Well at least if you are smart and got a STEM major and even got employed full time right out of college and didn't even get your job or pay get interuppted by covid then surely you should be financially stable and able to buy a house in your mid-20s like your dad did working a union job in the early 90s, right?
Right?
...right?
I will live in fear of rent, health, car troubles until I die and goddammit I did everything they all told me to.
throw in the fact that costs of medical care, housing, and education have all increased at rates higher than inflation in most of the country and it's even higher!
Inflation hasn't been even across the economy, either. The vast majority of inflation since the 1980s had been in the price of housing, education, and healthcare. People who bought a home and finished college 20+ years ago have seen almost zero inflation, while people who were too young or too disadvantaged to get on the ladder are even worse off.
$4/hr in the 70s is "officially" $18/hr now, but you could much more easily rent an apartment (without roommates or with only 1 roommate!) or pay for college making $4/hr in 1975 than making $18/hr now. A studio apartment in NYC was like $175 a month in the 70s!
Let's talk about STEM majors. Most fields have a fucking crazy funnel effect that nobody warns applicants about. Case in point: many of my high school friends who got BSc's in bio fields - microbiology, genetics, marine biology, etc. - which have a large undergrad intake and accept people with good but not exceptional marks. Problem is, there's maybe one honours place for every 10-15 graduates, and masters places are even scarcer, so if you aren't top of your class, you aren't doing postgrad. And if you don't do postgrad, you're underqualified for the jobs that want university education, but also overqualified/not correctly qualified to be a lab tech.
So what the fuck do you do? If you can afford to spend another two years studying while earning fuck all, you can train to become a high school teacher (and then still barely afford to live because teachers are criminally underpaid) or else you're basically stuck in some shitty middle management job using none of your skills at a company that has '-lab' or 'path-' in the name, maybe.
Engineering and computer science still have decent employment prospects after undergrad, but engineering programmes are relatively tiny and good luck getting a place if you aren't like top 5 in your school.
TL;DR: the whole "well maybe if you didn't major in postmodern decolonial basket-weaving..." line is utter bullshit because the majority of STEM grads are just as utterly fucked on today's economy.
The secret about STEM is that it really means "engineering and Computer Science, maybe math and physics if you work for big data". Basically, if it doesn't require at least Calc 2, it doesn't count.
The only reason STEM pays well is because schools can't figure out how to teach calculus, which means there's a natural bottleneck. Companies still think that they have to hire a "Calculus passer" for many jobs, which pushes up the cost.
Well at least if you are smart and got a STEM major and even got employed full time right out of college and didn't even get your job or pay get interuppted by covid then surely you should be financially stable and able to buy a house in your mid-20s like your dad did working a union job in the early 90s, right?
Right?
...right?
I will live in fear of rent, health, car troubles until I die and goddammit I did everything they all told me to.
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throw in the fact that costs of medical care, housing, and education have all increased at rates higher than inflation in most of the country and it's even higher!
Inflation hasn't been even across the economy, either. The vast majority of inflation since the 1980s had been in the price of housing, education, and healthcare. People who bought a home and finished college 20+ years ago have seen almost zero inflation, while people who were too young or too disadvantaged to get on the ladder are even worse off.
$4/hr in the 70s is "officially" $18/hr now, but you could much more easily rent an apartment (without roommates or with only 1 roommate!) or pay for college making $4/hr in 1975 than making $18/hr now. A studio apartment in NYC was like $175 a month in the 70s!
Let's talk about STEM majors. Most fields have a fucking crazy funnel effect that nobody warns applicants about. Case in point: many of my high school friends who got BSc's in bio fields - microbiology, genetics, marine biology, etc. - which have a large undergrad intake and accept people with good but not exceptional marks. Problem is, there's maybe one honours place for every 10-15 graduates, and masters places are even scarcer, so if you aren't top of your class, you aren't doing postgrad. And if you don't do postgrad, you're underqualified for the jobs that want university education, but also overqualified/not correctly qualified to be a lab tech.
So what the fuck do you do? If you can afford to spend another two years studying while earning fuck all, you can train to become a high school teacher (and then still barely afford to live because teachers are criminally underpaid) or else you're basically stuck in some shitty middle management job using none of your skills at a company that has '-lab' or 'path-' in the name, maybe.
Engineering and computer science still have decent employment prospects after undergrad, but engineering programmes are relatively tiny and good luck getting a place if you aren't like top 5 in your school.
TL;DR: the whole "well maybe if you didn't major in postmodern decolonial basket-weaving..." line is utter bullshit because the majority of STEM grads are just as utterly fucked on today's economy.
The secret about STEM is that it really means "engineering and Computer Science, maybe math and physics if you work for big data". Basically, if it doesn't require at least Calc 2, it doesn't count.
The only reason STEM pays well is because schools can't figure out how to teach calculus, which means there's a natural bottleneck. Companies still think that they have to hire a "Calculus passer" for many jobs, which pushes up the cost.
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In American education, math might as well be magic. And calculus isn't even real math, it's what you take before you get to the real stuff ;)
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I did all that too except just quit with no plans and am now flapping in the breeze lol join me
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