Employment After College

Plato and Thucydides are all well and good, but if you're going to spend all of that time and money on college, make wise practical decisions too:

1. Make sure that you graduate with realistic prospects for earning enough money to support (or help support) a family.
2. Don't get buried under a mountain of consumer and student loan debt.
3. Do something you really like to do.
4. Life has ups and downs, but quality work is generally recognized and rewarded.
5. Always keep learning.
   

The “Careers” of College Graduates - Daniel Luzer

In an update, of sorts, to the recent post about the influence of the Recession on current college graduates, Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post is letting us know that it’s actually even worse. Two charts explain it:

A HIGHER ED BUBBLE? - Glenn Reynolds

This sounds familiar:

So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.