HS whose dad was a long-haul trucker and his constant advice to my friend was "graduate from HS and go to college so you don't end up like me."
That's nonsense. First, there's never been a halcyon period of vocational ed in the United States.
Second, old style vocational ed--which wasn't very good so rid yourself of the "shop classes were awesome until boomers killed them" delusion-- was killed deliberately by Nation at Risk, and the belief that we needed high quality education to "beat the Russians". Career tech had to be of superior quality and the courses that came about to replace shop are extremely expensive and competitive. The kids getting these courses are often the same kids going to college, and the ones that are genuinely trades are getting just the best of the rest.
Back in the 70s and 80s it was totally logical to tell kids to go to college. There were all sorts of middle management positions and IT positions that were available. That these got killed doesn't mean it was bad advice.
I always thought of a 4-year degree being as much a class marker as anything else. It telegraphs to people of the educated class that you come from a financially stable enough situation that you could afford to be income-negative for four years. My dad always expressed it to me that you would always be better off making a living with your mind than with your time and your hands, but embedded in there is a very old notion of gentility and what "the right kind of people" do to earn a living.
My brother works in the trades, and an under appreciated aspect of that track is just how brutal the first few years of that job are as an apprentice. Your hourly pay is NOT better than in the service sector (my brother waited tables to pay the rent) and the master tradesguys attempt to give you the most backbreaking possible work. When the union maintained their benefits and pay during the pandemic (even if they couldn’t work), that was obviously a much better situation than in the restaurant industry, but absent the pandemic he probably would have quit the trades. Most of the other apprentices already had family in the trades and were living at home and really felt like they had no other options, especially because they were kind of bad at talking to people.
Back when I worked for a startup I compared it to a cult. You show up early, you get lunch with the same people, you go back to work, you get dinner with the same people and maybe goof around a big (bars, building electronic toys, running RC cars in the parking lot), you go back to work. You often sleep under your desk. Then you come in on Saturdays.
Yeah. The office holiday parties were the best I've ever been to because everyone needed to blow off steam and the company understood that.
Respectfully, it is *your* idea that's deranged, that "desperate teens were signing up for six-figure debt under economic/political gunpoint". I agree with Freddie's article, but this is simply false. Since you are talking about "teenagers", you can only be thinking of undergraduates, who are not anywhere close to borrowing six figures, on average.
If you haven't looked at the data, this 2020 piece by Adam Looney is among the best I can find: https://www.brookings.edu/research/ed-depts-college-scorecard-shows-where-student-loans-pay-off-and-where-they-dont/. Here's an abbreviated version of the final table, which shows the share of debt and share of borrowers by degree earned for the 2014/15 and 2015/2016 graduating cohorts. (I've broken the table out into two groups: programs "teenagers" might sign on for, and everything else.)
Degree (% of Borrowers) - Median Debt
Bachelors Degree (51.5%) - $23,236
Associate's Degree (15.6%) - $16,665
Undergraduate Certificate (12.8%) - $10,719
Master's Degree (16.2%) - $45,499
Professional Degree (2.6%) - $149,508
Doctoral Degree (0.8%) - $81,664
Gradual/Professional Certificate (0.6%) - $48,144
So the maximum median debt for the presumptive "teenager" group is $23k. I daresay the hippie punchers have a more accurate grip on reality than you.
Justin's post contains two claims, which I'll try to paraphrase:
1) There are people out there that argue the student debt crisis only affected rich people with (in their view) useless humanities degrees. These people are wrong.
2) What actually happened was teenagers desperate to secure a future for themselves took the only route open to them: six-figure loans.
The first claim could still be right, but his second claim does not substantiate it because it is false.
*Your* claims are a step in the right direction. I agree that if you're poor, repaying student loans will be extremely onerous, bordering on impossible. But I think you're badly mistaken about how many people are in that situation. Granted, it depends on what you think "poor" means, but I don't think you're very well calibrated. I myself took $25k in undergraduate loans ... in 1990 (higher than today's median). I didn't miss a payment during a period in which I was living on $30-35k/year.
The picture for borrowers is probably worse in some ways now - I think the loan terms are less favorable. But it seems like inflation makes it a wash: inflation since 1990 is estimated at 128%, so it's more like I borrowed $50k in todays terms.
I realize my history isn't the only data point and it shouldn't be the final word, but it makes me deeply skeptical of your claim that this is a widespread problem. (And really, this isn't just based on my own experience, but my broad observation of huge numbers of college graduates.) What are the absolute numbers here? Why should this be a policy priority?
Reporting the median without any measure of variance could be misleading.
I agree, but do you think it could be misleading enough to invalidate the point I'm making? I can't see it.
I think your basic point, that almost no one completes an undergrad degree with owing many hundreds of thousands of dollars, is sound. I guess the question is how many grads with a bachelors degree have an “unmanageable” level of debt (a level that is debateable). What percentage of recent grads owe more than $50k? $75k? $100k? It’s not a majority, but could still be a large group of people.
The rich gender studies grads who went to Brown are not the ones failing to get jobs and pay off their debt. Those students likely have less debt in the first place, because their parents could pay their tuition or because they went to schools with massive endowments that give generous aid packages, and they're not failing to get jobs because with a prestigious school on your resume you can walk into a decent paying white collar job in pretty much any industry regardless of your major. Most of those gender studies grads are working in tech or consulting. The ones that go into journalism and piss off the conservatives are usually independently wealthy and/or have zero student debt, which enables them work in a poorly-paying culture industry in the first place. It's the middle and working class kids who are taking on massive debt to attend Eastern {Insert State Here} State University and majoring in vaguely vocational-sounding things like "criminal justice" and "business management" who are getting absolutely fucked by this system.
But the rich kids that spent 4 years at Brown doing gender studies don't pay for their PhDs. They get into other Ivy League programs and get paid to get a doctorate.
I'm in a humanities PhD program at a super expensive (if I had to pay) school. Almost none of my colleagues has student loans and they certainly don't have them for their doctoral program, where tuition is waived and everyone gets a stipend. The person I know who does have 6-figure debt is my cousin, who attended mid-tier schools, some for-profit, as she tried to figure out what would get her a better paycheck. Sure, you can say it's her own fault, but she only ever tried to learn practical things that would get her a job and there are a lot of predatory colleges out there that teach very little and promise a lot while charging you all the way.
Yeah, they're typically expected to teach. Some schools do some maneuvering so that your stipend is technically not contingent on your teaching, but on your academic progress, which includes your teaching (essentially, they don't want grad students to be employees who can unionize/have actual contracts).
I really enjoyed Trade Wars are Class Wars by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein. They argue persuasively that there are 2 more causes of the decline in manufacturing.
1. The post-Bretton Woods trade system forces every country to hold dollar denominated assets. This creates a trade balance where the US sells financial services to other countries in exchange for physical goods. This is extremely good for US finance, and really bad for blue collar workers, who face the double whammy of fewer manufacturing jobs and all the money in finance bidding up the price of assets like housing. They have a really provocative theory that the "Bancor" system proposed by Keynes could rebalance international trade.
2. China and Germany suppress domestic consumption, which allows those countries to run huge trade surpluses, which further throws the trade balance out of whack. Trade policy for the American working class is often presented in an pseudo-xenophobic terms, but "support workers in Germany and China fighting for a higher share of their firms' profits" is a great win-win policy, although it is bad for Chinese and German capitalists :).
Yeah it will be interesting to see. I think part of the problem is that there is not a big reshore button Congress can press but chooses not to. Trump and Biden have both taken some aggressive actions, but I think it still remains to be seen how much reshoring will ultimately occur as a result. Trump opening a Foxconn Factory or Biden passing the CHIPS Act is splashy but has a pretty small impact imo. The Plaza Accord had a giant impact and really helped manufacturing for a decade, but the mainstream media does not cover trade policy so it's not even on the policy menu for most voters, and so many countries buy dollar assets today it's debatable if it's even possible to devalue it anymore.
Klein and Pettis's prescriptions - force Chinese and German firms to pay their workers more (when we lack the political will to gently nudge American firms to do so), and retool global finance so the dollar isn't the reserve asset - are way more difficult to achieve than anything Bernie was talking about, so I'm not holding my breath.
The Trump tariffs weren't nothing, so it will be interesting to see in a few years what their impact is.
I don't think anyone's blaming young people for signing up for (often pointless) college degrees. The shame - if that is the right word - is that so many signed up with seemingly not a jot of thought to the expense. And, in many cases, they made no attempt to reduce costs by eg starting in community college, attending a state rather than private college, working while studying or taking a gap year to save money.
You’ve missed the point entirely. They didn’t worry about the cost, by and large, because every single adult in their life (parents, relatives, teachers, the media, etc) told them over and over again that going to college ensured them a relatively high middle class lifestyle and that they would be able to pay the loans back.
Let’s not forget we are talking about 17 and 18 year olds, whose brains are still forming and who are not really in the best position to do actuarial analysis about their future earnings.
Reminds me of homedebtors who bought in 2004-2007, only to get whipsawed in 2008-2011.
In the runup to the GFC, everyone was screaming "buy!" Buy!" "BUY!", doesn't matter what real estate you buy, don't look at the loan terms, it's gonna be big, BUT YOU GOTTA BUY NOW!
Not to mention that, unless you happened to be a hedge fund billionaire, the average frustrated chump was going to have to take out some insane neg-am loan, at least if he wanted to be able to buy a home in a semi-habitable school district.
Then, when the bottom fell out of the real estate market, and the easy refi was no longer so easy, or even possible, and Wall Street lined up at the bailout trough, those same homedebtors got finger-wagging lectures about The Importance Of Paying One's Debts.
Cryptocurrency, anyone?
Even most 17 and 18 year old's are smart enough to limit the amount of debt that they take on--and keep in mind that about 45% of college grads have no debt whatsoever.
Most 17 and 18 year olds do not have the knowledge to read a dense financial contract, on which their parents' names are the operative signatures as co-signors.
I'll also stick up for those with post-bachelor's debt - I got a full ride to undergrad. I did a 5-year set of degrees in 4 years to avoid having to pay tuition on that last year. Everybody lauded my financial savvy! Until I got to senior year, realized I had no idea what I wanted to do with the degrees I'd gotten, and went to law school instead. With significant scholarships, I still took on six figures of debt. That was, in the end, the better financial decision, because the result has been a job that pays not just the rent but the mortgage and the student loans on top of that. But it was originally a move I made to try to credential my way into the kind of income my undergrad work was never going to give me. I don't see myself as so different from someone who got a Masters of Public Administration to try to add $10K a year to their bureaucratic job, just luckier.
For medical and law school? It's absolutely worth it. But if you are going to take $100,000k in additional debt to try to get a $10k a year raise?
From what I recall the worst return on investment is getting an English degree from an elite private university. But how many students actually do this? I think 17 and 18 year old's are probably getting a bad rap here because most actually do display fiscal responsibility in taking on college debt. Given that isn't it plausible that the outliers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans with no real way to pay them off are a fiscally irresponsible minority?
I think it’s important to return to your earlier point about the average debt being much smaller than this. I agree with you that far fewer people are in a position of having taken on massive debt for a useless degree. But I see loan forgiveness programs as having mainly benefited people who took on less debt, that they nevertheless cannot pay back. $15,000 might as well be $500,000 if you’re working a job you got because you couldn’t complete your degree, with no real prospects of financial advancement over time. The degree might have been a great idea in terms of future earnings, but that doesn’t matter if you never finished it, which I think applies to a lot of people in the “average debt“ bucket. Or they got a solid associate degree to get a job whose wages have not kept up with the cost of living. Or they belong to the group I mentioned above, who succumbed to the teenage pressure to get into college, and were smart enough to back out before they got four years in the hole, but still have to pay those first two years with all accrued interest.
So, on the one hand, from my own position, I’m happy to stick up for the small group of people with the useless public administration degrees who didn’t do the smartest thing possible with their money at a time when every job in their field demanded expensive credentials. But on the other hand, in terms of supporting loan forgiveness policy, I don’t actually care if a few arguably financially irresponsible people benefit if we pay down a gigantic proportion of the debt burdening people who made what was at the time a perfectly rational choice for them, in an environment that made irrational choices seem obligatory. 
Look at the building spree that colleges and universities have embarked upon in the last couple of decades. Large public and private universities, flush with cash, have constructed enormous edifices. How much of that wealth is due to government subsidies?
Paying off student debt is simply going to exacerbate that situation. At one level it's a regressive transfer of wealth from waitresses and janitors to college grads who not only earn more but will live longer and healthier lives than the people who will now subsidize their middle class lifestyles. At a societal level it's pumping even more money into a bloated college/university system that literally has more money than it knows what to do with and consequently embarks on a program of building modern day colosseums.
When I was 17 I made $200 babysitting for a weekend and I considered that an unfathomable sum of money. Teenagers who work might understand the value of a dollar but there are practically zero teenagers out there who understand the value of $100,000. Any teenager who is unusually good with money was probably either born rich and took up investing as a hobby or born poor and had to financially support their family. It's not reasonable to expect an average teenager to understand what it's going to feel like to be in debt while fully supporting yourself and your family.
I’ve seen people blame young people for this in every discussion of debt forgiveness I’ve participated in. I’ve had the argument several times in several places.
As others have said more eloquently - this was the only option presented as available. I went to a public school with the relentless, single-minded focus on college that FdB describes. Plenty of students did start out at community college, but this was seen as the embarrassing, a second-rate option. Surely those kids could have just worked harder and gotten a scholarship! Many students worked jobs and we knew the value of a dollar - but we didn’t know the value of $100,000, because we were 17 and that money and the reality of what we could buy with it were (1) still unreal to us and (2) being presented by every single adult in our lives as not to be counted as a prohibitive expense.
Basically, if any of us had had the wherewithal to turn to our parents, grandparents, teachers, educational counselors, etc., and say “I think this is too expensive and I’m not sure why I’m doing it,” we would have been immediately shouted down. Doing it was the reason for doing it. I knew plenty of people in my hometown who got a year or two in and realized college was simply not for them - their parents often treated the ensuing years of paycheck-to-paycheck poverty as their comeuppance for having been too stupid to just grind through.
Average college debt in the United States is less than $29,000 and only about 55% of students leave college with any debt whatsoever. Debt in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is a relative rarity. It may be justifiable for somebody who gets into medical school but somebody who gets a master's in public administration?
Keep in mind $29k is the average amount for the student loan. If you are only making the minimum payments you will be paying a hell of a lot more than that. The total cost of debt can be multiple times the initial loan value. I don't know how US federal student loans are structured, but I don't believe the average person is only paying $29k.
Aside from that I think you touch on the main problem. A Software Engineer and a Theatre Major are given the same type of debt. This is utterly insane. It's like giving the same type of loan to Apple and your friend who sells knitted hats.
As somebody else here pointed out a few articles ago what would happen if student loans were vetted based on future earnings? You would probably see a lot fewer theater majors taking on debt versus software engineers.
The inverse of this is happening right now. Engineering students are charged a higher tuition because of potential future earnings.
When I went to school the argument was that it was because the school had to pay off all the fancy labs and engineering buildings it had built.
There just *aren’t* that many theater majors, or the oft-sneered-at “gender studies” majors -- they are an extremely tiny fraction of the bachelor’s degrees awarded each year. They just show up in articles about the college debt crisis because it makes for good clickbait, and because journalists are more likely to frequent the kinds of coffee-shops where underemployed liberal arts majors work and hang out.
Plus, theater and gender studies majors tend to do fine. Largely because only fairly elite schools offer those and you get a bump from going to a good school and (probably) from already being from a decently well-off family.
Yep, I remember kids sneering at peers who went to community college. The idea that it was a financial decision never entered my mind. You ended up at community college if you had bad grades. (Now I know there are many colleges that accept everyone -- it probably was a financial decision for those families.)
The experience of living on campus was such a huge part of it too. Everyone dreamed of going away to college and having a blast--parties, sex, football games. College seemed like the only way to live apart from your parents at 18, to finally feel like "an adult" with freedom.
I mean, who wants to be stuck at home until you're 20 or older? That's another consequence of the decline in wages for working-class jobs. People who are emotionally ready to be adults can't afford to move out. College allows you to have freedom 9 months of the year on your parents' dime (and loans) and then when you graduate, you can get a job that supports an apartment.
Why, sure, I understand why it is very pleasant to go to big name colleges and party for four years, there's no mystery to that. "Kids sneering at peers who went to community college..." - sure, but everything comes at a price. Plenty of immigrant families figured out that two years at CC, then straight into top state university (UC Berkeley or UCLA in California) saved thousands and you ended up with the same degree. "Parties, sex, football games ..." well, yes, very jolly, but who pays? "College allows you to have freedom 9 months of the year on your parents' dime (and loans) ..." and now subsidized by tax payers, most of whom never got to party nine months a year themselves and never went to college.
`now subsidized by tax payers, most of whom never got to party nine months a year themselves and never went to college.'
The top 25% of income earners account for 86.6% of income taxes paid which, since no new taxes have been levied, will be used to pay for loan forgiveness/subsidies for student loans. To be in the top 25% income should be about $87k, which basically requires a Bachelor's degree these days (unfortunately). So in terms of percentage of individual income and overall `subsidy' amount, the burden of loan forgiveness/college loans is falling squarely on persons with a college education.
https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/heres-the-average-americans-income-by-education-level/
https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/average-salary-by-education-level/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233301/median-household-income-in-the-united-states-by-education/
It's not getting paid for out of income taxes. It's getting paid for out of deficit spending. This has both inflationary effects (which hurts lower-income people the most) and systemic risk effects (which affects everyone...maybe...someday). I won't pretend the impact of this is more than a relatively small piece of deficit spending, but it's not accurate to pretend that taxes are paying for this. The fair faith and credit of the US government is paying for it. The more we trade on that, the more systemic risk we introduce.
Agreed that deficit spending will be used to finance student loan relief. But it's deficit spending because the amount of funds the government expends is greater than the amount flowing to it, some of which comes in the form of income taxes. If we keep the notion alive that we will eventually have balanced budgets and we repay the debt, then we will do so in large part through income taxes (hence the connection between relief and income taxes).
Again no new taxes have been levied so the critique you're leveling is valid for all deficit spending. Why are people not upset that military expenditures increase every year and are a pretty blatant subsidy to defense contractors and well-paid engineers who work for them?
I'm of two minds on this. Part of me wants to almost entirely excuse students, and part of me wants to hold them somewhat more accountable. But in both minds, I think the adult guidance around these decisions is terrible.
1) I think expecting 17-year-olds to make good economic choices at a strategic level is absurd. There are individuals capable of doing so, but when taking into account the broad swath of people, it will ultimately fail. Young people need guidance, and the powers that be providing that guidance often don't have to shoulder the burden (at least not directly...though the graduates who stay at home much longer rather than striking out on their own suggests that parents did absorb some of those costs anyway).
2) When choosing colleges, my first choice was one of the more expensive schools to which I was accepted. My family was able to cover the cost of my education (I am supremely lucky in that), and my family never pressured me to choose the less expensive options, but I still went with my second choice which was about $10,000 per year less expensive. Choices *are* there (for some more than others); it seems like, with effective guidance, students *could* make better decisions. And having students get price-conscious advice *might* even make schools start to consider addressing the cost of tuition.
I went to college and graduate school for English degrees. Clueless. John Mulaney has a great bit about this that says it better than I ever could. https://youtu.be/aiqKK4ysI7g
I think there's a "different worlds" phenomenon afoot: as Tardigrade_Sonata pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the US is only at roughly 36% four-year degree attainment. College clearly isn't the "only option" for most people, whatever your experience has been, to say nothing of going _immediately_ to college after high school.
My own (fairly affluent, public) high school saw huge chunks of students start jobs, join the military, begin vocational schooling, etc..
Oh, we had kids who did all those things, too! It was just very clear to all of us that college (and the military, that was a big thing when I was in school too - but still better if you were going to ROTC in college than merely *enlisting*) was the only good option. If you had to do something else clearly you simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or you had some fundamental immaturity that prevented you from going right away. But surely you would still go later.
I knew a guy in school with a pretty pronounced intellectual disability - we were in music courses together. He was motivated and driven and social and really loved school, but even the remedial version of the standardized tests, shortened to accommodate him, took him many, many tries to pass. Didn’t matter: He was going to college, too! Everyone told him so! He was really looking forward to it. Because no adult could admit aloud that perhaps continued academic achievement was not going to pan out for every single student.
I know the situation most familiar to me is not the only one. My friends who attended big-city public schools had much different experiences from me in my suburban public school system. But I think the point still stands that for a lot of people and especially a lot of the middle class, this college-at-any-cost culture was pervasive. (This is not a counterpoint to you or the person you’re citing, but I’d also be interested to know how many of the people who don’t have 4-year attainment have 1 or 2-year attainment for degrees that they never finished.)
`I went to a public school with the relentless, single-minded focus on college that FdB describes.'
I wonder how prevalent this type of school really is? Is this something new and/or regionally isolated?
In the late 90s/early 2000s in the part of the midwest I grew up in (rural), community college was not `seen as the embarrassing, a second-rate option.' The students who went to CC classes while still in high school, particularly trade/vocational classes, were seen as quite canny as 1) they had someone else paying for their education and 2) they got out of boring high school classes.
Heading to CC after HS was similarly viewed as smart either because people knew they were just not going to take things too seriously for two years, and didn't want to overpay for that, were financially strapped, weren't sure about what they wanted to do, or were very sure what they wanted to do and saw CC as a cheap way to get the prerequisites out of the way.
But, anecdata...
Being in a relatively affluent suburb known for its school system, with a very high-achieving local immigrant population, definitely drove my perceptions. Honestly, this is one of the biggest bummers about it to me - our local CC was excellent and a great financial choice (I ended up taking a couple of courses there later to save on a semester’s tuition at my big state school) and it’s embarrassing to me now to look back and understand how cloistered I was.
But I also recognize the remnants of having grown up that way among many people in the field and professional class I occupy. People still talking about “gifted kid burnout” into their 30s, people still obsessed with diversity initiatives at their alma mater, people allergic to discussions of how class relates to educational attainment. It’s not a huge part of the overall population, maybe, but it certainly skews our national conversation about the necessity of college.
I agree, Freddie’s experience sounds like a middle class suburban phenomenon to me - which admittedly is a lot of America. I went to an city public high school in the Midwest. About one third of the class didn’t even graduate. Probably 40-50% started at a four year college, mostly because there was an educated affluent enclave right by the school skewing the numbers. The rest went into the military, trade school, or just got jobs.
kids did think about the expense. but they thought about it in the terms presented to them at the time: a bachelor's degree from a good college will easily pay for itself.
note, "good." the message (to teenagers, remember) often wasn't just, "go to college," it was more like, "go to the best college that'll have you." parents with kids who had a shot at elite universities weren't exactly encouraging their kids to attend community college.
in present-day politics there's just a total misapprehension of the context in which a lot of families made a lot of these decisions.
yes, obviously there are lots of people who were confronted with similar pressures in the same period who still didn't/couldn't take on (as much) debt as others did. but the point is that we're not really talking about a situation where one kind of person behaved reasonably and another kind of person behaved recklessly.
I feel like there is one important piece missing from this analysis. The invention of the programmable logic controller (PLC), in 1968. Here is a link talking about this history and what it changed in detail - https://library.automationdirect.com/history-of-the-plc/ Prior the invention and mass marketing of the PLC, industrial control was done entirely through logic circuits, where engineers and electricians would have to create networks of relays, hard wired PID loops for analog control, physical timers, and other devices instead of simply programming them. After 1968, the technology to automate most parts of the industrial process became much more efficient in almost every way (time, money, and physical space) - this is the point where automation became cheaper than skilled laborers. I know Reagan had something to do with this, but none of the policy matters if we don’t have the technological base to support deindustrialization and automation in place beforehand.
Yes, and as a result of the PLC we have:
1. Much higher quality manufacturing of all goods than could ever be achieved without automation, at a lower price to the consumer.
2. Many more firms that could automate, keeping them competitive with manufacturers from overseas that had substantially lower labor costs and overhead.
3. Lots of electricians (and other workers without a college degree) transitioning to being PLC programmers, resulting in them getting better pay. This dynamic continues today; a significant percentage of the PLC programmers I work with started out as electricians, and figured out how to program on the job, and have much higher salaries.
And in 10 years or so when machine learning modeling takes the place of PID loops (because they are more efficient, enabling energy and material savings) and younger engineers start using python instead of ladder logic, this happy story about electricians upskilling is likely over.
Edit: My point? Technology is good. But the structure of capitalism, with wage labor it’s defining characteristic, means that it will always leave some people worse off even when leading to improvements on the whole.
Oh, don't I wish - I've been selling against ladder logic for over 30 years. There have been better, non-ladder logic options out there forever, even simpler than Python.
But, all it takes is one old, grumpy ladder logic programmer/former electrician, to put that idea to rest. And these guys become old and grumpy at the age of 28. And they have a lot of sway with their boss and their boss's boss, because they keep things going.
All of the PLCs now have machine learning modules, that allow the final program to still be realized in ladder logic. The fancy AI engineers do their modeling in the module, the ladder logic guys still make all the lights go blinky blinky and the pumps go whirrr.
Well, somehow I made it well past 28 without joining the generally old-and-grumpy ranks of our profession. I might be off with 10 years, but grumpy will eventually lose to efficiency; always does in the end.
We've had the technology to replace PID for decades now, e.g., MPC, and yet it endures because it's very understandable and predictable (failure mode analysis is a mature topic for PID).
We'll see about ML-based control. Currently it's too slow, not terribly robust outside of its training data, tends to break things during training, and, largely, unexplainable (as in we can't predict the decisions so failure analysis is currently, outside certain settings, impossible). I know that the videos of ML-based control look impressive but remember they're generally put together by graduate students who only show you the one time out of 20 when the algorithm worked!
Also, RE: upskilling. Just have to train those PLC programmers to tune hyperparameters and select from the many models/architectures available. =)
For my boomer parents, they grew up in a world where a degree was a golden ticket. This they conveyed to me: the expectation was simply that I would go to university. To study what? didn't matter. Just graduate.
Of course, by the time my generation were graduating, it was no longer a ticket because so many people now have degrees. There's the basic market economics of something dropping in value as it is produced in surplus.
There's also the fact that just as factory jobs are diminished, a lot of white collar jobs have been removed too. The admin support jobs that used to make up many offices (secretarial pool, mail rooms, etc) have vanished. Executives type their own emails.
And the middle management jobs that once existed - many of them at the factories - have also gone.
As a counterpoint: to what extent does the PMC work to ensure that people with the right fit--college educated, white collar, upper middle class or better--are not subject to the whims of economic fortune?
In 2008 the highest unemployment rate for college grads was something like 5%. The demographic that really suffered was blue collar laborers.
I would argue that "we are ALL on devastating diagnosis, one car accident, one lost job, one economic downturn away from financial ruin" is applicable to the blue collar class. To people who work as software architects? Not so much.
I think that class solidarity (or the lack thereof) is precisely the point. David Brooks wrote that the PMC--after achieving economic security--has busily embarked on a program of pulling up the drawbridge to deny the same security to everybody else. To my mind the issue is that not only are the pressing needs of the two classes distinct (one worries about financial survival, the other about virtue signaling) but there is an active, concerted effort on the part of the top 20-25% of the economy to safeguard their own interests regardless of the costs to the rest of the country.
"My husband is a senior software architect at a large company. His work/life balance is totally out of whack because, even at his level (directorial) there’s no support staff. He gets a hundred emails a day and attends back to back meetings, while still being expected to deliver on extremely complex projects. He’s not an executive because he’s still creating applications, writing code, etc. But the demands on senior level employees like him are very different from 20 years ago."
In describing your husband's experience, it's like you're channeling my experience (save that I'm a line manager rather than a director): tons of "collaboration" activities (emails and meetings) and precious little time for actual work...but still having to complete projects as a primary contributor at the same time.
As a university professor I've seen the same thing. I've lost almost all support staff and now spend 40%+ of my time doing secretarial work that that staff used to do...
I'd go a step further and say that it wasn't just the secretaries, mail room staff, etc. In tech, at least (and I'd bet in many other "knowledge" work jobs that do not require physical presence), many of the actual workers who produce the products are being outsourced as well; offshoring manufacturing is happening today in the knowledge economy.
Globalization was never going to be kind to the labor markets of the richest country in the world save at the highest levels of ownership.
Looking at the "mass slaughter" going on at Twitter and Amazon right now, I don't think those jobs were outsourced to other countries but allowed to bloat new industries in the same way they bloated legacy industries, or other, similar employment sectors.
Indeed, this is true. But it is also true that many companies get bloated when fat with cash, so to speak, and later need to trim the fat. There is a strong tendency to attempt to solve problems with cash, and the most obvious sign of this is the hiring of additional people, as opposed to optimizing workforces.
And who do college people want to hire? More college people.
The downside of speculative bubbles is that they end up popping.
I believe you and Jolly are both making the mistake of conflating the likes of Twitter and Amazon with "the tech industry." The tech industry is much, much larger than a few highly visible firms. There is undoubtedly bloat in some companies. There is very little bloat in others. But there is considerable outsourcing going on, even in companies who serve primarily a North American market. I know companies who have 95+% of their customers in North America, and yet hire 60% of their engineers in India and 35% in Mexico. They are going where the labor is less expensive. It was insanity to think that globalization would be anything but negative for the US labor market.
This is just not what I see in the industry. There were numerous layoffs during the aughts and early teens. During the 2008 crash, many companies had to lay people off because of horrible debt covenants they signed *even while they were highly profitable.* I know companies with a >25% EBITDA that laid off 10% or more of their workforce because they had debt covenants that required them to maintain a high EBITDA or pay huge rates, and at that time, the companies couldn't simply renegotiate the debt because no one was offering credit at all. Your understanding of this industry, if you're looking at the news, is very limited.
Those companies outsource one class of professional, coders (for lack of a better term) while bloating up on middle management of various stripes: DEI, HR, etc.
Those are the jobs that will never be outsourced, as they are the bread and butter of the upper-middle-class college crowd.
Again, you're conflating. Yes, top visible companies have bloated up on DEI and the like. The middle of the market companies frequently have not and are in general a bit more conservative than the Twitters and Apples of the world.
And in terms of middle management: my observation is that the tech industry has worked harder to *decimate* middle management than any other industry. Tech companies for many years were notoriously flat in their hierarchy. I do not see this "bloat" among my peers in tech, but my peers in tech are not working at Apple or Twitter or Amazon; they are working at companies that have typically been in operation since the '60s or '70s, have gone through multiple technology transitions, (mainframes to Windows-based to web- and phone-based, in the software world), and as of the late aughts until now have been outsourcing engineering jobs steadily.
So, who are all these DEI employees subjecting to their DEI on, if everyone else is in another country? Do they have a "white people bad" struggle session at the factory in Vietnam?
Experiences vary. Go to any of the big campuses on either coast (or in the DFW/Austin corridor) and the technical roles are dominated by Asian immigrants from India and to a lesser extent China. Even with all of the offshoring and the imported labor however salaries and perks have continued to grow and grow--at least over the last couple of decades.
I certainly agree that the salaries have gotten better, even as the work force shrinks. I think the remaining US workers tend to be fiscal beneficiaries of the outsourcing. The tech firms *do* still want to retain many of the existing US employees; they simply rarely hire more workers there, and when layoffs come, they tended to impact the US first / most (although that is fading as the balance of the labor is now elsewhere).
I might humbly suggest that any company that cannot turn a profit more than twice in ten years is experiencing SOME kind of cost bloat. And payroll always being the biggest cost, it would seem sage to look at making cuts there first. Not to get into the ham-fisted disaster that was the Twitter RIF, but the core concept has some merit.
I can't tell you if Twitter was bloated or not because I'm only cursorily familiar with the company. However, it was never my contention that Twitter was not bloated.
I would also go a step further and say that undergrad degrees are no longer a golden ticket, but rather graduate degrees are. In an insanely saturated market of undergrad diplomas, most of the 'good' jobs require a post-secondary degree to get. And while the ones that didn't ever go to college may be saddled by low-paying jobs, a lot of the ones that only got a bachelor's degree are also somewhat saddled by low-paying jobs...except they also have the added weight of tens of thousands of dollars to pay back. I'm almost wondering who's better off between the two.
I agree on your second point, but I'd add a bit here too. Admin support jobs are still around, they are just fewer in number, many are outsourced, they have a much higher workload, and the pay is lousy. Support staff jobs, like manufacturing jobs, used to be regular careers with which you could buy a home and raise a family. Now they are little better than working at Target...except a crapton of them now require a bachelor's degree to get. At least the non-entry level ones do. It's a lose-lose scenario.
and even then, that grad degree had better be in law or something marketable. A Masters in Film isn't opening many doors.
Agreed -- the specific postgrad sought makes a huge difference.
I don't know if this is empirically true or not, but a graduate school degree in media and communication is an absurdity. Take a look at the partners at, say, Sard Verbinnen and tell me which is the more obvious correlation to success in the field: (i) quality of undergrad degree or (ii) existence of post-grad degree. Lot of Ivy degrees, fewer M.A.s than law degrees.
Laughs in history PhD.
My masters degree in clarinet performance’s only practical use is to get me into a doctoral degree.
But at least the stuff I learned during it were practical knowledge and skills for myself, even if the industry I can apply those things in is unadulterated neoliberal culture industry chaos.
My kid doing a masters in music is doing it for the increased time making connections and networking. There's certainly no future chasing the one or two teaching positions a doctoral degree might get you.
This is definitely a field where the institution you're at makes a difference. You'd better be good enough to command a high scholarship and have no debt. Except if you're rich...which a lot of them are.
We're under no illusions that she'll ever do more than make a living wage. That's fine.
What is often not taught in these programs is that there is a huge difference between being a working musician and an artist. It’s normal as a working musician to hold down a steady day/career job outside music, while fitting in your artistic pursuits and other gigs on the side. It’s also possible to focus exclusively on gig working and other performance opportunities, but that may leave little to no time for what’s often presented in school as “cultivating your artistry/artistic dream”.
Having that space to cultivate skills and connections, as well as explore topics of interest to learn/research if desired, is good and reasonable. And yes, these programs should be attended based on financial viability and pedagogical staff.
I hope she doesn’t see it as a fast track into an ensemble, chamber, or solo position somewhere. The contemporary classical “scene” is a right proper mess of too many performers and composers who are stuck in academia all exploiting each other’s labor and vying for attention from wealthy donors and grant offices while trying to edge each other out in competitions/auditions to extremely limited institutional spots.
I think whether or not an undergrad degree is a golden ticket these days is entirely dependent on the prestige of your school. It's still possible to get a degree in underwater basket weaving from Stanford or Yale and get a job in virtually any industry. I know because this is what I did and what the majority of my classmates did. If you have a prestigious enough name on your diploma you are virtually guaranteed a white collar job of some kind. I know people who studied philosophy and now work at hedge funds, who studied art and now work as software engineers, who studied classics and are now consultants at McKinsey, who studied anthropology and are now account executives at massive companies, who studied women's studies and have founded multiple silicon valley startups. No graduate degree or vocational training required. I think the degrees that have been devalued are bachelor's degrees from middling or low-prestige universities, whereas degrees from elite colleges have actually increased in value as they've become more competitive and continue to provide a huge leg up in the job market.
I don't know much about graduate degrees though so I can't comment on that part.
You're probably right about that. I went to a state college and don't really know anyone who went to 'elite' schools, so my knowledge of that prestige jump is almost non-existent.
`It's still possible to get a degree in underwater basket weaving from Stanford or Yale and get a job in virtually any industry.'
This is probably true (and something I believe) but it does not follow that `the degrees that have been devalued are bachelor's degrees from middling or low-prestige universities'.
I've taught in an engineering department that was ranked in excess of 100 in US News and World Report (public, PhD granting university), which is, ah, the opposite of prestigious. The students I have taught have gone on to work for FANG companies, as well as working for automotive OEMs, countless defense contractors, and government labs. They would certainly be at a disadvantage if they had the same resume as someone who went to Stanford but they are in demand and find jobs with relative ease. May take a while to get the dream job but they're still successful by any common definition.
I'll push back against this, slightly. In my engineering field (electrical and computer) the reason that graduate programs are populated mainly by international students is that domestic students receive such good offers from industry, with only a BS, that the long hours, difficult work, and low-pay graduate study requires is not worth it. Their careers are simply not impeded by this relative lack of credentials. We do get a handful of domestic students doing graduate studies part time after a few years in the workforce for advancement/niche purposes.
I agree the specific field of study matters. Tech and a lot of the hard sciences students are still well sought-after as an undergrad. I was meaning in general across the board.
1. Because debt is discipline. It's hard to leave the cubicle farm and set out on your own, much less challenge the system, if you have student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy hanging over your head. (Pace health insurance).
2. Because college takes young people, people at the wildest, most ambitious and most questioning time of their lives, and shunts those young peoples' energy and ambition into goalseeking behavior and socially harmless diversions.
"It’s common for defenders of automation (when not simply repeating the word “Luddite” over and over again) to say that automation creates jobs as well as destroys them. This may be true in aggregate, but when automation creates jobs it doesn’t usually create jobs for the same people."
This also applies exactly to offshoring and I cannot help but wonder to what degree political conflict today has its roots in class conflict between the winners and losers of globalization. When looking at the rise of Trump I would argue that the die was cast when NAFTA was approved in addition to MFN trade status for China and I'm constantly mystified when some argue that the deciding factor was Twitter.
Well, I think the obvious thing this misses is that some defenders of automation are actually on the left and posit that the problem with automation is just the problem with capitalism. If you don’t own the means of production, making it more efficient helps the ownership class, not you. Nobody complains about the efficiency of having automated dishwashing machines because they are something regular people own in their home or apartment. If dishwashing was instead a centrally controlled economic process where people paid for it on the marketplace, now you would have working class people complaining about how dishwashers are destroying jobs. This is where the whole Luddite critique comes in… Do we really want to battle against the technology, which is arguably a good thing, or against the structure that makes it harmful to some people?
My comment was directed at offshoring factory manufacturing jobs. And I think deBoer's original observation was spot on: offshoring and automation may benefit the economy as a whole but there are local winners and losers. As a gross oversimplification if executive A sees his salary rise from $400k a year to $450k a year while worker B is laid off and goes from $50k a year to $30k then the average salary has gone up.
Yes, I agree completely with you about the cause of the trump phenomenon. I’m more addressing the quote that you used. Sorry to not make that clear.
In my experience, offshoring occurs for a number of reasons, and not just to contain costs (though that is certainly a big driver). Another big factor is the need to establish a presence overseas so that they can sell more stuff overseas.
And note, many companies offshore just so they can maintain the status quo. There is a constant drive to contain costs, because there is a constant push by the consumer to drive prices down.
One of the companies I worked for (a large multinational) moved a lot of their operations offshore to both sell more stuff abroad and to contain costs. For the 13 years I worked for them, even as they adjusted headcount in the US and moved operations overseas, even though their revenue grew (because their market grew), their net margins stayed virtually the same (because of consistent downward pressure on prices, offset by continual cost containment measures), the executives bonuses didn't vary much throughout this entire period, we got consistent raises (slightly above the cost of living) every year, and the employee profit sharing payouts stayed pretty consistent.
What would have happened if they didn't contain their costs? Most of the scenarios are less favorable to the worker. There is a good chance they wouldn't have grown, headcount in the US would have probably dropped anyway, and/or we wouldn't have gotten our raises and profit sharing payouts.
People focus on the seen, and not the unseen. What people see are the changes and disruptions that occur as a company struggles (and it is a constant struggle) to stay in business and make a profit. What they don't see is the alternative - a company doesn't contain their costs, become less and less profitable, and then gives up and goes out of business and everyone loses their job.
I am a "lesser of two evils" type of person so I definitely do not believe that there is a fairy tale alternative to offshoring that keeps all the unicorns employed at their blue collar, unionized, manufacturing jobs.
At the same time I was stunned a few years ago when US average lifespans declined due to "deaths of despair" among blue collar whites. That represents a titanic, fundamental upheaval at the societal level that is going to reverberate through this country for generations.
People want easy answers that comport with their pre-existing beliefs. If you believe that NAFTA, etc. were net positives, then you will discount any factors pointing to a contrary issue.
Or, as Menken put it: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
When discussing automation and off-shoring, no one in these threads seem to consider whether the company was going to survive without it. Even with NAFTA and automation, the Big Three automakers essentially went bust-o and had to be rescued. What do you think happens if they had operated even less efficiently?
Hard to overstate the anger and resentment of those that graduated college during the GFC with minimal job prospects. Countless conversations of "WTF-- I borrowed money for a college degree so I could compete for $35K/year sales job that has nothing to do with anything I learned. What was the point??" Many folks I know went into the trades AFTER taking out $50K to get their bachelors degree. It also led to a hardened outlook 10+ years later for those that made it, found a way to higher earnings and have paid off the debt. "If I could figure it out during that shitstorm, why should we give handouts out now." I don't know the answer, but I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.
"In the span of 30 or 40 years, from the late 1970s to the turn of the century, a way of life more or less ended"
From the late 1970s to the turn of the century was just over 20 years, not 30 or 40. That's not a nitpick, your timeline seems important here.
OK I'll amend the line.
It's frustrating that the encouragement for taking on student debt is based in economics, while student debt itself is not allowed to operate by any basic economic principles.
In the debt trading world we were always on the lookout for scenarios like this. It usually meant there was an arbitrage opportunity and money to be made. I don't feel bad when corporations and sophisticated investors are involved. But it's terrible that we made young students the sucker in this situation.
Good article, but I think we need another article on what policies might have helped the problem, or would help it now, and why.
I can imagine a world in the Reagan-Thatcher era where a combination of powerful unions and nationalist trade litigation maintained relatively high levels of non-college employment for a while. Maybe that works for something like British Telecom, where there was no right to competition, so phone service in Britain would just stay more expensive and less good than other countries but would maintain employment.
But manufacturing would have been under a lot of pressure as a result of imports from high-automation countries like some of the East Asian countries, or relatively low wage countries like some of the South Asian nations. Is the idea that in the alternate universe, we would have maintained trade walls against any country that didn't have similar wages and anti-automation policies as the US and Britain, indefinitely?
There's also a neoliberal alternative - tax some of the gains that college educated workers are enjoying from free trade, etc., and use it to subsidize wages. It might be that Freddie doesn't have a specific policy in mind, but just thinks we should have done *something* other than more dakka on education to try to help displaced workers.
"I can imagine a world in the Reagan-Thatcher era where a combination of powerful unions and nationalist trade litigation maintained relatively high levels of non-college employment high for a while."
I get that Germany and the United States are very powerful (edit: meant to say different), but isn't this a good description of what Germany has been able to maintain? A vibrant vocational track in their education system, robust unions, and a highly-paid manufacturing sector?
I struggle to define the causal reason, but there seems to be an inverse relationship between the power of a country’s international finance sector (aka “Wall Street”) and the manufacturing sector. Our international finance sector is world-beating, Germany’s is pathetic -- there’s a reason that Deutsche Bank was the last investment bank willing to work with the Trump Organization. It does seem that relative to say Germany our society is unbalanced. What I don’t know: will kneecapping Wall Street (if even politically possible) actually lead to real overall benefits or just a bunch of unemployed people in New York City?
Based on what? Is there a historical relation?
I don't think it's causal, but I don't think it's a coincidence. Have you ever noticed what the largest global financial centers have in common? NY, London, Chicago, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai are all Anglophone financial centers.
Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Madrid, Milan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Seoul are second-rate financial centers relative to the size of their local markets.
Consider the Anglophone countries that don't have tier 1 global financial centers: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and India. Also not world beating manufacturing centers. This is not a fully formed opinion, but I would speculate that it is not so much that being a financial center in particular causes manufacturing decline, but that Anglophone countries have a culture that excels at creating vibrant service economies, whether in finance, IT, advertising, media, entertainment, law, accounting etc., that creates high paying alternatives to manufacturing.
Except that all of those economies passed through an industrial phase. The UK is the birthplace of the industrial revolution and in the post WWII period the US was a manufacturing powerhouse because the rest of the world had been reduced to rubble. At least with China you could argue that it is passing through the manufacturing economy phase that the US left years ago.
In the big scheme of things, the possibility of having a service sector led economy is a relatively recent phenomenon. There were no global financial centers 200 years ago.
I would argue that "200 years ago" is relative though in this sense: not every country passes through the arc of industrial->service->information economies at the same time. Obviously there are humans living on the planet right now who are still in the neolithic stage of human development. Never played Civ and rolled over somebody with tanks while they were trying to build chariots?
That's interesting, thanks! I didn't know that anybody had maintained a high paying non-college workforce, and will look into Germany.
I honestly think the seeds of pushing everyone into college happened much, much earlier - though it kicked into high gear around ten years prior to the era you highlighted, in the late 1960s, with rise in mass attendance of college by baby boomers resulting in the increasing "professionalization" of wide tiers of employment.
If you look at college in the early 19th century in the U.S., it was an institution in crisis. Many professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers would earn their certifications immediately after high school, through either mail-order degrees, clerking/apprenticeship, or some mixture of the two. College was basically just a finishing school for the upper classes, and really irrelevant if you were an upwardly mobile person of middle-class background, or even a wealthy businessman who didn't care one whit if your son had a classic education in Greek and Latin.
The "saving" of higher education is classically associated with Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and transformed the school in his 40 years into the first American modern research institution. Most notably, the entire structure of modern educational coursework - standardized testing for admission, undergraduate education as a prerequisite for graduate study, general education requirements, electives, etc. - was more or less created under his watch.
The most important aspect for us however is the idea that a college degree was a "requirement" for certain fields of study began under Eliot's watch. It didn't exist at all during earlier periods, with many leading polymaths entirely self-taught. This only expanded over time.
Take for example a field you have experience in - journalism. Through the early to mid 20th century, journalism was a working-class job that required little other than basic literacy. You graduated from high school, got a job at a local paper as an apprentice/copy editor, and worked your way up over the decades. Woodward and Bernstein were still quite a novelty within journalism at that time because they were part of the first generation of young journalists where a college background was becoming the norm. The educational requirements of journalism rose, the amount of skill required remained the same, and eventually the actual economic standard collapsed. But around the same time all sorts of jobs historically known as "clerks" - random office jobs - also shifted to requiring college degrees, arguably because they were always looking for young people from say the 70th to 95th percentile of aptitude, and now those people almost always went to college.
It's only gotten worse in the decades since of course. Now students fork out cash on degrees for things like being a chef, an x-ray technician, or a CNA. There was a for-profit college in Downtown Pittsburgh for becoming a vet-tech! Capitalism has now outsourced nearly all "job training" onto the job applicant, who also needs to somehow anticipate what sort of jobs will be available decades into the future.
The crucial shift though in the modern era is basically that the low-hanging fruit in terms of college readiness have already been plucked. People in the top third of aptitude didn't really need to go to college in order to get a job - that was a great swindle. But they were plenty capable of going to college. Many of the first-generation college attendees in the 1960s had parents who worked in manufacturing after all. But there was an assumption that we could just keep pushing more and more of the workforce through the great swindle, but that was really unworkable, even after for-profit trade schools created an entirely new second-class level of education even more transparently based upon swindling/empty credentialing.
One reason that jobs shifted to requiring degrees was that it became too difficult/risky for big companies to offer their own aptitude tests to applicants. The differential outcome lawsuits that suggested racial bias meant companies said "hell no", and instead outsourced their assessments to colleges instead. Perfect example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, in order to supposedly avoid discrimination, people now have to get a degree to do a job they could have done out of high school.
And the means of "working your way up" in a firm don't exist anymore either. Half of it is due to outsourcing, some to offshoring, and collapse of unions. But the "entry level" position offering a pathway doesn't any more. This story illustrated it perfectly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html
Would add to this important historical framework you present, the Morrill Act and the expansion and proliferation of agricultural colleges that later began to offer more “traditional” fields of study, and these colleges ended up being the backbone of many state university systems.
THANK YOU for writing this.
I’ve been trying to explain to my fellow professionals exactly why we are missing the boat in the “college for all” approach, but I couldn’t quite spit it out. Now I have a post I can link to.
I’ll have to emphasize the status part more than you did here, but that’s cool.
It’s just a shame. My daughter is a perfectly bright person who is going to do something in the sciences in a few years. But she would have also been fantastic with a job where she could simply use er hands to make awesome things, and in a more egalitarian world where it wasn’t pushed into her head that the only way to be of worth was a college degree, she might be happier in that world. (And I did my share of pushing before I got radicalized on the idea, tbh.) But with the world the way it is now, and also the resources to make sure she wasn’t graduating with a crapload of debt, how could I recommend that approach to her?
As a career high school teacher and Californian, I can attest to the overall truth of your sketch of the last five decades. Most of my teaching spots have been in inner-city schools in Los Angeles. My current gig, from which I’ll retire soon, is in a blue-collar ‘burb served by LAUSD. Having also graduated from HS in a nearby town in ‘78, the year Prop. 13 was voted-in, I could offer a tale or two in support of the story of de-industrialization supporting your case. But you’ve missed a facet of the story. A strong contributor to the college-going push, particularly for African-American and Hispanic students, was the desire among educators to compensate for the years of tracking as a standard practice that shunted many into voc. ed oriented courses of study in high school. It was never hard to discern racist intent in that, though it afflicted working class whites to a great extent as well. Hence the devotion by many well-intentioned teachers, counselors and admin. to the ‘college-going culture’. That this dove-tailed w/de-industrialization and the broad demise of voc. ed. is undeniable. But, for many years college costs remained reasonably affordable. I got an MA from a Cal St. U in ‘99. By then I was a father (and FT teacher) and so it took me a while. But I was able to pay tuition with a credit card and was debt-free when, after stretching the process out over extra years, I finally got the degree. So CSU was still relatively affordable then, though not as dirt-cheap as it had been 20 years earlier. (I paid $125 for a full course load at one for the spr. sem. in 1981; 3 years later at a Univ. of Cali campus I finally got my BA having paid about $1200 a year for a full 3 trimesters.) So I was part of a generation that benefited from and was used to thinking of a college education as affordable. The big bump in tuition has come since 2000. My eldest son graduated from a CSU in 2013 owing $15K. FWIW, Reagan had already been dead for awhile by then.
Yeah, Ilived it. My dad was a high-skilled machinist for Caterpiller. Just before he retired in1980theydid some stats and found his production was extremely higher than anyone else and he got an extra $400 a month on his pension. Yes, those still existed for. A lot of people with. union jobs. I went to college in 1964 at the U of Ill.I was the only one of my siblings to do so. I had the really. good federal loan of the time - 3% with a year forgiven for every year teaching. None of this. happens now, and by the 90s they were all gone. I grew upon a village in central Illinois. Only one of my siblings had a well paying job. He was a high- skilled. pipe fitter until COVID when his union jobs stopped. He got his training on the job until the company was bought out. All this is not really possible now.
College did not give me a high paying. job. I was a civil servant working fora state university, and retired with a decent pension, but below our state average. I feel sorry for working class people trying. to make their way in a world structured against them.