https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/16/stud...udy-finds.html

Current borrowers are almost certainly fine because people know what paperwork’s are needed now. The first batch (which would be the applicants today) was always going to be problematic. Most of those rejected are probably calling up their old employers to get their old jobs certified for PSLF and a decent chunk, of not most, will end up getting the forgiveness.

It’s going to take a while though.

This is exactly what is happening and why the entire thing is going to come crashing down at some point. The debt is only worth taking on in a limited number of fields.

Yeah, it's kind of horrifying how many docs I know have kids getting a degree in some obscure humanities area from a private college and ending up with 300K or so in debt and job prospects that are non-existent.

On a funny note, I'm going to write my last student loan check 3 months before I retire this December.

MM MD

those kids will be fine. They will (most likely) still get a bump in salary or get access to grad schools that open doors.

Even if not, deferrals are a thing. Take up of income based repayment plans have been slow (in part because nobody has a vested interest in promoting them) but it’s definitely picking up and there is increasing understanding the student loans are structured to not impose sever financial burden on the borrowers. Some experiments have been conducted to show a lot of the stress is psychological. (For example, NYU conducted an experiment where they offered accepted students economically identical aid packages, half worded as tuition waivers based on public service and half worded loan forgiveness programs like PSLF.)

I can confirm some pharmacists that recently graduated have 300k in debt and will be making 100k - 120k for the next 20 years

I think it’s a combination of fields and schools. A degree in anything from any semi respectable school will open a lot of doors and command a salary premium, even if the actual job doesn’t require a degree at all to do.

My wife for example became an art teacher with a degree in fine arts. I also knew traders with degrees in philosophy... among other majors.

And OTOH I have two colleagues with kids with degrees (one in French, one in some kind of art history) back in the basement (one literally)

So I think it varies. I do agree with grizy that there is an awareness that this all isn't optimal and that things are changing - but I don't know how much the changes will help the cohort that are already buried. And of course I don't know squat about those two kids - for all I know they barely squeeked through in a borderline respectable college - I'd guess not all art history degrees are created equal.

Is getting a minor still a thing? I have a minor in English Lit. - but I never planned on being an English teacher.

MM MD

As someone who has actually processed these applications in the past, 97% doesn't even begin to tell the full story. Makes it seem like they're making it intentionally difficult for you to get your forgiveness.

Even if you eliminate all the nittery and human error, the rejection rate for applications would probably still be 50%+.

You wouldn't believe how brazen some people are in trying to cheat that system. Some of them probably even get away with it because of said human error. Must be nice to have your $100k student loan written off because you successfully faked some documentation and bought an "official" seal off the internet somewhere. I'm sure the protections are more advanced than they were in 2001 when I was doing this.

I honestly think that’s more on the kids than the majors. French speaking abilities are pretty sought after by employers in a lot of fields.

Oh yeah, that wouldn't surprise me at all. I think the kids who get screwed are the ones who go to a decent but not top tier private college (or state college/uni out of state) and major in an area that the place isn't known for.

Example - Univ. of Nevada has well regarded mining/jounalism and Engineering programs. If you were an out of state student and had to pay the steep OOS fees, might be worth it (in terms of career prospects). I'd guess not so much for, say, a history degree.

MM MD

Even a history degree from U of Nevada I think would be fine just because most people would assume it's a respectable school (state school right?) and grad/law/business schools don't really care where you got your undergrad GPA. (with just a small premium if it's a ivy/stanford/maybe Michigan engineering type of school)

"and grad schools don't really care where you got your undergrad GPA."

At least for med school, I promise you this is not true. But med school is a special beast.

I don't think we're discussing the same stuff here, anyway. The point that I'm (probably poorly) trying to make is that there isn't much utility in spending a ton of money at a number of pretty-good-but-not great Universitys/colleges for a lot of "soft" degrees in that you'd get the same utility for a lot fewer dollars at any number of other schools.

Which is probably obvious, anyway.

MM MD

I just don't know about "lower dollar" anymore. In-state tuitions have been rising faster than out of state and for the most part, students do better just going to the best school they can get in. The gap between public and private has been closing too.

I definitely think US needs a technical/community college/apprentice solution for a huge chunk of the population but until that day, vast majority of American population should work toward a college degree.

Currently I think the smartest plan is: get in best college possible out of highschool. If you can't get in top 100 (I never thought about exactly where... but basically any state school and any non-scam private school that doesn't recruit "adjuncts" on Craig's List should do), go to local community college and look to transfer to your local state (most states have such programs) while studying for some certificate (medical billing?)+ associate degree. The certificate/associate degree are really more as a backup and the primary goal is still to transfer to the local state uni.

Absolutely do not, under any circumstances, go to a for-profit college. Everything they offer, a community college will offer (at least offer something close that will give you similar results) and provide you with the option to transfer to a better program. I'm speaking in absolute terms but I've only ever seen ONE exception in my life and that's a cafeteria worker literally being told she needed a college degree to be promoted to manager and get a 10k salary bump. She got a degree from DeVry and got the pay bump. But even then I thought she should have just gone to local community college then CUNY or something like that.

There are very few scenarios where 4 years at expensive school make more strict financial sense than 2 years of CC then transfer.

However we're talking about kids, who want to go to college like all their friends, and get that freshman experience. And parents who understandably don't want to deprive their kids of that experience that most of them got.

Just the freshman/sophomore recruiting done at state+ ranked schools alone makes sense as hedge (at minimum) for most people.

That's assuming you got someone hounding their asses to find summer internships/research(teaching) assistant jobs early. Freshmen are lazy and some don't even realize those opportunities are available.

My freshman year was one never ending beer bong.

You were a life fish. I went to a state school and got an ibanking internship... and partied every weekend. My grades weren't even that good. Got TA job too for sophomore year and learned my professor was a plagiarizing PoS.

Yeah sometimes I think maybe I should have been a doctor instead of a quant but then I remember I hate debt and long hours. And I talk to a couple friends who are MDs that are always asking me how they can get out of medicine. I have no career advice for anyone anymore--everyone is getting squeezed. About ten years ago, a quant masters and one actuarial exam could get you a $50-60k job on demand, so that was my fail-safe. I checked last year and people were saying I'd need 3 exams to interview for an internship (!) at most places.

I tell anyone who asks to max out CC hours. The first college statistics course I taught was in 2006 at a major state university. At the time, that course was somewhat rigorous and was mirrored by the state CC system who took our guidance on the content. Fast forward to today, the CC course is the same. The university course is such a sham that you might lay odds that I'm lying if I described it to you.

It actually depends on school and program. A lot of schools basically branched out "stats for non-science majors" or whatever they call it while the Business School and ECON program got their own stat classes going.

In MBA programs the stat class is pretty watered down (at MOST top programs, but not all. The exceptions tend to be schools that that mainly feed into IBanking) compared to the undergrad stat/econometrics classes I took almost 20 years ago. A lot of topics that used to be taught in intro to stat have been pushed to classes like operations management and decision science.

My programming career got started by 3 classes in the CA City College system - Java, Perl and C++. Entire cost? $117 - $13 a credit hour. One of my teachers taught the same class at Berkeley Extension for 10x as much.

You're old though.

Is the modern Computer Science world still filled with people who are fresh off a "HTML for Dummies" book and largely learning as they go? I'd imagine it's more competitive than it was for you in the 80s or whatever.

I dunno about the 80s, but 10-15 years ago it was much harder to get a programming job without a computer science (or related) degree than it is now.

In the modern world, demand for programmers is so high that there are shortcuts like coding bootcamps for people to learn to code and get into entry level programming jobs. A notable example is Haseeb Qureshi (aka dogishead from 2+2/poker), and there are also some participants in the Programming forum here who went that route and now have tech jobs.

I think the doors from boot camps to tech jobs are rapidly closing now.

At least they are in the finance space for quants and database guys in the NYC area. CUNY has been REALLY good in supplying competent coders and there is just no reason to sort through a thousand+ boot camp grads and give them technical interviews. My understanding is other T2/T3 schools similarly are producing enough coders to meet demand and it is increasingly costly to find good candidates among the boot camp graduates.

Respectable schools are also putting out their own de-facto boot camps (some just call it boot camps), sometimese as precursors to programs like masters in financial engineering. This dilutes value of Udacity and whatever boot camps even more.

Another institutional factor is that hiring is starting to be very concentrated in just a few big employers with basically identical hiring timelines... and increasingly focused on (traditional) campuses.

We actually saw something pretty similar happening in the 90s and early 2000s when no matter what your other credentials (or lack thereof) were, if you had Oracle certifications, you'd get a job. Nowadays, you need a legit background in database management and at least some coding skills to get good quant/DB jobs, unless you just want to be an onsite tech.