Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Maybe that young lady has a lot of student loan debt, however.
Not very expensive to attend the local community college less than 10 minutes away...
What impressed me the most is less than 48 hours of her arrival she had landed a job and was employed...
She had experience waiting tables during high school back in Colorado... she did say tips were much better here.
Undergraduate Tuition
Merritt College tuition is $1,104 per year for in-state residents.
This is 65% cheaper than the national average public two year tuition of $3,176. The cost is $4,012 and 78% cheaper than the average California tuition of $5,116 for 2 year colleges. Tuition ranks 17th in California amongst 2 year colleges for affordability and is the 137th most expensive 2 year college in the state.
The school charges an additional fees of $40 in addition to tuition bringing the total effective in-state tuition to $1,144.
Last edited by Ultrarunner; 01-27-2015 at 08:42 PM..
Most places will see the opposite of that, making more in CA and less in TX.
True in many cases, but not all. Since everyone wants to live in cool places like San Francisco and NYC, salaries for highly-educated professionals can actually be lower there relative to the cost of living than in podunk places like Texas or South Dakota. Which is one reason young people should be as flexible in their job search as possible. Do you REALLY want to pay the "hip city" tax if you don't need to?
First of all, I post relevant information with links that back up my assertions from reliable sources all the time and when it does not fit your world view, you ignore. This has played out in every discussion that we have ever had. Now, you post some article that doesn't even conflict with anything I've said, and I am supposed to drop everything and make an about face.
Not only that, you did not to school in 1970; you went in the late eighties. You had scholarships. And, yes, college, even in the late eighties was cheaper than it is now when adjusted for inflation. No one is saying different.
Here are the issues that I and others are having problems with what you and a small shrill minority of millennials are saying in this thread:
You cannot graduate from a quality university without six-figure debt. Your co-workers whine about it, so it must be true.
You play down the economic climate that existed during the late seventies/early eighties.
You play up the ease of life in the late seventies/early eighties. By and large, minimum wage employees could not buy a house. And if they did, they better have stellar credit and 20% down. That recession was awful, awful, awful. It was not a blip. I was trying to support one child with three minimum wage jobs and I was barely making it. And when we give you examples to the contrary, keeping true to form, you just ignore it.
And it was a HELL OF A LOT EASIER TO DO EVERYTHING IF YOU WERE A WHITE MALE. You know, like you.
You are the king of cherry pickers, false dichotomies, strawman, and goalpost moving. You have it down it down to an art. Those are great diversionary tactics when you are in a verbal discussion, but when everything is written down, it's much harder to get away it.
You ignore the fact that although you continually cite your own anecdote of YOUR college experience, when I and others use anecdotes in the same way to show that a determined student can graduate with little or no debt, you completely ignore and dismiss. Ignore and dismiss. Ignore and dismiss.
Yes.
I'm the old side of Gen X (b. 1967)...my daughter was born in '86...my situation with her was pretty much the same as the bolded part.
I'd like to know just how on Earth people are thinking it was so damn easy to just go buy a house. What a bleeping joke.
Bootstrapping is possible for anyone that's hellbent enough to do it. Continually making excuses for a person's failure to launch is nothing more than giving the person carte blanche to fail.
Frankly, college is also reachable for anyone. Even if it means taking out loans...you want college bad enough? If loans are the only way to get it done, then take them. If it's too much risk in one's estimation, then they don't have to go....but they better quit their whining about it because nothing's going to change it.
Most things that are worth a hoot also entail some risk taking.
Whining about lack of opportunities, employment, etc won't pay the bills. Simple.
Last edited by rhiannon67; 01-27-2015 at 10:27 PM..
I'm the old side of Gen X (b. 1967)...my daughter was born in '86...my situation with her was pretty much the same as the bolded part.
I'd like to know just how on Earth people are thinking it was so damn easy to just go buy a house. What a bleeping joke.
What were you making in 1986? Take that hourly wage (or that salary, if you started out salaried) and compare it to 2015. Let's say you were making $5/hour in 1986. Plug the inflation-adjusted income of $11/hour into 2015 and see how your life would be as a new mother making your wage today compared to 1986.
It was easier to buy a house then than it is today. This is fact. Being a single mom has never been easy. But it was easier in 1986 than it is today. Run the numbers, you'll see.
What were you making in 1986? Take that hourly wage (or that salary, if you started out salaried) and compare it to 2015. Let's say you were making $5/hour in 1986. Plug the inflation-adjusted income of $11/hour into 2015 and see how your life would be as a new mother making your wage today compared to 1986.
It was easier to buy a house then than it is today. This is fact. Being a single mom has never been easy. But it was easier in 1986 than it is today. Run the numbers, you'll see.
What you're saying is a joke.
There is NO WAY I could have EVER even entertained a pipe dream of owning a home back then. MW was a little over 3 bucks an hour, and I was living in LA County....one of the more expensive areas of the country.
What you are trying to tell me is making a mockery of the very real struggles I had back then as a single mom.
Today's young adults are a lot better off than I was, I will tell you that right now!
I'm saying take your three-and-change bucks an hour and plug those numbers into 2015 prices. If you were making minimum wage as a single parent in 1986, how would you like to try it in 2015 making $7.25/hour?
Run. The. Numbers.
Every moron who says that millennials aren't making it in life entirely because "they're lazy, spoiled and have an overly developed sense of entitlement" fails to look at what they were making when they themselves were starting out, and comparing that to what things cost today.
Minimum wage in 1986 was $3.35 per hour. Take a good, long, hard look at what things cost today and ask yourself how you would do making today's minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Who struggled more? The single mom making $3.35 per hour in 1986? Or the same single mom making $7.25 per hour in 2015?
Less than five percent of wage earners today are making minimum wage, and the majority of that very small percentage are working part time. I'm not going to post the source again because I've done so several times (it's the Census Bureau but you can look up the link yourself if you're interested).
So all this talk about single mothers today making minimum wage and trying to buy a house only applies to a tiny, tiny percentage of American workers.
By the way, minimum wage earners make up less than five percent of American workers today but they made up nearly nine percent of American workers in 1986 - double the percentage. And in 1981, FIFTEEN percent of American workers were making minimum wage! Triple the percentage of minimum wage earners today. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1987/07/rpt1full.pdf
Less than 5% make the bare minimum. This is an utter crock. Because these numbers don't reflect tipped employees making $2.13 per hour, and they don't reflect all the people who make $7.16 to $10.00 per hour -- otherwise known as "the misery zone." Five percent of our workforce makes EXACTLY $7.25 per hour. Many tipped workers make even less. They're not counted in your statistics.
Whatever. My "minimum wage plus 25%" jobs didn't allow me to buy a mansion and a Lamborghini. They allowed me to pay my way through a top-ranked school. But that was a few decades ago. Back when minimum wage (plus about 25%) could pay for a top-ranked school.
The employer who pays a nickle over minimum wage can crow about what a generous employer he or she is. And that same employer can claim they pay more than minimum wage. Whoopdie-doo.
Still waiting for you to take your personal "just starting out in life" numbers and post them here, adjusted for 2015 costs....
1) If you are one of the 30% of young people who don't even bother to graduate from high school, you are screwed. You were screwed in 1970, 1980, and today, but things are steadily getting worse for you. The days of weak mind and strong back jobs are gone. This is the only group that has a really tough time, and what our social safety net is for. These people are superfluous and will never be much more than day workers.
2) If you are a mediocre performer, college or not, nobody will hire you for a good job. You are not worth it. With some effort you can probably find an entry level job somewhere. Then it's up to you to show that you really are a star through job performance. The reason your parents told you to go to college was that they didn't want you stuck in a quagmire like their life had been the whole time you were growing up. It may take you years to see a return on your college investment, and it may be frustrating to see friends who bypassed college and just learned a useful skill through OJT make substantially more money than you do. This is the group that does all the whining, because they think they are entitled to all the goodies just for showing up. They have never learned to accurately assess their own value. If somebody doesn't tell them what to do, they won't do anything.
3) If you are a high performer you will do just fine, as high performers have always done. This group will either make a lot of money or will understand that the reason they are not making a lot of money is due to their own choices. This is roughly the top 10% of the population, and the only group that really matters. They are the ones who invent, create and build our world. Everyone else is just part of the scenery.
It's no more difficult to succeed nowadays than at any time in the last 100 years. It's fairly easy to find times when it was a lot tougher.
1) If you are one of the 30% of young people who don't even bother to graduate from high school, you are screwed. You were screwed in 1970, 1980, and today, but things are steadily getting worse for you. The days of weak mind and strong back jobs are gone. This is the only group that has a really tough time, and what our social safety net is for. These people are superfluous and will never be much more than day workers.
2) If you are a mediocre performer, college or not, nobody will hire you for a good job. You are not worth it. With some effort you can probably find an entry level job somewhere. Then it's up to you to show that you really are a star through job performance. The reason your parents told you to go to college was that they didn't want you stuck in a quagmire like their life had been the whole time you were growing up. It may take you years to see a return on your college investment, and it may be frustrating to see friends who bypassed college and just learned a useful skill through OJT make substantially more money than you do. This is the group that does all the whining, because they think they are entitled to all the goodies just for showing up. They have never learned to accurately assess their own value. If somebody doesn't tell them what to do, they won't do anything.
3) If you are a high performer you will do just fine, as high performers have always done. This group will either make a lot of money or will understand that the reason they are not making a lot of money is due to their own choices. This is roughly the top 10% of the population, and the only group that really matters. They are the ones who invent, create and build our world. Everyone else is just part of the scenery.
It's no more difficult to succeed nowadays than at any time in the last 100 years. It's fairly easy to find times when it was a lot tougher.
Really good post, Larry!
No matter how you slice it this is a tough time for low to middle income workers in America. Still, looking for scapegoats and excuses is inane and useless. It is true that you could practically fall off the turnip truck and do well at certain points in the past 30-40 years. But, that does not mean that anyone was screwed by "the baby boomers" (or "seniors" as the OP implies).
As far as homeownership goes, maybe millennials will have to wait until they are 35 to buy that first home, rather than at age 25? But, lets not forget that the cost of new homes today is not the same as it was in 1960 for many reasons besides inflation. Apples and oranges really. Homes are twice the size today as they were 50 years ago, with much nicer features. My Dad, a WW2 vet, bought his first home in 1961, way out in the burbs. He was 39 years old. He and my mother raised 7 kids in a 1700 sq ft cape cod with no A/C or dishwasher or even storm windows (northern Illinois). We certainly did not have cable TV, cell phones or internet or vacations. Today you could hardly call that "living the dream".
Let's not forget that the vast majority of baby boomers were not even out of HS when Medicare was created, let alone Social Security! Blaming them is akin to blaming the millennials for the housing bubble!
Maybe when we are all done pointing fingers and lamenting our lots in life, we can (as a country) work on some solutions?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
