A new correspondent writes Briefly - I started college in 1983 at a CA community college. I did OK for a while, earning some credits. I was in a very topsy-turvy time in my life - I was an artificially antisocial punk rocker and music shows were more important than anything - and consequently I did not finish my AA in Fine Arts. I had a great job that paid OK for 20 years so I didn't feel the pinch of not having a degree. That all changed when my husband nearly died, got a liver transplant and we decided to change our lives and move from super expensive CA to more affordable Georgia, 7 years ago. Here in GA I can't find a job making more than about $12 an hour - I was making nearly twice that in CA. I have tons of experience, but in way too many areas - the job I had in CA was family owned and we all pitched in and did everything. But I am not an "expert" in anything, and the fact that I'm now over 50 (though I look much younger, which is an asset) makes me feel ...
I’ve had issues with reports from Third Way in the past, so I approached the latest one, by Douglas Webber, warily. It’s about the lifetime economic returns of a bachelor’s degree. It’s relatively thoughtful, and it wins points from me for noting that the real issue with student debt isn’t the amount of debt that students carry, but whether they complete the degree or not. (That’s why the sizes of outstanding balances are _inversely_ correlated with repayment rates. Someone who dropped out after a semester or two is much less likely to repay loans than someone who graduated, even if the graduate borrowed more.) But a key omission jumped off the screen: “For data availability reasons, I only examine the returns to a Bachelor’s degree for individuals who did not attend graduate school.” Hmm. I don’t know about the availability of the data -- I’ll defer to experts on that -- but I’d bet good money that the average salary among those who went on to, say, medical school...
This week I attended a meeting of another industry advisory board for one of our vocationally-oriented programs. I’ve been attending those since my DeVry days, at four different colleges and in more programs than I can immediately remember. In every single case, without exception, the employers have had the same request: “It’s the social skills, the interpersonal skills.” It’s fashionable now to blame smartphones, and sure enough, some mimed the phone in front of the face with thumbs flying madly. But they said the same thing back in 2001, before smartphones were around. Phones in front of faces are symptoms, not causes. Some of it is probably a variation on “kids today…,” a complaint as old as generations. Some of it probably reflects the uncertainty that many younger employees have as they take jobs they don’t love just because they need to take something. Looking back at the way I carried myself at some summer-temp jobs at that age, I can’t say I was an...
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