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Student debt may hurt chances at full-time employment:
A recently published study led by The University of Texas at Arlington says that student debt may hurt students' chances of securing full-time employment due to added pressure in their job search.
[...] The researchers say that having student loan debt is a financial stressor to students that leads to additional stress during their job search, which in turn can harm their chances of securing a full-time job.
"Student loan debt creates an anticipated loss of financial resources, which brings higher levels of stress to student job-seekers," said Froidevaux, who is a fellow of the Eunice and James L. West Distinguished Professorship. Her research interests include career transitions, retirement and aging in the workplace, and identity negotiation.
The more financially strained individuals are, the less likely they are to have sufficient energy and motivation to invest in their search for a successful job placement, she said. Results from the study also suggest that students who are more stressed about their student loans were likelier to work more hours in part-time jobs. This stress in searching for a job reduced the likelihood of securing full-time employment upon graduation from college. The research team used data from 1,248 graduating seniors from four different American universities.
The current level of student loan debt in the USA is $1.6 trillion, above credit card debt and auto loans, and second only to mortgage debt.
Journal Reference:
Ariane Froidevaux et al, Is student loan debt good or bad for full-time employment upon graduation from college?, Journal of Applied Psychology (2020). DOI: 10.1037/apl0000487
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @04:48AM (13 children)
Employers are part of the problem. There are far too many jobs that "require" college degrees when those degrees aren't actually necessary to do the job.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday August 27 2020, @06:15AM (12 children)
It's true.
However, back when I was a teenager and I was wondering whether to pursue long university, my dad told me this: go to university for as long as you can. You won't learn anything of real value there. But it'll tell your first employer that you're patient and persistent enough to go through 5 years of mindless boring bullcrap without complaining to get a better paying job. It'll also tell them you're smart enough to understand that you need to give the expected answers, and not the right answers, to pass your final exam - and employers prefer to hear what they want to hear, not the truth. They value that.
He was right.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Thursday August 27 2020, @08:51AM (8 children)
One of my biggest problems is finding a way to accept that society is perfectly fine with throwing away 6.4% of someone's life for bullcrap. (5 years / 78 year life expectancy)
What's worse is that I threw away 6.4% of my life. Apparently, that isn't enough. Master's degrees are becoming more the norm.
People say not to take things like this personally, but I do take it personal. With 6.4% of my life being thrown away for crap, how can I not?
(Rosco P. Coltrane, I'm not knocking you or your dad. You're both right and I agree with you. It's the set of circumstances that led to this conclusion that I balk at.)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @10:52AM (1 child)
I threw away even more years of my life, getting a PhD. Do I regret it? Definitely not! My years at grad school were the best time in my life. Was it useful? Um, maybe, as I probably wouldn't have the job I have right now without that PhD. Do I use anything of what I learned during that time? No!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday August 27 2020, @11:45AM
The knowledge? Very likely not.
The skills? I bet you do use them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 27 2020, @12:45PM (2 children)
Can't you just online or night school it?
Because everyone has to do it, the standards have to implode, such that the classes are not too hard.
I generally go to the gym on alternate days, and when I was doing online classes on non-gym days I'd do my classes at lunch time.
If you want a real blackpill, what fraction of your life is thrown away on commuting because cities are unlivable, or what fraction of your life is thrown away to pay for taxes mostly doing unproductive or anti-productive stuff?
What fraction of your life is thrown away in higher prices of everything because burning down buildings somehow creates justice for black folks?
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday August 27 2020, @03:59PM (1 child)
I've thrown a lot of my life away commuting just so I could put bread on the table. That was due to circumstances I won't get into here.
But, no. In my case, there is no online nor night school possibilities. Again, I won't get into the why. I'll just simply say it isn't feasible in my case.
I workout at home. Depending on certain circumstances, it isn't unusual for me to get up at 4:00 AM so I can have breakfast, workout, and be at work for a reasonable hour.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 28 2020, @12:44PM
Well, OK and best of luck to you.
I will say I got an online degree back in '05 and the field continually expands and the tech gets more complicated/interesting, so even if you're correct that in 2020 you can't do online, who knows, keep up with the marketplace because maybe in 2025 it'll be possible.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @02:00PM (1 child)
Only the uneducated and moronic think that. For heaven's gate, nobody is forcing people to pursue a bullshit degree like one in gender studies. Most other degrees are worth the effort to obtain even if they don't directly pertain to career the graduate winds up in.
The time that one is in college is also an opportunity to make mistakes and further mature in an environment where there are fewer hazards and more safeguards before the training wheels come off completely. It also leaves generous portions of the year for youthful hijinks and road trips and is a great chance to meet members of the opposite sex. Around here, it's the best opportunity for men to find a woman worth having as the ratio is so horrible skewed in our favor, that women are willing to settle for somebody that's just great rather than perfect due to a lack of options.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday August 27 2020, @04:11PM
I'm not sure if you're trolling, but I'll reply anyway.
You're far from the first person to think I'm a moron and uneducated. You're not hurting my feelings.
I have a degree in IT and am getting another in IT. It's still my opinion that I could have contributed more to society if the education system had been setup different. For instance, I'm not a theory person. Why do I have to learn all this theory at the university? It would have been better if I had gone to a trade school, but no one wants an IT person who doesn't have at least a bachelor's degree. And often times, even that isn't good enough anymore. (Hence the reason why I'm going back.)
I've done it all -- worked for small business, large business, and city government. I even taught for a year at a specialized university. And every job was in IT. I also have a bachelor's degree in IT which I got somewhere in the middle of all that. You know where I learned 90% of my useful IT knowledge? It wasn't at the university where I earned my bachelor's degree; that was mostly useless crap. My education came from the School of Hard Knocks.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday August 27 2020, @08:26PM
On top of that, the time spent at the university is also supposed to count as training for your future job. So you can't just go to school for 5 years to study English literature or art history or astronomy or whatever interests you, because those degrees don't have a lot of value to employers (except perhaps their tiny niche). So now you're stuck in one of the "employable" degrees, at best learning a bunch of job skills that'll probably be obsolete by the time you graduate, but hopefully just relevant enough to land you that first job.
A big part of this seems to be the "experience" trap, where employers today almost universally want to hire someone with experience doing the job they are trying to fill. People just starting their careers are stuck in a catch-22: They don't have the on-the-job experience to land the job that'll give them the on-the-job experience that'll get them hired. The solution seems to be to try to use somewhat relevant coursework in place of the missing experience, which employers seem to begrudgingly accept if they really need to fill that job and can't find anyone else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @11:21AM (2 children)
As opposed to having the perseverance to self-study such that you're more than capable of doing the job spending years in a classroom? Many employers are very, very short-sighted. But I guess if you want to build a house of cards, that's a good way to do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @02:09PM (1 child)
And how do you quickly measure that? One of the main reasons why having a degree shows up on so many applications is that it's a quick screen. Even if somebody does genuinely have equivalent knowledge via a Will Hunting style personal improvement binge, it would take hours to really know if they have the goods or are just really good at bullshitting people. On top of which, the company would be susceptible to discrimination lawsuits.
The reality is that it's not normally an either or situation, I've got several degrees and will be getting another one soon, but I've also amassed a rather impressive amount of content knowledge in other areas as well via self-study.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday August 29 2020, @06:43PM
In theory they're hiring someone to work there for years. Shouldn't it be worth hours to see if they can actually do the job?
As more employers require a degree, the less having a degree actually means to the likely job performance. It ceases to be a real distinction. If you force everyone to get a degree to be employable, you see many people just going for the paper rather than going to take full advantage of the learning opportunity and actually getting something out of it besides the paper. You're back to needing hours to see if they know anything or they're just good at bullshitting.
Meanwhile, your process is selecting for people who have a big debt to pay off just to break even. They'll be needing more pay if that's going to happen.
The real solution is to bring back the entry level and probationary positions. That's where you find out if a young and inexperienced person has what it takes to learn the job and be trusted with actual responsibility.
It's interesting that employers filter by degree, and then moan that they can't find enough qualified people. Perhaps they're filtering them out.