I’m fortunate to have had my entirely private education paid for by my family. It’s a gift that I only now fully appreciate, imagining the absurd feeling of writing five-figure checks every year for my children’s education, knowing fully well what else I could do with that money (beach house! weekly meal at Nobu! my name on a plaque somewhere!).
My luck in that area has made me reluctant to wade into the student loan conversation. It seems disingenuous for me to have an opinion on the matter, having never made the hard choices that leave a lot of students saddled with debt for a chunk of their lives. Particularly since the argument is generally portrayed as black and white, with villains and victims:
- Lenders/institutions are predatory and taking advantage of children, or
- Students are adults who should know better before taking on six-figure loans
There are other perspectives, of course, but those two seem to be the ones that come out most often. Particularly in the last two years, when Democratic candidates were talking about loan forgiveness, the conversation seemed to bifurcate into those who blamed the corporations/institutions and those who blamed the students.
One challenge in understanding the nuance here – few things are truly black and white – is that, like the other ways we’re stratified as a country, it’s not common to have close friends across the spectrum of student debt outcomes. If you work in a high paying field, like tech, medicine, law, finance etc., you could very well know people who took on loans to get where they are, but their high pay is probably sufficient to make those loans a non-issue. If you work in library sciences, or film studies, or are training to be an actor, I’d imagine the majority of your peers are dealing with heavy debt loads they’re unsure they can ever pay back. And I doubt those two groups find themselves intermingling very often. So the variety of outcomes isn’t so much experienced as it is recounted anecdotally.
Anne Helen Peterson, a writer I cite frequently, is in the middle of a multi-part series on graduate programs and the challenging debt/earnings ratios they dump on their graduates. It’s great because of its nuance. Not all programs are evil, not all students are unwitting bystanders to the decisions they’re making, but Peterson does a good job outlining that most graduate programs know what they’re doing: selling someone on a master’s program they can’t afford, that is highly unlikely to provide a good return on investment. Here’s one student she quotes:
“At NYU, they graduated 40 new Master’s students every year in a discipline with maybe a dozen PhD programs in the U.S., and it was common knowledge that the NYU master’s program was the financial engine of the PhD program. The professors salaries, the grad student funding, the fancy speakers, they were all made possible by 40 students paying $60,000 a year. And the one and only way to get into the NYU PhD program? Go through their MA program first.”
It’s a great read. The numbers she quotes sound like a dystopian Mastercard commerical:
“The current median debt for an Actor’s Studio graduate at Pace: $138,000.
“The current median earnings two years after graduation: $26,253.“
… and produce shock no matter where you fall on the issue:
- How could an institution ever justify that kind of move to its students?!
- How could any students make that decision and be surprised by the consequences?!
One piece of the puzzle that’s often left out is who each student has helping them make this decision. Compared to the financial privilege I referenced above, I value the wisdom my parents provided far, far higher. I know my Dad would not have let me make the $138K/$26K decision without laying out, in excruciating detail, where that choice would lead me. And twenty years of his tutelage would have made me fully capable of figuring that out all on my own. Many people aren’t that lucky, and so less fortune on the hard money side is compounded with less financial education.
The effect of this isn’t limited to higher ed, either. For many people, buying a big, expensive new car is a financial mistake that we let happen all the time, despite the fact that a car salesman saying “you can afford this” doesn’t always mean you can really afford it. It’s predatory.
All sorts of industries are like this. Life insurance policies are sold to people who don’t fully understand the details as investments. People get trapped in timeshares all the time! We don’t like it, but we take it as given that our economy is going to attract some suckers.
But when the suckers are students – when deception like this extends into academia – we tend to draw the line. Education shouldn’t be such a minefield of poor financial decisions, right? But it is. And for many it’s an extremely high stakes choice: “’I’m unsure if I’ll ever be able to get a mortgage, if I can get married without adding this debt to my spouse’s name, or what the possible tax implications of loan forgiveness will be, if that even happens,’ she told me. ‘I try not to dwell on it too much because so much of it is out of my hands, but it can easily feel pretty crushing.'”
One step in the right direction seems clear: Require explicit disclosures of the relationship between debt load and expected earnings, and make students consent to that choice in writing. Have it on a single sheet of paper and require a third party, like a notary, to walk through the implications. As Peterson points out very well, the schools themselves are far from impartial and probably won’t be objective.
But then… you will still have people who are passionately convinced that a master’s in library science is right for them. They’ll continue to take on outsized loans to gain access to low-paying jobs. What might look like a charlatan’s trade to some is a logical career move to others. There’s a reason why people spend thousands of dollars on day trading courses and house flipping seminars. They pay off for some people.
And those who succeed will want others to be able to follow in their footsteps. Not everyone who strains themselves to buy a new Mercedes ends up with ruined credit and a repossessed car. Some leverage the perception that shiny Mercedes gives them into a successful career in sales (maybe). And some classically trained actors with large debt loads make it big in that world. Here’s another great quote in Peterson’s piece, from a Vice President at CNBC:
“To people balking at spending $100,000 to go to journalism school, here’s what I would say: It can be a power boost that propels you into the industry. It’s sort of like venture capital money. Sure, you could bootstrap and grow slowly, or you could take an investment, burn the cash, and scale quickly, then figure out profitability later.”
People will keep wanting to make that trade.
Leon Bridges
I discovered Leon Bridges’ music at some point in the last year, listening to the great Pandora station Hipster Cocktail Party. Once I heard his music, I started hearing it everywhere. Other people seemed to have found it from their own version of Hipster Cocktail Party, which is the most mainstream way I know to find music that seems “niche.”
I love his stuff. The best way to describe it is old-fashioned. There’s not much new music like it today. Clearly I’m not a music guy, because that’s as deep of a description as I’m capable of. But give it a listen.
I came across a profile of Bridges this week in Texas Monthly. It’s a great read for anyone who’s a fan or who likes these type of in-depth, 30 minute articles. His path to stardom was both rocky, with winter walks to gigs that left his hands “so numb that he can hardly strum his guitar,” and seemingly lucky, with early recognition on music blogs and SoundCloud that found its way to some powerful record labels.
The piece is also a funny reminder of exactly how mainstream my music tastes are, even when I think they’re not. Case in point:
- I “discovered” Bridges in 2020, even though he was first nominated for a Grammy in 2016 and has clearly been widely popular since then
- According to the piece, Bridges’ management “confessed to knowing best ‘how to market to white hipsters’.” Sounds like I am that target audience…
Like I said, I’m not a music guy. I’m perfectly fine listening to what everyone else is listening to. I like the song Without You, by The Kid LAROI, for Christ’s sake!
But I can only imagine how much it grinds true music fans’ gears when someone like me starts talking about Leon Bridges as though he’s some unknown genius.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
Tear Down the Restaurant Sheds Before It’s Too Late – Daniel Doctoroff, NYT
“If we don’t act quickly, what’s temporary will become permanent. The forces of inertia will make us miss a golden opportunity to move away from roads ruled by street parking or makeshift dining shelters toward a network of truly flexible public space.”
The California Dream Is Dying – Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
“Alas, the economic prospects for the typical resident have dimmed. Millions of people lack adequate housing, education, or jobs. College-educated Millennials can’t afford homes of their own. Poverty-stricken Californians dwell in growing tent cities.”
Why Is China Smashing Its Tech Industy? – Noah Smith
“After the Cold War, our priorities shifted from survival to enjoyment. Technologies like Facebook and Amazon.com, which are fundamentally about leisure and consumption, went from being fun and profitable spinoffs of defense efforts to the center of what Americans thought of as ‘tech’.”
What I’m Listening To: Miley Cyrus covers
Just Breathe – original by Pearl Jam
Heart of Glass – original by Blondie
Comfortably Numb – original by Pink Floyd
Summertime Sadness – original by Lana Del Ray