Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for May 08, 2020

Student debts have gone up since 1994. The minimum wage — not so much.

student stupidity has gone up as well.

And this is what happens when certain fields are pushed harder and harder onto kids: coders and STEM fields aren’t worth half of what they were even a decade ago, because so many recent graduates flooded the market and discovered themselves as code monkeys working for only a little over minimum wage.

“Math is hard. Let’s go get sh.tfaced”.

After high school I went to college for a year on a student loan, stopped to serve 4 years in the Marine Corps, got out and went back to college for 4 years, graduated, got a job and a year later, out of the blue, got a bill for that student loan 9+ years after the fact. I had hoped they had forgotten about it, or that there was a statute of limitations or something. Nope.

Local radio personality is 50’s and still paying off his from Yale.

In any case, well into his dotage.

People are making $7/h with $60k student debt right now, my dudes!

This cartoon was originally drawn in 1994 when unemployment was creeping down from a decade high of 7% in 1992 and was about 6.1%.

As of today unemployment in the United States at a historic high of 14.7%! The highest since the Great Depression.

Between usurious Student Loans and little prospect of any employment, our lads would be facing a very bleak future indeed, if they were graduating in 2020!

Did something happen between the two between yesterdays strip and today’s?

So let’s do the math. $7/hr x 8 hr/day x 350 days/yr x 10% (that much used for the loan) is about $2,000 /yr. If you start at age 22, this takes you to age 52 (considering only principal). Pretty close to the claim in the strip! Unless he has to pay interest on the loan (not all student loans require this, though I think after a few years they all do), in which case he’ll never stop paying… someone else can do the math for that one!

Did this, got the t-shirt, and now I’m on the constant edge of a total mental breakdown. On the plus side, my student loans are all finally paid off.

And student debt is now much higher

Well, that’s only a bit over 5 years if you save every bit of that income and get free room and board in your parents basement, and include income taxes.

In other words, the current problem is the same as the old problem. Lots of people pay huge coin to get useless degrees.

This problem is mostly the product of federal loan guarantees and direct lending. Tuition loans are going to people who have no plan, no viable employment future in their chosen field and no projected ability to repay the loan in the future.

A Bachelor’s in Gender Studies (among hundreds of other majors) gets you nothing but some useless paper and a job at Starbucks. That loan should have NEVER been approved.

Not to worry. The lack of distancing at recent grad parties should solve that

I’m amused that the second guy, though now shirtless, kept his tie on.

To paraphrase my hero Dave Ramsey- “Get off your $7 an hour ass and make something of yourself!”