what we probably need to realize is that simply getting a B.A. isn't enough anymore. In 1901 80% of Americans didn't finish high school now most go to college hence the bar is higher. Friends of mine who went through internships usually seem to have landed jobs, but even the olde school method of go to Asia and teach with your B.A. is becoming burdened with to many people (especially Canadains).

"Want to make more money? Pick a different field."

what field? economics? I.T.? Last time I saw the biggest movements were in the customer services divisions. Not to bitch I mean I graduated college in 2001 with a B.A. in English my only expectations was to work a low income job and then hopefully go to grad school for something meaningful. If you're tired of young people bitching then how about some answers? Where is the work at? From an economist's stand point what is the best option for young-ins looking to move up the field?

I'm a Gen-Xer and have a BA and an MA that I got in the 80's and 90's. There are a lot of good points made in what was posted. Yes, there's a sense of entitlement, a lack of perspective, and too much consumerism amongst my generation and Generation Y. Agreed.

What I still have a problem with is tuition prices. When I started out in college, I was paying twice what my sister (only 7 years older) paid. By the time I finished grad school, my podunk school was charging what Harvard was charging when I started my university career. Tuition has been so far above the rate of inflation that it is disgusting.

I count two different university professors as friends and neither of them can justify to me why their small universities charge $20,000 a year.

I think Time Magazine did an article while I was ending my college career about the deal the govt./loan agencies did with colleges. "Feel free to raise your tuition and we'll make loans easy." Well that's what happened and my wife and I started our life together $40,000 in debt.

I did go to an Ivy League school for my MA, but the bulk of my debt came from my dinky undergrad university. I am bitter about it, but more importantly I worry about Gen-Y and their college debt, and I worry about college costs getting so out of control that we hurt the USA by making education an impossibility for too many people.

I think there inevitably has to be a movement to reform this right? I mean, college couldn't possibly cost $75000 to $100,000 for a no name school by the time my 2 year old goes to college right?

By the way, despite my debt, I decided to choose a line of work that pays very little but in which I get to help people in the Third World. I don't have any regrets about the job I took. I'm not looking for sympathy, but have a very hard time understanding why my generation and this generation (Y) got so screwed....when my parents paid $500 per semester at the same school. It just doesn't seem right.

I meant to say "two university Presidents as friends."

Andrew-

Perhaps your difficulties can be explained by your evident lack of command of the language (English) which you studied in college. "Graduate" is not a transitive verb unless one is etching glass or otherwise marking off measurements. An educated person does not "graduate college," he "graduates from from college."

Get a higher degree. Choose a different line of employment.

But if the person who wrote the book had done that, and been successful enough, they would have taken a good job from somebody else. And the *other* person would be writing the book.

When you play musical chairs, somebody has to lose. Telling people to be more aggressive at jumping on a chair is good advice for those particular people....

Anyway, this particular person has started a career as a writer. If the book sells well then they're on their way. The author ought to thank anybody who publishes an unfavorable review, since any attention at all has the chance to sell books. And it's hard for a beginning young writer to get any attention whatsoever.

> College is more expensive today in real terms.

Something like 5x what it was in 1980, in fact.

As an middle-aged guy, I tend to agree with the "tough - life is hard" line. However, there does seem to me a fundamental difference between the achievement society the US has claimed to have since the 1600s (imperfectly though it may have been in practice) and the winner-take-all society we are currently building. For 20-somethings in the oughts, it isn't going to be the difference between a brownstone in Lincoln Park and a 3 bedroom in the Naperville cornfields - it is going to be the difference between being a lord and a serf. And as you may recall only about 0.25% of the population made the "lord" level, with a small scattering of priests, etc.

Cranky

If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for young blue collar workers.

The federal government, backed by a lot of pointy-headed economists, is working overtime to destroy quality jobs and to create $10-an-hour warehouse jobs (moving Chinese-made merchandise to big box stores).

At the same time the National Association of Manufacturers is upset because young people won't throw themselves into insecure manufacturing jobs.

The only thing more insufferable than Ivy Leaguers is whining Ivy Leaguers.

"Perhaps your difficulties can be explained by your evident lack of command of the language (English) which you studied in college. "Graduate" is not a transitive verb unless one is etching glass or otherwise marking off measurements. An educated person does not "graduate college," he "graduates from from college.""

Congratulations on being a complete jerkoff.

I think that the problem is that that young people who are graduating from college now have an unrealistic expectation of the level at which they are entering the wider world. It seems to me that many think, "hey my parents have a nice big house, two cars, eat out when they want, and on and on; why can't I have this too?" The problem is that their parents spent 30+ years getting to that level of income. I remember when I graduated and moved on, people had high (unrealistic) expectations for themselves, but they were not as wildly out of touch with reality that people have now. These kids forget that they have no or little work experience, so who is going to pay them 100k? Going to an Ivy League school means you went to an Ivy League school, not that you can do a good job.

On a related note, yes college is more expensive, but there is now an expectation that parents pay for their child’s college. My parents said they would do what they could for me, but I had to work summer jobs while in HS, take work-study jobs at the university, work 2 full-time jobs in the summers while in college and still take out loans, but I graduated in 4 years while still having a great time. I did not have a car at college until my senior year when my dad gave me a 10-year-old pickup truck to drive. I am not a martyr, but I am just saying that when I talk to kids in college now they feel entitled to a certain life style and it’s someone else’s fault if they can’t have it. And I remember that first computer I bought an 8088 with a green screen for $2000, and that was with the student discount. My first car cost less than that.

This is all fresh in my mind because I see all the college kids that are still home on vacation spending (their parent’s) money like it is going out of style complaining how tough things are for them.

BCN

You guys got it easy. Anya Kamenetz actually checked out MY brief comment about Gross's article and issued the Smackdown challenge.

This culture is diseased.

So, Kamentez has little to kvetch about? Because she has fine wedding gifts? Maybe, in 30 years, she'll be blessed to reside in generic suburbia with a Wal Mart nearby.

She has an above average American life, and may have a rather decent above average American life. Her complaining is overcooked. The criticism of it is underthought.

As a twenty-something, I'm pissed off. My friends and I want more money, sure, but we also grew up with an insane concept of reality. We could be what we wanted to be. We were special. It would all come sooner rather than later.

It's nonsense. My remarks, the comments before mine, this post, the review, and the original text are all poorly thought out didactics. We all feel real smart, huh?

Look, Kamenetz, gradually and over time you will build income and value and if you contribute 4.5 percent of your higher income to your new 401K. Great shape.

She's whining, yes. Many of you are crusty and old and forgot what it's like to want something higher but be unaware of how to attain it. I am sure you managed to buy damn fine televisions though.

Hahah. Gil. Very funny.

Should we blame the parents for giving their children the impression they could have everything thing they want without real effort? Instead of parents paying for an education, why don't they simply provide the capital for their children to live without working.

Undergraduate tuition at the University of North Carolina, a good public university, is $3,205 a year for in-state students. Fees are another $1,400. Room and board should hardly be considered, since you would have to eat and live somewhere even if you weren't going to college. I don't see how $4,800 a year is so bad.

Tuition is high partially because of the way the financial aid system works. The objective is to get as much money out of the students and parents as possible. So they make tuition extremely high, and then give out financial aid. At many private universities, most of tuition turns around and goes right back into financial aid for the cost of tuition. Add into that how people are obsessed with going to the best school regardless of cost, and basically don't consider costs at all (and how college rankings barely budge over many years), and you have a real case of price inelasticity.

One of two things happens: Either people are going to more expensive universities because it will increase their lifetime earnings by enough to pay for tuition, or they're making bad calculations and costing themselves money. In the former case, I don't see how they have so much room to complain. If university is going to increase your salary by over $15,000 per year for the rest of your life, should you really be so upset about paying $15,000 per year for tuition? In the latter, perhaps people should start paying attention to cost and going to public universities.

As for my case, I know plenty of friends that got excellent jobs right out of college with a bachelor's degree. They just didn't graduate with a B.A. in English, admittedly; they went into science and math and engineering.

> Either people are going to more expensive
> universities because it will increase their
> lifetime earnings by enough to pay for tuition

Again though that assumes that there is a linear relationship between capital investment (in this case, the college degree) and income/return. If we are now moving toward a winner-take-all binary relationship, then you would find parents desperately trying to get their children into one of the gatekeeper schools.

A question for you and BCN: do you have teenage children? If so, what are you advising/steering them toward studying? What type of college?

Cranky

Lord, I do not blame the parents.

I am not certain who to blame.

However, when I see economic analysis used as a justification to dismiss someone's feelings on a subject, well, I think the economists are acting rather stupidly. Their points may be valid and their degrees awe-inspiring, but they are not addressing the issue at hand.

Dan, the cux of this argument is that you are trying to rebuke a sociological critique with economics.

Insufferable Pedant,
In the event that you are checking back on this comment stream, not only
does an educated person not "graduate college," he has the intelligence to proofread his comments so as to not screw up his correction of another person (unless there is some bizarre dialect of English that makes "graduates from from college." correct). You have done a pretty good job of ensuring that I'll remember you (Pedant) as the fool, and not the original poster...

A question for you and BCN: do you have teenage children?

No, sorry. I'm in my mid 20s, graduating from graduate school in mathematics this year with my doctorate. Over the last five years I've had quite a few mid 20s friends get excellent jobs with bachelor's degrees or master's degrees; as I said, they all majored in engineering, math, or science. As for me, I really can't complain about the job offers I've received.

There are fields that are winner-take-all, like celebrity fields (music, movies, sports) or even to some degree academia. Throughout most of the country, that hasn't happened, though New York continues to be a very tough place to be middle class or poor, despite all its attractions to a certain type of twenty something. What you have more often are tradeoffs-- there are very well-compensated jobs out there in things like investment banking, accounting, and consulting that you can get with a bachelor's degree only, but the workload is absolutely horrendous and I'm not sure I would recommend that anyone take such a job. You can also make lots of money doing less glamorous jobs like plumbing, if you want. There are also really very fun jobs with better workloads that pay a lot less.

I'm not sure why people expect that there would be no tradeoff between fun, prestige, and payment. In fact, the fields where the best jobs have no tradeoff between workload/fun, prestige, and compensation are precisely those with gatekeepers and winner-take-all situations, like academia and celebrity jobs. Not surprising-- those are the types of jobs that everyone wants, so there ends up being a barrier to entry. (In the case of academia, the insanity of grad school followed by the incredible workload while publishing in order to get tenure in the barrier.)

The crux of this argument is that you are trying to rebuke a sociological critique with economics.

In that case, let's make it sociological. Plenty of people want to do only jobs which seem incredibly fun to them, have high prestige, get great wages, and are located in the most expensive parts of the country where lots of exciting things for wealthy people exist. They also want to achieve all of this including high wages at a young age.

In exactly which Golden Age did this ever happen for the average? The only people who got those kind of deals were the children of the well-off who could use Daddy's connections or inherit his firm. The whining to me sounds like children of the upper-middle class who are complaining because they're finding out that they can't just stay in the upper-middle class automatically once they get out of college, just because their families had money. They have to work hard, maybe doing jobs they don't like or living somewhere cheaper than New York, or else start somewhere lower on the economic chain and work their way up. Sounds to me like they believe that they should never, not even at the beginning of their independent adult life, have to be poorer than their parents or live less well than they did growing up. Silver candlesticks? Islands off the coast of Sweden? Give me a freaking break.

People in their 20s are never as wealthy as people in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. No matter what, they're going to feel poor if they live in the most expensive place in the country, where they're surrounded by people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who have put years into developing their careers and wealth.

As an upperclassman at a high quality liberal arts college, the difference in post-college employment at this level comes down to who started thinking about jobs their junior year and who was concerned about studying abroad and "finding themselves" by doing lots of drinking. Even my friends with English or art history B.A.'s got excellent jobs by December. Many people get jobs in law, finance, or consulting paying salaries from 35k to 50k (one guy is making 58k before bonus, but he got the Sachs job).

Building a network early on through internships and knowledgable professors seems the best way to go. The latter might be a special circumstance of my college (1600 students). But these people not only have connections to tap senior year, they already have some experience in a field and can be much more specific and realistic in the job search. My significant other is graduating and jobless at the moment. She is a great student and highly qualified to do just about anything. The reason she's jobless is a combination of holding out for that 'perfect' job and a lack of preparation through serious field-related internships.

As Prof. Drezner pointed out, undergraduates need to realize that their first job isn't their last, or even their fourth, fifth, etc. It really doesn't matter what you do, so long as it is productive and will put you in a better position to know what you want and then to pursue it.

Debt is a bad place to be, but it's worth it if it allows you to get something of equal or greater value you couldn't otherwise afford. I'm in huge debt for my education (100,000+ for a 160,000$ education) but I don't regret the choice I've made because I see the opportunities people have once they leave here. The self-deserving attitude held by people who got to delay their entry into the working world for another four years is out of place.

1) What percentage of college students pay the retail price? To what extent does student aid reduce the burden, even if there's been a shift towards "more loans and fewer grants"?

There are complicating interactions between the two halves here.

Virtually no college student pays the ticket price of a private university. Many of them have parents who do so on their behalf-- but those parents tend not to burden their children with any obligation to repay them later. Moreover, those are the parents who are most often in positions to help their offspring financially even after college graduation-- paying the security deposit on an apartment or even the down payment on a house, for example. Very, very few kids are directly disadvantaged by an increase in the highest-end ticket price.

On the other hand, families that qualify for financial aid often expect (and have no choice but to expect) the student him or herself to borrow or pay the portion of the bill not covered by financial aid. And those kids, graduating from college with substantial, are also less likely to be on the receiving end of those parental financial boosts.

I'm not saying that even the latter are being done badly by, or that they should be suffering generational angst. But I am saying that they're the ones who experience the financial crunch, and it's not directly driven by increases in the ticket price of tuition. That student aid reduces the burden compared with the ticket price (as it always has) doesn't change the importance of shifts in the grants-loans balance, for those people most likely to have financial crunches.

Disclaimer: my parents paid for my undergraduate tuition

That being said, while the rapid rise in the cost of tuition has been cause for concern for decades, I'd like to make two other points.

Firstly, it could be much worse. I recently saw this article http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/costs-drive-fees-schools/2006/01/09/1136771500723.html which has a real money quote in it. Specifically, "Principals said inflation was meaningless when determining the cost of education." Literally taken, that may be true. However, how can anyone ignore the consistent pattern? When will the greater than inflation increases stop? How much of our GDP can education (health care as well) take up? By the way, this article is about high school fees, not college. I don't know if private high schools in the US have experienced similar growth.

Secondly, in response to a post above, I agree that most of the lucrative jobs right out of college (engineering, finance and consulting come to mind) are secured by the people who do their homework early and get summer internships. As a person who interviews a lot of undergrads for investment banking positions, what I mourn is the loss of the summer job. No more lifeguarding, summer camp counselor jobs or working at a restaurant in Nantucket if you want to get the high powered job. Nowadays, students are looking for internships at accounting firms, banks, etc for after their freshman year! I understand the reason the banks like these sorts of students more (shows commitment / interest and a willingness to sacrifice) but I just wish these candidates could have some more fun before they turn 21. Then again, I suppose that is the sacrifice for the real fast track positions.

There is another option though for people who don't care about going on the ultra fast track. Do what you want in your summers (in my case I worked as a camp counselor). You could even major in a "useless" social science (mine was Psychology). You may graduate without a job (as I did) and even be unemployed for a while (I was a substitute teacher for six months while living at home). Eventually you may pick up an entry level position in some business field (mine was advertising) with a salary at or below a normal cost of living ($20k a year in New York didn't go very far in 1993). If you believe that you have ability and commitment, all you need is that first door opened. Twelve years since graduating, I've since been to business school (this time, I paid for it myself and found I paid a lot more attention as a result) and have been working at a bulge bracket investment bank for over six years.

A friend of mine who graduated a year after I did and went straight into banking is already a Managing Director at my firm. I do not begrudge him that success, but I would not trade places with him for anything. I loved my college summers and the great times I had in advertising. On the other hand, I don't think he has fond memories of working an average of 80+ hours per week for his first five years out of school.

Just a little experience from an "old man" who's been around the block once or twice.

I'd be dismissive of the gripes of overprivileged young Ivy Leaguers if I was sure they didn't represent anything fundamental about early 21st century America.

Maybe they don't. But when you consider that every major party Presidential nominee but one since 1992 has been educated at Yale -- which by itself ought to be considered something of a national humiliation -- you have to wonder. Being, and acting, somewhat spoiled is not the exclusive province of 20-somethings like Anya Kamenetz. Plenty of Americans of all ages have become accustomed to living with a sense of entitlement, a product perhaps of generations of easy prosperity. Dan's feelings notwithstanding, most Americans don't believe that young people aggrieved at not "having it all" right away are in the wrong. They feel pretty much the same way.

On one level this is obviously an issue of public morality, but on another it is purely practical. If you have a good income but are living on the margin and weighed down by debt, the odds are that you have spent more than you should have. This is actually more likely to be true the older you are, since the older you are the more likely it is that you have retired the debts run up to pay for your education. In any event the answer to the question "when can I have it all?" is always going to be, for most people, "you can't." You can live for the present and risk a greatly diminished standard of living in your later years, or you can forego consumption now to save for tomorrow. The poor and the rich, for opposite reasons, don't have to face this choice, but most of us do.

"Given the rising gap in wages between those with a college education and those without, doesn't a rising premium on college tuition make sense?" No. It would only make sense if you believe that college education *causes* higher wages through the impartation of knowledge, rather than merely being a signaling mechanism assisting employers in evaluating characteristics of potential employees. While obviously much knowledge impartation still goes on, for quite some time the "signaling" role has been in the ascendancy.

The unpaid summer internship is the most recent way for upper middle class students to distinguish themselves from the masses. Most kids spend summers working in dead end jobs because... they need the money. A certain strata gain access to elite jobs because they had "had a great internship" i.e. did not need the money. Oh yeah...they dont have a 100k in student loans either! MERITOCRACY!

When my father was in college after WWII, he was told that a year of college had tended to cost what a family that would send their kid to that kind of college would spend for a new car. He told me this in the 70s when I was getting ready to go to college, and that he had tracked it in the intervening years and found it to be a good rule of thumb. Since then I have tracked it intermittently, and also found it to be pretty valid. With the top schools costing around $40K now, it matches pretty well what a Lexus or Beemer would cost.

Now, you get a heck of a lot better car now than you did 30 or 60 years ago. Do you get a better college education? Or is that question really relevant? Simply put, colleges, like auto companies, are charging what the market will bear.

In the 35 years or so that I've been cognizant of the outside world, I've caught a pretty constant refrain that this generation (for the first time!) has it rougher than their parent's generation. Yet, when you look back at it carefully, it's been a pretty steady upward climb for everyone involved.

insurferable pedant,

I studied literature not grammar. Anyway, yes my grammer is quite bad. As for my problems I don't recall really having any to be honest. While I had trouble finding some work in the U.S. most schools districts were more than happy to take me on as a substitute teacher and I now teach English in Taiwan (I've also taught in Hong Kong and Korea). Part of the point of my post wasn't that finding work is difficult (I've had 3 interviews today alone for a new job in Taiwan), it was that Daniel was complaining about my generation complaining about an absence of instant success with out pointing out how people of generation X or apparently generation Y (I'm assuming that's me) could aquire the levels of wealth of our parents. Anyway, it might also be pointed out that I teach grammar to my students from text books and not my personal experience if you're concerned with young Asian students be talking like I do etc. =) Hope things are going well for you.

Kind Regards,
A

insurferable pedant,

I studied literature not grammar. Anyway, yes my grammer is quite bad. As for my problems I don't recall really having any to be honest. While I had trouble finding some work in the U.S. most schools districts were more than happy to take me on as a substitute teacher and I now teach English in Taiwan (I've also taught in Hong Kong and Korea). Part of the point of my post wasn't that finding work is difficult (I've had 3 interviews today alone for a new job in Taiwan), it was that Daniel was complaining about my generation complaining about an absence of instant success with out pointing out how people of generation X or apparently generation Y (I'm assuming that's me) could aquire the levels of wealth of our parents. Anyway, it might also be pointed out that I teach grammar to my students from text books and not my personal experience if you're concerned with young Asian students be talking like I do etc. =) Hope things are going well for you.

Kind Regards,
A

Sorry for the delay getting back, but work intervened. I do not have kids, and I am not married. I do live and work in the Washington DC area, so I am somewhat familiar with places with high costs of living. I would advise people, and I do this when I meet people who ask my advice on these types of things, that that people study what they find interesting. There are plenty of opportunities out there, but they need to be prepared to work at something that may not seem to be the "perfect" job in the beginning. Often jobs are what you make them, not what is written in the want ad.

I also council people to look at a wider geographic area when they are thinking about where to go after college. I have lived my adult work life in Washington, but I am from the Mid-West. It is my belief that the lower cost of living there more than offsets the lower wages paid. I am not advocating that people live in rural Nebraska, which is not at all a bad decision, but that they can and should look outside of NY, LA, DC and the like.

I understand the desire to be in a happening place, but it is important to remember that there are trade-offs. I work with plenty of 20 somethings that do their food shopping at expensive specialty markets, drive new cars and eat out often, and then turn around and complain how expensive it is to live here. I drive an 16 year old pickup truck, not the same one I had in college, buy my food at Shopper Food Warehouse, but have the ability to afford my vacations and other expenditures without going into debt. Again it is all about trade offs, and it seems that many younger people have not had to make many of these yet.

BCN

The point about the real cost of college cannot be shrugged off. Back in the late 1970s I was in a presentation by university administration to the student body where they discussed the "necessity" of keeping the rate of tuition increases at 'inflation + 5%'. Being a good engineering student I raised my hand and pointed out that that exponential rate of increase implied that by the year 2000 tuition would be increasing above the cost of living at a phenomenal absolete level. That got a good laugh from the administration.

Well, they have continued that 'inflation +5%' ever since, and - SURPRISE - their tution is now to the point where I, despite my economic success, cannot afford to send my children there. I am earning on average 4% more per year; they are raising tuition 6-9% per year. And my relative economic success means my children would pay full freight, whether it comes out of my wallet or theirs.

At this point I have to consider this deliberate: the ruling class has decided they want a bimodel distribution of top college gradutes. First the scions of wealth, who just write a check. And second the deserving poor, who can be given "scholarships" (discounts) but who will never be promoted to corporate VP or Cabinet Secretary anyway. Get rid of all those pesky middle class people in between and their expections for achievement.

Also, I find comparisions to Lexus' as the benchmark a bit disturbing. My mother was driving an 11-year-old Pontiac while I was in college, and I drove a 20-year-old Toyota for 3 years afterword as I paid the loans. It isn't the Lexus drivers that have the problem; it is the Buick drivers.

Cranky

PS "Was graduated" is less common than "graduated from" in the United States, but it is quite common in Canada and somewhat in England. It is perfectly acceptable US English, although many consider it affected.

Andrew,

In case the previous posts haven't alluded to this, the answer to your question about what field young Americans should consider is right under your nose. Those pupils you are teaching overseas use those English skills when they come to the United States on work visas. Their engineering and science educations are coveted by American companies that can't find sufficient domestic talent. There's a reason why chemical engineers make so much. Look at job postings at various Web sites (public sector jobs alone offer plenty of lucrative choices). There are plenty of fields where people can make more than a "warehouse worker's" wage. It's just that many of them aren't "fun." I think that's where the problem lies.

Cranky: "Graduated college" is colloquial, not formal English. James Kilpatrick recently covered this question in his syndicated column. The usage is becoming acceptable in some regions through consistent misuse, which is a way language evolves but it does create a transitional period where people quibble. A couple of the clerks in the H.R. department where I work refer to the "physical year" rather than "fiscal year." Perhaps that too will catch on and people will say it's "perfectly acceptable" U.S. English.

> Their engineering and science educations are
> coveted by American companies that can't find
> sufficient domestic talent.

Here is what I see for the young BSEng graduate in the United States:
1) get job
2) 2-3 months training in employer-specific technology
3) 5 years intensive, 16x6 work in employer specific environment. No training. No employee development.
4) 1 year writing "process improvment procedures"
5) 3 months implmenting "process improvement procedures" at "new Hydrabad office"
6) Laid off
7) Can't find new job - have only employer-specific skills and new graduates expect only 60% of your salary (and don't have kids, so don't consume much in benefits).
8) Work at Wal-Mart
9) ???
10) Profit

In the aerospace industry, you might get 2 or 3 jobs until you hit 45 - then it is the unemployment line for you. Or "consulting" via body shops at 60% of your last salary and zero benefits.

This isn't just a few people or a few "unmotivated losers" - it is entire cohorts and industries. There are 500 laid off aerospace engineers in my neighborhood alone, while their former employer continues to hire new grads and bring in H1Bs.

So that is why I ask the question; I really can't see advising my kids to follow my path into engineering. The only things I can think of are plumbing and DC lobbying.

Cranky

Mojave: "Was graduated" is to "graduated from" as "physical" is to "fiscal"?

Umm, no.

And, I think Cranky is onto a valuable point in his last comment: age discrimination is rampant in the United States. It's so often said that older out-of-work persons should get training in a new area and reenter the workforce at a professional level, but this is much harder than it would seem. Employers tend to hire young applicants for entry-level position; that's the way it's always been, and there's no sign that's changing.

Cranky, you miss my point about the Lexus. I was comparing it to the highest-level tuition as one example of my general point of college expenses tracking car costs over time. I could have used a Buick and a more "middle-of-the-road" college.

My bigger point is that none of these are new complaints. For over thirty years, I have been hearing about how college has gotten ridiculously expensive, only the rich can afford it, kids are getting out saddled in debt, and having a tougher time of it than their parents, etc. etc. etc. (And I'm sure it didn't start then.) Yet overwhelmingly, people, especially college graduates, have just gotten more and more prosperous in this period.

I think several commenters have hit the nail on the head focusing on the idea that people starting out in their 20s tend to compare their standard of living to what their parents and their parents' peers have in their 40s and 50s. It can be quite a shock if you are not prepared for it. I can remember my own moments of despair on the subject.

One other point: Kamenetz graduated in 2002, during a recession. It is, of course, harder to get started during a recession, when most firms are struggling to keep from laying off existing employees.

"In case the previous posts haven't alluded to this, the answer to your question about what field young Americans should consider is right under your nose. Those pupils you are teaching overseas use those English skills when they come to the United States on work visas. Their engineering and science educations are coveted by American companies that can't find sufficient domestic talent. There's a reason why chemical engineers make so much. Look at job postings at various Web sites (public sector jobs alone offer plenty of lucrative choices). There are plenty of fields where people can make more than a "warehouse worker's" wage. It's just that many of them aren't "fun." I think that's where the problem lies."

work in the tech and science sector is actually kinda fun in my opinion, but I'm not sure that Asia is as technical as you profess. Japan currently suffers from a derth of available and qualified science and engineering majors / professionals hence the visa reforms for hi-tech work in both Japan and Korea. I also might add that their younger generation faces a much tougher climb to economic sucess than current Americans do. There's not enough engineers to go around anywhere in the world.

"There's not enough engineers to go around anywhere in the world."

Do you have any proof of this? Or better yet, send me the job postings; I can send them to people I know who used to work at Ford or Visteon.

Ms. Kamenetz got a B.A. in literature and lives in the "hippest" part of Manhattan. What does she expect? She could have studies something useful, or gotten any of a number of real but "boring" jobs, or done what any other literature major could have done and gone to law school. Life is tough when you don't have skills and don't want to work hard.

She also doesn't realize that much of the cause of tuition inflation, or at least much of the reason why colleges can get away with it, is equally rapid growth in the amount of financial aid they give out. Prices would be much lower today if colleges didn't give out all these scholarships and grants. The poor get free educations and the very rich don't care. Anyone whose family earns between $60,000 and $1,000,000 gets screwed.

Hi. Thanks for the discussion. If you are curious, my book is not about me. Or Ivy Leaguers in general. Even whiny ones. It is primarily concerned with the 72 percent of young people with no BA, who are mostly low-wage workers, and the two-thirds of college grads who, unlike me, had to borrow and work their way through college.

I recommend a host of remedies, including political action, labor organizing, entrepreneurship, self-study, credit counseling, and "voluntary simplicity" ie. living on next to nothing while saving.

I wrote the book because I was concerned about the growth of income inequality and the slow erosion of guarantees to the middle class.

I am not complaining about anything, for myself. Doing the research for this book made me realize anew how lucky I am. Please check it out and see for yourself.
anyakamenetz.blogspot.com

"To what extent does student aid reduce the burden, even if there's been a shift towards "more loans and fewer grants"?"

*Very* little.

this is the comments thread that never ends anyway:

"Do you have any proof of this? Or better yet, send me the job postings; I can send them to people I know who used to work at Ford or Visteon."

you can try 3yen.com on working in Japan it can be quite hard to find a job you can also try osaka and tokyo's craig's list. most engineering work isn't in the auto-sector and if the books written about working for Toyota are any indication you probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway. most of the jobs are in computer sciences. In Korea many Indian and European engineers already work for Hyundai. I'm sure there's job listings somewhere.

As for Anya's comments I wasn't aware that 72% of young people don't have a B.A. and find this fact rather alarming. Much like you I got through college by wealth and didn't occur much debt. If these previous programs aren't work what does? Welafare was reformed, surely some type of program can increase american enrollment. After all it is our colleges and unviersities that are offering world class education and not our public schools.

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