Economics is not just liberal arts- there’s a liberal arts aspect, but you also learn to use data, and there’s some math involved.
It’s not a STEM degree, but it’s not useless by any stretch- though I am a bit biased.
I think you might be hung up on the definition of liberal arts. While you are right on the technical definition, I think Timex definition is what most people think off. Econ certainly has practical applications as would any math or science degree. So if it will help think of liberal arts degrees as being degree of limited practical utility in the job market.
The average student loan debt is $37K, which while a lot higher than it was just a few years ago, is still payable over 10 or 20 years. At the price tag almost any college degree is worth getting just to have degree. It is at the 100K+ level of debt that I think people really need to start questioning the value.
Economics is a Social Science; it’s part of the social and behavioral sciences right alongside political science, criminal justice, geography… the list is very long. Are we getting rid of cops too?
Being correct about a definition does not mean I am hung up on it. Timex and anyone else who just made up a definition in their head, did exactly that, made it up in their head. Your solution to people making up definitions as they go along seems to be along the lines of just creating subjective value judgments to help me decide what I think is practical in the job market. So in order to help with people making stuff up as they go along, I too should just make stuff up and and decide how practical a degree is…
Or we can have a real discussion that doesn’t involve making up definitions for words that are already defined and not try and short-cut our way to a solution to a very real problem. Taking short-cuts, just throwing money at the problem is one of the reason we got here in the first place. A number of the for profit technical schools, the ones geared towards specific career tracks like EMTs, medical equipment technicians, and transcriptionist kind of schools, not only are those not well-rounded liberal arts schools, a lot of them are folding due to extreme tuition costs (some of these career colleges don’t even have dorms although the Art Institute does), and inability to place graduates from those programs into actual jobs which has led to their federal funding being cut.
According to Fortune:
Even though for-profit schools only account for 26% of the students they account for 35% of the defaults which is actually down from 44%.
So what do you think, should we treat someone getting a well-rounded education at a public university on a History or English major track as the blight of society even though we know if they kept their loans costs down and finished in the 4-5 year period they probably did pick up enough soft skills and prove they are capable of learning to find meaningful work that pays relatively well in the profession school or look at one of these Art Institute degrees where some of them are not folding but still enrolling:
Maybe an art degree at one school is not the exact same as an art degree at another which means we shouldn’t auto dismiss the degree in it’s entirety but look at the actual programs…
Sorry, it’s a soft science. So soft that Psychology students make fun of them. That’s really the sad part, psychology is/should be a STEM, but pays like shit.
That’s a really endearingly, just adorably charming view of what student debt is today.
Heh, seriously. I consider myself lucky and even with ~$25k/yr in scholarships and my parents taking out a couple loans payments still started at $650/mo. I just turned 30 and by limiting lifestyle upgrades and mostly foregoing retirement savings it’s “only” $190/mo now.
In some regards I am lucky, since interest rates for student loans are nearly 7% these days (so I’ve been told) and I got in around 2.5%. Still unlikely that home ownership is a realistic goal for a few more years and I know I’m not the only one in this boat.
Degrees being required to get past the HR wall are leaving kids with the option of debt forever or being stuck in low-paying jobs.
So what is the average student loan payment?
Late to the discussion. But who’s paying for the forgiven loans? Tax payers?
Yup or more likely their kids.
Things could be worse, Guap. Way I see it, you’ve got a lot to be thankful for.
I don’t think anyone here believes that it’s a waste for someone to get a four year degree from a reputable institution in a classic liberal arts subject like literature, history, philosophy, or the like. Far from it; I’m reasonably sure we have a lot of examples here of people who have such degrees. It’s entirely possible, and some evidence even suggests likely, that getting a liberal arts degree, for the right person, can be a great stepping stone to broader career success. And let/s be honest–getting a STEM degree from a crappy for-profit school, or being shall we say a marginal performer with such a degree even from a reputable school might well be worse for everyone concerned than being a sharp person with a degree in medieval history.
The kicker is, what you expect from the degree, and what you plan to do with your life. For undergrad degrees, it’s imperative that graduates understand that their degree is not a guarantee of a job in that field (or any job at all really). It’s preparation for making a bunch of choices that they will have to manage, and that they’ll have to be flexible about. I think liberal arts degrees can give people a great set of tools for this, and hence can lead them into a host of great opportunities. All of which, mind you, will require the acquisition of additional skill sets, most of which will have bupkis to do with their major.
All of this is doubly, trebley true for grad degrees. Making the decision to go to grad school is pretty much on you, the student. Sometimes it’s a pretty clear and logical decisions; if you want to be a doctor, yeah, med school. In education, if you’re in K-12 often you have to go back to grad school to advance, but there’s a very clear sort of path laid out for that. And some fields, like accounting, have very clear milestones like the CPA exam that require certain post-graduate study. But even some of these, like law school, are full of red flags; there’s a glut of lawyers right now and going to a sub-top tier law school, or finishing less than at the top of a state school, means a likelihood of no job and and lots of debt.
The big culprits though are the humanities. I should know; I have a Masters of Arts in Foreign Affairs from the poli-Sci department at Virginia, and a Ph. D. in History from Georgia, to go with my bachelors in History. The MA I got right after undergrad, the Ph.D. a decade later after working for a while. Neither of my graduate degrees were, in themselves, that useful for what I actually ended up doing. They were very useful as credentials to get me in the door, particularly where I am now as a professor, even though I don’t teach history really. But after getting my first two degrees, I worked as a systems analyst, a teacher, a documentary editor, a freelance writer, a magazine editor, a freelance marketing consultant, did a smidgen of freelance game design work, and then became an adjunct professor, and ultimately a full-time professor. Oh, I poured concrete for a while too.
Key for me was flexibility. I was told by everyone involved in graduate study in the humanities that getting a graduate degree in these fields has to be for your own satisfaction; the number of jobs that specifically need these degrees is minuscule compared to the number of people who want them and who have the degrees. For a variety of reasons I was able to get these degrees with only a minimal amount of debt, paid off in something like three or four years. But to do so, I had to again be flexible.
The problem with so many of the graduates of MA and Ph.D. programs today is that they don’t seem to be very capable of looking beyond the narrow focus of their fields. Every time a college offers a position, it is deluged with people competing for the slot. Higher ed has leveraged this glut to exploit the mass of the underemployed intellectuals as adjunct faculty. While I have ethical qualms about this sort of exploitation, I also get frustrated when dealing with people who think that just because they got a Ph. D. in English or History or whatever, that somehow they are owed a full-time job using that degree. I understand that those of us who do have such jobs got amazingly lucky,but I also know that had I not landed this job fifteen years ago, I’d have done something else. Too many graduates of Ph.D. programs in the humanities seem to think it’s this or nothing; they’d rather work minimum wage while hoping for an academic job than actually try other avenues for truly gainful employment–avenues that their liberal arts degrees, ironically, actually prepare them for pretty well, if they can psychologically get their heads around the idea.
tl;dr I love my liberal arts degrees. But over the years I’ve developed technical and practical skills that I’ve used to pay the bills and to broaden my horizons. Some of my colleagues don’t quite “get” it, because many of them have only been in academia, nothing else, but as my school is professionally focused, I find that my diverse experience is really useful in dealing with our students; I have more in common with our professional faculty than with my colleagues in the general education/humanities area, often enough. If people want to get liberal arts degrees–and I heartily encourage them to do so, at least at the undergraduate level–they just need to be prepared to use the flexibility and breadth such an education gives them. What they can’t do is expect to have the same sort of one to one degree to job correspondence that, say, a degree in digital forensics might have.
If you want to be a liberal arts trained generalist, it simply will be more work for you initially, and maybe for a long while thereafter. But it is very viable.
There’s a handy tool here to estimate repayments based on loan inputs.
The average class of 2016 graduate had $37,172 in debt, per a very quick Google search (i.e. I didn’t research and verify that number, but it sounds pretty reasonable to me). Excerpt coming from the same quick google search:
I think this is key. Anyone who achieves an English degree and limits themselves to the idea that somehow they must be an English teacher or a writer is severely limiting themselves for no good reason (dream job is not a good reason). And if they do that long enough they could easily check the box that says they are unemployed or not employed in their field.
I currently work in a position I didn’t even know existed when I went to school. It never dawned on me that this type of work was out there or that I could do it. I applied because someone suggested I had a really good chance at getting at least an interview. Obviously they were correct.
I am still open to trying to avoid the situation where we have a someone graduating with a Masters in Music and 200k and has no hope paying that off. That’s not the same as some kid who has 30k and wants to live in Europe and just ignores their obligation. In many cases, 30k is something that can be reasonably paid off, and should be paid.
http://gawker.com/5696300/what-200000-in-student-debt-looks-like
Thanks that’s exactly process I used to come up with my figure of $350/month which @inactive_user mocked.
better from WSJ
And, of course, a $400 or even $200 payment is high if the borrower is unemployed or stuck in a low-level job. Indeed, borrowers who are the most behind on payments typically have balances in the low end–under $9,000–mostly because they never finished school.
The upshot is that many borrowers are doing just fine–some are even buying homes. But there are big variations from the norm that can’t be ignored.
Lost in the individual sob stories is a simple fact a college graduate even with a boatload of debt is almost always better off than high school grad. For the simple reason after 20 or so years the debt will be paid off and the college grad will get a big pay raise.
In fact, if we take the median income of a college grad of $43,143 vs high school grad 26,505 we get $16,638. Now the college grad will have to pay taxes (15%+7.65 payroll+ couple percent for state interest) call it 25% so that leave $12,479 +(400 in tax benefit from student loan interest) of additional disposal income that can be used to pay of student loans or roughly $1,050 a month or triple the average payment.
Even those who drop out aren’t entirely screwed they get to check the some college box, which provides a $4500 boost in median income.
So while they are big variation even the worse cases are still better off than typical high school only grad. Which is why it makes no sense to me to spend taxpayer dollars to help them rather than helping the high school grads.
Empathetic as ever.
The Perils of Empathy
In politics and policy, trying to feel the pain of others is a bad idea. Empathy distorts our reasoning and makes us biased, tribal and often cruel
Link may be behind paywall.
There are ways to cater to logic and reason without being a dick about it. It’s not like I jumped on the Bernie band wagon and threw money out the window screaming free college for everyone.
Also, i think calling it a “sob story” is cruel. Evidently you don’t have to be emphatic to be cruel.
Still, a lot less in real dollars then 20 or 30 years ago.
What’s not talked about is how debts cause young people to postpone both starting a family or owning homes. In a few years, baby boomers are going to be trying to off load their homes on the market, and no one will be buying because of student loan debt.