Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 10, 2012

Just default.

@Richard S. RussellThat is the problem that so many people have. The average income amount you’re looking for doesn’t exist in any real sense. There is the 1% and there is everyone else.

Somewhere in the area of $24,000 to $30,000, from what I have read in various places.

LOL! (Ow!) LOL! (Ow!) LOL! (Ow!) So much truth there.

@gmartin997

Hate to break this to you, but the idea of a profitable major is a myth, right up there with how every plumber is a millionaire sucking off innocent customers. Today’s must-have major is tomorrow’s white elephant after millions of other students decide to take it. Even if you get lucky with a good job or internship, you still have to love the subject, be good at it, and work very hard to get anywhere in a profession.

As for the “frivolous” majors…I majored in Classical Languages and I’ve scored more good jobs due to my language skills—especially the Latin—than anything else. The thing is that nobody is taking Latin because it’s not “practical,” but people still need it as a skill, so you do the (heh) math on how that affects its supply and demand.

Last year it was about $50,000 for every man, woman, child, and institutionalized person in the USA. $15.1 trillion divided by about 300 million people.

Does the Air Force still have a college program for giving them a commitment to serve? That is what I was thinking for any of my great-grand-children smart enough to go to college. Of course the oldes starts kindergarten in August so I am sure things will change.

The average is really a flawed measure in this case. If Bill Gates walks into a homeless shelter, the average income of everyone there becomes very respectable. Without changing the national income by a penny, but putting all the income into the hands of 10 million people, and taking it all away from 300 million, the average would not change at all. Median income is a better measure. Looking at the census figures, there are about 100,000 households in the U.S., and the median income for all households was just under $50K in 2009. The average household must have about 3 people in it. (Average works better here, there are no 1000-person households.) So most American households get by (or not) on less than 50K a year. With African-American households, the figure is less than 33K a year. Asians (I think) have the highest median. Of course,different ethnic groups may also have different average household sizes. Through most of its history, the United States was considering as the best place to be poor, offering the most opportunities to better ones condition. Until about 1850, Americans were considered by and large to be pretty equal, the nation not having the disparities of wealth and power that one saw in old aristocratic Europe. That began to change with industrialization, and the rise of the “Robber Barons” of the “Gilded Age” when inequality and wealth rose together. Modern capitalism concentrates wealth, and concentrated wealth means concentrated political power as well. Without mechanisms to redistribute wealth and break up large concentrations, equality dies and oligarchy prevails. Capitalism is, nevertheless, the best way to generate the wealth needed to support all. Too much redistribution, too artificial an equality, can actually wreck the whole machine. Not to mention that equality itself can be self-destroying trap in which liberty is squelched. So what is the proper balance between every-man-for-himself, what’s-mine-is-mine capitalism, and an everybody-is-entitled-to-an-equal-share-so-why-work-harder-or-better-than-the-next-guy communalism? That’s the big question. Just because you think the proper balance is to the left of where I think it should be does not make you a socialist. Just because you think the proper balance is to the right of where I think it should be does not make you a fascist, or the pawn of the megarich. But it is ever so much easier to call one another names that actually talk about the issue.

re: last panel

ARE there any “Full-Freight” parents left?

When I was in it WAS still manageable (Barely!) with Full-time work in the summer and a copy of the reading list to keep your nights from being too much fun. These days, I don’t know?

the 1% get the front seats in the pews, doncha know.

When you get out you have the equivalent of what was a high school education 60 years ago.

Amen, sister. gmartin997 only displays his ignorance in comments like that. It might be edifying for him/her to dig into the history of the discovery of the principles and technologies used to make his posting and good health possible.

While we’re on the subject of math, we might want to take a listen to NPR’s “Planet Money” episode #370, “The Real Price Of College.” The reporters make the interesting discovery that while the “list price” of college has gone through the roof, the actual amount the median student pays (after grants, scholarships and so forth) is increasing only a little faster than the inflation rate. It’s another example of how we have an economic system based on lying: “Oh, yeah, the tuition is $50K a year, but since we want you, we’ll give you a $25K/year scholarship.” Sounds like a used car dealer… or the medical/insurance complex, in which the hospital bills the insurance company $1300 for a routine test, but accepts $130 as full payment. Lies, lies, and more lies are what makes the economy go ’round…

#Occupy a student loan. Very sad state of affairs that ensures that the majority of young people will be indentured servants for life.Imagine in tens years when charter schools will do it to even young children?

Like many of the other commentators, I have always enjoyed your well-reasoned argument and thoughtful additions to every discussion. Thanks for your input and keep fighting the good fight.As a grandparent with a grandson only one year away from the Big Decision, this has been a very interesting strip, in more way than one.There are many who feel that a Liberal Arts degree is either elitist or useless, nowadays. I disagree. I think we need more well-rounded individuals whose ability to think and whose knowledge of a variety of subjects make them better suited to fit in to today’s world, than someone with a single-minded technocratic major.

As a full-freight parent, numerous scholarships and a state university helped out immensely. Anyone who borrows $100,000 for a bachelor’s degree needs to have their head examined.

Peter Dinklage was the commencement speaker at Bennington College where he had graduated. One of his statements was that now that you have graduated your parents have turned off the spigit. Then he look around and said,only the parents are applauding.

Well, they could always join the military…

My daughter just graduated from NYU (Journalism/already employed) owing about $12,000. I work 3 jobs and live in San Francisco but I intend to have that paid off in 2-3 years.Full freight?Not really, I have a half-Venezuelan daughter who is hard-working, studious, and smart. She got grants and scholarships and worked as a nanny for all 4 years.(I’m a very proud papa)

Right you are, sir. We need to get the masses of sheep in this country to stop nodding in agreement with Reagan era mantras on the holiness of privatization and selfishness.

For the life of me, I don’t know why people of modest means continue to vote Republican. Is it because Republican TV ads have got them brainwashed? In the 1930s and 1940s we had enough sense to support FDR , Truman and a stronger union movement.

Thank heavens “the private sector is doing fine,” and can supply well-paying jobs to all these new graduates!

A lot of folks who support the GOP will never be wealthy enough to benefit from the policies it supports. They will never be in the 1%. It is a mystery as to why they think they will be.

@DoughfootBetter check your arithmetic. You say there are about 100,000 households in the US with an average of 3 people in each household. That makes only 300,000 people! Does not compute.

Interesting because yesterday my son called to tell about his orientation to start his college program, after 13 years Navy, and disability retirement. Ih his veterinary tech program, of 25 students, only four are men. While he had considered a PhD in applied physics, he decided to go with what he loves to do, work with “critters”. While his VA helps provide his funding, he EARNED it.

My daughter had scholarships, jobs, and help from us, as parents, not bankers, and graduated with no debt. She also loves her job as a nurse.

“Poor planning on your part, doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part”, IS a valid consideration in today’s society, not just respecting college debt, but ALL the ludicrous debt Americans find “typical” to run up!!

If you get a paying job, scholarship, and “pay as you go”, debt doesn’t run up. If you do NOT bring in any money, as in NO TAXES, and spend anyway, like for contractors and wars, guess what, you end up with huge debt.

It is NOT how much your teachers make, it’s how much YOU earned, to pay them, to EDUCATE YOU, so you could make MORE than THEY do!! Oh, right, there’s no reason your teacher should earn as much as you will, that would just be silly, right?

Supply and demand, people; supply and demand.

“why insist that your child – or any other child – be “college prepared”, when that individual exhibits skills, and “craftmanship”, in abundance; and generally has little or no real need, or use, for “academics” in the “higher education” sense”?

I couldn’t agree more. I decided against college when I graduated from High school. I ended up for one year in trade school learning Auto Mechanics. Which led about 10 years later to a career in Copier Repair (and management). According to what I have read here, my income was about average (median?) and I’ve been quite content with the life I’ve led.

this

Making higher education further out of reach for the American Dreamer; Compliments of the Republicant Party.

I find this comical. The truly funny thing is kids that get degrees in things like Sociology, Art History, and Womyns Studies, have $100K plus in debt from it and then complain they can’t find a job. Did they not realize that those fields confer ZERO marketable Job Skills? Art History qualifies you to make intersting conversation at cocktail parties, the others qualify you to ask if a customer wants fries with their order. College is a wast of time unless you are going to study a specialized field with a marketable skillset. Hard Sciences(Mathmatics, Chemistry, various types of engineering) Medicine, Business and Accounting, and to a lesser extent law(huge glut of lawyers right now) are all the only courses of study that are really marketable. Other than that a person is better off attending a Votech or Community College and learning a skilled trade.

Exactly! Move to China and get a job, you lazy slackers!

(also @fbjsr) Just pay back what you agreed when you borrowed? Absolutely correct. But like so many adults who agreed to mortgages that are now underwater, the future turned out differently than they thought it would, and now they can’t..Just get a job? Earth to whoever-you-are: we’re going through the worst recession in 80 years, and the unemployment rate for students and college graduates is several times that for the workforce as a whole…and even that’s underreported by the official statistics. If they even can get a job, for most it will be for much less than their education used to command, and in the meantime the college loan repayment clock is ticking. And that will keep the housing market in the toilet: how will the next generation ever — ever — be able to afford, or be qualified for, a mortgage?.Bumper-sticker platitudes aren’t going to solve this one. But then again, they never do.

“The other 99% can too, all they have to do is do same as 1% take advantage of Tax Breaks by putting money in a Tax Sheltered College Fund”When our kids were little, we started putting $25/month into some savings plan or other, for the one-year-old. For the five-year-old, the payments were a little higher. With interest earned, their college educations were supposedly paid for. Well, sir, after a few years the whole thing went bankrupt and we escaped with just the principal intact.

Too many people go to college now anyway. College used to be for higher learning and academia. Now it’s just a vocational school.

While it’s true that the belief that we all should be college graduates is a fallacy, more and more employers are DEMANDING at least an associates degree for even “the trades” employment. It’s not people that are saying you have to have a college degree for a job, it’s corporations. Personally, I’d rather see vocational training and old-fashioned apprenticeships instead of the constant hue and cry for higher and higher degrees of education. When I started school in 1970 we were always told that you had to graduate high school to get a job, that with a high school diploma, the world opened up for you. By the time I graduated, that changed to you needed to have a college degree, which I couldn’t afford, and the military was my only option. But I washed out of basic, so the military was no good either, so I spent the next 15 years in minimum wage jobs. In 2009 I FINALLY got to start college, and now, after getting an associates, the mantra is if you want any job in this economy you have to have a bachelors. And IF I ever pay off the $56K in student loans, I’ll still be too poor to retire. I will work till the day I die. There is no other option to this. And I have never been able to afford a new car or a vacation. You cannot win.

Sounds like your son-in-law’s parents are a lot like mine. When I started high school my father told me that I had to move out when I graduated and he’d not pay one red cent to help me get an education. He lived up to it too, and I graduated at 17. With only a high school diploma the only option I had was the military. And even that, I was not physically able to meet their standards, so my father’s lack of help 30 years ago has removed any chance I have to retire, ever.

How when every cent you have coming in pays for food, rent, clothing, utilities and minimal transportation to keep getting to work? That is not counting getting sick and having to figure out what bill not to pay so you can go to a doctor.

My parents never paid one red cent for my education, something my father took great pride in telling me when I was a freshman in high school. No college fund for him to contribute to, as he had to “save for retirement” (his actual words)

Sure there are jobs available, one job for every 10 job seekers. Not exactly a good ratio to ensure that people who want to work can.

Assuming that you meet the standards for military service and are willing to put your life on the line for an education. For many, one or the other, or both reasons prevent military service.

You don’t even see the contradictions in your post, do you? There’s no such thing as “free education”, there are only different ways of funding it. As for the rich paying their “fair share”, the rich in the US actually pay a higher share of total tax revenue than in those wonderful Eurotopias. So give the envy a rest already. Oh, and the only reason they get by with their miniscule defense budgets is because Uncle Sucker (that would be us) has been generous enough to pick up the tab for the last few decades.

Lets see you can’t “default” you can’ file bankruptcy – I HAVE IT – CHINA!

My last offer from CHINA included a driver and 4 servants …

That still begs the question I have asked over and over in here, for those who do not meet the minimum physical requirements of the military, and who have only a high school education, which means only minimum wage, dead end jobs like fast food. how are we supposed to survive? Minimum wage last went up, federally, in 1996, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, the cost of EVERYTHING has gone up, A LOT. So the slave wages of 16 years ago are now less than starvation wages, and no end in sight. It’s either get a higher education, which when you can only get minimum wages means large student loans, or forget it. I say again, America is NO LONGER the land of opportunity, no longer a land where hard work will lead to success. Unless we get away from the conservative “every man for himself, women stay in the kitchen” mentality, this nation is finished.