Part I of II
It's said that the "devil is in the details." The problem I have with that video is that its producer has "cherry picked" people whose stories to tell. Each of them that has a "sad story" is an exception, not a "typical" member of their career or academic cohort and each of them chose among the most expensive ways that existed to finance their education. For both Dr. Bacon and Mr. Jacobs, I looked into the details of the path they chose. Neither of them made smart choices. (I discuss that in my remarks below)
The reality, like it or not, is that sometimes it happens that the only choices available, and by which one can pursue the career one wants, are bad ones. When that happens, one of the less risky and smart choices is to find something else to do that one enjoys doing. Refusing to do so, one must assume the risk. Risk is a thing that sometimes does materialize into a devastating reality. Nobody holds a gun to one's head forcing one to assume the risky option, yet Dr. Bacon and Mr. Jacobs assumed the risks they did.
you went into this with the attitude of "debunking" the whole thing.
Actually, I began watching the video looking for one credible assertion after the next, all leading to a sound conclusion. What I found from the outset was one unfounded opinion after the next.
I'm not opposed to unorthodox ideas. I am opposed to arguments that begin with false premises. The orthodoxy of sound argument-building is not a matter of opinion, nor is it optional.
To wit...In one section of the video, the discussion focuses on law school graduates and the implementation of laws in our society. The video asserts that members (lawyers) of Congress to purposefully pass "harmful and destructive" laws, "as many as possible" according to the video's narrator. Shortly afterward, the narrator says, "all the needless legislation passed each year has the devastating unintended consequence of destroying what little is left of the free market," namely that people cannot start successful small businesses because all their capital will be consumed by legal fees.
Neither assertion is corroborated by anything other than editorial opinion from individuals who are not experts on the matter. Moreover, the video contradicts itself in the space of mere minutes. One either intentionally passes laws "harmful and destructive" laws or one passes such laws unintentionally. Most importantly, however, no matter which be so,
Ethan Jacobs, a disillusioned law school graduate of
Chapman Law School is no authority on the matter, yet that's who they have attesting anecdotally to corroborate their assertions.
The guy is an example of exactly what I and the video aver does not work. I will openly admit it works even less among grad school students. Anyone with any knowledge higher education will tell you that where one gets one's final degree -- assuming one is going the degree route -- is what matters.
I wouldn't tell the kids I know to go to Chapman Law, yet based on the fact that it seems adept at taking mediocre undergrads and educating them to pass the bar exam, it may well have been right choice for Ethan. The key to success when going to a school like Chapman is understanding what impact it has on one's career path. Quite simply, like it or not, coming from Chapman, no matter how highly graduated, one cannot compete with the top tier grads for high paying associate positions, so one must take a different route.
Assuming one graduates well from Chapman, the smart move is public sector employment for three to six years and then switch to the private sector, being either self-employed or in a high paying firm. Why that path? Because one has to work enough to show that even though one didn't go to a top tier school, one is just as good as a top tier graduate. The way to do that is to "oppose" them, so to speak, which is exactly what one will be doing as a government attorney working on the opposite side of cases the top tier grads work. (One also will get much sooner noticed by one's peers and superiors in the profession. It's a long while before associates at top firms lead cases and argue in court. One "leads and pleads" much sooner in the government.)
As for the tuition costs, the best way to deal with that is to go to any decent school that one can afford and get one's bachelor's degree. Go to a top tier school for graduate work. It's worth nothing here that while all the "elite" schools are highly ranked in most disciplines, schools having far less renown are also top tier in specific fields. If one is interested in any of those specific fields, going to a top school that doesn't cost "Harvard-money" is just fine.
- Economics -- Chicago, Berkeley, NYU, U. Mich - Ann Arbor, U. Wisc. - Madison, U. MD -College Park, and others all are in the top 25 and they are reasonably priced, especially for in-state students.
- Engineering -- GA Tech, U. Mich - Ann Arbor, Purdue, U. IL - Urbana-Champaign, UT Austin, Texas A&M - College Station
One doesn't have to spend a "mint" to go to a top tier school, but one can. Just as I illustrated the rankings for two specific graduate programs, one can find the same for undergrad programs.
If one is shooting for maximum efficiency, as an undergrad, go to the best in-state school for the program one most desires. For example, if one wants to study psychology as an undergrad, though going to Harvard, Yale or Stanford won't hurt,
it'd be nuts to go to any of the those three if one lives in Michigan and doesn't get a very, very generous scholarship/grant package. (different psychology link than the last one)
And if one must have an "elite" school bachelor's degree, there are other ways to get one. Going to a community college and transferring into an "elite" school after a year or two at the community college is one way. It's also a very cost effective one. Why? Because the "dirty secret" of college is that the "core curriculum" of classes has exactly the same content no matter where one goes. Calculus is calculus everywhere one goes.That's why one who scores 4 or 5 the AP Calculus exam will get college credit for it anywhere one goes.
Speaking of AP exams, they are another way to reduce the cost of college. Each of my kids entered college as a sophomore or near-sophomore purely because they took AP classes and scored 4 or 5 on the AP exams. That got each them college credit (hours, not GPA points) for calculus, biology, physics, chemistry, US history, European history, English, and at least one language (my daughter also got credit for Latin, which made her enter college as a sophomore).
My oldest finished school in 3 years due to his taking summer classes and went straight to work. My daughter chose to take four years so she could take more classes in stuff she felt would be cool to study and to take a couple grad school classes to see what she thought about grad school. The other two are still in college. Even though money's not a factor in their college decisions, for families for which it is, the AP credits from high school plus (or) community college will save one many thousands of dollars.
I appreciate that you responded to my remarks somewhat substantively, but I think you missed the relevance of one or both of the more important points I made in it.
I think too many people miss a key part of the offer of the "American Dream." That being the implicit assumption that one must uphold one's end of the "deal" by being a top performer. That's always been so, but it's more so now than it was, say, 70 years ago. There's no question that the bar has been raised.
What I was told is that I need to get a degree and distinguish myself in the course of getting it. Why? Because unlike some of my high school classmates, there was no family business I was destined to own regardless of my collegiate performance. The point is that the less of an "already paved way" one has upon entering high school and college, the more necessary it is for one to be top (not "near top," top) performer, that is in the top 5% of one's graduating class. (except at schools like my kids' that don't have class rank; at such places one must just perform as near to as high as level as is possible to perform.)
you are living in a fantasy land.
By my reckoning, "fantasy land" is in part characterised by having an abundance of "residents" expecting success as those several individuals attained, and their doing so solely on the basis of having a college degree. The "real world," on the other hand, is characterised in part by its abundance of individuals who make a plan, follow it and adjust it as needed, and in turn realize a decent lifestyle, something that calls for nothing like the extent of success achieved by those several folks you cited.
It's also worth noting that college or no college, succeeding to the extent I or people like those you identified will obviate one principal concern the video expresses -- being in great debt as a result of having gone to college.
I'll tell you what else is "fantasy land." Going to dental school and then settling in Branson, MO, with its 11K residents and ~$20K per capita income ($43K median), and thinking one will make a great living.
Branson has three dentists' offices.
There you go. That's all of Branson, MO, all 11K of them
How many dentists do you think Branson needs? How may people in Branson do you think are paying for more than routine dental care? Call me crazy, but I doubt Branson, MO is a bustling hub of cosmetic dentistry. Quite simply, Branson is the wrong place to try hanging one's own new dentistry shingle, and while that it is is nobody's fault, that the woman in the video (8:22) has chosen to be a dentist there is nobody's fault but her own. [1] Odds are a person having a degree in IT, finance or engineering probably also isn't making a good living if they're trying to do so in Branson, MO.
Branson appears to be making something of a name for itself in the country music industry, but it's still not Nashville, which is what it'd need to be for a dentist, because there's not much money in dental work for tourists. Dentists need to be where there's an indigenous population that needs routine dentistry and will occasionally pay for cosmetic dentistry.
The cost of dental school or her undergrad degree, thus the loans
Dr. Bacon (
62 years old, she got her DDS in 1989) took out to get those degrees, doesn't have a damn thing to do with her poor choice of places to work. She wanted to be a dentist. Great. She is a dentist. She might be a happy dentist were she to have chosen to be one in Springfield, MO or St. Louis, MO.
I'll close this part by saying that were I to have come out of dental school with $200K in school debt,
I'd have found myself a dentist job somewhere that handsomely pays dentists, moving to Branson (or wherever) when, after I'd made the kind of money I needed to pay off those loans, I could buy one of the existing and thriving dental practices already in Branson.
Note:
- Dr. Bacon referred to is the anti-kick-back statute -- 42 U.S.C. 1320a - 7b(b). It's not a new statute. (click on the notes tab of the code link) The woman mentions that "they" don't tell you about the consequences defaulting on a HEAL loan. BS!
- The statute isn't new.
- The journal of the AMA in 1989 published the following document that discusses the matter: HELP FOR HEALERS WITH STUDENT LOAN TROUBLES (I'm not even a doctor, and she is) The document states:
First, if an individual defaults, the loan holder-generally a bank-must take the person to court to obtain a judgment before HRSA will pay the lender's default claim from the Student Loan Insurance Fund. A judgment is likely to end up at the Department of Justice for collection and subsequently may be referred to a collection agent. The result could be a practitioner's exclusion from Medicare reimbursement or a tax offset by the Internal Revenue Service.
I'll leave it to you to figure out what it takes to default on a student loan and to explain why an aspiring or new doctor/dentist isn't reading the Journal of the AMA, at least the abstracts to the articles, from the moment they start med/dental school, or once they begin to practice.
- 14:15 -- Dr. Bacon shares the monthly payment amount she was expected to pay. I can see quite clearly that in 1990, she was expected to pay ~$2300/month. That is what it is. In 1989, the median dentist salary was $143K/year. Even assuming she earned half that in 1989, would someone tell me why the hell she either (1) didn't chose to work somewhere that paid close to that, or (2) even earning half the median salary, could not make the payments in Branson, MO where even after taxes (assuming 31%, just to be conservative...her marginal rate earning ~$71K would have been 28%) she'd still have $1841 left over? (Note that as an employee, potentially she had only to pay for "tail coverage," but as a newly minted dentist, she didn't have prior patients, so she wouldn't have had to pay. Even so, it's not expensive. Were she an owner of the practice, she'd have had to pay it.)
- 15:15 -- The share of her wage that she's paying is 25%. The original payment plan had her at 10% of her wage. Why the big jump? She defaulted on the loan. That made her repayment amount increase dramatically.
Sometimes there are other paths to success.
I agree that college is not the only path. Going to a top tier college also isn't the only path. (see above)
Had the video commenced with that rather than making unfounded assertions about the school system and the "college approach" I might have been more receptive and laudatory about it. The argument the video attempts unsuccessfully to make can be made. But the video's authors didn't do so effectively because
too many of its premises are simply false. One cannot begin by telling me things that I know to be untrue and later expect me to buy the conclusion born of those untruths.
I'm not saying that college isn't right for some, maybe it is. Maybe it is right for the dull of imagination. Maybe it is right for those that aren't self-starters. Maybe it is right of those who need to be told what to do.
I went to college, accepted a job offer, went back for a graduate degree and started my own firm upon graduating. But for college, there's no way I would have started the firm I did because the stuff my firm does isn't taught anywhere else, and it's not content for which high school students are ready. Though I'm not a billionaire, I can assure you that nobody would gripe about "having the quantity of digits left of the decimal" that I do. Even the wealthier millionaires and billionaires, were they not as well-off as they are, would be okay with it. Indeed, one could be a good deal less comfortable than I and still be very okay with it.
That said, I'm nobody special at all outside my profession; I have "household" fame of no sort. Neither do my colleagues, and yet we've all "made it" and college was integral to their and my doing so. Most importantly, we're happy with our lives.
My brother also went to college, but followed a different path. He availed himself of his connections with some foreigners and went into business with them. Why? Because (1) he got "full pop" scholarships and Momma and Dad gave him the money they didn't have to spend on his college degree (that money went a lot farther overseas then it would have in the U.S.), and (2) there was, by his reckoning, less competition and the bunch of them though they "had a better mousetrap" than did the existing competition. He spent about 20 years overseas, and he's back in the states now "sitting pretty." He was able to retire long before I was. Neither one of us is complaining.
you went in to cherry pick segments
Actually I didn't. I began watching the video by randomly clicking to see where it was going to go. Every time I landed on a section, the narrator said something I knew to be false.
if you want to be a successful slave, a wage slave
Guy McPherson used the term "wage slave economy" (~10:00) referring to the process he followed:
- Finish college with little debt
- Start work
- Buy a house because culture tells one to do so --> F*ck what culture says do! Do you!
- Be a "slave" to the mortgage for the next 20 years
He called college the "new mortgage." Well, that isn't at all true, and that it isn't makes it yet another assertion the video makes that is false. How so?
- The average college loan debt is ~$38K. ($24K when the video was made.) That's a car, not a house. As I remarked elsewhere on USMB, there's no way I'd take or let my kids take $136K for a bachelor's degree. It's a stupid move when there are far less dear alternatives (see above) that will produce substantively the same outcomes.
- Student loans generally are payable over ten years. Who cannot pay $24K or $38K over ten years? We're talking (using $38K) ~$400/month on even an entry level job paying $50K/year? Even young people in D.C., where housing costs are very high, can handle that. They may have to share a place with someone else, but they can make it work.
- Unlike college debt, a mortgage, for the most part, locks one into a place, if not in fact, at least emotionally. I started my firm in D.C. because I had a mortgage in D.C.
You know what we say in my family? "Stupid and ugly are to the bone." In other words, if one begins life dong and thinking insipid things when one has sagacious alternatives, one will likely long do stupid things. We also say, "Ask a beggar how not to go broke, not how to get rich."
One can, of course, cotton to the "slave economy" model, but that again is one's own choice. Nobody makes one pursue that path.
