Thursday, April 4, 2024

More signs of major economic problems:

1) When I told my one friend from high school who's run a domestic violence shelter that I crunched the numbers from my W2 and that my server job would be equivalent to a $45K+ a year professional job if I was working full-time, she said that she's seen any number of non-profit jobs that pay less than that for initial low-level positions, and they all require master's degrees.

2) On a recent train trip back to the one college town that I now live in, the person next to me on the sold-out train was a(n undergrad), and he said he's doing food manufacturing science or whatever since he likes to cook and it was something that seems to make sense to get into.

He also said that most of his friends are doing stuff like electrical engineering, but it's hit or miss, and a number of them are getting worried since they aren't getting internships like they're supposed to, and are having trouble finding traction with initial jobs.

"Really?", I was like, and so I mentioned that a friend of my one (Asian-American) coworker had had good luck, and that that person had recently gotten a $90K a year starter engineering job.

"Then maybe that's on them and they're not doing what they're supposed to," he was like.

(But, this is a flagship school with a national profile, and they're supposedly in an area with high demand, it being STEM and all!)

Overall, when I asked him what the take was on school and the economy among him and his peers, he said that school was *way* too expensive, but it still made sense to go since you could make more money that way, even if it wasn't all that like it used to be.

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