[DePaul Bunyan]

Originally Posted by Shawn

Saw this a few weeks ago and thought of this thread:

Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley's wealth bubble

Some nice quotes: "One Apple employee was recently living in a Santa Cruz garage, using a compost bucket as a toilet. Another tech worker, enrolled in a coding bootcamp, described how he lived with 12 other engineers in a two-bedroom apartment rented via Airbnb. “It was $1,100 for a fucking bunk bed and five people in the same room. One guy was living in a closet, paying $1,400 for a ‘private room’.”

"Although he said his salary means he can afford to live a decent life, he finds the cost of living, combined with the terrible commute, unpalatable. He’s had enough, and has accepted a 50% pay cut to relocate to San Diego. . . We will be unequivocally better off than we are now.” He said he won’t miss some of the more mundane day-to-day costs, like spending $8 on a bagel and coffee or $12 on freshly pressed juice."

I've looked at moving to Coastal California, and the salary premium doesn't offset the massive housing premium or the general cost of living. Even at my level of employment / pay grade, it's necessarily a drop in quality of life. I'll pass.

I've thought about this. I could make 50-70% more basically anywhere in CA, but the housing premium would more than wipe that out, and then there are the highers costs of everything in CA, and the taxes.

Originally Posted by Shawn

Saw this a few weeks ago and thought of this thread:

Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley's wealth bubble

Some nice quotes: "One Apple employee was recently living in a Santa Cruz garage, using a compost bucket as a toilet. Another tech worker, enrolled in a coding bootcamp, described how he lived with 12 other engineers in a two-bedroom apartment rented via Airbnb. “It was $1,100 for a fucking bunk bed and five people in the same room. One guy was living in a closet, paying $1,400 for a ‘private room’.”

"Although he said his salary means he can afford to live a decent life, he finds the cost of living, combined with the terrible commute, unpalatable. He’s had enough, and has accepted a 50% pay cut to relocate to San Diego. . . We will be unequivocally better off than we are now.” He said he won’t miss some of the more mundane day-to-day costs, like spending $8 on a bagel and coffee or $12 on freshly pressed juice."

I've looked at moving to Coastal California, and the salary premium doesn't offset the massive housing premium or the general cost of living. Even at my level of employment / pay grade, it's necessarily a drop in quality of life. I'll pass.

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

I do NOT think you are doing students any favors by encouraging them to borrow money to get a bad education in a field with few employment options. I have seen one proposal for a reverse tuition scale whereby the easier it is to get a job following a given course of study, the lower the tuition charged to pursue it. Engineering students (US citizens) might be charged little or nothing. Students in "political science" and "ethnic studies" might be charged a lot.

Will never happen. College has become big business, and in states like California, the bureaucracy and administration that comes with such a system is too much of a golden goose for powerful public sector unions and the people in state government who rely on campaign contributions and patronage. It's a good idea, and coupled with tweaking bankruptcy laws to allow student debt to be discharged (thus removing the incentive for lenders to loan money for degrees that have poor returns) would go a long way to resolving the student debt crisis and getting college more affordable.