Ohio State - Free

[Skirtlet]

I am thinking that this is completely unrealistic.  Wanting an 18yo to be able to support a family is just silly.  Now, a 25 or 30yo with years of experience, that's a different story.  The world has not really been such that an 18yo could just go out the day after high school graduation and get a job that could completely support a family on day 1.  It has always been that you would have a few years under your belt, have gotten some work experience, and have moved up on the job ladder before you think you can do this.

Young adults in the 18-25 used to be able to support families just fine in the 1950s with only a high school diploma and one working spouse. The average woman in 1950 had a kid by 22.8 years old. I know very few 22 year olds that could support a spouse/kid with only a high school diploma today... or, 0. 

I'm talking the benefit of a degree over a lifetime. It's hard to make a decent income with no college education, unless you have a skilled trade or work your way up over the years of experience. No education hampers people's income potential even then. Average income in the USA stats include people with college degrees. People without any degree have a harder time getting a job that could support a family, whether they're 25 or 50. Years of work experience can help lessen the barrier of them not having a college degree if they work up to management or work their way up in general. By age 50, a college degree would be less significant because they have a good 30+ years of work experience by then, degree or no degree.

People not being able to afford a family at 18-25 easily shows the value of a college degree, whether a 2 or 4 year degree. At 25 or 30, people have work experience so a lack of a 4 year college degree is slightly less of an issue. A 2 year degree helps, but sometimes a 4 year degree isn't even enough anymore. A high school diploma used to be enough to get a good job. Now a college BA/BS degree barely is, but it's still better than nothing.

"Median weekly earnings for workers without a high-school diploma were $488, compared with $668 for those with a high-school diploma. Workers with some college or a two-year associate degree earned $761 and workers with bachelor's degrees or advanced degrees earned $1,193 – about two-and-a-half times the weekly earnings of workers without a high-school diploma and roughly twice the earnings of high-school graduates."

Trying to support a spouse and kids on $488 a week would be rough, and that's median incomes- not the poorest of the working poor with only a high school diploma.

I don't think a degree (2 year or 4 year degree) is a golden ticket, but it statistically helps. I know people with top tier degrees, along with JDs, that have been unemployed for a long time , especially during some of the economic downturns. I would not want to have no degree during a downturn unless I had impressive work experience.  

People could find a job with only a high school diploma that could support a spouse far more easily in the 1950s than now during their early adulthood, not specifically the day they turned 18. A high school diploma used to mean more and be enough for a decent number of careers. Fifty percent of the women born in 1950 had become mothers when they turned 22.8 years... making 25 rather 'old' to have kids now. It's not that people jumped out the gate at 18 back then and bought a house. It's that they could get married and afford a single household income with a spouse/kid more easily. Average houses back then weren't many multiples of starting salaries and it didn't usually take two parents working 40-80 hour weeks to support a house/kids back then.

The household median income in the U.S. in 1950 was $2,990 — roughly 40% of the median home value of $7,354. That includes people with only high school diplomas and college degrees, but the numbers were still far more in their favorite decades ago than now. There's no starting jobs that the average person now could find, take, and make enough to buy a house in a handful of years with a high school diploma alone. YouTube internet celebrity or rare anomaly aside, a high school diploma used to be valued by many employers more. It's not enough now.

Even minimum wage jobs in 1950 paid enough to make buying a house realistic within a decade or less. Now that's not the case. "Since the minimum wage was $0.75 an hour (on January 25, 1950), people working the minimum wage the average number of hours a week (43) made $1,677 a year. So, by working the average number of hours and making the federal minimum wage, you could make 52% of the average wage. In 1950, The estimated price of a new car or truck sold in the U.S. was $1,510, less than what minimum wage workers made a year. In 1950, a new house cost $8,450. So, if you never spent a penny of the money you earned, it would take roughly 5 years at the federal minimum wage to save the amount equal to that of a new house."

The bulk of teens in the U.S.A. now graduate from high school or get a GED, so most people have them and they're valued by employers less. If everyone had a college BA/BS, it would start taking a MA/MS and up to stand out to employers. Thankfully society isn't there yet and a BA/BS still is useful in job hunting. I agree with the Washington Post that the college degree (BA/BS) is about as valuable as what a high school diploma meant 50 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grad...-stagnant/

The Washington Post summarized it well: "Workers with a bachelor’s degree are forced into lower-skill jobs with lower wages. In other words, the bachelor’s degree is becoming the new high school diploma. Rather than a ticket to a high-paying, managerial job, the four-year degree is now the minimum ticket to get in the door to any job. Valletta wrote that his findings “suggest rising competition between education groups for increasingly scarce well-paid jobs.” 

We've devalued the high school diploma. We've started to devalue the college degree (BS/BA), but it still holds enough value to make it worth it. In a few decades, I would not want to enter the workforce without a master's degree or above. God forbid entering the workforce with only a high school diploma in a few decades. The master's degree could easily become, in a few decades, what a college BA/BS used to be in terms of rarity and value to employers. In the 1950s, a high school diploma was sufficient and valued.

People lived more cheaply in the 1950s too, on top of a high school diploma being of value to employers. Houses were smaller, people weren't spending hundreds a month on cell phones, some people didn't have central A/C, there were fewer cars/TVs/stuff per household on average and social culture was different too. 

Painting companies that pay $22+ an hour are extremely rare. It's $15/hour here no benefits, which is actually 'good' money around here and also hard to find. The pandemic has made jobs in retail, labor, and restaurant work easier in some cities, here included. I've seen jobs hiring here that want a master's but pay $15 an hour-- no college at all gets about half that wage. There's some outliers of companies that pay impressive money for unskilled work, but those are too often few and far between. Most young millennial with no degree aren't going to be making $22+ an hour with benefits outside of a pandemic with desperate employers, and this is the first pandemic in 100+ years.