Go to college to get a job. Get a job to pay for college.

[broken robot]

First, as others have pointed out, you need a college degree to get serious gainful employment (if you're lucky). But let's leave that aside for now and look at the big picture. This isn't about me or any particular person, it's the fact that the US welfare state for example (GI Bill, secure employment, everything that created a strong middle class) was undermined since the 1970s thanks to neoliberal policies of privatization and deregulation. In order to continue sustaining mass consumption, loan markets and debt were expanded. You can read Paul Pierson, Wolfgang Streeck, and a number of other political economists who have done serious research on this issue. I'm sure if someone did (probably has done) a historical study of average proportion of household debt it's increased significantly across the board since then, and not just because of educational expenses alone.

The banks and other financial institutions further created markets to trade these debts including creation of Collateralized Debt Obligations, debt swaps, and other financial instruments. Speculation eventually led to the most recent economic crisis of 2008, which of course completely screwed the employment situation for tens if not hundreds of thousands of recent graduates who just happened to be born at the wrong time. So it's not hard to see how these policies and decisions have accumulated over time to force us into the current dire state. Whether someone picks a STEM major or not then is irrelevant to the larger system and its impact on the whole generation.

I mean seriously, forget degree for a minute, you wouldn't tell people in the Great Depression to buck up and go sell their wheat at the next town's market "because man you'd totally be doing better off if you made the right choice." Such moralizing is useless and only obscures the real issues.

[exploited]

You know what scares the shit out of me?

How completely irrelevant everything you just wrote is.

The real issue is that a bunch of adults made a massive life-altering decision without even investigating if it was worth doing. That is their fault. Not the governments. Not the Boomers, who were just passing on faulty folk wisdom (school equals good). Not your school counselors. Yours, and yours alone.

Now we have total twats like Saz acting as if the only way they could POSSIBLY become a lawyer is to allegedly attend the most expensive schools in the country. That it is the Boomers fault that he didn't save up money prior to signing a massive loan. And on and on it goes. It's as if you weren't sat down, explained the loan, explained the interest rates, etc.

Totally sad. Nothing but a giant post-hoc rationalization. You know who you guys sound like? Boomers. "But it's not fairrrrrrrrr, I worked hard, why can't we just pass the cost onto someone else?"

[The Comrade]

yeah being told that you need to go to college before you're even in kindergarten definitely doesn't have an influencing factor into the decision.

[broken robot]

[exploited]

[exploited]

[The Comrade]

[exploited]

Typical Millennial. Works minimum wage job, doesn't "get" that taking on the equivalent of a mortgage at 18 might be hard to pay back. Insists education is needed to succeed, blames Boomers for insisting he gets an education. Insists an education is needed to get a job, signs up to college with no idea what he wants to do professionally.

I am willing to concede that the education system pushes kids towards college. What I am not willing to concede is that it is perfectly natural for a teenager to blindly do whatever an authority figure tells them. Doesn't sound like any teenager I knew.

[Saz]

[The Comrade]