As many articles as there are about this in the press, I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't become one of the biggest issues for the presidential election.
Which candidate(s) have an actual realistic plan that will make college education affordable and reduce the burden of existing student debt, as opposed to "Affordable education for all!" as a hollow platform piece?
Colleges could literally spend as much as they're provided. A lot of money right now seems to go towards adding shiny new things to attract more students (e.g. newer buildings, more tech, nicer chairs, etc). The only thing stopping them from charging more is competition, but so few students even check the cost of their education that it isn't working well, and many are geographically restricted.
Community college is where people go if they actually care at all about the costs. Or at least they get 2/3rds of their education done at a CC.
If I was in charge I'd attack this problem as follows:
- College loans are now provided by the US Government only at an interest rate DESIGNED to break even (i.e. no longer for-profit).
- Loans are repaid as a tax (for people who remain in the US, like a debt for people abroad).
- No repayment is required under a certain threshold (e.g. $30K single, 50K family, in 2015 dollars).
- Repayment schedules scale similar to income tax (e.g. you MUST repay faster the more you make).
- Loans are not subject to bankruptcy and are treated like a tax for inheritance purposes (i.e. paid back first).
- Under certain circumstances interest can be frozen (e.g. documented medical issues, natural disasters, continued education, etc).
This means that unemployment or illness isn't as damaging. People who leave college and get low paying jobs aren't hurt as badly day to day (although might technically have an outstanding loan for the rest of their life).
How about this: set tuition caps on any government guaranteed loan. Or maybe expand the role of community colleges so that you can get a BA or Masters at CC pricing.
You just described exactly how student loans work in New Zealand. You have a special tax code "addon" SL, which means you pay a little bit of extra tax, which goes towards your loans.
Only major difference is, death & bankruptcy release you from the loan in NZ...
It really doesn't matter if they have a plan now -- what matters is the demographic that put them in office. So if they want to get re-elected, they know they have to work hard enough to keep those that voted for them (and can vote them out) happy.
If you want the Democratic Party to run progressive candidates who will do more than give lip service to student loan debt, people need to 1. Vote in primaries and 2. Vote for Democrats (esp left leaning ones) in primaries and general elections. That's the only way the party will move closer to the left.
I'm excluding Republicans since their base believes that government intervention to alleviate student loan debt will be the equivalent of Judas kissing Jesus and Road to Serfdom and all that shit.
And it goes without saying the quixotic brand of Silicon Valley libertarianism is not fertile ground for this sort of thinking.
Well you don't even necessarily need to relieve student loan debt, you could start by making it forgivable. Right now student loan debt can't be discharged through bankruptcy, and it creates a perverse market incentive for college tuition.
Not to mention this attack ad is right on the website for the Washington State Republican Party:
That ad has nothing to do with student loan debt per se, and is a standard attack ad, the veracity of which I'm quick to doubt for being a 30 second sound bite.
But not as easily as a mortgage, which is downright silly considering the volume at which Fannie and Freddie originated mortgages. You can walk from a house if it has no value, why would a degree be any different?
Because it's unsecured debt. Cannot take an 'education' back. You can take back a house or a car. People with low or no income only get small credit lines.
You lose your house if you walk away from it, including all the money you've paid into it. The equivalent of this for student loans would be if you gave back your degree and related experience when you defaulted on student loans.
This only works when the underlying asset has value (note how many people walked away from their underwater homes during the housing collapse). This is no different.
Unless it is a Love Canal scenario, the land and home still have some value and can be resold, even if it is no longer worth as much as the owner owes. But the university cannot have you send your diploma back and auction it off to someone else to get partial compensation.
Loans always involve some risk and there are always some bad loans. But there is, in fact, a real difference between secured debt and unsecured debt. A mortgage is secured debt. A student loan is unsecured debt.
Furthermore, since the point of education is to basically help people become more clever, if we make it too easy for smart, knowledgeable people to wash their hands of their student loans, the end result will be an overall societal attitude of "Only a fool actually pays their student loans." At that point, the entire system falls apart in a way that makes our current woes look like small potatoes.
> Furthermore, since the point of education is to basically help people become more clever, if we make it too easy for smart, knowledgeable people to wash their hands of their student loans, the end result will be an overall societal attitude of "Only a fool actually pays their student loans." At that point, the entire system falls apart in a way that makes our current woes look like small potatoes.
That's going to happen regardless, with over a trillion dollars in student loan debt. Its just taking longer than expected.
Smart people will always learn how to hack the system. Its easy to default on a house in any state. Its easy to default on your student loan debt if you're moving to another country. The only people who get stuck with worthless debt are suckers.
The difference is that with bankruptcy, the majority of your assets are seized. The equivalent would be if the degree and related experience was seized as well.
Also, in bankruptcy the creditors are the ones who assume the losses. When defaulting on government loans, the taxpayers would foot the bill. Totally different scenario.
I certainly hope so. It would be a far better discussion topic than D. Trump's hair, or gay marriage, or immigration, or the ACA.
Speaking on behalf of the entire middle class--and let me assure you that I am both qualified and authorized to do so--we are getting sick of working our asses off just to live our entire lives sunk up to our multiple chins in debt.
But no one is likely to lift a finger to do anything about it until after missing a few meals. Perhaps it will help when Mr. Khan and allied parties in the tech industry start to eat Academia's lunch. Thanks to the Internet, you don't absolutely need to pay $100k+ for a degree, and you don't even need to pay the "buck fifty in late charges from the public library," as suggested in the movie Good Will Hunting.
Once employers start de-prioritizing an accredited degree and start recognizing online coursework certifications, it will already be too late. Nobody will be going to college for anything short of calculus, law, medicine, or petroleum-related geology.
After all, if your art history degree isn't going to help you get a job anyway, you could just browse artists' pages on Wikipedia and visit museums instead.
> Once employers start de-prioritizing an accredited degree and start recognizing online coursework certifications, it will already be too late. Nobody will be going to college for anything short of calculus, law, medicine, or petroleum-related geology.
What is the mechanism which will cause this change? It looks a bit chicken/egg from here—there will continue to be college graduates because they are strongly advantaged during hiring, and hiring will continue to strongly advantage graduates because there are enough of them that doing so doesn't drive their costs up much. Plus, no-one in HR gets fired because the Harvard grad didn't work out—take a chance on the guy with a GED and pile of Coursera certificates, OTOH...
Nobody has the authority to do that. After realizing that, it was just a matter of tracking a nobody down. Fortunately for me, there's a mirror right there in my bathroom, so I didn't have to look very far.
That fragment you quoted was a joke, intended to draw attention to the presumption that may have been missed if I just said "we".
Degrees aren't all about credentials. They're not even all about education. There's the networking aspect to consider as well, and I'd say it's one of the top reasons to go to college at all. You don't really get to network in MOOCs.
FYI to anyone who is curious but not enough to check out both: The actual writing appears to be the same, but they have different titles and different photos (+, of course, photo descriptions/comments) and I guess one has a video the other does not.
I absolutely agree with the article stating that vast amounts of students borrowed on the "premise ... that virtually every degree — regardless of the school or the major — could more than pay for itself because college graduates would command premium incomes". That's driven home in the previous paragraph: "The treatment led him to study Chinese medicine after graduation and become a licensed acupuncturist himself in 2004. He had already racked up $45,000 in college debt; acupuncture school required more."
When I went to college (2001-2005) the thought process was "borrow as much as you can, you'll get a good job straight out of college and no one can repo your college degree". I had the head of the financial aid department tell me that borrowing the max every year was fine and dandy and I should keep doing it because my degree wasn't like a car that could be repossessed. So I graduated $38K in debt and spent maybe half of that on actual school with the rest going towards stupid shit that 20 year olds spend too much money on.
Isn't there an inherent economic fallacy in the idea that "virtually every degree - regardless of the school or the major - could more than pay for itself because college graduates would command premium incomes"?
If everyone has a bachelor's degree, how is everyone going to command a premium income?
>> If everyone has a bachelor's degree, how is everyone going to command a premium income?
Then it becomes a starting point, not an end point. Most businesses, when faced with a deluge of BA's, will start to look for people with master degrees. Same thing if they have a highly sought after position and get a deluge of people with masters, then they look for PhD candidates.
This becomes an issue when you have a BA in a field where a majority of people have master degrees. I had several roommates who were engineering and CS graduates. At the time, the economy was shit (early 2000's) and they went back for their masters. Most said it was because when the economy finally bounced back, they would have a leg up on the people they were competing with.
The only problem they found was as the economy recovered, they had more opportunities with a masters degree, but many were hired at the salary level of an entry level engineer.
Everyone doesn't have a bachelor's degree. About 1/3 of 25-29 year olds have one. It is true that the advice you cite couldn't apply to all conceivable scenarios, but if given in a specific time and place it could very well be correct.
As I see it the problem is that it is actually correct at the present time. And despite the vast bulk of private schools claiming to be charitable organizations they act like rapacious capitalists. That being the case we can look at the equilibrium for firms in their positions, which is to capture virtually all of the surplus. That is exactly what they are in the process of doing.
There's probably several different governmental solutions possible, and by all means if you are interested in this issue you should pursue them. But if you want to do something on a personal level, consider forgoing the use of a degree as a proxy in hiring. Just look for whatever ultimate skills and attributes you are interested in directly. This will have a cost to you, the signal is not totally empty, but if adopted on a widespread basis it will have the salutary effect of making colleges live and die on their direct contribution rather than resting on their credentialist laurels.
Very true - especially when some of the people graduating with bachelor's degrees are practically illiterate (I know, they have worked for me). Soon it will require a master's degree to demand a middle-class salary - it's about at that point now (outside of tech at least).
> "premise ... that virtually every degree — regardless of the school or the major — could more than pay for itself because college graduates would command premium incomes"
I'm curious when this started. I graduated from undergrad in Dec. '99. At no point was I told the above. My parents had always pushed for MD/lawyer/engineer with business as a fallback. Keep in mind they were none of those things, and as a family we understood hardship. Maybe that is part of the equation?
When I originally started pre-med the potential salary at the time certainly drove my choice. I found programming as a side elective and switched majors the next semester. Even though I love technology and programming if the salaries didn't match up it would have remained a hobby and not something I majored in.
It does make sense, from the perspective of the "Old Economy Steve" meme. The world really was different for Baby Boomers, and there's more than a grain of truth that a BA in any subject would be your (upper) middle class meal ticket. Of course that was due to the post war economic boom and a society in which inequality wasn't so sharp as it is today.
>The world really was different for Baby Boomers, and there's more than a grain of truth that a BA in any subject would be your (upper) middle class meal ticket.
I'm not sure I buy that. In the mid '80s my dad's secretary had a graduate degree in marine biology, and the attitude was "Yes, she has a graduate degree and she's working as a secretary. But what do you expect? Marine Biology."
The past wasn't as comfortable as people make it out to be.
Yeah, they have the time period off. It wasn't so much us Baby Boomers as the prior gen, after the War, that experienced that in 46-72 time period. When too many of us Boomers tried to follow their lead, it didn't work out so well. The prosperous era of 82-07 was far less egalitarian than 46-72.
Completely different experience from me. I went to a public university, maybe that's why? Although, my friends who went to private schools seemed to be aware of the limits of the salary of their chosen salary and borrowed accordingly. Note that the stafford loan pamphlet had warnings to this effect and still does[1].
Is it too harsh to say that this sounds a lot like people not taking responsibility for their own financial mistake?
You can “say that this sounds like people not taking responsibility” all you want, but that doesn’t make the problem go away.
When there’s a society-wide systemic “failure to take responsibility”, it becomes everyone’s problem, and trying to blame individuals accomplishes nothing except to make whoever is doing the blaming feel smug.
Ehh, popular USA advice is to follow your passion. Mind you, everybody min maxing the money majors ends up ironically creating the same scenario . Practical money making majors are the top choice in poor countries which in turn lowers pay rates. More engineers =/= more engineering jobs.
I am seeing this happen to me even with a Computer Science degree. I just got out and am only making enough to pay for housing and food nothing else. I did end up in a shitty situation but I was under the impression that this wouldn't happen to me as I have a "STEM" degree.
I don't have that much debt but I can't get a job that will pay me more than 40k ish a year and Seattle is too expensive to live in for that little even with a roommate and cooking skills. This will hopefully change and my income with increase over the next few years but it is scary enough that I am regretting how I went to school. I should have worked for more than the first year even if I had to be in school for longer because of it.
Look into using Hired.com (note: not all that apply get approval).
I used it when switching jobs and it help me land a 50% salary increase. I am not exaggerating that. It showed all the possible salaries that companies were willing to pay me before negotiation and interviews started. It helps show what you may actually be worth to employers. Obviously your milage may vary but 40k is extremely low for computer science. Now it obviously depends how good you are etc. For reference I struggled straight out of school as I did computer science minor with another computer degree as my major. However, once I landed my first job ($65K) it has been upwards every since. Best of luck and reach out if you'd like (or anyone else in a similar position).
If you have the skills, you're very underpaid. I made 40k straight out of college in 2000 after the dotcom crash. It was low even then. I was in central Florida. Unlike Seattle, there isn't much of a tech industry there.
I am aware but it is hard to show that if I don't have the experience for a resume. I work as an intern for a company that won't hire me but since I can't get anything else I am stuck here just indefinitely in limbo.
I'd have to abandon my GF which I am not really willing to do yet. If it gets any worse I will start looking in other places but until Dec I don't have to worry about paying my loans off so I have a bit of a break.
In my experience this is pretty common unless your degree is from a top-tier school. The good news is a developer with a degree and 1-2 years experience is worth a lot more than one fresh out of college.
Put in a year and see if they give you a decent pay increase - some companies will give a 20-30% pay bump after the first year if all has gone well. If not, start looking for another job.
Gonna be blunt: either you're not very good or you're not displaying it in interviews, or you're not getting the right interviews. I find it mind blowing that you're making 40k out of school. I was making more than that in my internship in a non-high cost of living area of the country, and am making considerably more than that now.
I just threw a resume up on Dice and started getting decent to great recruiter contacts immediately. I still get hit up constantly on linkedin as well.
No interviews at all so far. I am an intern at a company that just got bought out and so they won't hire me "until they have more contracts" so they are keeping me on because they like me and want to hire me at some point. This means that it is very hard for me to get another job because I am not accruing experience in a "real" job and I am not qualified for any of the jobs I am applying for so I can't actually get real experience.
My immediate boss would love to hire me but as his boss says no I am stuck here looking.
I was actually kept in the same situation at my internship after I graduated myself. It sucks...I ended up leaving and getting a pretty significant bump in pay by just relentlessly interviewing any opportunity I got. I'll try to find the resume I used at the time and send it over to ya. I haven't had to make one in a couple of years, so...
It might be a lot more helpful to him if you contacted him privately and showed him your resume or whatever so he can see what is working for you and see if that somehow clues him what he can do differently. I am of the firm conviction that our current job acquiring culture is pretty broken. Being good at a job and being good at getting a job are distinctly different skills and you really shouldn't infer too much about his on-the-job competencies based on his lack of job hunting savvy.
When I went to college in the late 70's, my parents paid a portion, I got a few small scholarships and worked every summer and part time through the school year. It was enough to pay for 4 years at a private university and then I spent two years elsewhere trying to get a masters, which at least was cheap as I worked as a graduate assistant.
That is impossible today without either full scholarships or massive borrowing; the inflation of the cost of a 4 year degree from a private school from then to now wouldn't allow me to duplicate this any more.
I spent 10 years volunteering at a local public university and most students had a similar experience (working, some help from parents, a few scholarships) although a few had to borrow a small bit of money. The difference of course is it was a public university which isn't as well regarded as mine, but in the end I bet the actual educational benefit was similar.
Going to college is a great benefit socially and educationally but spending a fortune on it is only useful for a small set of careers (like go to Stanford for CS). I never used any of my 6 years of college studying Chemistry. But I never had to borrow to get my degree. Unless you are talking about medical school I can't see the benefit to going into massive debt just to get a degree.
Unfortunately many employers require a degree to even be considered. They are basically expecting you to come in the door with skills that they used to have to train employees in. In highly technical / safety critical fields I can understand this, but it has gotten out of control.
I used to not have a bachelor's and thought I was doing fine in my career. Then the Internet came along and every job required filling out an online profile, where people were screened out if they didn't have a degree. So I felt I had to go back. Perhaps some fields are different and a degree doesn't matter, but not mine, and not applying at large corporations.
A big missing piece in this conversation is the fact that there's essentially two ways to save on a national multi-decade scale: either you have easy to exploit oil reserves that you save for later, or you convince the next generation to build stuff for you later in exchange for things now.
That's the fundamental driving force behind a lot of insane pro-debt policies, especially student loans and mortgages. If you want the college situation to get better, attacking the idea of retirement is the way to go. That, and suing places like fire departments that require a college degree for no relevant reason.
I guess I can say I escaped. Got my first computer my sophomore year (I grew up really poor), and was going to a tiny state school. Was a bad student, staying up online and sleeping through morning classes. Had to leave school (bad grades = financial aid probation), got my first real job (worked for local computer store/ISP), and that turned into my career. So my debt load from school is actually pretty small relatively speaking (about $6500 for the 2 years)
Sorry, but I have trouble feeling sorry for these people. I know a person who has more than $100K in student loan debt, for degrees she has decided she doesn't want to use, who just quit her job to follow a dream of being an artist. I have other friends with student loan debt who have much nicer things than me (probably from credit card debt too).
I paid off $10K in student loans. It didn't take too long and i was making well under $50K a year. Lived in a cheap, not-very-nice apartment, drove an old car, didn't spend much on entertainment, etc. It's very possible to pay off even the average of $20K in debt and not have it be a chain on your life forever.
People also need to make sure they actually want to use the degree, that it's in a field where there are jobs, work while they are in school, and during their school time forgo the extras in life.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadColleges could literally spend as much as they're provided. A lot of money right now seems to go towards adding shiny new things to attract more students (e.g. newer buildings, more tech, nicer chairs, etc). The only thing stopping them from charging more is competition, but so few students even check the cost of their education that it isn't working well, and many are geographically restricted.
Community college is where people go if they actually care at all about the costs. Or at least they get 2/3rds of their education done at a CC.
If I was in charge I'd attack this problem as follows:
- College loans are now provided by the US Government only at an interest rate DESIGNED to break even (i.e. no longer for-profit).
- Loans are repaid as a tax (for people who remain in the US, like a debt for people abroad).
- No repayment is required under a certain threshold (e.g. $30K single, 50K family, in 2015 dollars).
- Repayment schedules scale similar to income tax (e.g. you MUST repay faster the more you make).
- Loans are not subject to bankruptcy and are treated like a tax for inheritance purposes (i.e. paid back first).
- Under certain circumstances interest can be frozen (e.g. documented medical issues, natural disasters, continued education, etc).
This means that unemployment or illness isn't as damaging. People who leave college and get low paying jobs aren't hurt as badly day to day (although might technically have an outstanding loan for the rest of their life).
Only major difference is, death & bankruptcy release you from the loan in NZ...
It's the parents of younger kids who should be paying attention.
I'm excluding Republicans since their base believes that government intervention to alleviate student loan debt will be the equivalent of Judas kissing Jesus and Road to Serfdom and all that shit.
And it goes without saying the quixotic brand of Silicon Valley libertarianism is not fertile ground for this sort of thinking.
Not to mention this attack ad is right on the website for the Washington State Republican Party:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOYX3TBZEM8
Loans always involve some risk and there are always some bad loans. But there is, in fact, a real difference between secured debt and unsecured debt. A mortgage is secured debt. A student loan is unsecured debt.
Furthermore, since the point of education is to basically help people become more clever, if we make it too easy for smart, knowledgeable people to wash their hands of their student loans, the end result will be an overall societal attitude of "Only a fool actually pays their student loans." At that point, the entire system falls apart in a way that makes our current woes look like small potatoes.
That's going to happen regardless, with over a trillion dollars in student loan debt. Its just taking longer than expected.
Smart people will always learn how to hack the system. Its easy to default on a house in any state. Its easy to default on your student loan debt if you're moving to another country. The only people who get stuck with worthless debt are suckers.
Also, in bankruptcy the creditors are the ones who assume the losses. When defaulting on government loans, the taxpayers would foot the bill. Totally different scenario.
Speaking on behalf of the entire middle class--and let me assure you that I am both qualified and authorized to do so--we are getting sick of working our asses off just to live our entire lives sunk up to our multiple chins in debt.
But no one is likely to lift a finger to do anything about it until after missing a few meals. Perhaps it will help when Mr. Khan and allied parties in the tech industry start to eat Academia's lunch. Thanks to the Internet, you don't absolutely need to pay $100k+ for a degree, and you don't even need to pay the "buck fifty in late charges from the public library," as suggested in the movie Good Will Hunting.
Once employers start de-prioritizing an accredited degree and start recognizing online coursework certifications, it will already be too late. Nobody will be going to college for anything short of calculus, law, medicine, or petroleum-related geology.
After all, if your art history degree isn't going to help you get a job anyway, you could just browse artists' pages on Wikipedia and visit museums instead.
What is the mechanism which will cause this change? It looks a bit chicken/egg from here—there will continue to be college graduates because they are strongly advantaged during hiring, and hiring will continue to strongly advantage graduates because there are enough of them that doing so doesn't drive their costs up much. Plus, no-one in HR gets fired because the Harvard grad didn't work out—take a chance on the guy with a GED and pile of Coursera certificates, OTOH...
Out of curiosity, who authorized you? And who had the authority to authorize you to speak on behalf of the middle class?
That fragment you quoted was a joke, intended to draw attention to the presumption that may have been missed if I just said "we".
It's not as if new networks would not exist in abscence of college networks.
FYI to anyone who is curious but not enough to check out both: The actual writing appears to be the same, but they have different titles and different photos (+, of course, photo descriptions/comments) and I guess one has a video the other does not.
When I went to college (2001-2005) the thought process was "borrow as much as you can, you'll get a good job straight out of college and no one can repo your college degree". I had the head of the financial aid department tell me that borrowing the max every year was fine and dandy and I should keep doing it because my degree wasn't like a car that could be repossessed. So I graduated $38K in debt and spent maybe half of that on actual school with the rest going towards stupid shit that 20 year olds spend too much money on.
If everyone has a bachelor's degree, how is everyone going to command a premium income?
Then it becomes a starting point, not an end point. Most businesses, when faced with a deluge of BA's, will start to look for people with master degrees. Same thing if they have a highly sought after position and get a deluge of people with masters, then they look for PhD candidates.
This becomes an issue when you have a BA in a field where a majority of people have master degrees. I had several roommates who were engineering and CS graduates. At the time, the economy was shit (early 2000's) and they went back for their masters. Most said it was because when the economy finally bounced back, they would have a leg up on the people they were competing with.
The only problem they found was as the economy recovered, they had more opportunities with a masters degree, but many were hired at the salary level of an entry level engineer.
As I see it the problem is that it is actually correct at the present time. And despite the vast bulk of private schools claiming to be charitable organizations they act like rapacious capitalists. That being the case we can look at the equilibrium for firms in their positions, which is to capture virtually all of the surplus. That is exactly what they are in the process of doing.
There's probably several different governmental solutions possible, and by all means if you are interested in this issue you should pursue them. But if you want to do something on a personal level, consider forgoing the use of a degree as a proxy in hiring. Just look for whatever ultimate skills and attributes you are interested in directly. This will have a cost to you, the signal is not totally empty, but if adopted on a widespread basis it will have the salutary effect of making colleges live and die on their direct contribution rather than resting on their credentialist laurels.
I'm curious when this started. I graduated from undergrad in Dec. '99. At no point was I told the above. My parents had always pushed for MD/lawyer/engineer with business as a fallback. Keep in mind they were none of those things, and as a family we understood hardship. Maybe that is part of the equation?
When I originally started pre-med the potential salary at the time certainly drove my choice. I found programming as a side elective and switched majors the next semester. Even though I love technology and programming if the salaries didn't match up it would have remained a hobby and not something I majored in.
I'm not sure I buy that. In the mid '80s my dad's secretary had a graduate degree in marine biology, and the attitude was "Yes, she has a graduate degree and she's working as a secretary. But what do you expect? Marine Biology."
The past wasn't as comfortable as people make it out to be.
Is it too harsh to say that this sounds a lot like people not taking responsibility for their own financial mistake?
[1] https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/sites/default/files/federal-loa...
When there’s a society-wide systemic “failure to take responsibility”, it becomes everyone’s problem, and trying to blame individuals accomplishes nothing except to make whoever is doing the blaming feel smug.
I don't have that much debt but I can't get a job that will pay me more than 40k ish a year and Seattle is too expensive to live in for that little even with a roommate and cooking skills. This will hopefully change and my income with increase over the next few years but it is scary enough that I am regretting how I went to school. I should have worked for more than the first year even if I had to be in school for longer because of it.
I used it when switching jobs and it help me land a 50% salary increase. I am not exaggerating that. It showed all the possible salaries that companies were willing to pay me before negotiation and interviews started. It helps show what you may actually be worth to employers. Obviously your milage may vary but 40k is extremely low for computer science. Now it obviously depends how good you are etc. For reference I struggled straight out of school as I did computer science minor with another computer degree as my major. However, once I landed my first job ($65K) it has been upwards every since. Best of luck and reach out if you'd like (or anyone else in a similar position).
Put in a year and see if they give you a decent pay increase - some companies will give a 20-30% pay bump after the first year if all has gone well. If not, start looking for another job.
I just threw a resume up on Dice and started getting decent to great recruiter contacts immediately. I still get hit up constantly on linkedin as well.
My immediate boss would love to hire me but as his boss says no I am stuck here looking.
That is impossible today without either full scholarships or massive borrowing; the inflation of the cost of a 4 year degree from a private school from then to now wouldn't allow me to duplicate this any more.
I spent 10 years volunteering at a local public university and most students had a similar experience (working, some help from parents, a few scholarships) although a few had to borrow a small bit of money. The difference of course is it was a public university which isn't as well regarded as mine, but in the end I bet the actual educational benefit was similar.
Going to college is a great benefit socially and educationally but spending a fortune on it is only useful for a small set of careers (like go to Stanford for CS). I never used any of my 6 years of college studying Chemistry. But I never had to borrow to get my degree. Unless you are talking about medical school I can't see the benefit to going into massive debt just to get a degree.
That's the fundamental driving force behind a lot of insane pro-debt policies, especially student loans and mortgages. If you want the college situation to get better, attacking the idea of retirement is the way to go. That, and suing places like fire departments that require a college degree for no relevant reason.
I paid off $10K in student loans. It didn't take too long and i was making well under $50K a year. Lived in a cheap, not-very-nice apartment, drove an old car, didn't spend much on entertainment, etc. It's very possible to pay off even the average of $20K in debt and not have it be a chain on your life forever.
People also need to make sure they actually want to use the degree, that it's in a field where there are jobs, work while they are in school, and during their school time forgo the extras in life.