The Real Cost of Grad School - $88,000

It's funny. If you go get an education and work hard, you'll make it. That's what the people on Fox News say. If it weren't for all those lazy, uneducated people just wanting hand-outs, America's economy would be in better shape and we wouldn't need welfare. I mean, the answer to solving the welfare problem in this country is education and hard work, right? Right. 

I sat down and calculated how much graduate school cost me recently. I went and got more education so I could be a better and harder worker, which I knew would come with some kind of investment cost. As a fully funded student who got paid to attend school, I thought I was doing something potentially great. I sought a dual master's degree, so I could become a rounded thinker and a more complete contributor to my field. Surely, with education and hard work, I would be worth at least as much as I was before I got my graduate degree.

When calculating how much graduate school cost me, I have to consider foregone wages for the entire duration from the day I quit my job to this day -- the day that I am employed again in my same field (I didn't switch). When I consider the amount I was making the day I left my job, I forewent just over $148,000 in wages. While in graduate school, I earned $32,000 over the entire period. In total, I forewent a net $116,400 in wages to attend graduate school. Graduate school cost me $116,400 in missed wages.

Then, I have to consider my changes in living expenses. Before going to grad school, I was spending about $18,000 per year to live in a suburban luxury townhome by my lonesome. That's a lot of money. So, I moved into an RV. In the RV, I paid rent, utilities, and for a storage unit. My living costs went from $18,000 per year to $7,700 per year. By moving from a luxury townhome to an RV, I saved roughly $10,260 per year. Over the ~2.8 year period, I saved roughly $28,700 in living costs. That feels good.

Regrettably, I also have to consider what grad school did for me in the way of market value. So far, it looks like my market value has fallen by a solid 40% from my value before I attended graduate school. Keeping in mind that I am not starting my career over and have instead built upon my worth, it sure seems fishy that I seem to now be worth 40% less than I was when I had a bachelor's degree. So, graduate school cost me 40% of my market value for an indefinite and unforeseeable period. 40% loss for more education in the same field. Yikes.

It appears that my net cost for graduate school was about $88,600 considering foregone wages and changes in living costs. But the tally doesn't stop there -- my choice to go to graduate school will now cost me 40% of every hour of every day I go to work until I rebuild my career to where it was before. Which may not be possible.

So, was graduate school worth it? I used to think so. Sometimes I think so. But when I see these numbers and my state of economy and employment, I'm afraid my answer is: Absolutely not. If I knew what I know now, I would have done things very differently. I wouldn't have attended graduate school. Instead, I would have continued with the RV plan, though perhaps my more minimal van plan, and I would have continued working my old job. I would have kept my wages, paid off my student loans that I already had, and I would have saved enough money to take off and roam for years.

It is difficult to account for all of this since hindsight is so easy to distort and see. But was graduate school worth two years of my life, $88,000 in foregone wages, and a 40% reduction of my market value? The answer is a resounding HELL NO. The myth of more education increasing market value drove me to seek more schooling and it was money poorly spent. I could have executed my van plan, paid off all my debt, and saved enough to road trip for years had I just stayed with my old job.

The analysis is preposterous, but I think it's incredibly sad to look at how much of a waste graduate school was, professionally and financially. Personally, I enjoyed it thoroughly -- it was probably one of the best experiences of my life -- but maybe there was another way to have a great experience than to go work my ass off to get more education, only to run myself bankrupt? Maybe I should have just saved my money and taken off on a multi-year road trip instead? Maybe I should have packed a backpack and headed to South America, New Zealand, and Asia instead? How much traveling and time could I have had with $88,000 worth of foregone wages? 

The answer is troubling. I could have done so much. Instead, I worked to find intellectual fulfillment through an instrumental pathway. The institution is an instrumental pathway and I wish I had chosen to travel and read books instead.

Someday, I will follow up with this. I could find a better job tomorrow. But I could also become a shoe salesman. The future is uncertain. But the past is a lesson.

A New Kind of Social Justice Issue

When I set off to earn my master's degree, my thought was that my realistic, worst-case scenario afterward would be a job like the one I had before I got my higher degree. I figured there was a distinct possibility of no advancement and the same pay (plus or minus a reasonable percentage for starting out again), but that in the long-run, the master's degree would dissolve any potential ceilings for advancement. I figured the job market would welcome me back with a great resume that spans 15 years of constant and consistent performance and a solid set of in-demand degrees.

While I have been welcomed back and have found work, I find myself severely underemployed. I have sent out resume after resume to jobs that I am qualified for at the very least, and even "overqualified" for. Not many jobs actually need a master's degree -- but it should be a benefit to an application. After sitting on an interview committee and watching the ONLY candidate with an advanced degree in the technical skills that we were seeking get flushed on count of him being "overqualified," I realized something big: Job hunting and the way the job market works creates new kinds of social justice issues.

Social justice boils down to the necessity to combat discrimination against a person for any trait or condition that creates exemptions to their potential success. A useful definition I found online includes this:

In conditions of social justice, people are "not be discriminated against, nor their welfare and well-being constrained or prejudiced on the basis of gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, age, race, belief, disability, location, social class, socioeconomic circumstances, or other characteristic of background or group membership" (Toowoomba Catholic Education, 2006).

(http://gjs.appstate.edu/social-justice-and-human-rights/what-social-justice)

The part of the definition that lends to my argument is the "social class, socioeconomic circumstances, or other characteristic of background or group membership." Those with higher degrees are part of every single one of those items. Social class is often a function of education, socioeconomic circumstances doesn't necessarily just mean indigent, and those with higher degrees are definitely part of a group membership. Those with higher degrees are part of a group that are well educated, yet not necessarily part of a higher economic class privilege.

After hearing so much about "overqualified" while on the job market, I came to view this word as a hidden and pervasive social justice issue. Those who are overqualified are discriminated against -- by those in power and those in the position of hiring. In workplaces dominated by those with bachelor or lower degrees, "overqualified" is a word used to create a form of discrimination that eliminates someone on count of "too much education" rather than too little.

The space where this becomes a problem is when higher degrees end up broadly excluding a person from doing positions that they are well suited for and that they can do and do well. If a person is to apply for a job that requires a bachelor's degree, yet a person with a master's degree is flushed on count of being "overqualified," we have a major problem. That problem is the discrimination against a person for having "too much education."

The strange thing about this argument is that it flips the conventions on social justice. Social justice positions are built on the idea that there is a group that cannot be discriminated against -- the wealthy, the white, and the educated.

As a person on the job market with great experience and education, after being flushed from pile after pile of jobs that require a bachelor's degree, I can say with confidence that I am getting flushed because I am "overqualified." To not even be interviewed is an indicator that I was put into a pile of a very particular kind. After seeing the interview process where the guy in the room with a bachelor's degree was vehemently against hiring a guy with a master's degree on count of him being "overqualified" and because "he would buck the group dynamic by being too good at these tasks," I suggest that the problem is systemic and discriminatory. After being on countless interview committees in my previous life where this was the reason for flushing countless candidates, the problem is here and it is real.

I am now weary of those who wield overqualification as a word used to cleave candidates from an interview pile. What this does is sets the bar high, but the bar is intended to cleave both those too far below the bar and those above the bar. Those above the bar are well-educated, polished candidates and are being cut on count of a membership that they belong to -- a social class that is now exempted from positions because of their education. When did overqualification become such a negative thing? Why are those in power by majority and status quo (bachelor's degrees) able to shed both those below their status and those above? The problem is systemic, but because of our conventional views on social justice, those above the bar of status quo are somehow exempt from discrimination protection.

I now understand those using this word to be part of the institutional structure of mediocrity and idiocy. At what point in our social development did we decide that those who work too hard or are well educated are both targets of our discrimination and exempt from complaints of discrimination? The world is broken.

The Rational Universe

One of the most important lessons I have learned over the past few years is that the rules we make about the world to navigate it are all wrong. And they're right. And there are no rules.

A belief in a rational universe is the construction of one in our mind. It's an invention that we make up with varying levels and kinds of structure to understand what's going on around us. And it's all made up in our heads. Kind of.

The rules we "discover" through our everyday ramblings are unique and based on our own experiences and our ability to map and interpret the systems that we are encountering. But the rules that we make up from these experiences are nothing more than cloudy approximations of a falsely objective system for which we invent a rule.

One thing I have noticed lately is that rule breakers are almost all of our heroes. Superheroes defy physics, Harry Potter defies the rules of magic, and Captain Kirk always wins by reinventing the rules to be in his favor.

The rules we make for ourselves based on some imaginary sense of an objective truth or reality are limited to our own experiences or anecdotal experiences of others. The rule doesn't exist, it's just a foggy approximation of how we think we should deal with all other situations that appear similar in the future.

The problem with rules arises when our rules become self-imposed limitations. When systems change, cultures change, or the foggy thug we call "reality" shifts unbenounced to us, our rules no longer apply.

Rules drive our sense of "should." I think this word is overlooked. It is a word mystically rooted in our sense of making rules and living by them. Most importantly, "should" becomes the way we exert force on those around us based on the belief in the rules that we faithfully think exist in some objective way.

"You shouldn't do that or else you will __________." That's a rule being imposed on someone else based on our own experience. It is the seed of culture.

It's a fascinating way of living -- viewing the world through a lens of rules based on our own experiences. Then believing that the rules that we form for ourselves will work for other people.

Most interestingly, the rules that we believe exist and then live by would appear to be the mechanism by which classes are formed and our social behaviors are designed. The wealthy CEO views the world through a completely different set of rules than that of the minimum wage burger flipper. If they lived in the same reality, how could they possibly end up in such different places?

My sense of "should" shifted a few years ago. My sense of rules about the world started crumbling more recently. I no longer view the world as objectively as I once did and I no longer treat experiences as a way to form new absolutes. I no longer have the same fear-based method for making rules and I am far less sold on my world view than I ever was before. The effect has been freeing.

I no longer think there's a right way to live or a good income to have or a right answer. Many will add those up and come up with an answer that appears entirely irrational. Well, the world isn't rational. It never has been. Some try to impose rational structure, but with only the self-illusion of success.

Living in an RV was supposed to be a bad idea. It's not. For me, at least. I know that most would not choose to do it and for good reason. But those reasons don't resonate with me because I have a different set of drives, skills and experiences that make it possible. Even highly enjoyable.

But that's the way every situation, lifestyle, and experience is for every living being. Hot coals are a bad idea to walk on, yet some do it anyway. Fighting a Gorn is a bad idea, but James T. Kirk does it anyway. There are no rules; only limitations that we impose on ourselves through the cloudy experience of the flawed infancy of consciousness that the human race collectively enjoys.

Live lightly. Observe the experiment. Fear nothing. Accept what is.

The Mortgage Crisis

People think I'm crazy for living in an RV. I will give them that -- it is crazy to live in 200 square feet of total space. But when I look at my mortgage statements for my house that I am renting out, I realize that I'm not actually the crazy one.

I bought my house in 2006 for an undisclosed amount. It's 2014, a full eight years later. I looked at my mortgage statement the other day, and even though my mortgage is a 30 year-fixed traditional mortgage (not interest only or any of the other scams out there) with a reputable company, I have only paid off $20,000 of the total amount I paid.

$20,000 sounds great, but after eight years? Even with the equity that the local housing market has picked up lately, I still might only have $40,000 in gross equity if I am lucky. If I sold it tomorrow, once sellers fees and capital gains taxes were taken out, that number would be significantly less.

After eight years of ownership, I own ten percent of my property.

I should be thankful for what I do have here -- most pay rent, like the folks renting my house now, and walk away with nothing, so I'm doing better than nothing. But where is all this money going?

My mortgage costs alone are around $11,500 per year, not including HOA and insurance payments. When mortgage rates were over 6%, I was paying more like $14,000 per year in mortgage alone. Over the last eight years, I have paid somewhere on the order of $105,000 in mortgage payments alone.

If the numbers made you tune out, the summary is that I have paid around $105,000 in mortgage payments in the last eight years, but I have only paid off $20,000 of the total cost of the house.

When I think about my choice to live in an RV, I realize it's crazy, but what's more crazy is the huge dollar amounts that go into housing costs and how little is ours. Is owning really "owning"? Who actually owns the house when you pay $105,000 and only get $20,000 of that over eight years? The answer is: Not you.

I currently live in a way that most can't, won't, or don't even want to admit exists. But am I the crazy one for wanting to save more of my money while I'm young and free? Are people who pay and pay and pay with nothing in return the sane one's? Or is everyone living in a van down by the river and they just don't know it? It appears to me that everyone is in worse shape than I'm in, but the facade of the American lifestyle has them believing that they're actually making it and doing well. I'm afraid steep rents and mortgages that don't amortize in a reasonable amount of time are the new form of slavery. I will inevitably have to give into slavery again in the future, but no sooner than I absolutely have to.

Life Lesson # 11,437

If life lessons happened every day, I have had over 11,000 opportunities to learn something new. So many of these daily life lessons appear to be cyclical and recurring. The one I have been encountering over and over lately is this: You can do everything right and still fail.

There appears to be a pervasive cultural myth that there is a "right" or a "wrong" way to do things. It motivates us to behave a certain way in order to get to a desired end. It is difficult to comprehend that if you truly do everything right that failure is even a possibility. Something tiny, unseen, or just misaligned makes the world appear fragile.

The fragility in the world is what I sometimes run into. Living in an RV year around, I have a keen connection to the fragility of the world around me. The freezing temperature of water is one example -- we are dependent on water that is kept above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, yet much of the U.S. freezes every night for much of the year. Life is fragile, but so are all of the systems around us.

Doing everything right is relative, but as it applies to life lessons, the trick is to keep all water flowing at above that 32 degree minimum. So many things can happen to restrict, stop, or divert the flow of liquid water. So many things can happen in the way our lives work to do the same with our life systems.

Relationships, jobs, school -- all of it is water. The trick is to keep all pipes warm and flowing. After applying to numerous full-time positions, networking for the right relationships, and building my identity for resilience and thoughtful living, I have found that I can still fail.

There was a time in my life when I thought that if I structured everything rigidly and followed the path of least resistance, I would succeed. I did -- I am succeeding -- but I am also failing. The life lesson is that every success is simultaneously a failure of something else. There are no right ways or true successes. There are only trade offs for success in one space for the sacrifice of another space.

My professional work experience brought relative success. I got out of college, landed a job before I graduated, and continued to work that job for a decade before I finally quit. In the meantime, I lost sight of what personal fulfillment was, the art of living a good life, and of how to be free from debt and the depression of captivity.

Right now, I can sleep until 9 AM every day if I want to, apply for jobs until my fingers go numb from typing, and I can still fail. I can flaunt my fancy resume with my fancy job history and my nearly four college degrees, and be sloughed out of every pile of applicants on count of being "overqualified" or even "under-qualified." I can be the most loving, attentive, generous, and caring boyfriend in the world and still be discarded like garbage. I can preemptively replace car parts and take special care of all of my vehicle systems and still have a car break down on part of a faulty part.

The life lesson is not just that one can do everything right and still fail, but that for every failure, there is a success. The success is that for every job that I am not selected for, every girl who is skeptical of my RV lifestyle, and for every car part that fails, I am able to get back up, brush myself off, and come back stronger than before. For every negative life lesson, there is a positive one -- we can only choose which lesson to focus on. For every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction.

Job Interview Culture

Can I call job interviewing a “culture”? Why not; Everything else is a culture these days. After being on interview committees for my current temporary job and preparing myself for professional interviews, I have come to view the process with skepticism and disdain. There are few processes that are as poisonous as job interviews, at least in the way they appear to be approached by most.

The toxic environment of job interviews and the culture that surrounds the creation of the environment appears to be born from false assumptions, establishment of hierarchy, and intimidation. While the job interviews that I have contributed to running have been placed in casual contexts in casual clothing with an intentionally upbeat vibe, I have guttural reactions to the modes and ways others approach the interview process and the interviewer position.

The first point in a long list that will not be covered here is choice of questions. There are pre-made lists to choose questions from, professionally phrased questions that sound good to some, and functional questions that help isolate a candidate’s competency for a particular role. After seeing the way some think of and their motivations behind asking certain questions, I have come to absolutely detest questions that specifically seek a falsified response. I am talking about questions that will almost certainly result in a lie. The problem does not arise from pushing someone to lie – that can be very valuable – the problem lies in not knowing that the question you’re asking is going to illicit a bold faced lie.

Here’s an example of the above: “Will you be happy entering data 20 hours per week from data sheets gathered in the field?” The applicant has three options here: 1) Realize that this is an asinine question and challenge it, 2) Tell the absolute truth, or 3) Lie their face off and tell the interviewer what they want to hear. Options 1 and 2 will almost certainly eliminate the candidate. Option 3 will likely get a passing answer. Congratulations; You have just witnessed a bold faced lie from your potential employee and you likely had no idea they were lying. Instead, you lapped it up and called it a “professional” answer. Given a spectrum of happiness where nails on a chalk board is unhappy and eating gelato on a summer day is super happy, does entering data 20 hours a week EVER fall nearer to eating gelato on a summer day than to nails on a chalk board? Absolutely not. If you want to see how someone lies, ask them a question like this.

The second point will be questions that just aren’t your business. Like the question above. Someone’s projected happiness when talking about a job isn’t relevant. Sure, it’s good to know if someone is going to hate their life if they accept this job, but it can be assumed that by applying to a job, the person has implicitly admitted and accepted that they are willing to do the job, regardless of their happiness. At certain levels, it is important to know if someone will be happy working 60-80 hours per week instead of 40 doing executive work, but asking someone if they will be happy doing certain other jobs is… none of your business and instead triggers a lie.

My third point about job interview culture is that it is based on establishment of hierarchy throughout the entire process. Not only is the interview committee in a position of power, inherently, by offering a job to begin with, but those on the interview committee get to circle, sniff butts without consequence to them (all new candidates are easily replaceable), and bite at will. The interviewee is in a position lacking power and ability to answer honestly without consequence, even on questions that are irrelevant to their willingness to do a job and do it well. The establishment of hierarchy is built into the process as a gateway into a job and it comes by the way people in the room orient themselves in relation to the candidate, the way each member presents themselves, and the way in which comfort or discomfort is manifested through body language, spoken language, and choices of questions.

I guess my final point for this medium on this topic is the intimidation factor. Born from questions that make you lie, aren’t your business, are irrelevant to the job itself, and the way an interview committee establishes hierarchy either over or in partnership with their candidate, intimidation is a part of interviews and it gains little. Of course nobody wants someone who can’t handle a little intimidation on the job, but intimidating someone in the cockamamie environment and culture of job interviews will not get the needed information about how someone will work in a group. Instead, it shows how well a person can fleece you, kiss your ass, and handle superficial presentation of themselves. It is unfortunate that some interviewers cultivate an intimidating interview environment when it isn’t called for.

Strangely, this all came out of being on interview committees for new employees. I was an interviewer, not an interviewee. What I realized is that many interviewers do not take into account the context of the job being applied for, the nature of some question styles as lie creators, and the fact that some questions are irrelevant to hiring someone who can do a job and do it well. Will someone be happy doing data entry 20 hours per week? Sure, it might not make them want to bleed out in a public place, but when compared with walking barefoot on the Italian coastline, the answer is a resounding no.

The typical American culture of job interviewing is not only broken, it’s preposterous. Screening applicants for a job needs to come from an understanding for the context of the job, whether the candidate will do the job well, and whether the person will be a good fit for the group culture.  Finding answers to these questions will not come out of a typical job interview. Instead, interviewers trigger a lot of lies, canned ass kissing, and irrelevant details for finding good candidates. Instead of asking, “Will you be happy doing data entry 20 hours per week?” tell the candidate the job overview in simple, understandable terms, then let them process it as part of their decision-making process to select or reject the job after the interview. Then show interest in their history as it applies for the job, look for lies on their resume, and have a human conversation with them. Ask them what their favorite color is, what made them choose their college degree, what they like to do in their free time, and what they hope to gain from this position.

Be human and allow potential candidates to be human, too. Posturing, false pretenses, and traditional professionalism are a disease of prior generations and it is time to abandon them.

Confessions of a Van Dweller, Act 1

Any poor soul who has been following along knows that I'm in my early 30's. They  also know that I abandoned a successful career at the age of 28 to attend graduate school. They may also know that I left a luxury townhome in a nice community along Colorado's highly-coveted Front Range to get my master's degree and to save money by living more minimally while still young and single. Why would anyone in their right mind do such a thing? One answer might be very surprising. 

When I abandoned my old life, I was looking to find knowledge and to reset my career with more education in my line of work. I was looking to better myself and to set a new career potential for myself with more education. My hypothesis was that I would start about where I left off once I finished school and would then have fewer impenetrable ceilings above me preventing my ascent into even better jobs. 

A dirty secret is that I don't really care for "jobs" -- a place you go to do tasks for someone else's vision for money so you can eat food, have a roof over your head, and drive a car. Jobs, in the rawest form don't interest me. But I don't have a choice, really. I wasn't born into money, so my post-child life has been largely dominated by... jobs.

In contemplating jobs, I realized that when you look at the system of the American life, we work jobs to pay off debts that we had no real choice in taking on, and the debt becomes the motivation to keep working. Hobson's Choice is where you are offered two options and one option isn't viable at all, meaning that you have been offered only one choice. For example, you can either choose to work and pay off the debt, or you can be homeless and/or die. Yikes. 

This line of thinking permeated my 20's. I realized that the house I lived in made it so I had no chance of escaping debt. Rent prices made me realize that rents are just unpayable debts. Then I realized that I couldn't bear to continue the organismic lifecycle of humanity by bringing another me into the world. I couldn't bring myself to consider bringing a new consciousness into a system where we are all enslaved by default of our existence. 

Like a captive panda, I couldn't bear the thought of having kids. Other panda's might handle the system better -- of course they are more successful. But then I realized that I could establish myself in this system even better, but it would require extreme action. I realized that if I could shift my financial system and potential, maybe I could live in a stable system where I did not feel enslaved by debt. 

The confession is that one of my reasons for abandoing my old life to live in an RV is so I could potentially have a family someday. Having a family is a relatively easy task, but since I can't seem to ignore debt and especially of the three-decade variety, I wanted to have a family on terms where I wasn't a slave to debt and neither were they.

It may be counterintuitive that one would live in an RV in order to eventually have a family. And it's not that I want a family or just any family; I want to have a family where I am not living day to day under complete financial oppression and having to work so much that I can't be there for my imaginary kids and imaginary wife. I set out to abandon everything and reset my system so I could provide something better, safer, and more complete. I was seeking liberation from captivity.