I recall reading this in the New Yorker when it appeared and had the following thoughts then: (1) why, if you are in such dire financial straits, do you have fresh cut flowers, and (2) why would you graudate with a music degree and then expect to be able to make a living?
I graduated in 1998 with a degree in English and knew right out of the gate that the finance jobs for which I was interviewing would not fall into my lap unless I could prove that, in addition to being able to parse Shakespeare, I could also parse a set of financial statements.
And so I learned useful skills.
Degrees are great. They are a luxury when you are able to be educated with having debt.
But education is an onerous albatross if you come from a family that cannot afford to pay for your education. Better, then, to work full time and complete your degree over time.
Middle-class kids are sold a bill of goods when it comes to higher education, especially when the education they are pursuing will not provide the skills with which to generate sufficient income.
One great thing about finances--eventually, the numbers will force a correction in unsustainable practices.
The underlying reason for her situation is / was that she acted according to her perception of where she thought she should be rather than the reality of where she was. She ran her life through a distorted lens. She felt that hip, successful writers should have a certain type of lifestyle, starting with the belief that such people must live in NYC. It was all downhill from there.
People usually don't recognize such delusions until cold, hard economic reality forces them to. The problem we have, at a macro level, is that millions of Americans have lived this way for years. Psychologically, we passed a tipping point and began living according to our expectations instead of our means. Hence our massive consumer debt. Pulling the lens back even farther, our society has been living this way for years. We've made huge commitments to public programs designed to ensure a high quality of life (Medicare, Social Security), commitments that we can't possibly afford.
Just like Visa was willing to underwrite the author's lifestyle, so the rest of the world has been willing to underwrite America's way of life. Eventually, she had to make painful changes. Our society is about to do the same.
It's hard to believe someone with a graduate degree from Columbia can make such poor decisions. I don't blame her for wanting to live in New York, and she could have easily kept doing so. A lot of people have 60k+ in student loans, and she was earning a good amount given her degree. She was just dumb.
The one really big mistake I see in there was that she just didn't calculate her taxes and spent all the money she was earning instead of 2/3 of it. That, and continuing to buy fresh-cut flowers, $45 dinners, and $200 antique lamps when her checking account is $1500 overdrawn and a giant tax payment looming. At least she came to her senses with only four figures in credit card debt. She's probably doing just fine now (this was '99).
The problem I have with people who write these reminiscences--or, more specifically, those who link to them--is that it always looks to me like they're just a thinly-veiled excuse: look, this person was foolish, too, so I don't have to feel bad about doing the same things.
Or, more bluntly, the kid in Nashville who drives himself into bankruptcy buying a giant plasma screen TV and a lifted F-350 is fundamentally no different than the sensitive liberal arts kid who drives herself into bankruptcy buying antique lamps, fresh flowers, and paying a silly rent to live in NYC: they're both unrealistic wannabes screwing up their lives trying to pay their way into a 'cool' persona.
"The problem I have with people who write these reminiscences--or, more specifically, those who link to them--is that it always looks to me like they're just a thinly-veiled excuse: look, this person was foolish, too, so I don't have to feel bad about doing the same things."
I missed the memo in which Megan said she got herself into debt by getting degrees that don't give her skills and living above her means.
But education is an onerous albatross if you come from a family that cannot afford to pay for your education.
This is an overly broad statement to make, as the returns to education (or, more properly the gap between the degreed and non-degreed) are growing. Even for a relatively poor person (and this woman appears decidedly middle class), getting a degree from a state institution need not imply an "onerous albatross" of debt.
What this decade old article highlights is not that a college education isn't worth it, but that going into debt for a fancy college education isn't worth it. Although even here, the example provided isn't necessarily the best one. The woman apparently was (and is?) making a living in the literary field, and it's not clear to me she would have managed to get a meaningful place in this sector had she taken advantage of her New Jersey residency by getting a sheepskin from Rutgers. I've got nothing against state schools mind you -- I went to a text book example of a non-prestigious, state-supported commuter college. I just don't have any illusions having gone there would have been helpful launching a career in journalism or the arts.
The returns to education are growing only if your education is in a field demanded by the nation's employers.
Music and the arts, while nice businesses to be in, are notoriously competitive and underpaid. Getting a college education in the arts is properly the province of the wealthy. Financing your college debt by writing scores for Broadway shows is a quick way to penury.
Has anyone else noticed how many parents, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, raise their children to belive that money isn't important. So many high school and college kids have no idea how much it costs to live even a decent middle class lifestyle.
What an extraodinarily narrow collection of comments!
The test of an experience is all in what one got out of it. And what better time to seek experience than one's twenties, especially in an epoch where adult life doesn't really seem to begin until one's thirties.
The debt-mongers (banks and universities) have done enormous financial harm to an entire generation. In that sense Ms. Daum is not unique. But as well as belonging to this sadly manipulated generation, she also belongs to a long line of young people coming to the city to learn what the schools and the provinces could not teach them. It is an honorable, admirable and often distinguished line in both its successes and its failures.
Whether it be Rome, Paris, London or New York, the great cities have always had something special to teach about life. And like war, they are great teachers indeed. To those who like Ms. Daum have found out what that is, I say "well done." She may have misspent her twenties, but it doesn't sound to me like she wasted them.
The writer went to Nebraska after the 1999 article ran. She regularly reported on her changing life there for NPR. She ended up writing a novel based on her experiences. She moved to LA 3 years ago and is a columnist for the LA Times.
She may have misspent her twenties, but it doesn't sound to me like she wasted them.
Indeed.
If you look at her website it appears she now enjoys considerable success in her chosen field. Again, I think going into debt for a prestige sheepskin makes very little sense for many fields of endeavor (and living beyond one's means is just stupid, no matter what). But if you want to do serious writing for magazines or newspapers, or you want to write for Hollywood, or do political consulting, or work at a high level in public policy (check out the CVs of Obama staffers) -- if you want to excel, in other words, at a career where most of the people studied liberal arts in college -- it seems to me a prestige degree is highly valuable. Think our own Megan would have a gig at The Atlantic without a stint at at prestige school or two? What's really stupid it seems to me is going into debt for an expensive but non-exclusive, non-famous private university. If you're going to be a 22-year old with a $175k debt load, at least make sure your degree is from a school that everybody has heard of and admires. Also, my impression is that the very most prestigious schools -- the Ivies + MIT + Stanford + a few others -- are rich enough so that nobody need borrow 100% of the cost of going there.
Has anyone else noticed how many parents, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, raise their children to belive that money isn't important. So many high school and college kids have no idea how much it costs to live even a decent middle class lifestyle.
This is not surprising, given how many ostensibly middle class parents have no idea how much it costs to live a decent middle class lifestyle, seeing as how they didn't work and pay for it, but instead charged/interest-only mortgaged it and now expect a government handout.
Well, I'm going to stick my neck out here and identify with Ms. Daum. Parts of this essay had such familiarity for me that they made me dizzy. I will cop to the same pretensions and behavior, and ended up in similar (though not as extreme) straits. The difference is that I lived in Manhattan as a resident, though still beyond my means, and jumped ship at the same time that I went from being a resident to being an attending. But the manner of living she describes, with the attendant expenditures to which ones pays far too little attention... well, it felt eerie to read about it, since I knew it all too well.
Glad, however, to have turned the corner into solvency in northern New England.
$1055 for 400 square feet in NYC? I'm paying $1100 for
I'm in minor debt (around ten grand or so) but I can identify with the "fuck it" mentality here. It's always on your mind, a weight on your chest that simultaneously informs every decision you make but puts you in such a black mood where even the smart decisions don't make sense. Sure I should stay in, but the $50 I'd save is so meaningless in the grand scheme of things I might as well make that dinner date at the pub. Once the numbers get so big it becomes meaningless to think about the little lifestyle changes that will help me out over the next year or so in favor of the big, sweeping gestures that will lop it off a chunk at a time. Big, sweeping gestures that may or may not ever happen
Or, more bluntly, the kid in Nashville who drives himself into bankruptcy buying a giant plasma screen TV and a lifted F-350 is fundamentally no different than the sensitive liberal arts kid who drives herself into bankruptcy buying antique lamps, fresh flowers, and paying a silly rent to live in NYC: they're both unrealistic wannabes screwing up their lives trying to pay their way into a 'cool' persona.
Actually, I think the perception - at least among "the elite" - is probably the opposite. Many read this, nodding along sympathetically, thinking "Yeah, that was foolish, but I understand her desire to live in the City, and fresh-cut flowers seems like a nice way to keep color and beauty in your life. It's sad that she's not able to live that way..." Meanwhile, those same people, upon reading about your "kid in Nashville" buying himself a plasma screen and F-350, would scoff and exclaim loudly about stupid wasteful rednecks with their big TVs and big trucks, tsk tsk, how irresponsible they are.
Heh. This article was sooo familiar. I, too, came from a nice middle-class suburban existence and somehow conceived the notion that NYC urban living must somehow be more culturally authentic. Or something, I can't quite remember anymore. Took me a while to realize that you don't catch "culture" like some communicable disease just by virtue of living in Manhattan.
Fortunately for me I did the cost-benefit analysis around the time I did my first grad degree, and I went into a paying line of work rather than music performance (my chosen flavor of youthful cultural authenticity). Maybe I was lucky that my dad was a small businessman, rather than an artsy-academic type, so no one ever fed me a fantasy that money isn't really important. But even with a real income, my fondest hope, now that I have kids, is to get the hell out of dodge and move somewhere nice and suburban where I can afford a decent, safe lifestyle and education (cultural and otherwise) for them, and maybe even have the time left over after working to provide some of it myself.
I'm sure at 17 they'll resent the hell out of me for it, thinking I robbed them of their "cool" patrimony or something. It's the way of the world.
No harm; no foul. It doesn't sound like she had the makings of a good plumbing contractor anyhow though maybe stone mason was a possibility. The version of Cinderella we didn't read was the one where her fairy godmother came in and said, 'Get dressed for the ball' and Cinderella said, 'Back off girlfriend. I'm a scullery maid.'
I remember reading this article when it came out, back when I was starting in grad school living in the UES of Manhattan. The article scared me to no end and kept me on the straight and narrow, financially, throughout my 6 years of the doctoral program. I kept it taped up next to my lab bench.
This idea of the New York life style is pervasive and unrealistic (see Sex and the City) and potentially toxic to impressionable young folks with too much access to credit and not enough sense (at least the first part is coming to and end). At lot of these ideas are promulgated by the small fraction of writers and stars that have made it, looking nostalgically on their high priced gambles.
Seriously, if you have a rich mommy and daddy, ba all means come to NYC and become a writer, director, etc.
If you come from a middle class family and your in the academically elite chances are you're not in the top 1% of the 1% that "make it".
Join the rest of the ordinary 1%ers and become a doc, lawyer, engineer, etc and move out of nyc before you're 30 so you get out while the opportunity/burn rate equation is in your favor.
I read stuff like the linked article and the comments, and all I can say is I'm glad I live in flyover country in a modest house which will be paid for within 8 years of its purchase.
Is this a joke? She went 75K in the hole because she wanted to live in the City when it was beyond her means.
I don't have a BA from Vassar, but I do know the definition of the word pretentious.
Since I recognize the name, she must have made out OK, in the end. Does she still live in Nebraska, or did she return triumphantly to NYC?
I recall reading this in the New Yorker when it appeared and had the following thoughts then: (1) why, if you are in such dire financial straits, do you have fresh cut flowers, and (2) why would you graudate with a music degree and then expect to be able to make a living?
I graduated in 1998 with a degree in English and knew right out of the gate that the finance jobs for which I was interviewing would not fall into my lap unless I could prove that, in addition to being able to parse Shakespeare, I could also parse a set of financial statements.
And so I learned useful skills.
Degrees are great. They are a luxury when you are able to be educated with having debt.
But education is an onerous albatross if you come from a family that cannot afford to pay for your education. Better, then, to work full time and complete your degree over time.
Middle-class kids are sold a bill of goods when it comes to higher education, especially when the education they are pursuing will not provide the skills with which to generate sufficient income.
Coyote Blog had a good post recently about what he referred to as the college bubble: http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/01/comparing-college-to-home-ownership.html
One great thing about finances--eventually, the numbers will force a correction in unsustainable practices.
The underlying reason for her situation is / was that she acted according to her perception of where she thought she should be rather than the reality of where she was. She ran her life through a distorted lens. She felt that hip, successful writers should have a certain type of lifestyle, starting with the belief that such people must live in NYC. It was all downhill from there.
People usually don't recognize such delusions until cold, hard economic reality forces them to. The problem we have, at a macro level, is that millions of Americans have lived this way for years. Psychologically, we passed a tipping point and began living according to our expectations instead of our means. Hence our massive consumer debt. Pulling the lens back even farther, our society has been living this way for years. We've made huge commitments to public programs designed to ensure a high quality of life (Medicare, Social Security), commitments that we can't possibly afford.
Just like Visa was willing to underwrite the author's lifestyle, so the rest of the world has been willing to underwrite America's way of life. Eventually, she had to make painful changes. Our society is about to do the same.
It's hard to believe someone with a graduate degree from Columbia can make such poor decisions. I don't blame her for wanting to live in New York, and she could have easily kept doing so. A lot of people have 60k+ in student loans, and she was earning a good amount given her degree. She was just dumb.
The one really big mistake I see in there was that she just didn't calculate her taxes and spent all the money she was earning instead of 2/3 of it. That, and continuing to buy fresh-cut flowers, $45 dinners, and $200 antique lamps when her checking account is $1500 overdrawn and a giant tax payment looming. At least she came to her senses with only four figures in credit card debt. She's probably doing just fine now (this was '99).
The problem I have with people who write these reminiscences--or, more specifically, those who link to them--is that it always looks to me like they're just a thinly-veiled excuse: look, this person was foolish, too, so I don't have to feel bad about doing the same things.
Or, more bluntly, the kid in Nashville who drives himself into bankruptcy buying a giant plasma screen TV and a lifted F-350 is fundamentally no different than the sensitive liberal arts kid who drives herself into bankruptcy buying antique lamps, fresh flowers, and paying a silly rent to live in NYC: they're both unrealistic wannabes screwing up their lives trying to pay their way into a 'cool' persona.
"The problem I have with people who write these reminiscences--or, more specifically, those who link to them--is that it always looks to me like they're just a thinly-veiled excuse: look, this person was foolish, too, so I don't have to feel bad about doing the same things."
I missed the memo in which Megan said she got herself into debt by getting degrees that don't give her skills and living above her means.
But education is an onerous albatross if you come from a family that cannot afford to pay for your education.
This is an overly broad statement to make, as the returns to education (or, more properly the gap between the degreed and non-degreed) are growing. Even for a relatively poor person (and this woman appears decidedly middle class), getting a degree from a state institution need not imply an "onerous albatross" of debt.
What this decade old article highlights is not that a college education isn't worth it, but that going into debt for a fancy college education isn't worth it. Although even here, the example provided isn't necessarily the best one. The woman apparently was (and is?) making a living in the literary field, and it's not clear to me she would have managed to get a meaningful place in this sector had she taken advantage of her New Jersey residency by getting a sheepskin from Rutgers. I've got nothing against state schools mind you -- I went to a text book example of a non-prestigious, state-supported commuter college. I just don't have any illusions having gone there would have been helpful launching a career in journalism or the arts.
The returns to education are growing only if your education is in a field demanded by the nation's employers.
Music and the arts, while nice businesses to be in, are notoriously competitive and underpaid. Getting a college education in the arts is properly the province of the wealthy. Financing your college debt by writing scores for Broadway shows is a quick way to penury.
Has anyone else noticed how many parents, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, raise their children to belive that money isn't important. So many high school and college kids have no idea how much it costs to live even a decent middle class lifestyle.
What an extraodinarily narrow collection of comments!
The test of an experience is all in what one got out of it. And what better time to seek experience than one's twenties, especially in an epoch where adult life doesn't really seem to begin until one's thirties.
The debt-mongers (banks and universities) have done enormous financial harm to an entire generation. In that sense Ms. Daum is not unique. But as well as belonging to this sadly manipulated generation, she also belongs to a long line of young people coming to the city to learn what the schools and the provinces could not teach them. It is an honorable, admirable and often distinguished line in both its successes and its failures.
Whether it be Rome, Paris, London or New York, the great cities have always had something special to teach about life. And like war, they are great teachers indeed. To those who like Ms. Daum have found out what that is, I say "well done." She may have misspent her twenties, but it doesn't sound to me like she wasted them.
The writer went to Nebraska after the 1999 article ran. She regularly reported on her changing life there for NPR. She ended up writing a novel based on her experiences. She moved to LA 3 years ago and is a columnist for the LA Times.
She may have misspent her twenties, but it doesn't sound to me like she wasted them.
Indeed.
If you look at her website it appears she now enjoys considerable success in her chosen field. Again, I think going into debt for a prestige sheepskin makes very little sense for many fields of endeavor (and living beyond one's means is just stupid, no matter what). But if you want to do serious writing for magazines or newspapers, or you want to write for Hollywood, or do political consulting, or work at a high level in public policy (check out the CVs of Obama staffers) -- if you want to excel, in other words, at a career where most of the people studied liberal arts in college -- it seems to me a prestige degree is highly valuable. Think our own Megan would have a gig at The Atlantic without a stint at at prestige school or two? What's really stupid it seems to me is going into debt for an expensive but non-exclusive, non-famous private university. If you're going to be a 22-year old with a $175k debt load, at least make sure your degree is from a school that everybody has heard of and admires. Also, my impression is that the very most prestigious schools -- the Ivies + MIT + Stanford + a few others -- are rich enough so that nobody need borrow 100% of the cost of going there.
Interesting discussion, though.
Has anyone else noticed how many parents, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, raise their children to belive that money isn't important. So many high school and college kids have no idea how much it costs to live even a decent middle class lifestyle.
This is not surprising, given how many ostensibly middle class parents have no idea how much it costs to live a decent middle class lifestyle, seeing as how they didn't work and pay for it, but instead charged/interest-only mortgaged it and now expect a government handout.
Well, I'm going to stick my neck out here and identify with Ms. Daum. Parts of this essay had such familiarity for me that they made me dizzy. I will cop to the same pretensions and behavior, and ended up in similar (though not as extreme) straits. The difference is that I lived in Manhattan as a resident, though still beyond my means, and jumped ship at the same time that I went from being a resident to being an attending. But the manner of living she describes, with the attendant expenditures to which ones pays far too little attention... well, it felt eerie to read about it, since I knew it all too well.
Glad, however, to have turned the corner into solvency in northern New England.
$1055 for 400 square feet in NYC? I'm paying $1100 for
I'm in minor debt (around ten grand or so) but I can identify with the "fuck it" mentality here. It's always on your mind, a weight on your chest that simultaneously informs every decision you make but puts you in such a black mood where even the smart decisions don't make sense. Sure I should stay in, but the $50 I'd save is so meaningless in the grand scheme of things I might as well make that dinner date at the pub. Once the numbers get so big it becomes meaningless to think about the little lifestyle changes that will help me out over the next year or so in favor of the big, sweeping gestures that will lop it off a chunk at a time. Big, sweeping gestures that may or may not ever happen
Actually, I think the perception - at least among "the elite" - is probably the opposite. Many read this, nodding along sympathetically, thinking "Yeah, that was foolish, but I understand her desire to live in the City, and fresh-cut flowers seems like a nice way to keep color and beauty in your life. It's sad that she's not able to live that way..." Meanwhile, those same people, upon reading about your "kid in Nashville" buying himself a plasma screen and F-350, would scoff and exclaim loudly about stupid wasteful rednecks with their big TVs and big trucks, tsk tsk, how irresponsible they are.
Heh. This article was sooo familiar. I, too, came from a nice middle-class suburban existence and somehow conceived the notion that NYC urban living must somehow be more culturally authentic. Or something, I can't quite remember anymore. Took me a while to realize that you don't catch "culture" like some communicable disease just by virtue of living in Manhattan.
Fortunately for me I did the cost-benefit analysis around the time I did my first grad degree, and I went into a paying line of work rather than music performance (my chosen flavor of youthful cultural authenticity). Maybe I was lucky that my dad was a small businessman, rather than an artsy-academic type, so no one ever fed me a fantasy that money isn't really important. But even with a real income, my fondest hope, now that I have kids, is to get the hell out of dodge and move somewhere nice and suburban where I can afford a decent, safe lifestyle and education (cultural and otherwise) for them, and maybe even have the time left over after working to provide some of it myself.
I'm sure at 17 they'll resent the hell out of me for it, thinking I robbed them of their "cool" patrimony or something. It's the way of the world.
No harm; no foul. It doesn't sound like she had the makings of a good plumbing contractor anyhow though maybe stone mason was a possibility. The version of Cinderella we didn't read was the one where her fairy godmother came in and said, 'Get dressed for the ball' and Cinderella said, 'Back off girlfriend. I'm a scullery maid.'
I remember reading this article when it came out, back when I was starting in grad school living in the UES of Manhattan. The article scared me to no end and kept me on the straight and narrow, financially, throughout my 6 years of the doctoral program. I kept it taped up next to my lab bench.
This idea of the New York life style is pervasive and unrealistic (see Sex and the City) and potentially toxic to impressionable young folks with too much access to credit and not enough sense (at least the first part is coming to and end). At lot of these ideas are promulgated by the small fraction of writers and stars that have made it, looking nostalgically on their high priced gambles.
Seriously, if you have a rich mommy and daddy, ba all means come to NYC and become a writer, director, etc.
If you come from a middle class family and your in the academically elite chances are you're not in the top 1% of the 1% that "make it".
Join the rest of the ordinary 1%ers and become a doc, lawyer, engineer, etc and move out of nyc before you're 30 so you get out while the opportunity/burn rate equation is in your favor.
There are days when I love efficient markets.
These are one of them.
I read stuff like the linked article and the comments, and all I can say is I'm glad I live in flyover country in a modest house which will be paid for within 8 years of its purchase.