And the deteriorating job market when they get out. My son has struggled/struggles with this. I 100% understand and I would, too, if I were in his position. I compare his situation to mine and they are night and day. The prevailing sentiment when I was in college: get a degree (in anything) and you'll be OK if you want to work hard.
What deteriorating job market? Despite some recent high profile tech industry layoffs, the US unemployment rate is 3.4%. There are jobs available for those who want to work. They may have to move.
A recent survey showed that most college students seriously overestimate their earnings potential. There is a mismatch in expectations. Students graduating with low-value degrees need to take whatever job they can get and work their way up.
Yeah, that was badly phrased. I was replying too quickly.
Yes, the job market has roared back in the last couple of years, but before that it was cooler. But, I should have mentioned other things besides jobs. The world is a pretty bleak place, in a lot of ways. Yeah, the cold war was always hovering about, but it was not really something that my peers really worried about.
The world is less bleak now than it has ever been in human history. If you zoom out and look beyond the news headlines we as a species are doing pretty well. Rates of extreme poverty are down worldwide and relatively few people are starving to death or being killed in wars.
The world still has a lot of problems but let's be objective about the data instead of succumbing to defeatist narratives.
This whole line of thinking strikes me as emotional reasoning: “I feel bad, therefore the world must be bleak”. People like to look for rational explanations for something that’s not very rational. These feelings of anxiety and depression are probably more correlated with things like lack of religious belief and overexposure to news media than with any facts about objective reality. Plenty of examples of “poor” (on paper) societies being happier on average.
Haven't median real wages in developed countries dropped since the 1970s or so (even more so if you include housing costs in your inflation number)? The world as a whole may be better off, but that's cold comfort when your future in your country looks worse than your parents'.
Median real total employee compensation in the US has increased significantly since with 1970s once you account for non-wage benefits like employer-funded health insurance premiums and retirement plans. (I am not familiar with the data for other developed countries.)
If the reason people are getting paid less is that health insurance has gotten more expensive then that's interesting and relevant as an explanation, but hardly refutes the idea that their lives are getting worse.
The last thirteen years have been a job market going from around 10% unemployment to practically zero to approximately 3% now, a period of continuous growth in employment and the economy, followed by the hottest extended job market in the last 30+ years of US history, consistently at or below the average for the last 40 years. The idea that these people have graduated into a tough market is nonsensical.
Yes, 2009-2010 was cooler, the rest has been average to significantly better than average.
