Question my wife would ask is

"Do we want people to study just for money.... or to study to be a more rounded person and enhance non-financial areas, such as Culture (Music and Art for exampe) or Religion?'.

I do agree, some Degress are not worth it (Media was all the rage a few yeats back in the UK - do you need a Degree to do Tik Tok Videos or Flog the latest idea on Facebook??) - but some degress are perhaps relevant for society as a whole?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 12:14 pm: Edit

The lenders aren't going to make loans that don't pay them a profit, Jessica, and compound interest is the way the world works. I agree that students who are 18 have no idea what they are walking into, but lots of parents sign up for loans just as stupid.

Mike, I never said that engineer and accounting were the only degrees worth getting; they were just examples. If your kid wants to be a cop they should get whatever degree the police want, but they should not get a degree in something random and then go try to find a job that matches. I would say that the default "Lowest choice" would be business administration, which at least lets you get a job as an assistant manager somewhere. Business logistics might be a better choice since by 2050 there only stores in America will be Amazon and Temu.

Jessica and I have many times said that trade schools for those with the mind that goes that direction are a great choice. There are billboards all over America offering starting diesel mechanics $100,000 plus a signing bonus. Contractors I know are begging for carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and bricklayers.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 12:42 pm: Edit

There's a huge demand for welders, and it's only getting worse.

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 12:57 pm: Edit

SVC ad Jessica

Abolsutely agree - and its the same in the UK.

Trades are short of new applicants.

The issue in the UK is

A) Trade jobs are dirty and 'old industry'
B) It means people have to get out of bed to work (article last week sayed 18-25 years old felt £40K pa was was they deserved in their first job - laughable!! - less than that they wasn't interested)
C) Why don't I just do 30 mins a day on doing Videos on how to make money???

D) Peiple perhaps don't notice how good the salaries can be now - as 20-30 years ago - they paid 1/4 of what they pay now.

So - the Media could be doing alot better for those positions!!

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 01:01 pm: Edit

Partly, I blame the lack of home economics classes in school.

Seriously, managing your own money is a far more important life skill than solving a quadratic equation, and I say this as a Math Ph.D. who's taught algebra classes.

I remember my father offering us a dollar to figure the payment rate on a $10,000, 30 year mortgate at 10% when I was in fourth grade. That was a math lesson, but it was also a lesson on loan and interest economics. I'd have to think about how to solve the math problem today, but "long term loans involve paying a lot of interest and very little principle, pay principle early whenever possible" is a lesson that stuck and that no one ever even tried to teach me in school, not even in economics classes.

Mike's stuff with his kids, where he tells them school is a job and pays them for it, is also an economics lesson; you work for your money, and your job is important, and this is just the way we behave.

Edited to add: Since this was the 4th grader with no calculator version of the problem (my sisters got slightly different versions), it was 10% APR and only one payment per year. The payments are approximately $1069.79, of which on the first payment $1000 is interest and $69.79 is principle.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 02:39 pm: Edit

The student loan business is a racket that only works because they cannot be bankrupted. The gimmick of suspending payments (but not interest) and the hardship forbearance trick (suspending payments not interest) means that some people are shocked to learn that the $40,000 they owed when Covid hit is now $60,000 because the interest keeps rolling over and the next month you pay interest on interest.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 02:41 pm: Edit

I will note that nursing is a great career if you have the stomach to put up with sick people. I don't. I wouldn't be a nurse for a billion dollars a year. God bless the people who excel in that field.

By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 03:27 pm: Edit

Saw a news report last month,
seems Harvard had to put in a remedial Math
course for incoming freshman....
Can't personally say, they are getting the elite students they claim to have....

By Timothy Linden (Timlinden) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 03:44 pm: Edit

In my grade 12 Economics class looong ago one thing we did was play the 'business game'. Get a fake small business, make financial choices, try to grow your business. Teacher essentially said take out max loans/invest/grow. I convinced our team to instead pay down the starting debt. If we played one more turn, our business would have been in first place (instead of second) in terms of income, no debt and well placed to grow as we wanted. And not at the mercy of any interest rate increases/etc.. Teacher was grumpy both that we did that and that it worked.

Any debt should be taken only for good/necessary reasons with a good plan on getting that all paid off in a reasonable timeframe IMO. But as others indicated, that lesson was left to our parents/family, not the education system.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 01, 2025 - 03:54 pm: Edit

I might remark that the company divided (decades ago) into TFG and ADB just because my partner at the time wanted to "grow with debt" and I wanted to "grow slowly without debt." In the end, TFG2 collapsed due to massive debts and was bought out at a deep discount.

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Friday, May 02, 2025 - 12:06 pm: Edit

I say: If you want a "non-working" college degree (i.e., one that doesn't directly train you for a job) and you want government help to pay for it, then you go into the military and pay for it with your hard work and service. No student loans, period, unless your degree trains you for a specific job that earns enough to pay for the loan. And then your student loan payments come out of your paycheck - and you live on the rest.

Simple solution, and - going forward anyway - simply prevents this unpaid student loan crap.

Restricting student loans will also force universities to stop the madness of ever-increasing fees. Turn off the spigot, and they'll have to tighten their own belts to something reasonable instead of building the next wasteful megastructure in honor of some provost's ego.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, May 02, 2025 - 01:27 pm: Edit

Limit student loans to the cost of an in state school. If Harvard wants you, they can give you a scholarship for the difference.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Friday, May 02, 2025 - 05:22 pm: Edit

University of Alabama estimates in state expenses to attend of $34,608 per year. Out of state is estimated at $58,530 per year. Most of the difference is tuition, but a bit is estimated transportation expenses.

So, instate rate, you're talking circa $140,000 for your four year degree. That's still a LOT of debt for a kid just starting out even if he has a useful degree.

You can save a lot of that by living at home and going to the local school. There's at least one community college in every county in Alabama, so you can do at least the first 2 years within an easy drive of home.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, May 03, 2025 - 08:58 pm: Edit

In other news, Spain had a national power grid failure this last week.

One story simply pointed out that Spain, on Earth Day, claimed that 100% of the power both generated and consumed was renewable sourced.

Days later, the system collapsed.

No detailed explanation yet, but conjecture is that one or more of the renewable sources failed to hit the target energy levels.

If true, then it illustrates graphically how fragile energy grids are to fluctuations in supply.

By Tom Lusco (Tlusco) on Monday, May 05, 2025 - 07:36 am: Edit

W/r to the power grid issue.

Early indications are that oscillations in generation frequency necessitated a disconnect, else the outage would have been much greater. This is likely related to the prevalence of renewable generation without sufficient storage to dampen oscillation (my speculation, but reasonable per conversations with actual experts).

It is of course also possible that a cyberattack is related or even totally to blame; we may never know about that.

Power grids in Europe and the US need a lot of work to better support both oscillation in generation capacity from inconsistent non-baseload sources, and to better handle the bidirectional flow of energy from micro-generation (e.g., rooftop solar).

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Wednesday, May 07, 2025 - 03:36 pm: Edit

Student loans. I am obviously not too bright, but when they offered these I turned them down, because I honestly did not understand them. Besides, I was going into the Army and felt the Army pay of a 2nd LT was enough for my needs, with a sure path for promotion. Ten years later the path of promotion failed and here I am, a survivor (I am told I was a not expected to to make it) of double pneumonia (well I caught it twice) but but still yearning for the Army.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 08, 2025 - 03:29 am: Edit

I paid my way through the first two years at community college, working afternoons and weekends and summers.

When I got to Texas Tech, I had a full ride ROTC scholarship which led (supposedly) to a regular army commission, but at the last minute they gave my active duty slot to a guy who tried to avoid fulfilling his contract (forcing someone who didn't want to be in the Army to stay two years, while forcing the guy who wanted to be in the Army to go home without anything but a degree the Army paid for).

My girlfriend/fiance at the time had student loans and I was not at all happy about the idea of my having to pay them while she got a useless drama degree so she could teach high school drama clubs. Then she dumped me and I missed a bullet in oh so many ways.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Thursday, May 08, 2025 - 02:12 pm: Edit

My solution is to induct both of you.

This was around 1972 or so? Serious issues with the draft around then. Lots of draft dodging, fake medical deferments, Canadian refugees, Claiming to be gay (when not), smoking marijuana to fail the drug test, etc.

By Michael F Guntly (Ares) on Thursday, May 08, 2025 - 03:15 pm: Edit

I reported I was eligible for the draft in 1973, when my lottery number was 321. They never got that far drafting people.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, May 18, 2025 - 10:50 am: Edit

I had hoped this subject would continue to be ignored, sigh, but I am not going to allow discussion because it humiliates one side. The biggest scandal in American political history is the massive conspiracy between the White House staff, his political party, and the so-called journalists to hide the fact that President Biden was mentally incompetent to serve. I will point out that many of us pointed this out many times over the last years and we were castigated as being nasty liars. No end of people who proved to be part of the conspiracy straight-up lied to the American people. Now a series of books by people who were part of the coverup prove we were right all along. The liars who said “Biden is mentally alert” have zero credibility.

President Biden was not functional as president for many months or maybe years. His policies, which changed from his lifetime positions, were clearly not his policies but the policies of far out staffers who used his autopen to sign things he never knew had been signed. All of those last minute pardons are legally dubious. Putin knew that Biden was asleep at the switch, so did Xi, with obvious results. VP Harris was part of the coverup.

This is the sad truth. No wonder one side wants to ignore the truth and move forward. Every American needs to set politics aside, go do some reading of multiple viewpoint sources, and deal with this mess, never again trusting anyone who lied about Biden’s fitness.

I had to delete the ouburst posts on this mess just now, and won’t allow any more, but the cat got out of his bag and left me no choice.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, May 18, 2025 - 02:14 pm: Edit

An inspector general report says that during 46 there were 448,000 unaccompanied children who illegally crossed the border and were sent all over the US with inadequate documentation. Immigration has lost track of 31,000, mostly older teens who just disappeared. Another 48,000 so far have not shown up for court. No one has a clue where 430,000 of those kids are. Some, no doubt, are being used as sex slaves or work slaves. Other are just living as illegals in some sort of family situation. All of that is the fault of 46.

You won’t find this in most of the media.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Sunday, May 18, 2025 - 02:16 pm: Edit

Deleted. I can always count on Mike to break every rule he sees.—SVC

And no more lies about Trump. Capiche?

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Sunday, May 18, 2025 - 04:05 pm: Edit

DELETED, suspended for seven days for deliberate violation and flagrant provocation. You got what you wanted. Tell that lie about Trump again and you will be banned forever. Make my day.—SVC

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, May 18, 2025 - 05:30 pm: Edit

Former President Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and is considering treatment options. Five year survival chances are 35%. The cancer has metasticized to the bones, which means fast spreading and considerable pain. This is very bad. We pray for him and his family.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, May 18, 2025 - 11:25 pm: Edit

Sad to hear that President Biden cancer has spread.

I have been listening to a couple news channels (Fox on cable and Fox Channel 42, Rochester MN.)

Two medical professionals were interviewed, both were saying very similar things, notably that under most circumstances, prostate Cancer is detectable and treatable.

Both had questions about whether the former president was properly screened for the last 15 years, since that is the length of time it would take for undetected prostate cancer to progress to the stage being reported now.

It was also reported that the same doctor at the white house treated former President Obama and President Trump during President Trumps first term in office.

The concern being that if a mistake occurred in the testing for Prostate cancer with former president Biden, did the same mistake also occur for President Obama and President Trump?

Lots of questions.