5 Worst College Degrees? I don’t think so. May 12, 2013

It’s very rare that I turn my nose up at an article steering kids away from college degrees that will never, ever pay the bills.  With tuition costs the new bubble, engulfing an entire generation of hard-working kids, it’s time to start telling our students that some college majors will not pay the bills.  Some degrees, though exciting and rewarding, will have them working a lot harder, for a lot less money, than anyone has ever sold to them.  “You can be anything you want to be” should be amended with an “as long as you don’t mind paying $3k in student loan interest charges per year, on top of a monthly payment, for the next 40 years.”

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I’m under no illusions that all majors are created equal.  I do believe that we should warn kids about the dangers of taking it too easy in college, but steering young people away from majors that will lead to fulfilling careers is where I draw the line.  Have you ever noticed that doing nice things for others makes you feel good?  That pulling in a big paycheck still doesn’t put a smile on that rich lady’s wrinkled face?  That in a society we need to help each other and that getting paid for it is a bonus?  It’s been shown that once basic needs are met, additional income makes little difference to a person’s happiness (Forbes’s Tim Hartford reports on this here.  The film I Am is another wonderful example).  I don’t think Alex Planes had Life in mind when penning his nauseatingly narrow minded article The Five Worst College Degrees for Your Career.  It was less an analysis of bad degree choices and more an attack on the selfless act of helping others.  Every one of Alex’s targeted career choices is one that makes society run a little smoother.  It left me wondering if he had recently been jilted by a teacher.

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Alex’s 5 worst college degrees are, along with my responses to each:

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5: Special Education – I’m a special education teacher.  On top of being in the most rewarding teaching position that I have ever held, Special Education teachers are in very high demand.  A dual-certified Special Education teacher will never want for work.  Alex’s median mid-career salary is also way off, unless he only surveyed teachers in the most rural parts of the US.

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4: Human Development – Admittedly I have no idea what Human Developers do, but seeing as this career choice is sandwiched between two very important careers, I can only assume that Alex has no idea what he is talking about.

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3: Elementary Education – It was an elementary school teacher who gave Alex the ability to later string together nonsense and call it fact.  An elementary school teacher taught him to identify letters, sounds, words, the parts of a book, how to punctuate a sentence.  Ditto on the median salary here too, Alex.

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2: Social Work – Yeah, not important.  Of the billions of photos one can easily pull from a Google Search, Alex chooses to punctuate this bullet point with one of a nurse helping an elderly man.  Screw old people, right Alex?  Gotta get dat money, son!  He even adds that “the field is projected to add to its numbers at a faster clip than the national average (161,200 new social workers will be needed by 2020).”  So if job security was not a consideration here, what was?  Is Alex’s definition of a good career choice one that helps as few people as possible?

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1: Child and Family Studies – We all want our kids to take school seriously and graduate.  It’s been shown that being a part of a Head Start program as a small child is directly linked to the student’s high school attendance.  This paper by the Baltimore Education Research Consortium is a compilation of the data.  Head Start programs don’t run themselves, Head Start teachers do.  They inspire our kids to be the best they can be.

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At the very end of Alex’s article is link for a “free”, “shockingly true” retirement report.  Sell out much?  There’s nothing worse than a 25 year old working every day for his future retirement.  But since he baited me to go there, I will.  While it’s true that a teacher will never get the opportunity to make $150k per year, it all averages out in the end.  Every two weeks, 11% of my paycheck goes into a little closed-system thing called a pension fund.  Once I hit 60 years old, I can walk away from teaching and continue to collect 80% of the average of my best three years for the rest of my Life.

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Write about that one, Alex!

Median income: $51,914. Are you Romney’s Chosen 53%? September 23, 2012

Army Base Salaries found at: http://www.goarmy.com/benefits/money/basic-pay-active-duty-soldiers.html

Tonight I wanted to find out just what it takes to be one of Romney’s chosen 53%.  So, I checked the census.--I went right to US median household income: $51,914.  To be fair, living in Massachusetts gives us a leg up in this subcategory, so I skipped over to the Massachusetts census where I found median household income to be slightly higher at $64,509.  Though, at a median home value of $352,300 here as compared to the US median of $188,400, we’re hardly ahead.  Still, my husband and I have a combined income greater than the US average, and considering there’s only 2 of us living here (not the 2.59 National median), we’re good.  Romney cares about us.

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I was going to stop there, but why?  Putting a webpage of data in front of a Math teacher is like swinging Patriots tickets in front of a Bostonian and telling them not to grab.  So I grabbed.  Next I looked at the US poverty rate: 13.8%, or about 3 people out of every 22.  With 23.7% of the country being under 18 (ie: in school), we can say that in every US classroom, at least 1 kid is hungry.  Do you go to bed hungry?  When the US minimum wage is $7.25/hour ($15,080/year), it’s easy to see how this can happen.  This bottom 13.8% is well within Romney’s 47%.  He doesn’t give two shits about these people.

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I kept looking at the [wonderfully beautiful] numbers.  What I didn’t expect in the census was data on how many private, nonfarm establishments there are in the US: 7,396,628!  That’s a lot, right?  These must be Romney’s beloved small businesses.  A quick calculation will give us the percentage of small businesses owners to the rest of us 8-5 schleps… 7,396,628 divided by how many people there are in the US: 311,591,917….2.37%.  Wait, what?  Just 2.37%? 

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Below is what we’ve gathered so far.  In the United States of America:

• 13.8% of people live below the poverty line.  These people have little food or heat.  They have no air-conditioning.
• 2.37% own small businesses (small businesses are, afterall, owned, right?).  They employ people at $7.25/hour.

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I wonder if the non-business-owning 50.63% in Romney’s golden 53% know that all his talk of “small business” is aimed at just 2.37% of the US population.  Given that Romney is a one-percenter himself, some may say that including an extra 1.37% into his special club is generous.  I’m not in his club.  I don’t want to be in his club.  Romney may like me because of my income, but I’m a public school teacher, so I just fell way off his list.

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FEAR: But the Mexicans are taking over!

Reality: 16.7% of people in the US come from Hispanic countries.

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FEAR: Immigrants are invading!

Reality: 12.7% of people living in the US were born somewhere – anywhere – else.  There are 192 countries in the World, maybe more.

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Lastly, I wanted to look back to median household income to see what the per-person income is in the US: $27,334.  Since this is median and Romney likes 53% of us, let’s round down to say $25,000.  So that I don’t feel alone, I looked into who else Romney doesn’t like:

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Average US Salaries:

Childcare worker (for all those parents who have to work): $19,000

Preschool Teacher (for those parents who want their kids to get ahead): $25,700

Teacher assistant (to help all kids reach No Child Left Behind): $23,220

Long-term care Nurse (for old people whose kids hate them): $25,641

Starbuck’s Barista (doesn’t spit in your $8 latte): $18,242

Pharmacy Technician (prepares your heart and cholesterol medication): $20,800

Bank Teller (counts all of your off-shore money): $22,750

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In all seriousness, these are important jobs, performed by important, grossly underpaid people.  And this, of course, is just a partial list.  These are people not included in Romney’s Club 53.  Moreover, the commonality between most of these positions is that they are positions at large, multi-million and billion dollar companies – companies that used to care about their people and have the means to pay their employees more, but don’t. 

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As research often does, I am left at a different question from the one I originally asked:  if a person gives 30+ years of their Life to a company – any US company – what can they expect at 65?  To live out the rest of their years happily fed as Romney will or, after giving out best years to a pension-free company, that we will simply not go to bed hungry and slip into the US’s 13.8%?

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How About Better Parents? November 20, 2011

Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-about-better-parents.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman  or by clicking the article above.

Brookline, MA: Parking ticket APR 928%. And you thought your VISA was bad. June 21, 2011

The big banks, and in this case the rich Boston burbs, know that we are too weak to unionize; we’re too scattered and separated from one another to fight against their fees.  By charging millions of people a few dollars at a time, they get their fees without causing too big an uproar.  We’re the path of least resistance between the big corporations and our money that they want for themselves, and the robbery will continue until the wrong person gets charged an amount that finally tips the pissed-off-meter.  When will that be?  I’m already pissed off and am waiting for you.

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Cambridge, Massachusetts charges an APR of 373.00% on unpaid parking tickets and Brookline an APR of 928.00%.  And you thought your credit card was bad.

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I was distracted, sure.  But I’m aware now.  In September, 2010, en expired meter parking ticket for $25 landed on my dashboard in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA.  It was annoying, but I gladly accepted my car’s fate.  For hours I had been working with Harvard’s Committee for the Use of Human Subjects Director to iron out the kinks in my thesis proposal’s CUHS application.  By the time I got out of the meeting, I had renewed faith that my thesis would be possible and paying a $25 ticket felt worth it.  Plus, I knew I did wrong.

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In November, 2010, I got a parking ticket just over the Boston border in Brookline.  There were no “no parking” signs, and other people were parked in front and behind me.  I know the “other people are doing it” excuse is not right, still, the few days before I hadn’t gotten a ticket, but this day I had.  That hardly felt consistent or necessary.  This ticket was for $30.

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By November 2010, I had one $25 ticket and one $30 ticket.  I swear I paid the Cambridge one, but for the sake of argument – Cambridge’s argument – let’s say that I didn’t.  So I had $55 total in parking tickets. 

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By calling Brookline and explaining that there was no “no parking” sign, my ticket was decreased to $10 and a firm warning that “All Brookline streets have a parking ban and it’s clearly stated on the Welcome to Brookline sign”.  I explained to deaf ears that there was no welcome sign.  She didn’t care.  In any case, my ticket was now $10.  I didn’t pay it on principle.  There was no sign.

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Fast forward to yesterday, June 20, 2011, and things had drastically changed.  My tickets had drastically changed.

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Cambridge:                                        Brookline:

September 2010: $25                                     November 2010: $10

June 2011: $95                                               June 2011: $70

Percent increase: 280%                             Percent increase: 600%

Annual % rate (APR): 373.00%                Annual % rate (APR): 928.00%

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You’re reading those numbers right.  I didn’t forget to divide or move the decimal.  On parking tickets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they are charging an APR of 373% and in Brookline, Massachusetts, they are charging an APR of 928%. 

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After cycling through anger, despair, frustration, nausea, I finally decided that my sanity is worth more than my money and I paid these two tickets.  There is no regulation on this type of behavior and it will keep going on until the right person gets hit or people finally decide they have the right to stand up for themselves.  It’s not right.  Typing this makes me angry.  It is not our fault that we are in a recession.  Moreover, I know this post will do nothing.  It needs to stop.

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The Math of the MA State Lottery: Fishy Probability April 26, 2011

The probability of losing on 30 scratch tickets in a row is 1/192,307.  My friend is the luckiest unlucky person ever.

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My brother witnessed me scratch my first ticket.  Though the mechanism of scratching is hardly difficult, I managed to mess up one part of the code by uncovering the prizes for all of my numbers.  When my brother looked over and saw “1 MIL”… well, let’s just say we were both a bit disappointed.  That ticket was my first contribution to Massachusetts’s secret underground revenue stream where there are no checks and balances, just tickets.  Everyone wonders where their tax dollars go and, when we take home just 2/3 of the amount we’re told we make, why our cars still get swallowed by pot holes into the summer.  That being said, public schools are worth every penny I pay in taxes.  But taxes aside, what happens to lottery money?  Is there any system in place to assure that the odds printed on the backs of tickets are accurate? 

 

For my friend’s 30^th birthday, I bought her 30 $1 scratch tickets with the idea she’d win something.  Anything.  The thought barely crossed my mind that all 30 of those tickets would end up in Monday’s recycling pile.  So what did she win?  Nothing.  Clearly printed on the front of each of these 30 tickets was the probability that “one in three is a winner”.  Based on this ratio, she should have won 10 times on 30 tickets.  OK, so maybe probability doesn’t always mirror real life, but can a girl get a win?  When I posed this question to the math blogger Josh Rappaport of mathchat, he gave the following response:

 

Hi ZS, assuming that whether or not one wins or loses on one scratch ticket (what is that, anyhow?) is independent from winning or losing on any other scratch ticket, you treat each event as an independent event. Laws of probability tell us to multiply the various probabilities of independent events. It appears that the probability of [losing] on any particular scratch ticket must be 2/3. So then the probability of [losing] on 30 scratch tickets in a row (if that is what your problem is asking) must be (2/3)^30 = approximately 5.2 x 10^–6, which is about .0000052, or 52 out of 10 million, which boils down to 1 chance out of 192,307.

 

The chance of my friend losing on all 30 tickets, like she did, was 1 in 192,307.  If 192,307 people all got 30 scratch tickets each, just one – my friend – would lose on all 30.  Something seems a bit off in the Massachusetts State lottery.

 

My thoughts here are that scratching a ticket is not truly an independent event, though there are so many tickets printed that it might as well be.  If we were to work this as a dependent probability problem, we’d have to know how many tickets are printed.  So how many are actually printed?  It strikes me as suspicious that the only people who know this figure are the very same people who are in charge of dolling out – or, more accurately, not doling out – the prize money.

 

A lot of people spend more on scratchies than they do on food.  I am not one of them.  The price I spend on food every couple weeks is comfortably higher than the cost of all the scratch tickets I have ever bought.  Still, I sometimes like to test my luck.  At the time of my first ticket, I was living in Southie.  For anyone who knows the area, my apartment was, not unlike many apartments in this area east of downtown, sandwiched between a convenience store and a liquor store, both of which sold scratchies.  Spent tickets littered the streets.  Spent people littered the streets.  It truly was an avenue of broken dreams.  Still, I’d win sometimes.  The $100 I once won somehow felt much more than 1/8 of my rent at the time and I vowed to keep the five crisp $20 bills in a secret place in my apartment.  They were all gone next grocery day. 

 

Buying a scratch ticket now and again is OK for a person who has a steady job, is paid decent money and has been educated on the dangers of gambling by parents who do not gamble.  Scratch tickets comprised a small sliver of my budgeted entertainment money and everyone needs a good adrenaline rush now and again.  But what about my neighbors in Southie, waiting for the bus frantically scratching tickets?  Who is going to stop them from falling into this trap?

 

Moreover, what if the game changes?  Of course there is no real way of verifying my claim, but scratch tickets aren’t paying out like they did five years ago.  Whereas I would win every once in a while, I have not won on a ticket in enough time to make me feel something is wrong.  My rational mind does not conclude that I am unlucky, it tells me there’s something fishy in Denmark.  More specifically, there’s something rank in the Massachusetts State lottery; they changed the rules mid-game and are back ally robbing the Massachusetts working class.

 

The last ticket I scratched – a sleek black $5 number – directed me to a website to learn its odds.  I have searched online for how many tickets are printed but have come up empty.  What is the probability of winning?  Is anyone overseeing that the Massachusetts State lottery is operating fairly?  Where does all this money go?

 

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contact blog author Shana Donohue: shanadonohue@gmail.com

 

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My experience with Ms. Entitled: Fists up, nation unemployed! January 30, 2011

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Is it still 2011?  Did I travel back in time last night?

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This morning I got an email from a woman who runs a tutoring company here in Massachusetts:

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“Thank you for your interest in L*#$% Tutoring, LLC. Please complete the attached questionnaire so that we may better evaluate whether it would be productive for us to work with you.

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Also, we are concerned about the following comment on your blog ‘Already ill from the thought of rich kids all over the US ‘unschooling’ their kids, I get an email from the tutoring company WyZant from a parent in the South End of Boston who’s looking for help for her 11-year old son….’

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We’re having difficulty with this comment on a few counts:

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We work only with tutors who work exclusively with us. If you would continue working with Wyzant, this would obviate working with us.

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Parents of our students would likely Google you before agreeing to an introductory session with you. Disparaging remarks about “rich kids” would almost certainly put them off.

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If we agreed to go forward with you, would you:

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remove this comment from your blog?
divest yourself of your connections with Wyzant?

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Looking forward to hearing from you,

Ms. 17th Century (ok, not her real name)

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While I’m flattered that she found only one blog post to disagree with (with which to disagree?), that she even bothered to comb through my math blog looking for dirty posts (I’m not that interesting), that she still decided to write even though she thinks I’m trash and that she even bothered to look into my less than sordid, barely-worth-mentioning past at all, I am reminded of what it must have been like for women back in the days of the Victorians, before Women’s Lib, before Snookie came into our world and changed it all.  Moreover, this is Massachusetts.  We’re home to Harvard, the Minutemen, The Boston Tea Party, we’re the one state that didn’t vote for Richard Nixon in the 1969 election.  That last one is why my parents moved here.  People move to Massachusetts to be progressive and to live freely.  Shame on you, Ms. Entitled. 

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I emailed the woman back to tell her that I didn’t think it would be a good fit and that I make no apologies for the content of my blog or working with other people.  Did she think I’d grovel for her part-time, benefit-free $15/hour job?  Wait, would anyone?  It’s amazing what the entitled will feel, well, entitled, to ask you to do.  Relax, don’t do it!  Your dignity will thank you.  

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Fists up, my unemployed brothas and sistas!  Stay strong!  Never apologize for being well-educated, hard-working, motivated, drug-free, wanting healthcare, working with other people or writing a blog entry on how messed up it is to unschool your kids!

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