"in 2008, science and engineering doctorate holders up to three years out of school had just 1.5 percent unemployment"
I'm not worried about them not being able to pay their debts for undergraduate loans.
I'm not worried about them not being able to pay their debts for undergraduate loans.
Because I can guarantee you right now that a postdoc salary is horrible, especially considering the amount of work that goes into getting that PhD in the first place.
Being employed != being employed in their field, and being employed != being paid a livable wage that can simultaneously sustain student debt.
Furthermore, this adds nothing to your original belief that if people were to do something that benefits society, they would be financially stable. This statement cannot be any further from the truth.
You only have to look so far as teaching to see how wrong that idea is. Teachers are absolutely necessary, and yet in many places, teachers are heavily in debt and not being paid a livable wage. You don't even have to look far - in the Bay Area, the center of technology, school districts are facing massive staffing shortages because teachers simply are not able to live with the salaries they're offered, so they're no longer looking at the Bay as a viable option.
You and I have the immense luck of both being able to enjoy programming and having some measure of talent in it. On top of that, our mutual field is going through an extraordinary time of heavy demand and high salaries.
Not everyone is that lucky. It is absolutely factually and logically wrong to extrapolate your own lucky circumstances and impose them on people less fortunate than you. Not everyone can enjoy and be good in a field that is constantly hiring and paying very well. Not everyone who works hard gets the same opportunities at financial stability that we do. To look down on people and think that by doing something "meaningful" they can find financial stability is a horrible logical fallacy to make.
STEM PhD is currently at around 2.4 percent. But unemployment rate doesn't speak to income, they may be employed or underemployed and still having a touch time paying back student loans.
But nice to pick out one tiny figure from four articles to try to prove an irrelevant point. Let me remind you, your point was that people learning something useful to society won't have trouble finding jobs and paying off debt. But you've failed to provide any evidence backing your position, unless your position is everyone must get PhD's in STEM to be gainfully employed. Problem still stands that if everyone moves to that tract we will still have more candidates for jobs than actual jobs available.