American Gentry, or, the GOP's College-Educated Whites

[Santander]

You're not saying anything people don't already know. And quoting literally half an article doesn't make your post any more interesting.

[Santander]

I mean a lot of the dem base by this same basis are people who got tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt majoring in useless sjw degrees which didnt have good job prospects at all and they ended up working jobs people with high school grads can as well.

The actual number of people who do this is relatively low, and the number of people who do this and end up hundreds of thousands in debt is basically non-existent. People with 6-figure student loan balances almost always have graduate and/or professional degrees, and almost never in a "SJW" subject.

Even in a market economy, we need some people who are motivated by things other than money, or "ROI", such as teachers, whom I think the vast majority of people can agree should be educated to degree level.

[Santander]

What is a major with good or bad job prospects?

Mitt Romney majored in English in college. Seems like it worked out okay for him.

Meanwhile one of my college classmates got a BBA in marketing and worked at an Enterprise car rental counter after graduation. Not to belittle the esteemed and valuable rental car industry, but I don't see how taking a car reservation and giving someone the keys is a job that requires a college degree or why that is meaningfully different from getting a Medieval history degree and working at a coffee shop. At least the barista at the coffee shop enjoyed four years of rich intellectual life while the marketing major was taking multiple choice tests and reading incredibly dumbed down business textbooks.

Mittens' father was the Governor of Michigan. Math is a major with objectively good job prospects if you have even the most basic social skills and the motivation to get a "real job". And if the history major and marketing major went to the same school, the history major was probably sitting in canned lectures taught by an underpaid adjunct who moonlights as an Uber driver.

[Santander]

They get away with saying they aren't part of the elite because they live in mid-sized cities and aren't part of the cultural elite. In fact, however, they have more money than many of the cultural elites in the big cities that they disdain.

You're right.
Only in the US can millionaires claim not to be in the elite.
The lack of self-awareness is painful.

Compared to the elite of Europe, most of the American elite are new money. And there is also massive inequality within the elite. The 10 richest American billionaires are worth at least $60 billion each, and three of them (Bezos, Musk, and Gates) are worth over $100 billion. They each have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of times the amount of money that a "mere" millionaire has.

There is a big inequality between Bezos, Musk and Gates. Gates has divested and diversified his way to quasi-infinite wealth, while Bezos and especially Musk are just founders riding the stock market and can borrow against their stock for liquidity.

[Santander]

Back before rocks cooled, and tuition was perhaps 10K per year in current dollars, rather than 60K, the idea among the upper, upper middle class, was you went to college and studied the humanities and social sciences, etc., to enrich your life, discover yourself as a person, hone your writing and reasoning skills, and then went to "trade school," be it law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. I suspect there is not much currency left in that ideal now. It's just too prohibitively expensive.

I just want to say that Engineering is most likely going to be a 4 year undergrad degree. Unless I am missing something ?

Perhaps.That is certainly the most typical. Engineering was outside my interest area, so I never paid any attention to it.

It's actually more common these days for engineers to have master's degrees. But relatively few "engineering" degrees are granted in true engineering disciplines these days. (i.e. civil and to some extent mechanical engineering)

[Santander]

An average senior SWE at a mid-prestige firm makes about 120 base , 150 TC. That’s probably what a senior law associate makes with the feds in an expensive city as a GS-14 or working in a law office with 30 other lawyers in a place like Tampa or Minneapolis.

You cannot compare someone making $120k in the Bay Area (poverty wage) vs $120k in Tampa or the job security of federal employment. You can get a 6-figure pension if you start your fed career as a GS-15 to max out the steps (hard to guarantee maxing out the steps if you start at GS-13 or 14), but then again, GS-15 jobs tend to be real jobs and are not that chill.