It sucks being poor

There was a pretty good article on MSN.com about the staggering debt that people who are about 30 have taken on.

Here are three important paragraphs that sum up the situation:

In myriad ways, the economics of being 30 have changed for the worse. A college degree is now the minimum required to find a place in the working world that affords some job satisfaction and material comfort. But it doesn't offer protection against turmoil in the labor market, as it once did. Nor does it guarantee such things as health insurance or a retirement plan. And real earnings for college graduates without an advanced degree have fallen four years in a row, for the first time since the 1970s.

The cost of higher education, however, has increased so dramatically in the past decade and a half -- up by 63% at public schools and 47% at private -- that more students have to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend, ensuring that many of them are paying off those loans well into their 40s.

Almost two-thirds of students have to borrow money to get through school; as many as one-quarter may be accumulating credit-card debt to help pay for tuition.

In my experience, people who didn’t get undergraduate degrees (or who don’t use them) who go into service-based industries are doing better than many people who went to graduate school. Read: An experienced waiter easily makes more than the average office lackey. They may have much less debt, and have started earning good income at least four years earlier than people who went to college. Many are able to save up for 5-10 years and pay for college outright- a lot longer than it takes to pay off student loans if you go to college first.

Heck, I would encourage high school graduates to work on their service skills before (or during) going to college. Service work may hit a salary cap for all but a few elite workers pretty early on, but if college and graduate training doesn’t work out, you can always go back to bartending, even in a bad economy. You can't alwys fall back on a master’s in political science.