While student debt keeps rising

StudentDebt_v_Income.jpg


While student debt keeps rising… income for college graduates keeps sinking. Income for college graduates under age 35 is now 2.2% less than it was in 2005.

J.P. Travis: Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976 graduate of University of Michigan, father, grandfather, husband, founder and CEO of Travelyn Publishing (http://www.travelynpublishing.com/), and passionate anti-government believer in individual liberty.

View Comments (70)

    • Historically black colleges are racist a nd should be closed down. I have seen so many reports of minority groups and schools screwing their own people it is disgusting. This is the anniversary of Brown vs Board of Education. If black schools are failing, they should be closed. Why waste the money? Get those kids to a school that will actually teach them something. T here is nothing valuable about a bad school. Blacks no longer HAVE to attend these schools, so what is th e point?

  • A lot of this drop in wages has to do with what degrees these people are graduating with. A liberal arts degree is never going to pay as much as an engineering degree.

    • I'm sure there were engineering degrees and degrees in feminist studies at the beginning of the period covered, and the same at the end. After all, the data population was everybody with a college degree.

  • Overly general statistics = general, unusable conclusions.

    The problem with this article and graph is that all graduates are lumped into one pile. This would be fine if the point you want to make is that we need gov't intervention - either forcing college tuitions down, or providing college educations by using that magic money that grows on trees and lies in money wells, also known as "gov't money".

    If you want to really find the real problem, then we need to separate the college degrees, and relate them to debt separately. We can't really draw any conclusions from this until we look at graduates with degrees in anything that ends with the word "studies", art, drama, literature, most humanities separately from each other and especially separately from degrees in technology, science, engineering, computer sciences, economics, business, etc.

    Otherwise, we have a set of statistics that comes from an expensive mental masturbation session that will be used by politicians not to solve anything, but rather to convince us that they are "addressing the problem" while they do nothing more than increase their power and expropriation of our money.

    IF we find (and I'm not saying we necessarily will), that there is no growing gap in the STEM fields, while the gap is getting absurd in the fields that are inapplicable to anything in real life, the solution becomes clear: tell the people who are majoring in useless fields of knowledge to either stop wasting their time or live with the consequences. In other words, "it's YOUR problem".

    This would not be to the universities' liking - the potential is there to reduce demand for their product, which will in turn put downward pressure on their pricing. It will not be to the liking of gov't parasites - there is no need for any action on their part. And it would most definitely not be to the liking of the students who are wasting their time and the universities' resources - they are stuck with the responsibility for their own financial condition.

    • The whole point of looking at overall data is to remove the bias of anecdotal evidence. Pointing out that people with engineering degrees make decent money doesn't address the overall problem of growing student debt. I'm sure people with engineering degrees have been doing pretty good for a long time. What's new is that student debt is mushrooming and I think the chart is useful is pointing out that it's mushrooming in the absence of any sort of corresponding income rise.

      • I have since realized that pooling together a huge sample has been done very recently (again), to come up with a false "problem" that does not lend itself to any solution other than gov't force:

        Women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.

        No anecdotal data, outliers are not skewing the data.

        But do we have useful information?

          • all women are lumped into one group, as are all men. And the result neither states the problem, nor a solution. But it is data.

          • What I see is precisely the opposite. The pooled data for the population as a whole is divided into illogical and disparate sub-populations for the purpose of creating a false comparison. What you are holding forth to be an example of a valid example of pooled data is, in fact, the perfect example of invalid artificially-segregated data which has been manipulated to make a political point. If we really wanted to compare men to women, we would (for example) take male CEOs and compare them to female CEOs with the same years of experience. When we do that, the difference in salary disappears (or almost disappears). Entire articles have been written about this. The false dichotomy you've presented as a good example of pooled data use, is, in fact, the entire basis of the conservative opposition to Democrat proposals to legislatively correct gender wage disparities.

          • When it comes to pushing a particular agenda, data will be manipulated as necessary. If lumping apples and oranges together "makes my point", then that is what I do. Or if "separating" it - I put that in quotes because an apparent separation, i.e., making it look like I'm comparing apples to apples, can be done in all sorts of groupings that produce skewed results - makes my point, then THAT is what I do.

            But your example of comparing CEO's to CEO's is exactly what my original point was - I wanted to separate the whole population of students and compare the different groups. I don't know whether my suspicions (that BS degrees end up working for minimum or near minimum wage, and an increase in BS degrees is the reason for the growing gap), will be found, but it's worth a look in order to get useful data.

            Now that I look at the graph again, it did not originally really sink in that the graph starts at 2005. My contention that there is a growing number of BS (that's "bullshit, not bachelor's of science), degrees would more likely be true over a few decades rather than 9 years.

            But in this time frame we have extenuating circumstances that could also paint a false image - that being the 2008 recession and the ensuing crap-ass financial policies of the the current administration (Obmanacare being the hallmark of same), that put downward pressure on average earnings of grads that has nothing or little to do with the money pits that universities have become.

      • I think that if we looked at STEM graduates, humanities grads, "studies" grads separately we would have sufficiently large sample sizes to determine an average with a standard deviation, and throw away outliers (those anecdotal stories).

        There is no question that college education prices have far outpaced inflation. But during my lifetime, I saw the percentage of people going to higher ed increase significantly. Some of that price increase can probably be attributed to the increase in the demand side of the equation. Some I'm sure can be attributed to the 3rd party paying system (similar to the effect of health insurance system on health care prices).

        People IMO have over-inflated the value of a college education. Parents feel that their kid MUST go to college. What they study became secondary. The colleges are charging outrageous prices for degrees in feminist studies mainly because parents and/or scholarship foundations are willing to pay those prices. So what we have is a bubble in the viewpoint of that value by the market. With that widening gap as shown in that graph, the market will necessarily adjust.

      • I think it is helpful to point out which degrees yield better incomes. If someone is dumb enough to study a discipline that has zero market demand and they rack up $100K in debt, which they have little hope of repaying I think it is fair to compare that to the finance major who amasses similar debt but will payoff ahead of schedule. I realize that doesn't answer the questions about the costs. As long as government money floods the colleges and the supply/demand curve for college is skewed, people must figure out that if they must borrow money for school they need to be responsible enough to finds way to pay it back by studying something that fills a market need.

        Naturally that won't happen and progs will demand "free" college and loan forgiveness to be fair, dontcha know.

    • You just illustrated exactly why the US fares poorly in international high school achievement rankings. We lump everyone into the same set and the rest of the world cherry picks their sample. Same goes with comparing Alabama to Iowa. If we compare demographic to demographic the results are even.

      A bit off topic, but I get irritated with the raft of misleading charts that populate the Internet.

      • that populate the internet? Heck, this is symptomatic of innumeracy. The MSM is constantly spewing out results of "studies" that are absolutely meaningless for the same reason.

        This is no different than taking the entire population, determining that there is a growing number of overweight/obese people, and forcing "solutions" on everyone, be they additional costs of printing nutritional information on menus, banning large sodas, etc.

        It's a cop-out. It's laziness and irresponsibility.

        • You're right about innumeracy. People don't slow down for five seconds to critically think about what they are looking at.

          This made me laugh: http://www.tylervigen.com

          My favorite correlation/causation absurdity was seen on a liberal global warming thread. Someone pointed out that the rising temperatures correlated with increased Somali piracy, therefore; Somali pirates are responsible for climate change.

          • You have to see how the data was collected and then howiy was set up. Like polls that ask thing like have you stopped beating your wife? No matter how you answer, you come across as a bully. There is . No.option for never having beat her.

          • The use of SmartPhones in the U.S. during the last decade has skyrocketed, during the same decade the number of low-information-voters has also exploded; ergo...

          • Thing is, Sidekick, the chart posted above isn't making any sort of causation argument. No such claim is made. Higher student debt is not MAKING incomes go down, that would be absurd. The chart is not even making a correlation argument. It's simply showing two statistical trends and pointing out that they are problematic - you can't reasonably expect people to be able to pay off their student loans if these trends continue. Doesn't matter what the various degrees are, doesn't matter how stupid some of the students are for thinking feminist history will land them a job - all it means is that we, as taxpayers, have an impending catastrophe on our hands. Current student debt outstanding is over a trillion dollars, most of it guaranteed by the federal government, which means us:

            http://www.finaid.org/loans/studentloandebtclock.phtml

          • I get all that JP. Admittedly, I am conflating your chart with causation/correlation to illustrate that most charts are crap because the data points are usually skewed to reinforce a preconceived conclusion. I don't doubt your chart's validity as it is but I would prefer to see some segmenting of degrees and income/debt levels. It would be more impactful, IMO.

          • Ok, I got it now. If we want to save the bees, we must immediately legalize weed. No more arrests, the bees come back.

            great site, love it.

            Rush used to point out the absurdity of spurious correlations with his carrot stats. Everyone who ate carrots between 1920 and 1940 is now dead or in declining health. Therefore, carrots are really really bad for you.

            The one I loved was a topic for an hour's worth of discussion on NJ101.5. A study showed that people who delayed sex until their mid-20's had bad relationship issues. The conclusion? It's better not to delay sex.

            I suppose it would be ridiculous to think that the reason someone didn't have sex until later in life might have been due to pre-existing relationship issues. That never happens, does it?

  • And when all these fast food places replace humans with an order screen, where are the graduates with a degree in midget transgender studies gonna work?

    Anytime you get the government to lend you money, you should be flogged..If you owe the IRS, Sallie Mae, or even Obamadeathcare, you are gonna be spending a lot of time with some little weasel in a cubicle somewhere who would love to take away your income when he/she is not to busy watching porn or "investigating" the Tea party...

  • College education will be promoted as an entitlement as precedent for transferring all this debt to the taxpayer- on the hopes that doing so finishes off the country's economy.

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