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A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College

mac said:
I think agreeing to work a few years to repay the cost of the education is a reasonable agreement. For example, service academies require a 6 year commitment to repay a 4 year degree. Of course, during that 6 years, you are being paid, well, and have no student loans. At the end of it, you come out a 27 year old O3/4 with good experience, a BS, and a work ethic. Win-win for everyone.
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It's a great deal, so long as you don't get sent into combat. You get a degree sans student loans, and six years of experience.
 
Some very young people here have some strange ideas.
Education is what you get that makes you trainable. Training is usually done on the job. Employers do pay, I spent 8 years in night classes going for a BS degree, and my employer reimbused me for all of it. Truth be known, not much of those night classes actually improved my skills. After 12 years in the Navy, I already had plenty of training and experience, more than enough for the jobs I worked.
Experience is not linear. Some people, after 10 years on the job, have 10 years experience, others have 1 year 10 times.
I worked with a lot of engineers, and can say that a few of them had too much college education and too little expereince/training. They did not deserve their pay. Very few of them come out of college ready to be productive employees. Not all jobs are alike, even those with the same title...
Employer take some risk hiring people. They can't really know if you are worth what they pay you until they try you. Sometimes, they end up having to fire you. If they take you in, train you, finally get to the point where you are an asset to them, what is stopping you from leaving and going to work for the competition? OTOH, some employers are rather stupid when they hire. Imagine being a degreed and somewhat experienced engineer and you read a posting on the wall for a union job, like meter reader, and see that they make more than the company is paying you? Seen it done, several quit.
The system is huge, and complicated. Do what is best for you within the system, because the system isn't likely to change any time soon, no matter how much you value your own opinions as to how it SHOULD be...
 
Cephus said:
If it's within the letter of the law, then it isn't illegal. I suppose it depends on how they work the system, they can require you to keep up existing external certifications and the like on your own time, but any internal Apple training, they must, by law, pay you for.
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It's simple. Apple Retail didn't -- on paper -- require you to learn more than the bare minimum tools for consumer-level use of Apple software in order to work as a Creative (a position they no longer support). However, in actual practice, if you didn't bust your ass to learn such software inside and out, your training team at a given store has a hard time attracting and retaining One To One training memberships...and then your session counts fall below quota...and then you get stuck in a permanent case of understaffing (so everyone who sticks around is overworked and stressed out). So legally, you could just get into that position and freeze your skill levels and not be fired, but your team would never get the payroll hours it needs in order to expand coverage, and the steady increase in job obligations (Apple Retail doesn't honor its own job descriptions; it regularly adds things in without additional pay or renegotiation) means everyone ends up overworked and grumpy. Furthermore, anyone seeking a promotion will put up with the extra study requirements, and so the company ends up with unpaid training time taken on "voluntarily" because people don't want to be passed over.

Just another case of using surplus labor pressure to get away with squeezing more out of employees.
 
cmakaioz said:
It's simple. Apple Retail didn't -- on paper -- require you to learn more than the bare minimum tools for consumer-level use of Apple software in order to work as a Creative (a position they no longer support). However, in actual practice, if you didn't bust your ass to learn such software inside and out, your training team at a given store has a hard time attracting and retaining One To One training memberships...and then your session counts fall below quota...and then you get stuck in a permanent case of understaffing (so everyone who sticks around is overworked and stressed out). So legally, you could just get into that position and freeze your skill levels and not be fired, but your team would never get the payroll hours it needs in order to expand coverage, and the steady increase in job obligations (Apple Retail doesn't honor its own job descriptions; it regularly adds things in without additional pay or renegotiation) means everyone ends up overworked and grumpy. Furthermore, anyone seeking a promotion will put up with the extra study requirements, and so the company ends up with unpaid training time taken on "voluntarily" because people don't want to be passed over.

Just another case of using surplus labor pressure to get away with squeezing more out of employees.
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And I would venture to say that just about EVERY job I have ever had is similar to this. Apple was the 2nd to worst, in my opinion...but as a general rule, if you wanna move up in a company, most ANY company, then you gotta more or less BE the next step up, long before you are ever paid to be in that position.
 
KevinKohler said:
But the question I think Cmakoize is posing is, should this be an OPTION for the industry, or should there be some form of REQUIREMENT of them to help fund college educations, in exchange for services?
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Certainly, but no more so than any other benefit. If you enter an agreement for them to pay for 4 years of school in exchange for a 6 year contract, where's the question? A contract is a contract.
 
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cmakaioz said:
It's simple. Apple Retail didn't -- on paper -- require you to learn more than the bare minimum tools for consumer-level use of Apple software in order to work as a Creative (a position they no longer support). However, in actual practice, if you didn't bust your ass to learn such software inside and out, your training team at a given store has a hard time attracting and retaining One To One training memberships...and then your session counts fall below quota...and then you get stuck in a permanent case of understaffing (so everyone who sticks around is overworked and stressed out). So legally, you could just get into that position and freeze your skill levels and not be fired, but your team would never get the payroll hours it needs in order to expand coverage, and the steady increase in job obligations (Apple Retail doesn't honor its own job descriptions; it regularly adds things in without additional pay or renegotiation) means everyone ends up overworked and grumpy. Furthermore, anyone seeking a promotion will put up with the extra study requirements, and so the company ends up with unpaid training time taken on "voluntarily" because people don't want to be passed over.

Just another case of using surplus labor pressure to get away with squeezing more out of employees.
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Do you expect to climb the corporate ladder by meeting the minimums and no more?
 
UtahBill said:
Some very young people here have some strange ideas.
Education is what you get that makes you trainable. Training is usually done on the job. Employers do pay, I spent 8 years in night classes going for a BS degree, and my employer reimbused me for all of it. Truth be known, not much of those night classes actually improved my skills. After 12 years in the Navy, I already had plenty of training and experience, more than enough for the jobs I worked.
Experience is not linear. Some people, after 10 years on the job, have 10 years experience, others have 1 year 10 times.
I worked with a lot of engineers, and can say that a few of them had too much college education and too little expereince/training. They did not deserve their pay. Very few of them come out of college ready to be productive employees. Not all jobs are alike, even those with the same title...
Employer take some risk hiring people. They can't really know if you are worth what they pay you until they try you. Sometimes, they end up having to fire you. If they take you in, train you, finally get to the point where you are an asset to them, what is stopping you from leaving and going to work for the competition? OTOH, some employers are rather stupid when they hire. Imagine being a degreed and somewhat experienced engineer and you read a posting on the wall for a union job, like meter reader, and see that they make more than the company is paying you? Seen it done, several quit.
The system is huge, and complicated. Do what is best for you within the system, because the system isn't likely to change any time soon, no matter how much you value your own opinions as to how it SHOULD be...
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Nicely put. Bottom line is that you have to provide more than you cost, or you won't move up.
 
Dittohead not! said:
It's a great deal, so long as you don't get sent into combat. You get a degree sans student loans, and six years of experience.
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It's a great deal period. Getting sent into combat is part of the deal. Don't like it, don't take it, and pay back 150k in student loans...
 
mac said:
Do you expect to climb the corporate ladder by meeting the minimums and no more?
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Absolutely not. My point -- which perhaps you missed entirely -- was in regard to an unpaid and unwritten but de facto training requirement which employees were (and from what I hear from former coworkers) still are paying for with their own time and money.

The point is that the employer ends up getting a big chunk of the expense for providing the effective minimum work standards...furnished by the employee instead of the employer...and that this practice is common. Back at Apple, we COULD have -- legally speaking -- just done the bare minimum on-paper requirements, but this would mean shooting ourselves in the feet in terms of quality-of-life issues and working conditions because the only way to begin to approach appropriate staffing levels for our work is to hire more people, and the only way (within the company) the store qualifies for that additional payroll is by attracting and retaining more training members to use the service more frequently. Whether from rigging the system such that exceeding the paid-for standards is a de facto requirement of gaining the resources needed to keep the quality of work and working conditions stable, or from relying upon the common artificial scarcity of decent jobs (so that rivals for a possible promotion within a workplace each overdeliver in order to keep themselves in the running for the same better position), the employer ends up getting quite a lot of unpaid extra production and quality.
 
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Everyone needs a college education today...there are no more decent labor jobs for HS graduates...so now a 4 yr college degree is like a HS diploma because most everyone gets one now...so now to stand out you have to have a masters or be trained in something specific...like accting....how many more lawyers can the USA support gahhh....
 
Arbo said:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/b...l=1&adxnnlx=1336924899-7j2fEdhHEUB9uA5C7RvZyw



"No one told me that." Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]
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It is not exactly reasonable to expect responsibility. Not because there is none, but the prevailing zeitgeist is that failing to get a college education is tantamount to throwing your life away. The reality is that the lion's share of people who get college degrees never do anything meaningful with it and end up in menial labor jobs for which they didn't even really need a high school education.

However, the education industry wants people to think it is important so that they can rake in more money and they will use guile and deception to achieve it. Basically its a racket where the various other rackets, such as the banking racket, stand to profit as well. That a teenager is subjugated to the careful manipulation of the adults around him or her is not really a fault of the teenager. People today are not taught to think for ourselves so it is not unusual that we would end up doing exactly what society expects. Even adults are easily controlled under the right circumstances (see the Iraq War).

Only when the youth begin questioning the cultural norms that dictate their career plans en masse will this issue find a resolution.
 
cmakaioz said:
Absolutely not. My point -- which perhaps you missed entirely -- was in regard to an unpaid and unwritten but de facto training requirement which employees were (and from what I hear from former coworkers) still are paying for with their own time and money.
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So? Unless the job is in China...you don't have to work there. People that improve their worth to a company are going to succeed, more so than people that don't. :shrug:

The point is that the employer ends up getting a big chunk of the expense for providing the effective minimum work standards...furnished by the employee instead of the employer...and that this practice is common. Back at Apple, we COULD have -- legally speaking -- just done the bare minimum on-paper requirements, but this would mean shooting ourselves in the feet in terms of quality-of-life issues and working conditions because the only way to begin to approach appropriate staffing levels for our work is to hire more people, and the only way (within the company) the store qualifies for that additional payroll is by attracting and retaining more training members to use the service more frequently. Whether from rigging the system such that exceeding the paid-for standards is a de facto requirement of gaining the resources needed to keep the quality of work and working conditions stable, or from relying upon the common artificial scarcity of decent jobs (so that rivals for a possible promotion within a workplace each overdeliver in order to keep themselves in the running for the same better position), the employer ends up getting quite a lot of unpaid extra production and quality.
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How many companies benefit from your education? Are you as valuable to the company without your degree as you were with it? If so, save the time and money and don't get the degree. If not....get a degree and get a good job. I'm not missing your point, but you are overlooking a crucial one. Competition. Why hire/promote you when they can hire/promote someone that offers more?
 
lpast said:
Everyone needs a college education today...there are no more decent labor jobs for HS graduates...so now a 4 yr college degree is like a HS diploma because most everyone gets one now...so now to stand out you have to have a masters or be trained in something specific...like accting....how many more lawyers can the USA support gahhh....
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That's not necessarily true. Skilled labor is declining in the US and therefore, income will go up for plumbers, electricians....HVAC specialists. I have two HVAC guys in my neighborhood, and they're both rolling in dough. Neither of them have a degree in anything. Another neighbor is a network penetration tester...rolling in dough, no degree. Skilled labor will always pay.
 
lpast said:
Everyone needs a college education today...there are no more decent labor jobs for HS graduates...so now a 4 yr college degree is like a HS diploma because most everyone gets one now...so now to stand out you have to have a masters or be trained in something specific...like accting....how many more lawyers can the USA support gahhh....
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sorry, there are a lot of jobs that don't even require High School, just 9th grade or so skills. Clerks, pool cleaners, landscaping laborers, construction, janitors, bus drivers, etc. Most of those will have the HS, but that is because their employer will hire them first, before hiring a dropout...
 
mac said:
So?
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So it's another case of employers exploiting systemic vulnerabilities of workers in order to get workers to pay for something from which the employers are the prime beneficiaries. In case you missed it, that was the point being made.

mac said:
Unless the job is in China...you don't have to work there.
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Not the point. Call back if you can manage to focus on the point being made, instead of wandering off into tangents.

mac said:
I'm not missing your point,
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Since nothing in your post addresses my point at all, yes, actually, you are.
 
lpast said:
Everyone needs a college education today...there are no more decent labor jobs for HS graduates...so now a 4 yr college degree is like a HS diploma because most everyone gets one now...so now to stand out you have to have a masters or be trained in something specific...like accting....how many more lawyers can the USA support gahhh....
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If that's the case, it's just one more proof that American high schools need a serious overhaul, which clearly they do.
 
Arbo said:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/b...l=1&adxnnlx=1336924899-7j2fEdhHEUB9uA5C7RvZyw



"No one told me that." Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]
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I think maybe its time to quit promoting the idea that everyone should go to college.The only thing this idea does is increase the number of people with useless degree and devalues lower educational degrees. I would support legally requiring colleges to inform students what their future job perspectives would be in the degree they are going to college for, what that field's starting pay is and how many years it would take paying back those loan. If students realize that they have a snowballs change in hell getting into a certain field or that degree pays barely above what a non-college job pays then they won't waste their money or in some cases our money getting a useless degree. Selling a useless degree is no different than selling a fraudulent product.
 
cmakaioz said:
So it's another case of employers exploiting systemic vulnerabilities of workers in order to get workers to pay for something from which the employers are the prime beneficiaries. In case you missed it, that was the point being made.



Not the point. Call back if you can manage to focus on the point being made, instead of wandering off into tangents.



Since nothing in your post addresses my point at all, yes, actually, you are.
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Oh, I get it. You just want to bitch.

Listen, better yourself or flip burgers. Your choice.
 
education over the course of time has transcended from a commodity that only the wealthy and powerful in society can afford to the (in president obama's words) "great equalizer" but the current trend would say other wise, the prize of having a good college education makes the body go numb. the greatest asset in the global market today (a good education) is being sold in the united states at prices which the average earner can not afford comfortably. this is a great contrast to Asia and in my opinion thus the reason for the sore in the Asian standard of living and development.
 
jamesrage said:
I would support legally requiring colleges to inform students what their future job perspectives would be in the degree they are going to college for, what that field's starting pay is and how many years it would take paying back those loan.
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This information is available to online. The Occupational Outlook Handbook provides such data. Moreover, if one wants to analyze what's actually happening, Schedules A-8, A-13, A-14, and B-1 through B-9 on the monthly Employment Situation reports are useful. In addition, a variety of loan calculators is available online.

Having said that, a combination of initiative, ability to identify and understand trends, and literacy is necessary for students--or any individual for that matter--to access and utilize such information. In my opinion, it would be a good idea for the Academic Advising offices, or related offices that provide guidance to students regarding major selection, to introduce students to such information. In the longer-run, providing useful information to students could enhance the value added by the institutions of higher education that provide such information.
 
iliveonramen said:
I certainly agree with this...100%. High School should graduate folks "job ready" for the new economic environment.
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They used to, until they started passing kids who couldn't read because they don't dare make them feel bad.
 
Jerry said:
The federal government requires recipients of financial aid to complete a personal finance brief as a condition of Pell Grants and Stanford Loans, and this is an example of why.
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When I went to grad school there was a mandatory meeting with a financial aid officer who reviewed all my loans and told me exactly what my monthly payments would be based on then-current interest rates. Every school should do that, if they don't already.
 
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