Parents obviously stressed education but think i would have been just as happy kicking it in some skilled trade. When you're 17 though blue collar type jobs seem beneath you. Shame.

I think part of what happened is that people who actually are skilled laborers and had half-smart (male) children were like 'you're not gonna bust your ass all day like I did, you're going to go to college'

and then when the market overcorrects people with "worthless college degrees" will be able to land cushy office gigs again. Its all supply and demand. If you want the easiest time getting a job you go to the field with the least competition. Markets all tend to overshoot so its both academically predictable yet also an equilibrium that won't ever be found in practice.

Best job I ever had was assistant greenskeeper at a golf course, no lie

My freshman year I was very torn between Engineering and business/finance. Even given my current situation, I would go back and get an Engineering or Computer Science degree rather than what I got.

isnt a major issue that caused this our use of non-renewable energy? I dont have any background on this, but thats my impression. Our generation is using more non-renewable energy per capita than any that preceded us though.

Only thing I'll engage about on this topic:

There are a lot of high achieving kids from good-to-great schools, both undergraduate and graduate, who did not dick around and yet have no reasonable job or prospects and shoulder 5 to 6 figure debt for that education. To understand vastly expanded education price increases you have to understand investment in student loans, and by extension you must understand that the cost of education increased far more than most other items - and far more than costs or inflation - because the generation you're talking about grasped the opportunity to charge "us" significantly more on a year-by-year basis and to then sell shares of the student loans - think housing bubble - to investors from that same generation.

Bearing in mind that student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, there is no way to tell the above story without it being pernicious and cruel to "us," for the benefit and profit of the same generation that is draining our social resources faster than "we" can contribute.

Also they don't retire anymore because they never saved, like idiots. This effect costs "us" yet more job opportunities.

/done politarding

I was the exact same way and chose the same direction and would never do it the other way.

Probably because we use more energy per capita in general though. I'm willing to bet that the percentage of our total per capita usage that comes from non-renewable sources has gone down

can't blame boomers for global warming. that's just human progress. people will always consume the most possible with the least cost. nothing us is doing now will curb it cuz the same industrialization is going on in china and india etc. they're not gonna start using renewables in mass until it's feasible from a cost perspective.

also don't think it's a huge deal but don't feel like politarding.

and hoya obv right. education bubble is coming. Lot of schools will be in rough shape.

This is a hard take but I don't disagree with any of it.

I would assume thats correct. However, there is naturally going to be environmental damage that occurs and parts of the natural ecosystem that no longer can survive anytime there is technological advancement. This has been happening for thousands of years. It is only due to the rapid advancement in technology that we can actually quantify this and project into the future now. It is also due to the fact that in the past technological changes were not so rapid that they completely morphed the world around us before nature could adapt from an evolutionary perspective.

Ya I didn't mean to blame baby boomers for global warming existing if that is how it came out. More of a head in the sand for too long thing.

yeah i wouldn't even say that. but i'll drop it.

The decision to help kids goto college by making student loans very obtainable rather than by controlling tuition fees and offering subsidies, esp for lower income kids, was a v bad one. It was probably made by baby boomers.

meh. i think some of you would be surprised how little schools push the skilled labor/trade angle. for some reason, education has decided that EVERYONE needs to go to college. forget that you were a giant ****up in HS. you'll figure it out in college.

and yea, I agree with hoya. However, I blame all the kids who chose the college path when they shouldn't have. I am one of them in that I got a $60k Masters degree that has had absolutely no career value to me to this point. I pay the loans every month and chalk it up as a good learning experience. I also had a good enough time that I would do it again if I had the option of forgoing it. While it doesn't have a monetary return that has show up yet I made a ton of good friends who will be beneficial to many different aspects of my life in both the short and long-run and that was worth paying for on its own.

can't wait till needle reads this page

depends what school youre talking about. Sure the University of Phoenix has done this, but most if not all of the top few tiers of universities offer meaningful grants or other ways to reduce the cost of attendance for low income kids and keep them from having loans that amount to the full cost of the education. I came from a poorer family than a lot of my college friends and ended up with way fewer loans than those who's parents decided they weren't going to bear the entire cost.

Can blame educators/guidance counselors i guess but society as a whole doesn't "respect" trades. Would have felt like a failure to go down that path at that age.

Eh, in practice this isn't a horrible idea. The trouble is, 18 year olds coming out of American high schools (and their dumb parents) shouldn't be able to make this decision. If you want to go to a subsidy system, you should also move to giving out subsidies in sectors where we as a society should want people to go (i.e. less for art history majors, more for engineering majors)

I'm not surprised at this at all, this is how it was in my high school, and it's utterly preposterous. Not everyone is cut out for college.

I agree and in particular with the bolded.

more or less all of this comes back to the idea that most people in every society make very poor economic decisions on both a micro and macro scale.

yeah see that's what was great about poker is that we could exploit that on a daily basis at the individual level instead of sitting around complaining about it