Everyone who works hard has a right to live comfortably and not in fear of some giant cost coming forcing them to squirrel away piles of money.
Stem should be about building tomorrow and making a better society, the personal fortune building has polluted the field and is distracting us from more important problems. Having a $500,000 stock portfolio shouldn't be mandatory for a decent life.
There's a reason for our technological stagnations mapping to the rise in inequality.
STEM jobs generally pay more than non-STEM jobs, and I'd say graduate jobs range between $20-26/hr.
If someone without a degree is making $20/hr and you're making barely more than that, why the hell did you waste 4 years to get a degree? I know someone who is in this exact situation.
I'd honestly still be a programmer if the pay was poor. In fact, I do it for free quite a bit and I enjoy it more.
People are motivated by more than mindless greed and universities shouldn't be transactional skills training camps. It should be about building an enlightened and educated society.
College tuition in New Zealand are not structured like the United States. It's much more reasonable
But I refuse to be confined by the structures intentionally legislated by decades of Austrian economic policy to try to convince me that there is no alternative.
The debt could be erased, for example, if someone chooses a position of high societal ROI, such as say, an urban planner. Reward people if a need of society is satisfied.
Things can trivially be reshaped to encourage what we want instead of us always feeling pressured to do what we don't. Conforming our laws and incentives to a particular ideology wasn't necessary, it was a choice we can change.
Considering the low yield on treasury bonds it would be foolish to not invest that money into higher education. After all, if you just let it sit there it is going nowhere. It's neither going to employ people today, nor ensure that workers of the future are highly qualified.
The fact that you mentioned Austrian economics is actually quite relevant here. All economic theories are ideologically driven because there is no meaning of life. There is no objective metric to optimize for. Austrian economics' goal is the minimum possible economy. Inflation driven ideologies have the maximum possible economy as their goal. We get to choose what we want for ourselves and we definitively should use that power.
