Yay, we've found another Millennial to troll

Those quotes remind me of something from my childhood. Riding in the back of the family station wagon on the way to my grandparents, I was around junior-high age and talking to my brothers about college. I said I wasn't going to go to college, to which my dad replied 'You get a college degree, people will be lining up to pay you $10 an hour.'

This was about 40 years ago, and my dad was right. Whole lot of people out there wanting to pay college graduates $10 an hour nowadays.

 

If that's your takeaway, I guess that puts you solidly in the Milton Friedman camp of economic thought and while the article didn't get into that, my parents' generation didn't live with the idea that any publicly traded company's main goal was maximizing shareholder value.

The notion used to be that companies were expected to act in good faith in the communities where they resided and that isn't true now.

But that doesn't maximize shareholder value (aka the "world's dumbest idea") being all worried about how layoffs would play.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/

 

When I went to my public college in the 90s, the total cost (tuition, room, board, books, fees, personal) was about $10K per year. Out of that, state and fed aid paid between $5-6K, my parents paid about $2K, I paid about $2K and a student loan was about $1K. Freshman year, I had a couple of small scholarships which erased that year's need for the loan. My total student debt was around $3K.

Today with inflation, that $10K total is the equivalent of about $15K. So I looked up my school's current rates ... and the price of everything was about $20K. Meaning that there's an extra $20K for four years that they have to come up with. And this is with federal and state aid that isn't keeping up with the costs, which mean they and their parents have to come up with even more on top of the additional $5K per year.

If my parents and I were to get the max in fed and state aid today for my school, we'd get about $8K, leaving us with another $12K to come up with ourselves. Our contributions, adjusted for inflation, would be $3K each if we did what we did over 15 years ago. Meaning we'd need a loan of $6K per year, for a total of $24K in debt.

And I'd be considered lucky that I only had $24K in debt from a public school.

 

There is the option for parents to save during the first 18 years of a child's life.

The student can also work as a teenager, after school, and in the summer.

A year spent working between high school and college isn't the worst thing that could happen to a kid.

And, when you consider that a full time load is about 15 hours, there is time to work, and get your studying done, as long as you're willing to cut into you beer drinking, and marijuana smoking time. (Which, conveniently, saves money.)

 

The fact that someone who's a good writer can't make as good a living as he/she could 40 years ago has about, oh, nothing to do with whether the management of corporations should fulfill their primary ethical obligation to maximize the present value of their bosses' (i.e., the shareholders') investment. To even nudge up against such an assertion may not qualify as the World's Dumbest Idea (because, let's face it, the competition for that one is gonna be fierce), but it's certainly going to make the field of 68.

 

Just saw an article today that we are losing our global dominion in science.
I then tried to come up with some measurable ways in which America is truly exceptional, but failed.
From education, to healthcare, our political process, personal freedom, happiness, we no longer rank at the top of any list I could conceive.

 

Oh, please. We rank higher than ANYONE in giving away piles of cash to billionaires to build stadiums that allow said billionaires to fleece us again to enter.

 

True, we are exceptional in our self-destructiveness.
And in our own level of self-esteem.
The world does not share that regard.
And then we get to look forward to twits like Jesse A. Myerson looking after us in the autumn of life.
Fun stuff.

 

I believe we still lead in high-tech innovation.