…I can think of no better way than telling them education will help you get a better job, or more marketable, and that everyone should go. It’s a simple supply and demand thing: You have more people with bachelors, masters, doctorate degrees and you lessen the value of the degree. I call it certification inflation.
Those degrees cost you more and more because you don’t pay for it…right away. You get offered loans, and then the money comes due. Say you don’t have a job, so you go for another degree, hoping to spin out a few years riding out the unemployment of the last few years in grad school. You get out and there’s not only no new jobs, but your degree is worth less, because others are doing the same thing.
If you took loans for that MD, JD, or PhD you could be looking at as much as $140-145,000 at the federally mandated 6.8%. That’s roughly $830/mo. How do you pay that? Even if there’s two of you working and you make the median $42,000 a year, between housing, the rise in food and gas prices — god forbid you have a kid! — how do you pay?
Answer: You can’t. Now you owe the federal government. They take from your pay, your tax returns, or if they get really desperate, expect mandatory service to pay them off. In the Soviet Union, this was why you had PhDs sweeping floors for a living.
Don’t get a liberal arts degree. Get a skill, take a degree in something useful like engineering. Anything you can use to market yourself in a global economy (and that philosophy degree..? That ain’t it, sport.) Don’t let the pundits, experts, and politicians tell you otherwise — there’s no glamor to a higher degree, and outside of getting you a management position at a Starbucks or a call center, you’re better off training to be a plumber or an electrician.
