Student loans - a life sentence

[funeralcrasher]

Forget about getting married and buying a home. This generation is thinking about next month's payment.

"My student loan debt is my biggest source of stress in my life at the moment," said Steve Desroches, a 2002 graduate from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "I live paycheck to paycheck."

The degree left Desroches, who works for a newspaper on Cape Cod, $50,000 in debt with no savings. He's unable to buy a needed car or to even think about entering Massachusetts's "out of control" real estate market.

The repayments were so financially restrictive he briefly considered declaring bankruptcy, until he learned it wouldn't affect his student loans because they're federally guaranteed.

"My feelings about my degree now? My graduate education was invaluable [to my career], but it wasn't worth $50,000, or more accurately, it isn't worth the debt. My options are definitely limited."

I can soooo relate. I've put a lot of thought behind teaching but the one thing that keeps coming back is the low pay. It's what I want to do but I simply cannot afford it -and- pay my student loans off.

At the same time with IT work being outsourced and offshored I'm not sure what my future holds in this field either. What stays here won't pay as much as it used to. Some of the support centers still in American only pay $7/hr for entry level techs. Compare with 28-32k salaries a few years ago.

God this is depressing me.

Off to work.

Comments

[pkbarbiedoll.livejournal.com]

Yet we're told high-tech jobs are the future of this country! The sheer absurdity of it all astounds me.

[bedivere.livejournal.com]

We were just talking in our company last technology summit how hard its been to find qualified people for many of our tech positions. People studying CS in the past few years has dropped something like 60%.

[pkbarbiedoll.livejournal.com]

Where are these companies and what skills are being sought?

I've found a few in Atlanta that offered $30k/yr with no benefits for full time plus weekends. but that really wasn't what I had in mind. Hopefully having an associates degree will count for something..

[bedivere.livejournal.com]

My particularly company just does consulting, and has offices all over the place. So the IT candidates are basically technical architects and developers, mostly J2EE, .NET, or Content Management people.

[pkbarbiedoll.livejournal.com]

what is a technical architect?

[bedivere.livejournal.com]

In our company, the person's role is to do the technical design on a project. What that entails varies from project to project, but generally its doing database design, application architecture, object modeling and documenting all of that in the technical specs. Usually we end up doing some portion of the development too.

[pkbarbiedoll.livejournal.com]

So unless one had advanced programming skills, or project management experience breaking into these jobs isn't so possible? What I mean to ask is, are there any intermediate positions or have most of these been offshored by now?

[bedivere.livejournal.com]

Actually, our company doesn't offshore at all. Mainly because the level of interactivity with our clients being so high, it doesn't work. Not to mention, in software developement in particular, the quality of work you get from offshoring not very high, we don't want to deliver subpar product.

As far as positions go, you don't need project management skills at all, just a fair amount of development experience and a fair amount of education (not sure if they require a BS or not). There are lower level and intermediate development positions or contract-to-hire positions, and as time goes by you get moved up.

There's also front-end people - i.e. flash, CSS, graphic design, etc... but i'm not sure how that works since thats not what I do, but I'm guessing thats not you either.

If you want, you can send me your C.V. and I can see if our company has anything open that matches up, we have an Atlanta office.