I graduated a year earlier than you with a degree in education. About this time, colleges started offering 5 year masters programs for teaching. Many of my friends went this route. I did not, mostly for financial reasons. My peers paid for an extra year of schooling and came out with a higher degree. Initially, I felt inadequate but within a few years, I realized I made the smart decision.
Though it was only a year's difference, district saw that I had one more year of teaching experience than my peers which equated to handling the reality of teaching better. My peers spent more time in a college classroom and were further removed from the reality of a public school k-8 classroom. Many of them quit education after only a few years of teaching. The ones that didn't quit, went back to school for a second masters degree because what they thought they wanted to do before they entered the workforce was not what they actually wanted to do once they did.
People don't need schooling, they need experience. Many jobs now require that college diploma that didn't 30 years ago. But really, companies just need people with experience - which doesn't happen on a university campus. Employers need to lower their degree requirements so people aren't forced to get one just to get a job that doesn't need it.
Now, I work with high school students and the number of kids will haven't had a job before graduating is astounding. They don't want to work and cry about only being paid minimum wage. They have 6AP tests and a high GPA, but no job. I constantly hear "my parents want me to focus on school, so I don't have time for a job." OR they are party of 4 travel sports teams and don't have a job. We're teaching them that work and work experience isn't important when it's much more important than everything else, IMO. That also needs to change.
Thank you for sharing your experience! One of my roommates in college did the 5-year teaching option.
You hit the nail on the head: People don't need schooling, they need experience.
Of course, there's always going to be fields that require some degree of knowledge, but for most people, careers are built on experience not education (or let's be honest, credentials).
I hate admitting it but I was one of your high school students. I preferred the college route over the work route. I balked at the idea of working. Even in college, I worked the bare minimum to fulfill the work-study requirement. I truly believed the world was a meritocracy and I would be rewarded for all my hard academic work.
Jokes on me. I'm still paying the consequences of my choices.
You're absolutely right, we're teaching kids to value the wrong things. Something needs to change and fast.
It's definitely a societal problem. I didn't blame the students. Most of them are doing what they think they need too. And parents as well. They've been told straight A mean more. Hopefully that shift is coming.
Good commentary. I'd note, though, that most jobs that in my time (Gen X) were jobs for high school teens are now considered jobs for adults, often with families. The fast food places will employ a teen (they did mine), but they aren't set up for them very well, and if a teen works there he will be working with mostly grown adults.
Graduated driver's license programs make it harder for younger teens to get licenses and get to work.
Predatory environments are very common in my experience, I think driven by the internet dysfunction. My teens / young adults face a lot of harassment and some actual dangerous situations (35 year old managers coercing a ride home from 16 year olds, that sort of thing).
I mean, my great grandfather had to quit school at 11 to work in a boiler room for a railroad because his father died, this isn't that kind of "hard". But it's still harder for a high school student to work a part time job than it was in my day, when it was normal.
This is a good point and for the sake of brevity, I'm not looking at Gen X/Boomers in this analysis. Maybe that's a topic for another series because this is equally important to.
All of this affects folks on the cusp of retirement (or after retirement too) with the added problem of age discrimination.
Yes. Started noticing the age discrimination around age 45 when I worked in aerospace. Much of it went away when I moved into teaching. But when I moved into teaching industry for a corporation, it was back. 12 weeks after I turned 60, though I had a spotless record, they fired me. Screwed my retirement bigly. I had planned on working for them until 67. They replaced me with a blue collar guy with no education experience, 20 years younger, and at half the salary.
Gen X thought they were targeted, Gen Z, and now the current generation. Newsflash: we were all targeted by a system that is hostile to Americans.
It's much worse than your post suggests. Oldest grandson age 24 graduated from excellent university and was hired at $70,000 a year to start in small town Oregon. I told him he should buy a starter home. He replied, "I make more than 90% my age and I can not buy the least expensive house in this small town and may never be able to."
I asked what is happening to cause this.
He replied, Private equity investors buy up all the housing stock and have turned generation Z into renters."
I started asking other young Generation Z if this is true. they all said yes, the baby boomers are sucking us dry with their pensions using private equity money to buy up housing stock and then drive up rents to get high pension fund returns.
I graduated from high school in 1962. Mountain Bar candy cost 10 cents but now sells for 2 dollars. A McDonald's fish filet was 25 cents but is now 5 dollars. This documents since 1962 things have gone up 20 fold and the minimum 1962 wage would need to be $25 today to keep things equal. Housing, however, has gone up over 40 fold.
I asked the grand son what is the solution. He said for the baby boomers to die off and the pension funds to collapse.
Thanks for sharing this. I've been aware of private equity but haven't done too deep of a dive into it yet. It seems like this is an urgent issue that isn't being addressed, in part because the financial system has become so complex. Wall Street keeps inventing new ways to dice up debt that the average person is struggling to keep track of it all.
Thanks for this. The flaw in this plan is that private pension funds don't collapse when pensioners die; they get larger, because they are not paying out as much. The idea that young people paying in is what funds pension payments hasn't been the whole story since these private asset management companies were created. They represent legacy wealth from a time before globalised manufacturing, just as the elite universities have legacies in the billions which stretch back centuries.
This is such an important issue. Thank you for highlighting it.
I am a Gen Xer and a graduate of two elite schools (Princeton and Harvard Law). Two decades ago I saw the writing on the wall.
When friends who tell me their children were interested in pursuing a career in law and wanted my advice, I would simply tell them: “Unless they’re admitted to a top 10 school or they get a free ride at a second tier school, I would steer clear of a JD. It’s just not a reasonable ROI.”
That was 20 years ago. Now I’m advising anyone with a child to send them to trade school or nursing school. At the rate things are going and with investments in lab-grown meat and other delicacies, I wouldn’t even recommend a career in farming or agriculture.
Add to this the simmering retirement crisis and it becomes increasingly clear that no one will be safe from what’s coming:
What’s happening is unsustainable economically and socially, and many of us know this. As you correctly pointed out, younger people should feel motivated and inspired to be productive. Otherwise, our society will become unstable and we risk social unrest.
This problem demands our urgent attention. Unfortunately, the people who are equipped to take action — our elected leaders — refuse to acknowledge the problem.
You didn’t mention this in the article, but I’d like to draw your attention to what’s happening in the entertainment industry. I’ve worked in the business for most of my career, and while it’s never been a large sector that employs as many people as tech or finance, it has been a pathway for many from non-elite schools (or in many cases, with no college education at all) to forge middle class lives.
The entertainment industry is absolutely imploding now. Many of my friends and colleagues are holding on for dear life after COVID, strikes, and AI have decimated production. In many ways, it resembles Detroit now: extant, but virtually irrelevant:
Thank you for adding your thoughts, especially as someone who graduated from elite schools.
I echo your sentiment about law school. When I was in undergrad I had the good fortune of working in the law school and I befriended many of the law students. Most of them were only a few years older than me. This was 2009-2013 so many of them had graduated at the peak of the financial crisis and retreated to law school a few years after graduating.
They were enrolled in a Tier 2 law school. The ones who did ok were dual enrolled in Master's programs at the Maxwell School, a top ranking school for public administration. The ones who only went for a JD found themselves doing document review for $35 an hour.
This was 10 years ago when we were all living and working in DC. Most of these classmates ended up leaving for smaller cities. From my anecdotal observations, having a JD didn't help them. If anything, it mired them in debt.
Re: entertainment. Do you know anyone here on Substack who's documenting their experience? You're right, I don't have exposure to that industry but I'd love to read some first hand accounts of what's going on.
Good question about whether anyone is documenting the entertainment implosion on Substack. I follow Crewstories on Instagram — lots of interesting anecdotes there:
Below-the-line (crew) are more outspoken about what’s happening, but the crisis has infected all tiers of the business, including creative executives and other management personnel at networks and studios. The entire industry is being fundamentally restructured and downsized. I would strongly recommend anyone considering a career in entertainment to avoid it.
This article is not helpful to me. My daughter is not attending the right school in the right city…although she did choose to major in Engineering so there’s that. So am I to believe her degree will be worthless? I don’t like articles that are high in negativity with no proposed solutions or proposed course of action. And no, she is absolutely not going to become a plumber or an electrician. There has been a run on trade schools in my area. She was thinking about taking a gap year and going to vo-tech, but the programs were all full because “everyone” had decided college was not the way to go, vocational school was.
I graduated college in 1986 and moved to Washington D.C. immediately afterward to attend graduate school. After my MA, I worked for an Embassy for five years. Washington D.C. is the same as it ever was. Impossible to make enough money to live there, unless you have roommates. Although from your account, it sounds like it has gotten a little worse.
I appreciate your feedback. I'm simply sharing my experience and my perspective. I know you don't want to see your support for your daughter as a waste of time, but if you aggregate anecdotes like mine and look at the lived experienced of Millennials across the country it's clear the college-career pipeline is fundamentally broken.
Maybe your daughter is the exception. But realistically speaking, I think exceptionalism has done more harm for young people than good.
It's possible this whole analysis is bullshit. Maybe I f*cked up. Maybe I just wasn't good enough.
And it's also possible that maybe there's a systemic problem that disadvantages certain types of college students (first gen, state schools, etc.). And maybe that problem is by design.
If you disagree, I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend that you and your daughter read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. He lays out where the design for systemic failure in college-career comes from.
To be honest, I resonate with your anger and frustration because that's how I've felt over the last 5 ish years. I've spent A LOT of money on therapy trying to decouple my identity from my career. I cannot put into words how DESTRUCTIVE it was to be groomed my entire life by all my teachers for a specific outcome and to have that outcome not come to fruition.
My goal here is to WARN others because if these expectations continue to go unmet, it will lead to a mental health crisis the likes of which we have never seen before.
Look, I was just like your daughter. I sat for 8 AP exams; 3 of them weren't taught at my school. I read the textbooks for the material and sat for the exam anyways, earning college credit completely on my own. And then because that wasn't enough, I also took Calc I and Calc II in high school. I started college as a sophomore and maxed out all my transfer credits.
I, too, applied for Ivy League schools. I didn't get in for undergrad but I did get into one for grad school. Because of the cost, I chose not to go.
I graduated college with 3 official majors (4 unofficial counting my coursework in the Middle East). I graduated with honors, summa cum laude, and was Phi Beta Kappa eligible.
But you know what? I REGRET spending so much time studying because it didn't matter. No employer ever asked me for my GPA. No one cared about the courses I took or what I studied. And I didn't get special treatment because I was "smart."
I've been out of college now for 12 years. I graduated with $35K in student loan debt. My balance is currently $27K. At this point I've made at least $15K worth of payments.
I'm financially illiterate. That's why I started freelance writing about personal finance and economics. I'm teaching myself the information none of the adults in the room were able to teach me when I was younger.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it was worth it. Like everyone else, college has saddled me with debt. I prioritized good grades instead of making friends. And I have documentation of my deteriorating mental and physical health while working in DC to personify how it all affected me.
Your daughter may have a great career with her degree. But she's probably not going to become an editor at the New York Times or an ambassador somewhere. I don't know STEM but I suspect funding and research projects are biased along socioeconomic lines as well. And based on hiring patterns in Silicon Valley, if she didn't go to Berkeley or Stanford -- and can't afford rent in SF -- she's going to struggle.
The ROI from all of this for me was letting go of my expectations of what my life should look like and accepting that I was lied to. It's taken a lot of time but I'm at peace now.
My advice is parents and young people read the room to see what's actually going on in the world, now what they think it's supposed to be like.
As I said in a comment above, this article just doesn't hold true for a nursing degree. Bsns are the most flexible high earning 4 year degrees. My other guys got degrees in computer science and engineering and they are screwed. But not my nurse! A 4-year degree in education will also still get you a job.... Especially if it's special. Ed .It just won't be as well paying as a BSN.
Nursing is definitely in short supply and high demand! That said though, to my knowledge, you don't need a BSN to become a nurse. And if you do, that's definitely a degree you can get affordably at a state school.
I knew a lot of girls from my church growing up who became nurses. They did a nursing program in a partnership with one of the hospitals. I think that made them LPNs. I don't know too much about nursing but I'm sure there's a different requirement for RNs, PAs, and any other medical profession just short of becoming a full-fledged doctor.
In order to be a nurse earning enough pay to make a living on, you need a bachelor of science in nursing. This is a change from previous time periods. You can get a job as an LPN and work on your bachelor's while working as an LPN. But the bottom line is you need a BSN if you want to do anything other than basic pay work. It's a 4-year degree.
Nursing and care work careers are also susceptible to changes in migration policy, because of the large number of women who are willing to work on the other side of the world, spending nothing on themselves, to send home remittances.
A woman can work shifts in a care home in England and send home enough to put her child through private school in the Philippines or Zimbabwe. But the number of very elderly people needing care could drop sharply when the UK government approves euthanasia, as it is expected to do shortly.
I’ve been thinking about what you wrote and your response to my reply.
You may very well be right and I am going to look for that book you mentioned.
My daughter is a fourth generation college student. My great-grandfather told my grandmother and her siblings that: “We cannot leave you children with a lot of money, But we can give you an education. An education is something that no one can ever take away from you.”
Of my four grandparents, three had either a college/graduate degree or had spent time in college.
Even if everything you say is true, (and it probably is) for me, my college years were worth it, and I would never consider that my daughter would not get a college degree, although I was willing for her to take a gap year and get a trade certificate.
You can’t just take classes to get the “A” and then move on to the next harder step, etc. I mean, you can, obviously, but to me that’s not what college is for. You have to let the things you learn change you. Absorb the environment, make your friends, etc.
My graduate school was not the most prestigious one, but I got my job at the Embassy from a classmate. It was because I saw him sitting all alone waiting for his wife to get out of class. I thought he looked lonely. I went over to talk to him. He asked me how I was doing and I made what was supposed to be just a cute remark about, “I’m almost finished. I have to start looking for a job.” I Was Not networking or trying to hit him up for work!!! People ask me how I ended up working for an Embassy. It was basically because I had wanted to be friendly to someone who I thought looked lonely. I have seen people breeze through cocktail parties in Washington passing out business cards…but that was not my mindset.
A higher education is a cherished value in my family and has been for well over a hundred years. No matter what the economic situation in the country is, we will be attending college. I have tried to slant my daughter towards STEM because I’ve heard that’s where the jobs are. She is not looking for a brilliant career in San Francisco. Just a job that will earn enough money to enable her to enjoy life with her family and friends.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through what I wrote and respond. I love this exchange because it's incredibly thought provoking for me as well.
I have two thoughts for you:
1) We need to differentiate college from education
College is a product that is sold and often financed. In theory, students are supposed to learn while they're in college but more often than not, they don't.
I've written about the ChatGPT economics course I created. I studied international relations, political science, and history in college. I should have read primary source material from the likes of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, etc.
I didn't. I read my professor's journal articles and the textbooks my professors contributed to. That's why I'm re-educating myself. I didn't actually learn anything and I don't feel like I got a real education.
I'm currently reading a book about how to read because quite literally no one has ever taught me HOW to read. And this is coming from someone who had to read a novel a week for AP Lit in high school...
One could argue that maybe I would have read those works in grad school had I gone. But I don't think so.
I had a really neat opportunity in undergrad to sit in and audit grad courses. I did the same work as the real grad students in the classes I took and it was utter nonsense.
There was an exchange of time to earn a degree but there wasn't an exchange of time to learn things. I don't regret going to college per se, but I do regret investing so much time into "learning." Your GPA and the number of classes you take are not indicative of real learning.
2) Networking is passive
You raise another good point about networking. You got your embassy job because you befriended a classmate. I got my full-time defense contracting jobs in DC because of the friendships I built when I sat in on those grad classes.
Every job I've had is the result of a pre-existing personal relationship, not active networking. I knew people who knew hiring managers and could personally refer me for jobs.
LinkedIn data reports about 80% of jobs are the result of connections. That's one of the reasons why I'm so pessimistic about access to jobs. The data shows it's not what we think it is. Resumes and cover letters won't really get you anymore.
That's why going to an elite school matters. It's not the quality of the education you get so much as the depth of the network you get access to.
My network was only as deep as bureaucratic paper pushing. I could get a different job in DC if I wanted to, but I hit a glass ceiling. I was never going to get the type of job I wanted because I didn't have the relationships I needed to get me there.
I think this is pervasive everywhere, not just Washington, DC. Every aspect of life is predicated on relationships with other people.
It's not so much college or the job market that's the issue it's our expectations about what both should be. If you manage expectations, you'll have a great life. But if someone goes to a unremarkable state school, for example, and expects to get a job on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley because they got good grades, they're going to be in for a world of hurt. The outcomes they hope for aren't impossible but they're highly unlikely.
Depending on what kind of engineering your daughter is studying, and whether or not she needs a license, she probably will be fine. You don’t need to go to an elite school to get a job that pays decently; you do need to get a degree in a field where they need warm bodies, or in one where where competition is limited by regulation.
This is what I often see, people recommend going vocational. But it's still the case that while a college degree is the minimum requirement to enter the American middle class, and you can't know at age 17 whether you will want to be in that class, so you have to get that piece of paper.
I know many people without college degrees, and even the ones that are highly skilled live in perpetual insecurity because if they lose the job they are doing well because the market dies or the company does (nothing to do with them) and then have to enter the job market, not having a degree on the application gets it tossed before it's even read.
In addition, you have to have some interest and aptitude to do a job. The parents who know this is true of, say, engineering don't seem to get it that it's also true of plumbing or electrical work (or medical work, so many parents think every girl should become a nurse). If you aren't good at the work you won't succeed, and in a glutted labor market full of young adults pushed into vocations by parents who have read too many commentaries telling them that's the smart thing to do, they won't get a job.
This seems to be limited to expectations of work post university. I would wager that the root cause of this crisis may be our cultural assumptions about higher education. We tell kids that uni is the answer but then it’s not.
Maybe telling some kids to learn to fix things would equate to better outcomes.
I ran up credit card debt to create an illusion everything was fine in my personal and professional life.
A lot of job markets in big cities have unspoken social expectations that are directly correlated to new job opportunities. In DC, happy hour is big and everyone kind of dresses the same way. If you want to play the game, you have to fit in.
I'm not saying I ran up massive bar tabs or anything but when you're not breaking even each month and you have to dry clean your clothes or meet up with coworkers after work for a drink or two, it all adds up.
All due respect, this is a perfect comment -- people without kids (or with young kids) think this is the obvious and common sense way to go. I totally understand why, I once also did.
But it's fighting the last war.
When my kids started moving into middle and high school, bunches of the local parents (conservative home school) took this point of view. All the girls were supposed to be nurses, all the guys electricians. I think one of the kids wound up going into the electrical field and probably made it to apprentice or higher? The rest would try for a nursing degree, for example, but if they weren't good at those skills they didn't make it through the program, and if they did they entered a field flooded with other young people doing the same thing and had to compete for jobs with people better at it than they were. The only ones that aren't working as baristas are getting jobs with family and friends or they got degrees.
As useless as a college degree can be, not having one is a black mark against you in a nations where (I think) about 70% of young people now get some (useful or useless) college education. I don't want it to be that way -- with all my kids, we talked about how we wished they could "safely" skip college. But the risk of that is super high unless your family is already rich or connected. Most regular Americans can't afford to take the chance, sadly.
My beloved brother said that if he had to do it again he would get a degree. Just as you said, it’s a black mark against you in some job markets. Freakin stupid.
I very much agree. The amount of time wasted in credentialing, I think it's one of the things that saps the energy of the economy. But on an individual level, you need to be very risk tolerant and have a ton of resources to skip a degree. Best we've figured out to do is get degrees at state schools without debt, which is still suboptimal.
Unless you're going to be a nurse! A BSN is the biggest bang for the buck right now. 4-year degree, guaranteed job....excellent pay. That's my 24 yo daughter's route.
I was in DC for some of the same years you were, and this is incredibly accurate. I had a law degree from a T14 Law School, had 6 unpaid internships, funded by $200k of debt, and I didn’t get a single offer for a job as a lawyer. I did het 3 job offers for federal government jobs and took one, but it was a job as an HR Specialist that in a less degree inflated economy should have gone to someone like you. Now I’m chronically underemployed and likely will be for my whole life.
Thanks for sharing your experience and verifying my observations. You bring up a really good point: all these people with advanced degrees are going to be chronically underemployed forever.
I don't think people are thinking about that. They assume JD = good job. And maybe that's true for a small town but definitely not DC.
The other thing is because of degree inflation, people like you took jobs that should've gone to people like me. And after sequestration in the 2010s, entry-level jobs were outsourced to contractors. There weren't many GS-7 and 9 positions when I was trying to find a job. They were all 13s and I couldn't compete because everyone else applying either had military preference or a MA.
This in turn suppressed wages. If you're in a position that could've gone to someone like me and your wage is probably commensurate with that, who am I, a lowly BA holder, to ask for a higher paying job?
There are so many overqualified people who aren't earning what they should be earning and it suppresses opportunities as well as wages for everyone beneath them. DC felt like such an unwinable game.
I want to give another perspective. Another route if you can get into - starting your own business. It takes a lot of effort to make it work out, but if you can, a lot of things you can control are a good thing for the future. Also, give you a flexible time for family or anything that you care about. We started our business because my husband had no job and I had no job - but because my husband likes hobby games so we started 17 years ago. Up and down, but we can say that after 17 years, we have our tool to support our family, and we enjoy it (not all but the majority of work). I hope our business benefits our son or his future if he chooses to. Just another idea for doing something that you may have options in your control (not all of them but a lot still).
Question, though. Why should college graduates rightfully expect a six figure job right out of college? As a mom of three Gen Z, one out of college and one in, with those two both employed in jobs paying about $20 an hour (which would be $40,000 a year full time), I'm wondering if we did something wrong or something right.
When I lived in D.C. it would have been very easy for me to get a job on the staff of a Congressman or Senator, with just a Bachelor’s degree, working as a paralegal or a similar position. But those people worked All…the…time. Literally. I wanted to have a life.
I put my daughter with math tutors since the 5th grade in an attempt to prepare for her to study in a STEM related field. Many is the Sunday afternoon I would have liked to have stayed at home and rested, but I hauled my rear end to the car to meet with her math tutor all the years of high school. Do not tell me it has all been for nothing because she didn’t get into an Ivy League school!
My daughter is 2e. She was not able to get it together enough to get into one of the top schools, even though she was a National Merit Commended Scholar. Not that she ever wanted to go to one.
She is happy where she is, and I believe that counts for something.
I hope it works out for her.STEM is the new computer science degree. Be careful, find grants, scholarships and whatever. Don’t touch student loans with a ten foot pole.
You can do everything right but reality is that no one knows what is going to happen month to month or year to year, shit happens. You can do everything right and not get the job or life you dreamed of. It happens. See if the college offers co-op at her college where she can work in her field and go to school. These are hard to find but are jewels. Make sure that this is your daughter’s wish and have her talk to firms in her field.
I am not an ivy school person, income wise, heritage, where I live. I just wanted a school where I could learn how to support myself, stay out of poverty’s grasp, and be safe and have experiences that made me well rounded, inquisitive, and a decent human being. It took a while, lots of false starts and stops. It happens to everyone.
I graduated a year earlier than you with a degree in education. About this time, colleges started offering 5 year masters programs for teaching. Many of my friends went this route. I did not, mostly for financial reasons. My peers paid for an extra year of schooling and came out with a higher degree. Initially, I felt inadequate but within a few years, I realized I made the smart decision.
Though it was only a year's difference, district saw that I had one more year of teaching experience than my peers which equated to handling the reality of teaching better. My peers spent more time in a college classroom and were further removed from the reality of a public school k-8 classroom. Many of them quit education after only a few years of teaching. The ones that didn't quit, went back to school for a second masters degree because what they thought they wanted to do before they entered the workforce was not what they actually wanted to do once they did.
People don't need schooling, they need experience. Many jobs now require that college diploma that didn't 30 years ago. But really, companies just need people with experience - which doesn't happen on a university campus. Employers need to lower their degree requirements so people aren't forced to get one just to get a job that doesn't need it.
Now, I work with high school students and the number of kids will haven't had a job before graduating is astounding. They don't want to work and cry about only being paid minimum wage. They have 6AP tests and a high GPA, but no job. I constantly hear "my parents want me to focus on school, so I don't have time for a job." OR they are party of 4 travel sports teams and don't have a job. We're teaching them that work and work experience isn't important when it's much more important than everything else, IMO. That also needs to change.
Thank you for sharing your experience! One of my roommates in college did the 5-year teaching option.
You hit the nail on the head: People don't need schooling, they need experience.
Of course, there's always going to be fields that require some degree of knowledge, but for most people, careers are built on experience not education (or let's be honest, credentials).
I hate admitting it but I was one of your high school students. I preferred the college route over the work route. I balked at the idea of working. Even in college, I worked the bare minimum to fulfill the work-study requirement. I truly believed the world was a meritocracy and I would be rewarded for all my hard academic work.
Jokes on me. I'm still paying the consequences of my choices.
You're absolutely right, we're teaching kids to value the wrong things. Something needs to change and fast.
It's definitely a societal problem. I didn't blame the students. Most of them are doing what they think they need too. And parents as well. They've been told straight A mean more. Hopefully that shift is coming.
Good commentary. I'd note, though, that most jobs that in my time (Gen X) were jobs for high school teens are now considered jobs for adults, often with families. The fast food places will employ a teen (they did mine), but they aren't set up for them very well, and if a teen works there he will be working with mostly grown adults.
Graduated driver's license programs make it harder for younger teens to get licenses and get to work.
Predatory environments are very common in my experience, I think driven by the internet dysfunction. My teens / young adults face a lot of harassment and some actual dangerous situations (35 year old managers coercing a ride home from 16 year olds, that sort of thing).
I mean, my great grandfather had to quit school at 11 to work in a boiler room for a railroad because his father died, this isn't that kind of "hard". But it's still harder for a high school student to work a part time job than it was in my day, when it was normal.
It’s the same with older people too. 61, Masters degree with years of experience, and forced to work multiple part time jobs and short term gigs.
This is a good point and for the sake of brevity, I'm not looking at Gen X/Boomers in this analysis. Maybe that's a topic for another series because this is equally important to.
All of this affects folks on the cusp of retirement (or after retirement too) with the added problem of age discrimination.
Yes. Started noticing the age discrimination around age 45 when I worked in aerospace. Much of it went away when I moved into teaching. But when I moved into teaching industry for a corporation, it was back. 12 weeks after I turned 60, though I had a spotless record, they fired me. Screwed my retirement bigly. I had planned on working for them until 67. They replaced me with a blue collar guy with no education experience, 20 years younger, and at half the salary.
Gen X thought they were targeted, Gen Z, and now the current generation. Newsflash: we were all targeted by a system that is hostile to Americans.
It's much worse than your post suggests. Oldest grandson age 24 graduated from excellent university and was hired at $70,000 a year to start in small town Oregon. I told him he should buy a starter home. He replied, "I make more than 90% my age and I can not buy the least expensive house in this small town and may never be able to."
I asked what is happening to cause this.
He replied, Private equity investors buy up all the housing stock and have turned generation Z into renters."
I started asking other young Generation Z if this is true. they all said yes, the baby boomers are sucking us dry with their pensions using private equity money to buy up housing stock and then drive up rents to get high pension fund returns.
I graduated from high school in 1962. Mountain Bar candy cost 10 cents but now sells for 2 dollars. A McDonald's fish filet was 25 cents but is now 5 dollars. This documents since 1962 things have gone up 20 fold and the minimum 1962 wage would need to be $25 today to keep things equal. Housing, however, has gone up over 40 fold.
I asked the grand son what is the solution. He said for the baby boomers to die off and the pension funds to collapse.
Thanks for sharing this. I've been aware of private equity but haven't done too deep of a dive into it yet. It seems like this is an urgent issue that isn't being addressed, in part because the financial system has become so complex. Wall Street keeps inventing new ways to dice up debt that the average person is struggling to keep track of it all.
The insane part is private equity gets its money from government employee pension funds.
This is absolutely a problem, the housing market is massively dysfunctional and has been since at least 2008's crash.
Thanks for this. The flaw in this plan is that private pension funds don't collapse when pensioners die; they get larger, because they are not paying out as much. The idea that young people paying in is what funds pension payments hasn't been the whole story since these private asset management companies were created. They represent legacy wealth from a time before globalised manufacturing, just as the elite universities have legacies in the billions which stretch back centuries.
This is such an important issue. Thank you for highlighting it.
I am a Gen Xer and a graduate of two elite schools (Princeton and Harvard Law). Two decades ago I saw the writing on the wall.
When friends who tell me their children were interested in pursuing a career in law and wanted my advice, I would simply tell them: “Unless they’re admitted to a top 10 school or they get a free ride at a second tier school, I would steer clear of a JD. It’s just not a reasonable ROI.”
That was 20 years ago. Now I’m advising anyone with a child to send them to trade school or nursing school. At the rate things are going and with investments in lab-grown meat and other delicacies, I wouldn’t even recommend a career in farming or agriculture.
Add to this the simmering retirement crisis and it becomes increasingly clear that no one will be safe from what’s coming:
https://x.com/thevinomom/status/1901662703292211595?s=46&t=oe714ERC6ECcg0Soyh9foQ
What’s happening is unsustainable economically and socially, and many of us know this. As you correctly pointed out, younger people should feel motivated and inspired to be productive. Otherwise, our society will become unstable and we risk social unrest.
This problem demands our urgent attention. Unfortunately, the people who are equipped to take action — our elected leaders — refuse to acknowledge the problem.
You didn’t mention this in the article, but I’d like to draw your attention to what’s happening in the entertainment industry. I’ve worked in the business for most of my career, and while it’s never been a large sector that employs as many people as tech or finance, it has been a pathway for many from non-elite schools (or in many cases, with no college education at all) to forge middle class lives.
The entertainment industry is absolutely imploding now. Many of my friends and colleagues are holding on for dear life after COVID, strikes, and AI have decimated production. In many ways, it resembles Detroit now: extant, but virtually irrelevant:
https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2024-08-06/ec-reality-tv-production-plummets-essential-california
We are truly in interesting times and uncharted territory.
I look forward to the next installment in your series.
Thank you for adding your thoughts, especially as someone who graduated from elite schools.
I echo your sentiment about law school. When I was in undergrad I had the good fortune of working in the law school and I befriended many of the law students. Most of them were only a few years older than me. This was 2009-2013 so many of them had graduated at the peak of the financial crisis and retreated to law school a few years after graduating.
They were enrolled in a Tier 2 law school. The ones who did ok were dual enrolled in Master's programs at the Maxwell School, a top ranking school for public administration. The ones who only went for a JD found themselves doing document review for $35 an hour.
This was 10 years ago when we were all living and working in DC. Most of these classmates ended up leaving for smaller cities. From my anecdotal observations, having a JD didn't help them. If anything, it mired them in debt.
Re: entertainment. Do you know anyone here on Substack who's documenting their experience? You're right, I don't have exposure to that industry but I'd love to read some first hand accounts of what's going on.
Good question about whether anyone is documenting the entertainment implosion on Substack. I follow Crewstories on Instagram — lots of interesting anecdotes there:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJKGUo8vm4w/?igsh=aXB0b3F2NTg1d3p5
Below-the-line (crew) are more outspoken about what’s happening, but the crisis has infected all tiers of the business, including creative executives and other management personnel at networks and studios. The entire industry is being fundamentally restructured and downsized. I would strongly recommend anyone considering a career in entertainment to avoid it.
This article is not helpful to me. My daughter is not attending the right school in the right city…although she did choose to major in Engineering so there’s that. So am I to believe her degree will be worthless? I don’t like articles that are high in negativity with no proposed solutions or proposed course of action. And no, she is absolutely not going to become a plumber or an electrician. There has been a run on trade schools in my area. She was thinking about taking a gap year and going to vo-tech, but the programs were all full because “everyone” had decided college was not the way to go, vocational school was.
I graduated college in 1986 and moved to Washington D.C. immediately afterward to attend graduate school. After my MA, I worked for an Embassy for five years. Washington D.C. is the same as it ever was. Impossible to make enough money to live there, unless you have roommates. Although from your account, it sounds like it has gotten a little worse.
I appreciate your feedback. I'm simply sharing my experience and my perspective. I know you don't want to see your support for your daughter as a waste of time, but if you aggregate anecdotes like mine and look at the lived experienced of Millennials across the country it's clear the college-career pipeline is fundamentally broken.
Maybe your daughter is the exception. But realistically speaking, I think exceptionalism has done more harm for young people than good.
It's possible this whole analysis is bullshit. Maybe I f*cked up. Maybe I just wasn't good enough.
And it's also possible that maybe there's a systemic problem that disadvantages certain types of college students (first gen, state schools, etc.). And maybe that problem is by design.
If you disagree, I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend that you and your daughter read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. He lays out where the design for systemic failure in college-career comes from.
To be honest, I resonate with your anger and frustration because that's how I've felt over the last 5 ish years. I've spent A LOT of money on therapy trying to decouple my identity from my career. I cannot put into words how DESTRUCTIVE it was to be groomed my entire life by all my teachers for a specific outcome and to have that outcome not come to fruition.
My goal here is to WARN others because if these expectations continue to go unmet, it will lead to a mental health crisis the likes of which we have never seen before.
Look, I was just like your daughter. I sat for 8 AP exams; 3 of them weren't taught at my school. I read the textbooks for the material and sat for the exam anyways, earning college credit completely on my own. And then because that wasn't enough, I also took Calc I and Calc II in high school. I started college as a sophomore and maxed out all my transfer credits.
I, too, applied for Ivy League schools. I didn't get in for undergrad but I did get into one for grad school. Because of the cost, I chose not to go.
I graduated college with 3 official majors (4 unofficial counting my coursework in the Middle East). I graduated with honors, summa cum laude, and was Phi Beta Kappa eligible.
But you know what? I REGRET spending so much time studying because it didn't matter. No employer ever asked me for my GPA. No one cared about the courses I took or what I studied. And I didn't get special treatment because I was "smart."
I've been out of college now for 12 years. I graduated with $35K in student loan debt. My balance is currently $27K. At this point I've made at least $15K worth of payments.
I'm financially illiterate. That's why I started freelance writing about personal finance and economics. I'm teaching myself the information none of the adults in the room were able to teach me when I was younger.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it was worth it. Like everyone else, college has saddled me with debt. I prioritized good grades instead of making friends. And I have documentation of my deteriorating mental and physical health while working in DC to personify how it all affected me.
Your daughter may have a great career with her degree. But she's probably not going to become an editor at the New York Times or an ambassador somewhere. I don't know STEM but I suspect funding and research projects are biased along socioeconomic lines as well. And based on hiring patterns in Silicon Valley, if she didn't go to Berkeley or Stanford -- and can't afford rent in SF -- she's going to struggle.
The ROI from all of this for me was letting go of my expectations of what my life should look like and accepting that I was lied to. It's taken a lot of time but I'm at peace now.
My advice is parents and young people read the room to see what's actually going on in the world, now what they think it's supposed to be like.
As I said in a comment above, this article just doesn't hold true for a nursing degree. Bsns are the most flexible high earning 4 year degrees. My other guys got degrees in computer science and engineering and they are screwed. But not my nurse! A 4-year degree in education will also still get you a job.... Especially if it's special. Ed .It just won't be as well paying as a BSN.
Nursing is definitely in short supply and high demand! That said though, to my knowledge, you don't need a BSN to become a nurse. And if you do, that's definitely a degree you can get affordably at a state school.
I knew a lot of girls from my church growing up who became nurses. They did a nursing program in a partnership with one of the hospitals. I think that made them LPNs. I don't know too much about nursing but I'm sure there's a different requirement for RNs, PAs, and any other medical profession just short of becoming a full-fledged doctor.
In order to be a nurse earning enough pay to make a living on, you need a bachelor of science in nursing. This is a change from previous time periods. You can get a job as an LPN and work on your bachelor's while working as an LPN. But the bottom line is you need a BSN if you want to do anything other than basic pay work. It's a 4-year degree.
Nursing and care work careers are also susceptible to changes in migration policy, because of the large number of women who are willing to work on the other side of the world, spending nothing on themselves, to send home remittances.
A woman can work shifts in a care home in England and send home enough to put her child through private school in the Philippines or Zimbabwe. But the number of very elderly people needing care could drop sharply when the UK government approves euthanasia, as it is expected to do shortly.
I’ve been thinking about what you wrote and your response to my reply.
You may very well be right and I am going to look for that book you mentioned.
My daughter is a fourth generation college student. My great-grandfather told my grandmother and her siblings that: “We cannot leave you children with a lot of money, But we can give you an education. An education is something that no one can ever take away from you.”
Of my four grandparents, three had either a college/graduate degree or had spent time in college.
Even if everything you say is true, (and it probably is) for me, my college years were worth it, and I would never consider that my daughter would not get a college degree, although I was willing for her to take a gap year and get a trade certificate.
You can’t just take classes to get the “A” and then move on to the next harder step, etc. I mean, you can, obviously, but to me that’s not what college is for. You have to let the things you learn change you. Absorb the environment, make your friends, etc.
My graduate school was not the most prestigious one, but I got my job at the Embassy from a classmate. It was because I saw him sitting all alone waiting for his wife to get out of class. I thought he looked lonely. I went over to talk to him. He asked me how I was doing and I made what was supposed to be just a cute remark about, “I’m almost finished. I have to start looking for a job.” I Was Not networking or trying to hit him up for work!!! People ask me how I ended up working for an Embassy. It was basically because I had wanted to be friendly to someone who I thought looked lonely. I have seen people breeze through cocktail parties in Washington passing out business cards…but that was not my mindset.
A higher education is a cherished value in my family and has been for well over a hundred years. No matter what the economic situation in the country is, we will be attending college. I have tried to slant my daughter towards STEM because I’ve heard that’s where the jobs are. She is not looking for a brilliant career in San Francisco. Just a job that will earn enough money to enable her to enjoy life with her family and friends.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through what I wrote and respond. I love this exchange because it's incredibly thought provoking for me as well.
I have two thoughts for you:
1) We need to differentiate college from education
College is a product that is sold and often financed. In theory, students are supposed to learn while they're in college but more often than not, they don't.
I've written about the ChatGPT economics course I created. I studied international relations, political science, and history in college. I should have read primary source material from the likes of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, etc.
I didn't. I read my professor's journal articles and the textbooks my professors contributed to. That's why I'm re-educating myself. I didn't actually learn anything and I don't feel like I got a real education.
I'm currently reading a book about how to read because quite literally no one has ever taught me HOW to read. And this is coming from someone who had to read a novel a week for AP Lit in high school...
One could argue that maybe I would have read those works in grad school had I gone. But I don't think so.
I had a really neat opportunity in undergrad to sit in and audit grad courses. I did the same work as the real grad students in the classes I took and it was utter nonsense.
There was an exchange of time to earn a degree but there wasn't an exchange of time to learn things. I don't regret going to college per se, but I do regret investing so much time into "learning." Your GPA and the number of classes you take are not indicative of real learning.
2) Networking is passive
You raise another good point about networking. You got your embassy job because you befriended a classmate. I got my full-time defense contracting jobs in DC because of the friendships I built when I sat in on those grad classes.
Every job I've had is the result of a pre-existing personal relationship, not active networking. I knew people who knew hiring managers and could personally refer me for jobs.
LinkedIn data reports about 80% of jobs are the result of connections. That's one of the reasons why I'm so pessimistic about access to jobs. The data shows it's not what we think it is. Resumes and cover letters won't really get you anymore.
That's why going to an elite school matters. It's not the quality of the education you get so much as the depth of the network you get access to.
My network was only as deep as bureaucratic paper pushing. I could get a different job in DC if I wanted to, but I hit a glass ceiling. I was never going to get the type of job I wanted because I didn't have the relationships I needed to get me there.
I think this is pervasive everywhere, not just Washington, DC. Every aspect of life is predicated on relationships with other people.
It's not so much college or the job market that's the issue it's our expectations about what both should be. If you manage expectations, you'll have a great life. But if someone goes to a unremarkable state school, for example, and expects to get a job on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley because they got good grades, they're going to be in for a world of hurt. The outcomes they hope for aren't impossible but they're highly unlikely.
Depending on what kind of engineering your daughter is studying, and whether or not she needs a license, she probably will be fine. You don’t need to go to an elite school to get a job that pays decently; you do need to get a degree in a field where they need warm bodies, or in one where where competition is limited by regulation.
This is what I often see, people recommend going vocational. But it's still the case that while a college degree is the minimum requirement to enter the American middle class, and you can't know at age 17 whether you will want to be in that class, so you have to get that piece of paper.
I know many people without college degrees, and even the ones that are highly skilled live in perpetual insecurity because if they lose the job they are doing well because the market dies or the company does (nothing to do with them) and then have to enter the job market, not having a degree on the application gets it tossed before it's even read.
In addition, you have to have some interest and aptitude to do a job. The parents who know this is true of, say, engineering don't seem to get it that it's also true of plumbing or electrical work (or medical work, so many parents think every girl should become a nurse). If you aren't good at the work you won't succeed, and in a glutted labor market full of young adults pushed into vocations by parents who have read too many commentaries telling them that's the smart thing to do, they won't get a job.
This seems to be limited to expectations of work post university. I would wager that the root cause of this crisis may be our cultural assumptions about higher education. We tell kids that uni is the answer but then it’s not.
Maybe telling some kids to learn to fix things would equate to better outcomes.
Stay tuned. Part 3 will dive into the cultural aspects of all of this.
“…a lot of Gen Zers wouldn’t want to do the work anyways.” Maybe this says it all.
Stay tuned for Part 3 👀
Good article, but what did you mean by: "In an effort to fake it until I made it, I financed my life."
I ran up credit card debt to create an illusion everything was fine in my personal and professional life.
A lot of job markets in big cities have unspoken social expectations that are directly correlated to new job opportunities. In DC, happy hour is big and everyone kind of dresses the same way. If you want to play the game, you have to fit in.
I'm not saying I ran up massive bar tabs or anything but when you're not breaking even each month and you have to dry clean your clothes or meet up with coworkers after work for a drink or two, it all adds up.
Yeah if I had kids they would be an electrician, plumber, carpenter. No college, it isn’t worth it. No return on investment.
All due respect, this is a perfect comment -- people without kids (or with young kids) think this is the obvious and common sense way to go. I totally understand why, I once also did.
But it's fighting the last war.
When my kids started moving into middle and high school, bunches of the local parents (conservative home school) took this point of view. All the girls were supposed to be nurses, all the guys electricians. I think one of the kids wound up going into the electrical field and probably made it to apprentice or higher? The rest would try for a nursing degree, for example, but if they weren't good at those skills they didn't make it through the program, and if they did they entered a field flooded with other young people doing the same thing and had to compete for jobs with people better at it than they were. The only ones that aren't working as baristas are getting jobs with family and friends or they got degrees.
As useless as a college degree can be, not having one is a black mark against you in a nations where (I think) about 70% of young people now get some (useful or useless) college education. I don't want it to be that way -- with all my kids, we talked about how we wished they could "safely" skip college. But the risk of that is super high unless your family is already rich or connected. Most regular Americans can't afford to take the chance, sadly.
My beloved brother said that if he had to do it again he would get a degree. Just as you said, it’s a black mark against you in some job markets. Freakin stupid.
I very much agree. The amount of time wasted in credentialing, I think it's one of the things that saps the energy of the economy. But on an individual level, you need to be very risk tolerant and have a ton of resources to skip a degree. Best we've figured out to do is get degrees at state schools without debt, which is still suboptimal.
Unless you're going to be a nurse! A BSN is the biggest bang for the buck right now. 4-year degree, guaranteed job....excellent pay. That's my 24 yo daughter's route.
GOOD FOR HER, yes I am yelling. It takes someone special to be a nurse!
I was in DC for some of the same years you were, and this is incredibly accurate. I had a law degree from a T14 Law School, had 6 unpaid internships, funded by $200k of debt, and I didn’t get a single offer for a job as a lawyer. I did het 3 job offers for federal government jobs and took one, but it was a job as an HR Specialist that in a less degree inflated economy should have gone to someone like you. Now I’m chronically underemployed and likely will be for my whole life.
Thanks for sharing your experience and verifying my observations. You bring up a really good point: all these people with advanced degrees are going to be chronically underemployed forever.
I don't think people are thinking about that. They assume JD = good job. And maybe that's true for a small town but definitely not DC.
The other thing is because of degree inflation, people like you took jobs that should've gone to people like me. And after sequestration in the 2010s, entry-level jobs were outsourced to contractors. There weren't many GS-7 and 9 positions when I was trying to find a job. They were all 13s and I couldn't compete because everyone else applying either had military preference or a MA.
This in turn suppressed wages. If you're in a position that could've gone to someone like me and your wage is probably commensurate with that, who am I, a lowly BA holder, to ask for a higher paying job?
There are so many overqualified people who aren't earning what they should be earning and it suppresses opportunities as well as wages for everyone beneath them. DC felt like such an unwinable game.
I want to give another perspective. Another route if you can get into - starting your own business. It takes a lot of effort to make it work out, but if you can, a lot of things you can control are a good thing for the future. Also, give you a flexible time for family or anything that you care about. We started our business because my husband had no job and I had no job - but because my husband likes hobby games so we started 17 years ago. Up and down, but we can say that after 17 years, we have our tool to support our family, and we enjoy it (not all but the majority of work). I hope our business benefits our son or his future if he chooses to. Just another idea for doing something that you may have options in your control (not all of them but a lot still).
Great article.
Question, though. Why should college graduates rightfully expect a six figure job right out of college? As a mom of three Gen Z, one out of college and one in, with those two both employed in jobs paying about $20 an hour (which would be $40,000 a year full time), I'm wondering if we did something wrong or something right.
When I lived in D.C. it would have been very easy for me to get a job on the staff of a Congressman or Senator, with just a Bachelor’s degree, working as a paralegal or a similar position. But those people worked All…the…time. Literally. I wanted to have a life.
I put my daughter with math tutors since the 5th grade in an attempt to prepare for her to study in a STEM related field. Many is the Sunday afternoon I would have liked to have stayed at home and rested, but I hauled my rear end to the car to meet with her math tutor all the years of high school. Do not tell me it has all been for nothing because she didn’t get into an Ivy League school!
My daughter is 2e. She was not able to get it together enough to get into one of the top schools, even though she was a National Merit Commended Scholar. Not that she ever wanted to go to one.
She is happy where she is, and I believe that counts for something.
I hope it works out for her.STEM is the new computer science degree. Be careful, find grants, scholarships and whatever. Don’t touch student loans with a ten foot pole.
You can do everything right but reality is that no one knows what is going to happen month to month or year to year, shit happens. You can do everything right and not get the job or life you dreamed of. It happens. See if the college offers co-op at her college where she can work in her field and go to school. These are hard to find but are jewels. Make sure that this is your daughter’s wish and have her talk to firms in her field.
I am not an ivy school person, income wise, heritage, where I live. I just wanted a school where I could learn how to support myself, stay out of poverty’s grasp, and be safe and have experiences that made me well rounded, inquisitive, and a decent human being. It took a while, lots of false starts and stops. It happens to everyone.