Guest post: Young people are working harder, paying more, and earning less
Originally a comment by James Garnett on How much worse prospects for young people today are.
It’s very much true that things are worse now for younger people in the USA, too. Economically and career-wise, I mean. When I entered university at age 18 in 1984, a full semester of tuition at my state university cost about $1500, which is about $3500 in 2016 terms. That was just tuition. Back then, I recall that a salary of $40,000/year on graduation was relatively decent (in my field, Computer Science). Moreover, getting into the university was just a matter of having good grades and SAT scores.
Today students must pad their personal resumes with volunteering and extracurricular activities in addition to having good grades just to be accepted to the same university, and once accepted, they face single-semester tuitions of a little over $10,000. Upon graduation, they can look forward to a salary of around $70,000/year. So income hasn’t quite doubled, but expenses have almost tripled—and that’s just tuition. There are living expenses as well, and those have risen at the same rate.
So young people are working harder, paying more, and earning less. I know some younger colleagues who are facing decades of debt payments, as a result. How is someone supposed to save for retirement like that, when they are going to be scraping by, practically hand-to-mouth until at least their 40’s and sometimes even 50’s? The answer is obviously that they are not.
Is it any wonder that younger people are rejecting establishment candidates, and opting instead for those who promise them at least the same level of opportunity and life-success as we, their parents, had and have?
I wonder where they are facing single semester tuition of over $10,000? I have remained in the school system both as a student and an instructor and my experience is that tuition at public colleges falls well short of that and at the private college in our town, probably well above that. For our students, the far bigger problem is books, which seem to have increased several hundred percent just in the past 30 years.
Oh, my. One never knows when an offhand comment is going to make a post at B&W!
iknklast@1:
I went back to my school’s site and looked up the relevant data, and you are right. In-state tuition for the credit load that I took, per semester, is a tad over $6000. Out-of-state is a bit over $16000. International is the same as out-of-state. So the tuition costs have about doubled, rather than tripled. But adding in the overall expense of living, books, etc., I feel that my overall point stands, i.e. when expenses are taken as a whole, the overall cost has approximately tripled, while the earned income upon graduation has not quite doubled. I was apparently originally looking at the two-semester cost when I first wrote that comment. (The university in question is CU Boulder, and the college in the university was/is the College of Engineering, btw.)
Another point worth consideration: back in 1984, the degree I earned was considered to be from a tier 2 school–not the best, but pretty good. Today I believe that it is considered tier 3 or 4 (that is, for degrees earned from there today).
Something else that occurred to me: a summer job back then, in the mid-1980’s, could earn almost enough (or maybe even enough) to pay for one semester’s tuition. I remember working about 30 hours a week during the summer, for three-ish months, at minimum wage, and that came to about $1200 in 1984 dollars. At the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, three months of working 30 hours a week is only $2610. So I was able to work and save for almost an entire semester, back in 1984, but kids today can’t even save up for half a semester at the same school.
Of course, my parents paid my tuition, because I chose the right parents—ones who cared about education and had been saving for it since before I was even born. My summer earnings were purely for spending money. I’m not certain how many parents are able to pay today’s approximately ~$30,000/year total expenses for one child at that university, much less for multiple children, even if they work in the still relatively well paid professions that my parents adopted. It must be far worse for kids who decide to be born to parents who don’t care.
Older people are screwed too. Not as bad as the young will be, no doubt. I’m 52. I have barely any retirement savings (3-4 years worth). I’m an adjunct instructor at a community college. I am from the first generation that makes less than my parents’ generation.
@Charle Sullivan
I’m so sorry. Adjunct professors seem to have it just about the worst: no job security, terrible wages, working at multiple locations often in the same day.
I and many of my friends are those disenfranchised your people. Personally, I am planning on becoming an expatriate barring substantial political change for the better in the US. I dropped out of college because I couldn’t afford it anymore and I lost my job. Fortunately for me and my wife, her grandmother was able to help pay for her education. She got a job as an English teacher in Japan and by living frugally we have a good chance of saving enough money to live outside the US after her contract is up.
It’s bad news academically, too.
For background: 20 years ago, when I was an undergrad, there were no tuition fees in the UK, and the government gave you a grant. Not a very big one, and smaller than it had been a few years previously, but it was there. The result was that you would probably leave university with some debt, but not all that huge an amount – and you might leave with none. That was increasingly rare as the size of the grant fell, but it was just about possible (especially if you got a decent* summer job).
The thing that this bought us was thinking time. I now teach at a fairly major British university, and most of my students have a job of some sort. The poorer ones are working every hour that god sends pulling pints, handing out fliers, or something of the sort. That’s time that, a generation ago, would have been free to read books. And the fact that people don’t read… well, it really shows in essays: I’ll leave it at that. OK: granted that we didn’t spend all our spare time in the library – we spent most of it watching re-runs of 1970s cop shows – but, hell, we could have, and we spent some of it there.
There’s another pernicious effect. Leaving with a huge debt means that the need for at least a safe 2.1 is overriding; and that breeds a kind of academic conservatism in students. They want to know what to do to get an upper second or first-class degree; that’s the only way they stand a chance of getting a job. They are, though, very reluctant to take any risks academically – even though we say to them, time and again, that risk-taking attracts marks. Tell them that a gloriously wrong paper might score more highly than a safe but uninteresting one, and they look utterly nonplussed. Tell them that they’re allowed to attack the premises of an assigned question, and to say that one of the people they’ve been reading – or even the person lecturing them – is wrong, and that that might be a good thing, and they just smile nervously and back away.
I can’t help but to think that that bodes ill for the coming years. We’re churning out a generation of perfectly competent middle-managers and people who can do exactly what they’re told, but noone who’ll ever have their portrait hung in the boardroom. That seems a terrible legacy, and a terrible betrayal of a generation.
*Within a certain definition of decency. I knew someone whose summer job was working in a fish-packing factory. In one sense, it was awful. But the pay was good.
Massive immigration coupled with waves of automation mean that the future of employment for many will be quite bleak.
Even hi-tech jobs are being lost to IT technicians imported from, say, India by companies using various work visa schemes. In a world without borders, the cheapest options will always win the day. In addition, we’ve outsourced all of our manufacturing sector. Believe it or not, there isn’t a single T.V. factory left anywhere in the U.S. Try and find a manufactured item made in the U.S.A. whether it be electronics, an article of clothing or a household item.
Just the other day I learned, and with great disappointment, that Bernie Sanders, a candidate who’s trumpeting a 15$ minimum wage, only pays his campaign workers 12$ an hour…
Mr. Fancy Pants: I wasn’t questioning your actual point, but I think we need to be very careful in our figures, because there are people out there who will lay into the single digit that is off!
I teach at a community college; the tuitions there are still very affordable, but students are being encouraged to skip using these for their first two years because people think they are not “good enough”. In fact, many community colleges have become quite rigorous over the past 20 years, and are continuing to boost up their quality to the point that now many (I won’t say most, because that I don’t know) community colleges offer courses that are the equivalent of what a four year college offers – for a fraction of the cost. There is no “snob value” to a community college, and four year professors often denigrate students who have started at community colleges (I know, because I’ve been there. As a single mother, I had few options, and I will hold up my community college courses as the equivalent of anything I had in the four year colleges, and better than a number of those courses). We need to quit looking down on things just because they cost less, and assuming we get better when we pay more.
My students still have to deal with out-of-control textbook costs (not unusual for a single book to cost $200), but the tuition and fees are extremely manageable, and are not going up as quickly as the four year colleges. Obama has been promoting community colleges; I will give him major kudos for that. A student who does the first two years there will reduce their debt load substantially without sacrificing their education. It’s time we made that more widely known.
John@9:
The response to the fact that Sanders pays his interns $12/hour is probably going to be that, legally, interns need not be paid at all. (And, indeed, most congressional interns are not.)
iknklast@10:
Fair enough. However: as long as access to the best-paid positions is predicated upon training/education not only from a research university but also from one of the *top tier* research universities, a community college education is not going to suffice. That is not to denigrate the value of that education in terms of gained knowledge and skills, it just reflects a marketplace reality—which, I agree, is biased and wrong-headed.
@11 No matter the minimum wage at the moment, Sanders could lead by example. I’m sure many of his campaign workers/interns are young college kids, and so they’d appreciate the raise.
It’s be interesting to know just how much each of the candidates are paying their workers.
Who are the real tightwads? Trump? Clinton? Rubio?
Mr Fancy Pants – I went to a research institution. I started at a community college, but was readily accepted to higher level facilities. A community college need not stop the progress of any student, and some of our top research scientists in our state went to community college first. It is only the first two years of your school, not the entirety of it (except, of course, for students going there to learn a trade). Your comment is an example of what I’m talking about – people dismissing community colleges without talking to people who went to community colleges.
Of the people who went to community college with me (in my program), every single one of us was accepted into a research institution of our choice, and completed our degree to the highest level we desired. Anyone who stopped short of the goal stopped by choice, not by failure to be accepted. No one I know (except one professor) has questioned my credentials, nor those of the other students with me that also went on.
There is no reason that I can see for community college to stop your progress unless you are determined you belong in the Ivy League and nothing else will do.
These days, I think community college first is a smart move for anyone who isn’t rich. You get to adjust to controlling your schedule and all those little changes college has compared to high school, learn how to navigate online classes, take responsibility for your planning, etc. in a more nurturing environment. It’s cheaper by far; I’m poor and I’m getting free tuition, even though I already have a Bachelors and have gone back for a more practical AA. The instructors often have more interest in teaching (as opposed to research), which is nice for fresman/sophomores, and the class sizes are better. Altogether, a good community college can offer a better education. There are also chances to explore things you can’t when the money is tighter. Dance class? Theater appreciation? Otherwise expensive hobbies are a cheap way to go for cultural self-development.