Barnes & Noble is criminal

Cuffing someone upside the head also helps people to see things your way. With people like hondo, this method saves a great deal of time and aggravation.

 

Explain the current problem with the system, please: Tuition and books are going up, journalism jobs are harder to come by; they pay less.

I don't think salaries are falling. Granted, they may not be rising as fast as tuition, but I don't think there's any reason a person can't go to school without leaving up to thier eyes in debt. Live in the dorm; get on a meal plan; work; find scholarships; stay away from $80/week bar tabs.

And you can insult me all you want, but I'm not going there.

 

My school's dorms were overbooked my freshman year. They just kept admitting kids to the dorms before they realized there weren't any rooms left. So a couple hundred kids who got screwed out of a room had to go out and get off-campus housing instead.

Oh, and tuition has increased 250% since the mid-1970s. Salary increases are miniscule compared to that.

 

Let me add another dimension to this argument: A lot of how you get your start in life depends on where you live.

It was relatively easy for my wife and me to buy our first house, a 2,000-square foot, 50-year-old ranch house in a nice quiet Midwestern town, for $90,000 six years ago. We were both just out of school -- she had student loans to pay back; I didn't (academic scholarship for a poor kid).

All we needed was 3 percent down with our FHA loan.

It was a bad rate (8.35 percent at the time) but it got us in the door, got our credit rolling, etc.

My father, who's pushing 60, for the first time bought a house in the Southern California market four years ago. It was half the size of my house, had 1/3rd the yard of mine, and it cost him $350,000. And they scraped and scraped and scraped to barely make a minimal down payment on the joint.

I realize that salaries are higher out there -- but I don't think they're four and five times what I make in Indiana for my job.

So where you're at can put you at an immediate advantage or disadvantage right out the gate.

A 23-year-old making $35,000 a year can do a lot better in the Midwest than he or she can on the coasts. After all, you can get a 1,100-square-foot apartment here for $500 a month. So you can make your paycheck go a lot farther in some places than you can in others.

On top of all that, even if I hadn't been granted a scholarship, my student loans wouldn't have been all that bad. I chose a state university that costs about $7,500 a year, books and tuition included. I certainly had the grades and the scholarship backing to go to some of the more prestigious schools in the state, but I couldn't justify it because of my career choice -- the programs just weren't that different.

It would've been a different story had I wanted to go into engineering or computer programming, which is only offered in certain schools here. But English, poly sci and my other concentrations? Those were pretty much the same everywhere at the state schools.

 

I agree with your point, OTR, but I've never known a 23-yr-old in this field to make $35K a year. The Baby Boomers have implemented the "mandatory internship period" that can last 1-3 years after college graduation. As a 23-yr-old I was making $13K.

And three_bags, the dorms and the meal plans are far from the least expensive option. Most students would save money by getting a few roommates in an off-campus place. Schools make a ton of money on the meal plans, because they make meals mandatory when you're in a dorm and the food services have been contracted out to private businesses, such as Aramark, who are in it for the buck.

 

Sorry, Cadet, for the confusion: I was talking about all fields in general, not just journalism.

And $13K a year for a college graduate is fucking criminal.

 

Undergraduate tuition, room, board and books at Ole Miss runs a shade under $10,000 a year.

I realize that's expensive, and some folks can't afford it. Hell, my folks couldn't, for sure.

But if a person truly wants to make it happen, they can.

With two years of college at 23, I was making about $30K. I'd been in the business for about four years and had worked my ass off at places like Natchez, Miss., to get there, but I see your point.

 

And the credit industry in this country is run by amoral thieves and con-men.

 

Sure, I completely understand no situation is as cut and dry as it sounds. But there's still something to be said for being mature enough and mentally tough enough to put aside your wants and focus on your needs as a college kid.

But what irks me is when Dye comes on and blames something on the system or the executives (as in DH's thread on the journalism side). Goddamnit, suck it up and drive the fuck on. If you spend your time blaming someone or something else for what's gone wrong in your life, you won't get very far. Quit bitching and feeling sorry for yourself and do something!!

Sorry for the rant.

 

And FB's spot on. The credit industry is, next to prostitution, the most immoral industry out there. I'd rather live next to a meth factory than I had a collector.

 

How can we cut down the time we need as a college kid to mature?

 

Prepare them for life better when they're younger.

That doesn't happen much at home, and it doesn't happen much in high school. So many sheltered kids are so naive to reality when they hit college that they're almost set up for failure. Their lives are so micromanaged for 18 years that they have no idea how to handle the responsibility of freedom that college inevitably brings.

And that's where the system truly fails.