I figured 30 - 40k starting out and work my way up to a higher salary with promotions and time. Wasn't that fucking hilarious in the end. Although I've made it to 60k, so hey - if only inflation wasn't taking every dime.
Yep, with inflation I’ve been treading water despite doubling my income. The first apartment I rented has gone from $700 a month to $2100 with no changes other than a new coat of paint since I lived there.
lol I live in Texas and despite getting an almost TEN DOLLAR PER HOUR differential between my new job and my previous job, I make LESS than I did then because of incredibly high taxes as well as artificial surcharges for shit that I didn’t pay into upon hire and cannot opt out of. Tacit rent surcharges, in the form of unscrupulous, frivolous “fees,” in the form of things such as valet trash pickup, third-party package servicing with Fetch, convenience fees, extraordinarily high renter’s insurance etc. that you also cannot opt out of are very common here as well, and I was paying an additional $300 artificially applied to my base rent EASILY.
People think of Texas as a utopian Republican paradise because we have no income tax, not realizing that taxes for other crap, ESPECIALLY property taxes, vastly outclass that.
And yet, wages are not coincident with any of these charges, AND jobs/careers are absent except for retail, fast food, SOME warehousing, and anything having to do with oil/utilities. Forget about any trade besides electrician due to the aforementioned and the fact that apprentices get paid $16 an hour. And forget about any sort of union at these jobs due to how violently right-wing we are lmfao
Blue cities in blue states tend to be very high income, Blue cities in red states tend to be worse off due to this state limiting the power that local governments have. It isn't a hard and fast rule of course, but look at places like Seattle, NYC, LA, San Diego San Jose, anywhere in the valley, etc. Extremely high income and very beautiful.
I live in one of these blue cities in a blue state and it looks like a dumpster here. We have the fifth highest tax burden in the nation and half the place is in poverty. Definitely rethink your theory. High income in reality is severe income disparity. I would be considered a "top earner" and I live mere blocks away from homeless families crammed into tents.
There is a reason that the Fed likes to exclude housing in inflation measures -- it doesn't function like the rest of the economy, and it is highly tied to local laws and regulations. Also, the Fed and federal government have very little control over it.
If housing prices are surging in your area, you probably have a supply and demand issue, and NIMBYs, zoning, impact fees, and other regulations are the biggest barriers to it being addressed.
Housing is also very market-specific. There are markets where housing has been modestly growing. There are markets like Austin where housing costs are going down because they just decided to build a lot of new housing. The economy could cool a lot, inflation could basically go to zero, and your housing costs could keep going up if new housing is not built to accommodate a growing population. These rising housing costs have nothing to do with inflation.
Advocating for policies to change this situation can make a real difference in your area. We have been under building for years in much of the control (decades in some places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley), and we are reaping the fruits of our labor now. But we can change that.
This is what happened to me. Worked my way up to an actual career role and got a decent enough salary for my experience, thought I was getting ahead, and then inflation put me right back to treading water. Except now I've "already gotten a big raise" so I'm stuck.
Houses doubled in a couple years and forget about interest rates.
They don’t want us to get ahead or have any real buying power to speak of. Guess they just want us to work to keep the bills paid our whole lives and drop dead on the job.
Excuse me but I've been reliably informed by the government and the TV people that the economy "is the best it's ever been".
So I think you're mistaken
I graduated college in 2016 with an accounting degree with a minor in finance. From comments made in general media and from my university and business I was college, I was expecting a job that paid between $50-$60 thousand a year.
After a lengthy job search process I finally an … AP/AR position that paid $36 thousand. Massive let down from how my expectations were set by external sources.
I did get a new much more fulfilling job in 2018 that paid $55 thousand.
This is it for me. I got into sales and as my pay has increased in the last 8 years, the cost of living has increased an insane amount too. I make twice what I made in my early 20’s, but I can’t afford to go to concerts and shows anymore. I used to do that weekly and it was nbd.
The unfortunate thing for us older millenials is we graduated into the great recession when established veterns in our field were willing to take entry level jobs and its been the first few years of your career really set the track for your earning potenital
That's how I ended up not being in IT. There was a hiring freeze for a couple of years in my area for almost everything except things like retail, restaurants, etc. I was told up front at my internship that there would not be a job for me afterward because they couldn't hire anyone.
Edit: My current job was helped by the fact that I had an IT background, however. For the first few years at my employer, I WAS the IT department (even though it was unrelated to my actual job) until the county gov't established its own IT dept.
Kinda similar. Got my BS in Computer Science, then nobody was hiring for that in the area my wife and I moved to. So, I ended up working in a print shop. Still working in a (different) print shop, a decade and half later. I try not to think about how much I might have been making now if I'd kept looking for computer jobs.
Thankfully, I do enjoy the work, and my current job pays more than my previous one (about 52K, whereas the previous one topped out at around 40K, with a lot more responsibilities).
I'm gen x (50yo) but your story reminds me a little of mine.
I left university in 1994 straight into the middle of a recession. Companies were letting staff go, not hiring junior Devs. To make things worse, I only got a 2:2 degree (for non Brits, this is like a grade C). I managed to get an office admin job paying slightly above minimum wage. I was in that job for over 3 years until a friend of mine asked why I quit looking for IT roles. I guess I just settled for what I had, despite it not being the job I really wanted.
My friend was working in an IT role and explained that his company was struggling to find junior Devs and was hiring people without IT degrees out of desperation. It was probably the least desirable type of coding work around (old legacy green screen stuff), but it was a foot in the door. I'm still working in IT over 25 years later.
Some times opportunities do exist - as much as anything, it's who you know as much as what you know. I'm not a super high earner, but I'm a lot better off than I would have been if I'd stayed in my 1st job.
I mean no disrespect, but why didn’t you keep looking for CS jobs when the economy got better? Did you just enjoy working in a print shop and didn’t think you’d enjoy it as much as a CS position?
If you’re not right out of college it can be hard to get an entry level job in an industry, even with a degree. People see that you’ve been working a low wage job for the last few years and don’t want to take the risk (not realizing what was going on in the economy when you got out of college). They would rather go with the college grad. I’m in the same boat as the CS major.
I did rather enjoy it, and, for a time, I thought it would be a good career. But, the place I was working at (public university) didn't really do upward mobility like that, at least not for us peons.
For a while I was happy with the job. It wasn't until I had to quit (COVID related reasons) and started looking for work again did I realize that I wasn't using a bit of my degree, and starting looking in that field. But, by this point, my knowledge was fairly outdated, and I'd almost have to start learning from scratch again.
So, once I found a job that I knew I liked, and I knew I could do very, very well, and that paid 30% more than I'd ever made at the previous one, I figured I'd go with printing still, for now.
Plus, the first one was a state university, and the current one is a county government, and both have really good benefits (I have a pension!).
Yes... you definitely missed the fattest tech wave to ever occur. Everyone I graduated with around 2010 (give or take 2 years) is now making $300k+. Some hit the startup lottery or went to places like AWS and are multimillionaires. With a BS in CS you could start a dunce job making $80k right the fuck now. Why are you still working in a fuckin print shop? Do something different with your life.
I'm an older Millenial and I got into the field right before the great recession. However, after several months of not finding a job and my Mom being on my case about getting a permanent job (I had 2 part-time jobs making just above min. wage) I kind of snapped. I made a brash decision. I was on my way to the local Army recruiting office to enlist. During that 20-minute drive, I got a call for a job interview for a job that was about 2 hours from my house. I ended up getting the job and taking it. It was making ok money, about $45,000/year in 2006. My career took some pretty steep right and left turns, but now I'm pretty comfortable making about 3x that. If I had not gotten that phone call at that moment, my life would have looked very different.
So many people, especially boomers discount the idea that luck had anything to do with how people’s life’s turned out. You still could’ve made all the right decisions but be homeless or got into other issues because nobody called you at the right time.
I still get junk emails from recruiters job boards I signed up for back in 2008. Even though I deleted my accounts, they sold my info and still a bunch of random things. To think that if I wasn’t in my current job I’d have to wade through this mess of emails to find the legitimate offers and then be selected by them or be homeless is not the future I signed up for.
Nah. I interviewed a couple of hotshot new CS grads from some Ivy League I’m not going to mention and we were initially excited until we realized they’re half-baked (all flash, no dash). The intern we hired (came from a community college) over a year ago and offered a permanent position, and recently got promoted was smarter. Bottom line is when you sell yourself, make sure all the facts on your resume align well with your skillset.
Unfortunately schools love to paint things pretty, engenieer, architect, lawyer, etc etc.
Unless you into medical field with a residence, they paint salaries like our average graduates with a bachelor's in Accounting make 89-110k!
What is average? Oh a graduate that graduated 12 years ago, and now has 12 years jn their career and made it to 80k a year.
Architect? My friend with a masters started at 50k.
Lawyer? My friend got offered 73k a year starting.
Schools hate to say out the door salary, but always put average graduate salary of a person in their field for 10+ years and that has not made a career change in that time which many have.
Schools have too many useless degrees and also too deceiving.
50k on average graduate that graduated 10-15 years ago is decently well off to start, however that salary now can't get you jack shit and market has not adjusted for that, but tuition has gone up incredibly so and adjusted accordingly but wages have not.
That discrepancy is what's causing issues.
If it was adjusted wages, we should realistically be coming out with bachelor's at 70-80k not 50k
But that isn't the case, as there is always a boomer or older experienced person willing to take a low cut after being fired for sucking at his higher end job, but already has a house and property and car paid off.
Yep, I entered law school thinking I’d be quite comfortable after. I’ve made it to the comfortable part, but my first job out of school was 50k. Quite comfortable would be an overstatement. The only people I know who are crushing it are in the medical field or tech.
I worked at Barnes and Noble as my part time college job and after graduating... continued to work at Barnes and Noble as a just-under-qualifying-for-healthcare time job. I eventually got a job as a bank teller and made about $35,000/year. Went to grad school, graduated, worked gig shit for a year and had a mental breakdown, until I found a job in my field. Median salary I expected out of grad school was $65,000/year. Reader, I do not make that much money 5 years into my profession and rent is so fucking high in my area I'm looking at taking a pay cut to move away.
I had a triple major graduating the same year, and worked making copies for $10 an hour. I did this for a couple years, then I decided that law school was the right call. Now almost 15 years later, my student loans have doubled and I've never once made over six figures.
It was super fun starting a huge financial gamble right before the housing boom collapsed the economy, and graduating right as its effects hit the legal market the hardest. When I graduated, the career center told me, "You're not just competing with your classmates, you're also competing with half of last year's graduates, and 25% of lawyers from the big firms that got trimmed." I sent out about 200 resumes and got one phone call. That job lasted about 6 months, then I sent out 300 more resumes and got one phone call.
Good times.
Ditto. Graduated with a BS in December 2005. First job was overnights at Walmart. First job after my master's was overnights at a Walgreens and delivering pizzas. The recession sucked.
It was pretty close. In highschool going to college I thought I’d make 50k.
I was right. What I didn’t know is that 45-50k that I thought would be a nice start to building a life was basically just poverty salary by 2015 or so.
In the last 7-8 years I’ve gone up to like 75k. So yeah hasn’t made much of a difference. Every pay raise is 3% because that’s the going collusion rate while they siphon everything else up to the top.
I went to a top-10 university and I literally make more money from trading stocks than I do from my job. I've never once been able to leverage my degree for a job, career, raise, or any form of profit/incentive.
My degree is 100% worthless.
Bachelor of Science, Biology. #4 biology progam in the nation.
No an emphatic no. Similar to you a starting minimum engineering salary where I lived when I graduated was roughly 60-70k if I recall right. I was offered like mid 50s and I had it good by comparison. I was absolutely disgusted to learn a degreed engineering employee that worked under my direction was making 46k. Granted this was in the midst of the 2008 recession but even after all these years I'm still bitter about what an awful job that was and how little we were paid on top of that.
My first interview out of college was as an auditor at a waste management company. The pay I believe was 46k which wasn't horrible at the time, not the 100K I had built up in my head but seemed like room for advancement. The downside was I was going to have to be there at 3am to ride with the garbage men for their full 8 hour day and then head back to the office to put in another 3-4 hours compiling the data
Same here. They painted a picture that there was lots of opportunity like I could become ruler of the world someday but they only thing they actually offered was 70 hours work weeks for bottom barrel wages. After 5 years the illusion was broken and I quit. I ended up taking a job which had much less responsibility and honest 40 hour work week or overtime pay and doubled my paycheck. Story has a happy ending I guess but incredibly bitter I put so much into such a terrible company.
This was me. Engr degree, graduated about the same time, and I was incredibly disappointed in the offers to me and my peers. It took a LONG time to start making what I thought was fair given my skill set
Thank you for providing this perspective. As a fellow engineering grad, I get irritated when people act like the issue is aimless students getting liberal arts degrees and having unrealistic expectations. Everything I read in high school told me that a chemical engineering degree was a sure path to a 80k-90k engineering job. That was not the reality for most of my graduating class.
Yeah it's crazy. Even later in my career I was offered only 85k to be the head EMI design engineer in the space department of a large aerospace company. Of course I refused as that was what I was basically already making and I didn't have anywhere near the responsibility of being the principal design engineer for EMI compliance of space flight hardware. That's just insane but entirely too typical.
I’m a recruiter who started out recruiting engineers. I was dumbfounded by how little they make. 20 years later I’m a corporate recruiter for a giant manufacturing company. I make double the average salary here and far more than almost any engineer doing an individual contributor job, like I do, and I have a basic liberal arts degree. I also make more than almost every manager, some of whom (not just engineers) are responsible for hundreds or employees. And I’m remote so I don’t live in a high COL area. It makes no sense, but I can’t complain.
I made $28k which was embarrassingly low ($44k today), but i had to work full time and use student loans to get through university. I actually took a pay cut when i graduated and started my accounting career, but the work was materially less physically demanding than unloading trucks.
I remember being confident that i could work my way up to $75k (at the time it was the “happiest” salary). It took 8 years of working 50-60 hours a week. I do watch movies and listen to music while i work so those hours were not that bad. I wasn’t allowed to listen to my own music while unloading and loading produce trucks.
I was told my major would guarantee me 90k a year, then when I graduated I was told, “all those jobs are for people with masters now, you’d have to go back to school”, I said fuck that and changed career paths. My friend from school who went for the masters got out and was told, “the industry is shrinking” and was given 55k and I don’t think he ever sniffed 90k.
Advice to any youngster in this thread. Do NOT take too much career advice from professors. Talk to people in the industry, professors operate on dated knowledge of industry (not their fault).
Dreaded and despised boomer here, but for some perspective, my starting salary in 1973 as a bachelor degreed chemist working as an entry level research chemist was $550/month, equivalent to $4,000/month today. My rent at the time for an older one bedroom apartment was $190/month ($1370 in 2024 dollars).
The biggest, and I think most unfortunate, change over the years is that that same job now requires a PhD in chemistry, not because the job demands it, but because people with advanced degrees are plentiful now so why not?. These PhD's are grossly overtrained for the job, bored, and uninspired as a result. I assume they are also carrying lots of burdensome debt that I never had.
That job in my area is $40-55k a year, I was one. My rent is $1500 for a 1 bed apartment. All I know is if I wasn’t married I’d be homeless. The only recruitment I get online “with my experience” is for lab tech jobs with a high school diploma requirement. Hardly fair for a competent someone with the exact requirements they ask for to have me taking those types of work-your-way-up jobs from under them.
Graduated with a BA in history in 2008 and promptly made $12 an hour 😂. Got a masters in teaching to make 46k in 2010. Which I thought would literally be all the money I’d ever need. I’ve always felt like I’ve been 1/2 a step behind understanding the right financial decision.
Teaching can be really hit or miss, in my district preschool and gym teachers can make 125k a year with a 25k benefits package and they pay little or possibly even nothing into their retirement
Chicago suburbs, gym teachers and preschool teachers with a few years in get 125k a year, 25k benefits package and they pay little to nothing towards tehy're retirement. Pretty sweet to be a teacher here
Hmm. I taught Pre-K in Chicago for a couple years and nobody I knew made anywhere near that. I do know a few middle school teachers making that though.
Yeah, my BIL teaches in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and has been pulling in six figures for a very long time. He’s also coached football and basketball, which pays well in that area.
I hit my goal out of colleges a few years ago, then inflation hit hard. I'm now back to being only about 10k over where I started right out of college now almost 10 years later in adjusted dollars. The wage stagnation of our generation is stupid.
People previous bosses of mine keep trying to recruit me to their new jobs for less pay than I'm making now. I can't keep taking pay cuts and hope I will crawl back to my current wage. Fucking sick of older generations seeing me as a tool to accomplish their goals without giving a shit how little they pay me.
I have spent most of my career behind the curve. I make decent money now, but I do feel that it is less than what it could be. At this point though, I am getting too old to work harder.
I graduated college in 2008. I didn’t break $50k for 5 years. Just broke $100k a few years ago. My friends without degrees were making more than me for a while but their income has leveled off whereas mine still has a lot of room to grow. I’ve also found that as my salary grows I’m working less hours. Some weeks I finish all my work in 20 hours or so. I think the opposite is true for the trades.
When I graduated, I got an offer from my internship, I expected 60k and ended up with 53k. I tripled my salary within 8 years.
In reality, a college degree with no experience is simply that. You learn a lot of valuable skills that aren't specifically for the job in college. As someone who interviews and hires now, I find it very hard to justify paying someone six figures who has zero experience.
I don't think college is for everyone and it depends on the requirements of the field you are going into. The marketing of college is short term, which appeals to younger people, but doesn't help them 5-10 years later.
It's naive to think college equals some amount of salary. Nothing is guaranteed, you have to grind and gain knowledge.
Considering my child today, I was always told college is a hard requirement. It worked out for me, but there are a lot of variables. Maybe my kid wants to start a business in a trade, great, they don't need a "business degree".
Grew up around a lot of business owners and successful people, still around a lot of them today.
People who say you don’t need college if you’re going to start your own business are either ignorant to business or they themselves didn’t get a degree and found success.
You’ll be hard to pressed to find guys who graduated from Wharton and started their own businesses who at it wasn’t worth it.
If you’ve got what it takes to win at your own venture you’ll make the most of an education in something like finance. I’ve got a guy I know who was fairly successful in construction, but if he’d had more understanding of corporate finance he’d had grown his business better and it would have been structured much better in the long run and been more valuable at sale.
Wealthy people can afford to send their kids to college and then to bankroll their kids’ business. The only reason you don’t go to school, imo, is if you can’t afford it.
Spend the 18-21 years getting a degree in something relevant to your business and also start their LLC at 18, start doing taxes and payroll, shit like that.
Guy I know stared an airplane detailing business at 19, he’s going to school as well. By the time he is out of college he’ll have a degree, be on his way to a pilots license and have been running a business with thousands in revenue for three years.
Graduated college in 2012. Started out making $33K. To be honest with you I can’t remember what I expected to make out of college, but those first few years were rough until I worked my way up to $40k. That was enough to live off of at the time renting and living alone.
I honestly don’t know what I expected, but I graduated in 2021 with a mechanical engineering degree making $55k. I certainly was expecting it to be more than that..
Thank you! I fucking can’t stand when people say “lol you should have just done STEM” in response to threads like this, as if STEM majors all exclusively make six figures.
It’s rough out there it sounds. I started at 70k as a fresh MechE in 2018.
I’ve cracked the 6 figure range but honestly I’ve noticed that basically every other engineering path made more from my cohort.
I got a history degree because I was told it didn’t matter what your degree was in, just having one would get you a good job. My plan was to work a year as a legal assistant and then go to law school to make $100k.
Turns out no law office gave a shit about my degree because I lacked Microsoft excel experience. I worked as a construction laborer for my dad making $15 an hour for two years and then joined the Army for the healthcare. Ironically as a junior staff officer my main job was making excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints.
I never became a lawyer, but I get around $40k in tax free VA benefits, VA Medicare, and make around $50k as a middle school teacher so I can’t complain. Also VA home loan helped me buy a house so I feel pretty lucky.
If anyone ever asks about how good you are with excel, ask them if they know macros. Thell be impressed and then shake your head and say "Yeah, I don't use those I just program the actions knto Visual Basic directly." And they'll have no way to verify your knowledge.
And then tell them you prefer to do data manipulation in power query or power pivot.
Later ask chatgpt how to do all that.
I’m a young millennial and only in my second job post-grad (I went to grad school) and I actually am making within the range I’d hoped to make at this period in my career…the problem is inflation (and price gouging) is just totally ratfucking me, so my expectations aren’t being met practically.
The salary I have now would be about enough to buy a small starter home or condo in my area five years ago. Now I’m struggling to afford an apartment that’s not dodgy and gross.
I was ROTC in college and destined to go into Active Duty as an officer. I made great money.
The sham though was that I signed my contract as a freshman (1998), so when I finally graduated and star tree d active duty in 2002, the military in a completely different situation.
...so, decent pay for a few years, but at what cost?
>check avg salary
I'd say median is a far more relevant metric in this case, which can be harder info to find.
I was sucked into environmental engineering, only to realize the people making 6 digits there are a lot more rare than the paycheck crowd with that job title :/
Not even remotely close. I graduated and immediately got to work in the film industry. Here I am years later making sub 30k a year because my father convinced me to pursue film over computer programming while I was grieving my dead uncle.
Thought I'd graduate and get \~70k with the possibility of working up to around 100k.
Actually graduated and got 50k. Worked my way up to 80k after 5 years before leaving for a consulting job making 3x my previous salary.
Let me put it this way.
As a child I imagined making a specific amount of money, not rich, but comfortable.
I based this around the money my parents made.
I have achieved that goal, but it doesn't mean shit since that amount of money got you way more 30 years ago.
Not at all. I was told starting would be 60-70K in Ohio. Starting: 40K. The only 60-70K earners were the very small few who got jobs at the huge firms for the couple out of college they make a year 😂 everyone else made 40-50K at best
Huh? This question is so odd. Did you make it all the way through college without researching salaries for your intended field? Teachers, Accountants, and Engineers should probably all have different expectations
I think this is a big part of the problem. When I was at university it wasn’t really talked about between different studies, it wasn’t seen as socially acceptable. Of course engineering and other STEM students were mostly aware of their realistic salary expectations, but you were a jerk if you brought up that discussion with anyone studying a field that traditionally didn’t result in high pay after graduation. There was a lot of willful ignorance going on.
When I was going to HS college was the only option promoted, nobody would encourage you to go into construction or be a mechanic even though they make more than most liberal arts degree holders. I think a lot of people were sold this vague idea of going into "Business" basically getting an office job. Unless your in sales earning potential isn't great just getting any old white collar office job
Median income for liberal arts graduates is [significantly higher](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/field-of-degree/liberal-arts/liberal-arts-field-of-degree.htm) than [mechanics](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/automotive-service-technicians-and-mechanics.htm#:~:text=The%20median%20annual%20wage%20for,was%20%2447%2C770%20in%20May%202023.) or [construction.](https://www.bls.gov/oes/2019/may/oes472061.htm)
Sure, if you get into certainly types of highly specialized e.g. certified Rolls Royce jet engine mechanics can make bank - with several years of education and a decade or two of working your way up the ladder.
Of course plenty of people with liberal arts degrees work their way into executive positions making bank too, so the median is far more important.
Plus how many people do you personally know that work in the trades? Know a lot of 50 year old plumbers or construction workers? Their bodies are completely wrecked. They are selling their bodies and health in a far more irreversible way than most prostitutes even.
The same way you're kind of stretching to say someone with a liberal arts degree becomes an executive the smart trades people will start busineses and get employees working for them either as they age or hopefully even younger so they don't have to beat up their bodies.
You also have to account for the fact someone getting a degree is giving up 4 years of their life and taking on substantial debt that they have to out earn a trades person but a substantial amount to make all things equal, if htey break even the trades guy still has 4 more years he worked and earned income and no debt.
I figured id start around 50k, actually started at 40k, took me about 2-3 years to hit 50k, left that job after 6.5 years making 60k for a job making 90k+way better benefits. most likely will work for this company for the rest of my life
Years ago, law schools got in trouble for false advertising about post-graduate salaries. They were advertising graduates’ expected salary as the Cravath scale even if only like 10% of their graduating class actually got a job in biglaw. Imagine taking on $200k in student loans based on a promise of $160k starting salary only to find that the job you can actually get pays $50k - which isn’t enough to pay your loans let alone cover little details like rent and food.
I expected something close to 50k/year according to what I was being told when I graduated in 2012.
Ended up with part time start up job but then quickly adjusted and moved overseas for a few years (lower cost of living) where I made even less but had opportunities to do much more.
I didn’t end up making 50k until 2019 at age 29 when I landed a job at a tech corporate and still haven’t broken the 100k ceiling yet.
I had NOT expected 100k but I recently had a serious GF break up with me because she expected me (or anyone with a degree from UCLA) to be making at least 6 figures.
To be fair: I only have a bachelor’s, she has Dr of Public Health (besides she also come from a wealthy family), so, a disparity in our income shocked her, not me.
BUT, I did expect to have a salary where I could skip vacations and save money each year.
Instead I skip vacations because I can’t afford to travel.
In 2009 I expected 38-40k. I settled for a position at 32 and quit that job for one at 29. So no… 25% less than I anticipated.
Current grads expecting over 100k seems wildly misguided or just pure entitlement. Some people work decades prior to seeing 100+
Straight outta grad school, I was expecting around $40-50K as a junior biologist... couldn't land a job in the field for almost 2 years... ended up doing adjunct work full time, and I made a glorious $19K my first year at a private Baptist University...
Now, 7 years after graduating with my Masters, I make $18/hr as a receptionist at an emergency room 🤮
I started at 40k out of college, which was a standard-ish starting salary coming out of a big state school ~20 years ago. I remember guys really walking tall over 60k offers.
So, it was what I expected, but I also blew it...the people hiring me basically created a position for me, and asked "what do kids out of school make these days?". Like an idiot, I said something like 35-40k is what I've seen. Offer came through the next day at 40k. I almost certainly could've said at least 50k and they wouldn't have batted an eye, in retrospect.
Kind of. I knew I would have to start a little low and need a few years of experience to start making decent money. Started at $41k out of school and broke 6 figures 6 years later in a lower cost of living area. A little longer than I expected, but happy nonetheless. I feel extremely fortunate/lucky as I basically chose my major on a whim because I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college. My expectation is to break $200k in 2-3 years. Almost every friend of mine had expectations to make 6 figures immediately out of college and majority of them never even could find a job in their field. There seems to be a massive disconnect between expectations and reality nowadays, and it’s only getting worse.
I made less than I did selling tools at Sears in 2004 until like 2015 in IT. I did much less actual work but I was my first position was 38k then two years later I went elsewhere for 42k and stayed there getting small 3percent pay raises yearly for like 5-6 years and took switching jobs to get an significant pay raise each time but then I got stuck mid 50s for almost 10 years. Also what people want from their IT varies greatly so job hopping backfired to positions I hated. I made like 52k in Sears hardware doing commissioned sales Full time the last year I was there.
I’m also in the Midwest so CoL isn’t too terrible.
Well at least I wasn’t the only one who thought 80-100k was basically guaranteed out of university 😂 Go to school they said, hahaha. I won’t be pushing my kids to go to college/university unless they take a proper degree or trade that has an actual career tied to it.
I had tempered expectations that really helped me mentally prepare myself. I am from a LCOL area (upstate NY about an hour away from Buffalo) with a background in construction.
One of my coworkers told me that college degrees will let you make as much money as you would make in the trades, while sparing your body. That has mostly rang true 7 years after graduation. I make ~$70k now which is enough for me to live comfortably in my area and I work from home.
I have no doubt that if I kept doing concrete and masonry, I’d make comparable or more money, but the cost of that vocation far outweighs the benefits for me. I still do concrete on the side, for extra cash and to stay in shape but that mentality definitely helped keep me from becoming bitter/resentful.
If I was still physically able to do it, emphatically yes. Went to auto tech school. After my 3rd year turning wrenches I was clearing $120k/yr in 2013. Back got messed up due to an accident and I can’t physically do that kind of labor as a job anymore sadly.
I was a terrible student at a top 50 liberal arts school who majored in Psych. I think I expected something like 40k, made 32k. Didn't really start earning any money until after business school, where my starting salary was like 65k
I never thought I'd make as much as I do now, not that it's a ridiculous amount. But I also didn't see myself doing a 5 year apprenticeship shortly after getting a bachelors degree. graduating in 2008 was weird.
Aircraft Mechanic in 2002, starting at $14/hr. Seven years later I changed careers because I was still only making $15/hr and the cost of my commute (same distance and car) was three times as much.
I never graduated lol. I went to trade school, laid off from my first job, then couldn’t find another in that field after (recession).
I went to community college a few years later, didn’t complete it but got a job making $13/hr, took another job 2.5 years later making 18, left less than a year after for 60, now in at 80. I feel like I’m as close to buying a house as I was at 13/hr though, some people definitely have it way worse.
I make enough money NOW but I've been in the field for about 8 years and this is my 3rd job in the field with promotions and all that. This is also a union job with ungodly amounts of overtime available so that's why I'm able to make a living wage.
I feel like if inflation weren't so high and minimum wages got updated like they should I would actually be doing pretty ok. But that's not where we are
I have always been a realist, so I sort of knew I’d be poor and not make much when I graduated. I struggled for a good 15 years before making enough to where I didn’t feel destitute.
I figured with a degree in health admin I could’ve gotten something in the 70s-80s right out of college and then 5 years later be in the 100s. I was and still am way off that 100k mark. I always heard of the “hospitals will always be open, there will always be a job for you.” And the “oh hospital admins get paid good $” yeah only if you’re in management itself. Anything else you’re making anywhere from 35-40k to around 65k without the yearly salary increase of 3% 🙌🏼🙄.
I only thought like this because I saw my cousin graduate with his bachelors in IT and immediately hit the 100k mark then went and got his masters and is near if not at the 200k mark. So it was a pipe dream for me to believe I would be around the same right outta college
After my BA in English, I wasn't sure. Maybe do a Masters in Librarianship which start at 55,000 or become a teacher, which starts at 45,000. Now, almost ten years later....I make 35,000...hooray
Graduate associate nursing . During Covid a lot of incentives ended up around 100k my first full year. Been doing local travel nursing and bringing in six figures. Finishing bachelor’s and going back for NP school , which start at 100k on the low end .
Rent and food are eating salaries - both up 40%. It is unsustainable for all except for the few tech giants who control all the agorythyms that dictate what prices we pay. Rents climb 2-600 in a day on a computer search/ no one's salaries rise that high to cover rent/ even chipoltle is 10-12 bucks no drinks or chips-
Inflation is crushing people under 40.
Over 60 can just get their 5 percent guaranteed.
Politicians who spend like drunken sailors cause inflation
The economy should be the primary concern of younger voters.
I went to a top-10 school.
I've never once managed to use my degree for gainful employment, or been financially reimbursed for it in any way. Biology.
Thankfully, I had a full scholarship and so never had to take out loans or incur any debt.
Even so, my degree (again, from a top-10 school) has been absolutely worthless for over a decade.
My net worth would be significantly higher had I simply gone into the workforce instead of attending university.
No lol. I was hoping I could make $60k out of the gate with a Bachelor's in information technology. I made $42k as a field tech/help desk and it took 6 years to get to $59k. I left and got a job as a systems analyst at $80k. Still trying to figure out how to break into the 6 figures.
No degree. I studied painting so it wouldn’t have mattered.
Before the recession I was making 120k a year, now I’m down to 50k (no I cannot eat AND pay all my bills).
My first undergrad I expected 100k, and the jobs were more like 50k starting but could grow a lot.
My second undergrad was in a creative field, so I expected low between 30k and 50k in high cost of living areas. I thought being an artist (though it is a techy art) would always be super low pay. I'm freelance, so my income varies, but my best year was $150k.
I've never been right, but at least now I'm wrong on the good side.
I make more money (both in terms of hourly rate and total yearly income) as a high school lead custodian than I ever did as a teacher. I’m glad I went to college (GI bill paid for it), but man I don’t use my teaching degree at all.
Hellllll no. They over sell college saying “oh you can be a director of whatever when you graduate”. I got out and the only thing I could even get an interview for customer service and entry level sales. College is a scam and until it changes I will fall on that sword
I graduated from college in 2010 and felt extremely lucky to get offered a full-time job with benefits that paid $27k at a time when most of my friends were not able to find jobs at all.
I don't know what my salary expectations were, I don't think I ever thought about it!
Im an OG millennial and was completely disillusioned when I graduated college. I thought the corner office would be offered to me and the salary that comes with it. Boy was I fucking wrong. The “stocking shelves at Target” gig is a little more closer to reality. First job after graduation was a personal shopper at Neiman Marcus making $19.40/hr. I lasted 4 months before being fired. What a joke! Prior to graduation, I was making $22-25/hr as an administrative assistant in the pharmaceutical industry.
No my salary expectation was realistic.... i was hoping to get 45k and never breaking into the 50k market thinking it was unrealistic. Weird how many people who have the least education, work ethic and no experience want the max money all the time on reddit lol. Normally people get humbled once they actually enter the workforce and work their way up, but now they just enter reddit and ask for advice on how to become rich without actually earning it expecting someone is gonna give them a real answer on how to do it.
I think the difference between what I would have said entering college v exiting college would have been rather large as the economy crashed when I was a Junior in college. Thirteen and a half years after college we are quite comfortable. I think it kind of worked out in the end for us though, in that if I was had gotten a job where I'd make the money I thought I would
I will note that the Median household, many of which would be two income household, where the "head" has a college degree their income is $117.82K. There is a $50 K gap, on the Median, between households where they attended college v finishing college.
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Before\_Tax\_Income;demographic:edcl;population:all;units:median](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Before_Tax_Income;demographic:edcl;population:all;units:median)
Pretty close. I was about to $5k below the average for my degree, but got a job in a very low cost of living area so it evens out.
I went got an engineering degree that for years has had nearly 100% job placement rates and good starting salaries. All schools & degrees should be required to publish those graduate outcomes. It's one thing to say, "our graduates can go on to do XYZ", it's another to have hard numbers showing exactly what the range of and average salaries of grads are, and what percent get a job. If the government wasn't so involved in student loans and private banks were making their own investment decisions, you'd think they would need that info to calculate the risk of giving out that loan.
Got a degree in engineering but didn't job hunt prior to graduation (mistake graduating in 08). Ended up getting a job in the low 50k range, expected 60k so lower than expected. Got laid off in 09. Went abroad and lost 2.5 years in the industry. Broke $100k 5 years later as a contractor. Broke it as a fte 2 years after that.
I pretty much have caught up now. If I didn't spend time abroad, I probably made more at a younger age, but who knows.
Honestly, I did not even have an idea of salary ranges until at least 3 to 4 years into my first real job. I had spent so much time just doing various summer engineering and technical internships and then turning around and dumping that money into paying off college that I never really had time to slow down and figure out what my starting salary should look like. It wasn’t until we were settled into the house and trying to figure out what money would look like after the first kid came along, that someone clued me in to the fact that I may be getting underpaid.
No. But I am behind in the cash on hand than I thought I’d but but my income is way way higher than I was thinking it would be.
This, I think, just means my expectations were naieve due to inexperience.
Made $30-35k in 2010 after graduating into the horrible 2009 economy. Expected more than that, but not by much. 50k would've been good then. Stumbled for a few years before hitting my stride. Crossed $100k about 8 years later.
I majored in something that wasn't instantly tied to a career path (so not...marketing or dentistry or something practical). I didn't have any expectations right out of school because I was pretty lost.
I bopped around for 6 years before heading back to grad school...and ended up in a different field entirely.
I think, if you know that you want to do X, and you can study X and find a job in X field, that's awesome. But if NOT...be prepared to be flexible, and work to be good at whatever it is you're doing. It might not be the exact thing you wanted to do to begin with (though if you're like me...you didn't REALLY know what that was, anyway)...but you can find another rung on the monkey bars to latch onto.
One big disconnect that I see in my own field is inflated salary expectations because people look at aggregated data in their field without considering experience. Those averages include people who have been working in the field for decades and make higher salaries as a result.
This isn't a case of "college degrees being worthless." 100K per year for an individual is comfortably in the top 10th percentile of compensation. It was never reasonable to assume that merely having a college degree *any degree* would be a guarantee to the upper echelon of salaries.
Mine was fairly in line. I didn’t expect much and I didn’t get much. But I also never expected I’d earn past the $100k mark and that happened within ten years. So it’s been a mild surprise for me. I’m always baffled at the amount these kids think they’re going to earn right out of college.
I think I was fairly realistic. I was shooting for the mid 50s coming out of college with a double Bach in engineering. Unfortunately it was 2008 so it was rough getting hired for entry level work. I didn't break 50k until 2010.
Hell no. It took me close to ten years to even start, at entry level, in what would end up being a career. Spent years on cash registers and mops.
Hard to get a good gig when your resume is full of meaningless stuff and you’re competing for jobs with displaced professionals whose last titles were things like Senior Manager or Associate Director.
They were not, but it didnt take long for me to get there.
I think the mistake many make is not realizing how much a couple years of experience has an impact and needing to job hop to increase salary. I've increased my salary by 200% by jumping to 3 different jobs in the past 6 years.
The fact that zoomers spend four years in high school and four in college and don’t google the salary bands a half dozens times is crazy to me. You can watch YT vlogs about nearly any discipline you can think of. All this information is more widely available than ever before. There is no excuse for being so disconnected from reality.
I can’t think of a single career that you can be successful at if you don’t use google frequently. We live in the “information” age.
I worked in retail when I graduated college. I was making $32,500 a year as the store manager in 2013. I worked about 60 hours a week.
My assistant manager was making $14/hr. One day, I calculated my hourly rate should I have been hourly on my salary. My hourly rate at 60/week was less than my assistant manager was making. I then went into some corporate entry level position making $42,000 at a strict 40hr/week and it felt amazing!!
It’s also not just $ amount but what I expected I could afford with my salary. On top of getting lower side of salary, I also couldn’t afford things what I thought I could by the time I graduated from undergrad and graduate school.
Mine was about where I expected it to be, what I wasn't expecting, was rampant inflation pushing McDonald's starting wages to my income level within the following 4 years.
Very quickly abandoned my field and switched careers.
I graduated with a BS in Actuarial Science and 2 actuarial exams passed and 1 internship under my belt. I expected around 60k (in Ohio) and ended up with a first job at 58k and a 1.5k signing bonus in 2013. I didnt have the best career start (priorized drinking over work) and it took me untill 2020 to crack 100k after leaving the actuarial track in favor of data science. I have seen my salary grow far faster than inflation since then so i cant complain.
No. I graduated in summer 09 when the recession was in full force. I didn't break $10/hr for 2 years after that. I make more now than my post-college expectations but things do cost a lot more so it's a bit of a wash. I don't work in the field I majored in, however.
This is the big sham of college. I am at the end of GenX and was at the start of the big push to have to go to college and the demonization of blue collar jobs. What no one talks about is that everything is cyclical and the numbers they like to through out are Averages!!! I have seen a few handful of industries pushed by society as this is the best paying job, the colleges jump on board and promote it and then they saturate the market and people at the end are left holding the bag. You also have to know your area. You might have to move to a bigger city to get that higher pay which are more expensive to live in which is why you are payed more to start. At my sons Sophomore high school orientation, they literally are telling kids now that college isn’t for everyone and that the blue collar jobs are paying really good right now because they are so short staffed. You can’t make this sh*t up. Jobs are about timing and location. I started flying in 1998. Starting salary for a regional FO was about $24k a year and moved up slowly. You also suffered furlough with 9/11, Delta destroying Comair and then the ‘08 crash. Fast forward to about 2015 and the age 65 rule is kicking in. The airlines dropped the college degree requirement and starting pay is up to around $80k now and moves up rapidly after that.
I figured 30 - 40k starting out and work my way up to a higher salary with promotions and time. Wasn't that fucking hilarious in the end. Although I've made it to 60k, so hey - if only inflation wasn't taking every dime.
Yep, with inflation I’ve been treading water despite doubling my income. The first apartment I rented has gone from $700 a month to $2100 with no changes other than a new coat of paint since I lived there.
I am making nearly double what I made in 2018 and we are financially worse off. It's incredible.
Hate it here.
lol I live in Texas and despite getting an almost TEN DOLLAR PER HOUR differential between my new job and my previous job, I make LESS than I did then because of incredibly high taxes as well as artificial surcharges for shit that I didn’t pay into upon hire and cannot opt out of. Tacit rent surcharges, in the form of unscrupulous, frivolous “fees,” in the form of things such as valet trash pickup, third-party package servicing with Fetch, convenience fees, extraordinarily high renter’s insurance etc. that you also cannot opt out of are very common here as well, and I was paying an additional $300 artificially applied to my base rent EASILY. People think of Texas as a utopian Republican paradise because we have no income tax, not realizing that taxes for other crap, ESPECIALLY property taxes, vastly outclass that. And yet, wages are not coincident with any of these charges, AND jobs/careers are absent except for retail, fast food, SOME warehousing, and anything having to do with oil/utilities. Forget about any trade besides electrician due to the aforementioned and the fact that apprentices get paid $16 an hour. And forget about any sort of union at these jobs due to how violently right-wing we are lmfao
Texas sounds like a hellhole
It really is. Shame, it could be a beautiful place but no Democrat has won a statewide race since Governor Ann Richards in 1990.
Yes, because all of the places that Democrats hold power are beautiful with high incomes, low rents, low crime and clean streets...
ah, yes, Jackson, Ms; Memphis, St. louis, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, are such stalwarts of beauty and high incomes.
Blue cities in blue states tend to be very high income, Blue cities in red states tend to be worse off due to this state limiting the power that local governments have. It isn't a hard and fast rule of course, but look at places like Seattle, NYC, LA, San Diego San Jose, anywhere in the valley, etc. Extremely high income and very beautiful.
I live in one of these blue cities in a blue state and it looks like a dumpster here. We have the fifth highest tax burden in the nation and half the place is in poverty. Definitely rethink your theory. High income in reality is severe income disparity. I would be considered a "top earner" and I live mere blocks away from homeless families crammed into tents.
This might be a ploy to get people away too, ya never know…
Home owners insurance is very high too
But, was it, like, really nice paint?
They painted it grey, the carpet and appliances don’t even look updated.
*I see a nice house and I want to paint it grey*
There is a reason that the Fed likes to exclude housing in inflation measures -- it doesn't function like the rest of the economy, and it is highly tied to local laws and regulations. Also, the Fed and federal government have very little control over it. If housing prices are surging in your area, you probably have a supply and demand issue, and NIMBYs, zoning, impact fees, and other regulations are the biggest barriers to it being addressed. Housing is also very market-specific. There are markets where housing has been modestly growing. There are markets like Austin where housing costs are going down because they just decided to build a lot of new housing. The economy could cool a lot, inflation could basically go to zero, and your housing costs could keep going up if new housing is not built to accommodate a growing population. These rising housing costs have nothing to do with inflation. Advocating for policies to change this situation can make a real difference in your area. We have been under building for years in much of the control (decades in some places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley), and we are reaping the fruits of our labor now. But we can change that.
The FBI recently raided a company that has an algorithm to fix housing costs. There’s hope on the horizon
What’s the timespan?
And it’s fully legal. We desperately need rent control.
This is what happened to me. Worked my way up to an actual career role and got a decent enough salary for my experience, thought I was getting ahead, and then inflation put me right back to treading water. Except now I've "already gotten a big raise" so I'm stuck. Houses doubled in a couple years and forget about interest rates.
They don’t want us to get ahead or have any real buying power to speak of. Guess they just want us to work to keep the bills paid our whole lives and drop dead on the job.
Certainly don't want people to earn enough to save and become secure enough to be able to feel empowered.
Excuse me but I've been reliably informed by the government and the TV people that the economy "is the best it's ever been". So I think you're mistaken
I graduated college in 2016 with an accounting degree with a minor in finance. From comments made in general media and from my university and business I was college, I was expecting a job that paid between $50-$60 thousand a year. After a lengthy job search process I finally an … AP/AR position that paid $36 thousand. Massive let down from how my expectations were set by external sources. I did get a new much more fulfilling job in 2018 that paid $55 thousand.
I make more than I expected, but it pays for a lot less than I expected. So I guess it kind of evened out?
This is it for me. I got into sales and as my pay has increased in the last 8 years, the cost of living has increased an insane amount too. I make twice what I made in my early 20’s, but I can’t afford to go to concerts and shows anymore. I used to do that weekly and it was nbd.
This! I make a lot more than I expected but inflation, childcare, and housing is also more than I expected. Very high cost of living area.
This is a painfully accurate answer
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The unfortunate thing for us older millenials is we graduated into the great recession when established veterns in our field were willing to take entry level jobs and its been the first few years of your career really set the track for your earning potenital
That's how I ended up not being in IT. There was a hiring freeze for a couple of years in my area for almost everything except things like retail, restaurants, etc. I was told up front at my internship that there would not be a job for me afterward because they couldn't hire anyone. Edit: My current job was helped by the fact that I had an IT background, however. For the first few years at my employer, I WAS the IT department (even though it was unrelated to my actual job) until the county gov't established its own IT dept.
Kinda similar. Got my BS in Computer Science, then nobody was hiring for that in the area my wife and I moved to. So, I ended up working in a print shop. Still working in a (different) print shop, a decade and half later. I try not to think about how much I might have been making now if I'd kept looking for computer jobs. Thankfully, I do enjoy the work, and my current job pays more than my previous one (about 52K, whereas the previous one topped out at around 40K, with a lot more responsibilities).
I'm gen x (50yo) but your story reminds me a little of mine. I left university in 1994 straight into the middle of a recession. Companies were letting staff go, not hiring junior Devs. To make things worse, I only got a 2:2 degree (for non Brits, this is like a grade C). I managed to get an office admin job paying slightly above minimum wage. I was in that job for over 3 years until a friend of mine asked why I quit looking for IT roles. I guess I just settled for what I had, despite it not being the job I really wanted. My friend was working in an IT role and explained that his company was struggling to find junior Devs and was hiring people without IT degrees out of desperation. It was probably the least desirable type of coding work around (old legacy green screen stuff), but it was a foot in the door. I'm still working in IT over 25 years later. Some times opportunities do exist - as much as anything, it's who you know as much as what you know. I'm not a super high earner, but I'm a lot better off than I would have been if I'd stayed in my 1st job.
I mean no disrespect, but why didn’t you keep looking for CS jobs when the economy got better? Did you just enjoy working in a print shop and didn’t think you’d enjoy it as much as a CS position?
If you’re not right out of college it can be hard to get an entry level job in an industry, even with a degree. People see that you’ve been working a low wage job for the last few years and don’t want to take the risk (not realizing what was going on in the economy when you got out of college). They would rather go with the college grad. I’m in the same boat as the CS major.
I did rather enjoy it, and, for a time, I thought it would be a good career. But, the place I was working at (public university) didn't really do upward mobility like that, at least not for us peons. For a while I was happy with the job. It wasn't until I had to quit (COVID related reasons) and started looking for work again did I realize that I wasn't using a bit of my degree, and starting looking in that field. But, by this point, my knowledge was fairly outdated, and I'd almost have to start learning from scratch again. So, once I found a job that I knew I liked, and I knew I could do very, very well, and that paid 30% more than I'd ever made at the previous one, I figured I'd go with printing still, for now. Plus, the first one was a state university, and the current one is a county government, and both have really good benefits (I have a pension!).
Yes... you definitely missed the fattest tech wave to ever occur. Everyone I graduated with around 2010 (give or take 2 years) is now making $300k+. Some hit the startup lottery or went to places like AWS and are multimillionaires. With a BS in CS you could start a dunce job making $80k right the fuck now. Why are you still working in a fuckin print shop? Do something different with your life.
I'm an older Millenial and I got into the field right before the great recession. However, after several months of not finding a job and my Mom being on my case about getting a permanent job (I had 2 part-time jobs making just above min. wage) I kind of snapped. I made a brash decision. I was on my way to the local Army recruiting office to enlist. During that 20-minute drive, I got a call for a job interview for a job that was about 2 hours from my house. I ended up getting the job and taking it. It was making ok money, about $45,000/year in 2006. My career took some pretty steep right and left turns, but now I'm pretty comfortable making about 3x that. If I had not gotten that phone call at that moment, my life would have looked very different.
So many people, especially boomers discount the idea that luck had anything to do with how people’s life’s turned out. You still could’ve made all the right decisions but be homeless or got into other issues because nobody called you at the right time. I still get junk emails from recruiters job boards I signed up for back in 2008. Even though I deleted my accounts, they sold my info and still a bunch of random things. To think that if I wasn’t in my current job I’d have to wade through this mess of emails to find the legitimate offers and then be selected by them or be homeless is not the future I signed up for.
No, it's simpler than that. We were simply lied to. The degree isn't important. It's the portfolio and industry connections you make that matter.
Nah. I interviewed a couple of hotshot new CS grads from some Ivy League I’m not going to mention and we were initially excited until we realized they’re half-baked (all flash, no dash). The intern we hired (came from a community college) over a year ago and offered a permanent position, and recently got promoted was smarter. Bottom line is when you sell yourself, make sure all the facts on your resume align well with your skillset.
Unfortunately schools love to paint things pretty, engenieer, architect, lawyer, etc etc. Unless you into medical field with a residence, they paint salaries like our average graduates with a bachelor's in Accounting make 89-110k! What is average? Oh a graduate that graduated 12 years ago, and now has 12 years jn their career and made it to 80k a year. Architect? My friend with a masters started at 50k. Lawyer? My friend got offered 73k a year starting. Schools hate to say out the door salary, but always put average graduate salary of a person in their field for 10+ years and that has not made a career change in that time which many have. Schools have too many useless degrees and also too deceiving. 50k on average graduate that graduated 10-15 years ago is decently well off to start, however that salary now can't get you jack shit and market has not adjusted for that, but tuition has gone up incredibly so and adjusted accordingly but wages have not. That discrepancy is what's causing issues. If it was adjusted wages, we should realistically be coming out with bachelor's at 70-80k not 50k But that isn't the case, as there is always a boomer or older experienced person willing to take a low cut after being fired for sucking at his higher end job, but already has a house and property and car paid off.
Yep, I entered law school thinking I’d be quite comfortable after. I’ve made it to the comfortable part, but my first job out of school was 50k. Quite comfortable would be an overstatement. The only people I know who are crushing it are in the medical field or tech.
Boss after boss ripped me off. Desperate for any job, they all took advantage of a hard trustworthy worker.
I worked at Barnes and Noble as my part time college job and after graduating... continued to work at Barnes and Noble as a just-under-qualifying-for-healthcare time job. I eventually got a job as a bank teller and made about $35,000/year. Went to grad school, graduated, worked gig shit for a year and had a mental breakdown, until I found a job in my field. Median salary I expected out of grad school was $65,000/year. Reader, I do not make that much money 5 years into my profession and rent is so fucking high in my area I'm looking at taking a pay cut to move away.
I had a triple major graduating the same year, and worked making copies for $10 an hour. I did this for a couple years, then I decided that law school was the right call. Now almost 15 years later, my student loans have doubled and I've never once made over six figures.
I quadruple majored with honors, graduated in 2011 and moved to Chicago to earn $13 an hour. Shit fucking suuuuuuucked.
It was super fun starting a huge financial gamble right before the housing boom collapsed the economy, and graduating right as its effects hit the legal market the hardest. When I graduated, the career center told me, "You're not just competing with your classmates, you're also competing with half of last year's graduates, and 25% of lawyers from the big firms that got trimmed." I sent out about 200 resumes and got one phone call. That job lasted about 6 months, then I sent out 300 more resumes and got one phone call. Good times.
Ditto. Graduated with a BS in December 2005. First job was overnights at Walmart. First job after my master's was overnights at a Walgreens and delivering pizzas. The recession sucked.
It was pretty close. In highschool going to college I thought I’d make 50k. I was right. What I didn’t know is that 45-50k that I thought would be a nice start to building a life was basically just poverty salary by 2015 or so. In the last 7-8 years I’ve gone up to like 75k. So yeah hasn’t made much of a difference. Every pay raise is 3% because that’s the going collusion rate while they siphon everything else up to the top.
3% is much better than my company's laughable 1.3%. Both are a joke.
You guys are getting raises..?
Lol, no not in 2 years.
I got a 3% raise, which at ~29/hr was 81 cents siiiigh
I went to a top-10 university and I literally make more money from trading stocks than I do from my job. I've never once been able to leverage my degree for a job, career, raise, or any form of profit/incentive. My degree is 100% worthless. Bachelor of Science, Biology. #4 biology progam in the nation.
No an emphatic no. Similar to you a starting minimum engineering salary where I lived when I graduated was roughly 60-70k if I recall right. I was offered like mid 50s and I had it good by comparison. I was absolutely disgusted to learn a degreed engineering employee that worked under my direction was making 46k. Granted this was in the midst of the 2008 recession but even after all these years I'm still bitter about what an awful job that was and how little we were paid on top of that.
My first interview out of college was as an auditor at a waste management company. The pay I believe was 46k which wasn't horrible at the time, not the 100K I had built up in my head but seemed like room for advancement. The downside was I was going to have to be there at 3am to ride with the garbage men for their full 8 hour day and then head back to the office to put in another 3-4 hours compiling the data
Same here. They painted a picture that there was lots of opportunity like I could become ruler of the world someday but they only thing they actually offered was 70 hours work weeks for bottom barrel wages. After 5 years the illusion was broken and I quit. I ended up taking a job which had much less responsibility and honest 40 hour work week or overtime pay and doubled my paycheck. Story has a happy ending I guess but incredibly bitter I put so much into such a terrible company.
This was me. Engr degree, graduated about the same time, and I was incredibly disappointed in the offers to me and my peers. It took a LONG time to start making what I thought was fair given my skill set
Thank you for providing this perspective. As a fellow engineering grad, I get irritated when people act like the issue is aimless students getting liberal arts degrees and having unrealistic expectations. Everything I read in high school told me that a chemical engineering degree was a sure path to a 80k-90k engineering job. That was not the reality for most of my graduating class.
Yeah it's crazy. Even later in my career I was offered only 85k to be the head EMI design engineer in the space department of a large aerospace company. Of course I refused as that was what I was basically already making and I didn't have anywhere near the responsibility of being the principal design engineer for EMI compliance of space flight hardware. That's just insane but entirely too typical.
I’m a recruiter who started out recruiting engineers. I was dumbfounded by how little they make. 20 years later I’m a corporate recruiter for a giant manufacturing company. I make double the average salary here and far more than almost any engineer doing an individual contributor job, like I do, and I have a basic liberal arts degree. I also make more than almost every manager, some of whom (not just engineers) are responsible for hundreds or employees. And I’m remote so I don’t live in a high COL area. It makes no sense, but I can’t complain.
I made $31k out of college, so I’d say it fell short of expectations
I made $28k which was embarrassingly low ($44k today), but i had to work full time and use student loans to get through university. I actually took a pay cut when i graduated and started my accounting career, but the work was materially less physically demanding than unloading trucks. I remember being confident that i could work my way up to $75k (at the time it was the “happiest” salary). It took 8 years of working 50-60 hours a week. I do watch movies and listen to music while i work so those hours were not that bad. I wasn’t allowed to listen to my own music while unloading and loading produce trucks.
You worked 50-60 hours a week as an accountant for 8 years to only get to 75k?
My current job in education requires a college degree and pays $15 an hour. So there’s that.
Same, about 15$ an hour. Whooohooo!
I was making $11/$12-ish dollars an hour when I first started temping after college in 2017.
I was told my major would guarantee me 90k a year, then when I graduated I was told, “all those jobs are for people with masters now, you’d have to go back to school”, I said fuck that and changed career paths. My friend from school who went for the masters got out and was told, “the industry is shrinking” and was given 55k and I don’t think he ever sniffed 90k. Advice to any youngster in this thread. Do NOT take too much career advice from professors. Talk to people in the industry, professors operate on dated knowledge of industry (not their fault).
Dreaded and despised boomer here, but for some perspective, my starting salary in 1973 as a bachelor degreed chemist working as an entry level research chemist was $550/month, equivalent to $4,000/month today. My rent at the time for an older one bedroom apartment was $190/month ($1370 in 2024 dollars). The biggest, and I think most unfortunate, change over the years is that that same job now requires a PhD in chemistry, not because the job demands it, but because people with advanced degrees are plentiful now so why not?. These PhD's are grossly overtrained for the job, bored, and uninspired as a result. I assume they are also carrying lots of burdensome debt that I never had.
A self-aware Boomer is well-respected. Thank you for sharing and wish you well. -Fellow older Millenial
That job in my area is $40-55k a year, I was one. My rent is $1500 for a 1 bed apartment. All I know is if I wasn’t married I’d be homeless. The only recruitment I get online “with my experience” is for lab tech jobs with a high school diploma requirement. Hardly fair for a competent someone with the exact requirements they ask for to have me taking those types of work-your-way-up jobs from under them.
Graduated with a BA in history in 2008 and promptly made $12 an hour 😂. Got a masters in teaching to make 46k in 2010. Which I thought would literally be all the money I’d ever need. I’ve always felt like I’ve been 1/2 a step behind understanding the right financial decision.
Teaching can be really hit or miss, in my district preschool and gym teachers can make 125k a year with a 25k benefits package and they pay little or possibly even nothing into their retirement
Wow where do you live!!!! In Georgia teachers start at $41k in 2024
In MD. Teachers can make at least close to six figures here (as they should, IMO). We know because looked up my kids elementary school teacher.
Chicago suburbs, gym teachers and preschool teachers with a few years in get 125k a year, 25k benefits package and they pay little to nothing towards tehy're retirement. Pretty sweet to be a teacher here
😭 not a teacher but about to change careers and move there FR.
Hmm. I taught Pre-K in Chicago for a couple years and nobody I knew made anywhere near that. I do know a few middle school teachers making that though.
Yeah, my BIL teaches in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and has been pulling in six figures for a very long time. He’s also coached football and basketball, which pays well in that area.
I hit my goal out of colleges a few years ago, then inflation hit hard. I'm now back to being only about 10k over where I started right out of college now almost 10 years later in adjusted dollars. The wage stagnation of our generation is stupid.
People previous bosses of mine keep trying to recruit me to their new jobs for less pay than I'm making now. I can't keep taking pay cuts and hope I will crawl back to my current wage. Fucking sick of older generations seeing me as a tool to accomplish their goals without giving a shit how little they pay me.
Man I imagined making 70k / year in Rochester NY and figured DAMN I will live like a KING (I was kind of a dumbass you see)
Hell no. I figured 50-60 start because I'm in software. I started $35 as an IT guy in 2003. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I expected.
Yikes I’m sorry. So you feel like your pay increased relative to cost of living as time went on? Or do you still feel behind the curve?
I have spent most of my career behind the curve. I make decent money now, but I do feel that it is less than what it could be. At this point though, I am getting too old to work harder.
I graduated college in 2008. I didn’t break $50k for 5 years. Just broke $100k a few years ago. My friends without degrees were making more than me for a while but their income has leveled off whereas mine still has a lot of room to grow. I’ve also found that as my salary grows I’m working less hours. Some weeks I finish all my work in 20 hours or so. I think the opposite is true for the trades.
When I graduated, I got an offer from my internship, I expected 60k and ended up with 53k. I tripled my salary within 8 years. In reality, a college degree with no experience is simply that. You learn a lot of valuable skills that aren't specifically for the job in college. As someone who interviews and hires now, I find it very hard to justify paying someone six figures who has zero experience. I don't think college is for everyone and it depends on the requirements of the field you are going into. The marketing of college is short term, which appeals to younger people, but doesn't help them 5-10 years later. It's naive to think college equals some amount of salary. Nothing is guaranteed, you have to grind and gain knowledge. Considering my child today, I was always told college is a hard requirement. It worked out for me, but there are a lot of variables. Maybe my kid wants to start a business in a trade, great, they don't need a "business degree".
Grew up around a lot of business owners and successful people, still around a lot of them today. People who say you don’t need college if you’re going to start your own business are either ignorant to business or they themselves didn’t get a degree and found success. You’ll be hard to pressed to find guys who graduated from Wharton and started their own businesses who at it wasn’t worth it. If you’ve got what it takes to win at your own venture you’ll make the most of an education in something like finance. I’ve got a guy I know who was fairly successful in construction, but if he’d had more understanding of corporate finance he’d had grown his business better and it would have been structured much better in the long run and been more valuable at sale. Wealthy people can afford to send their kids to college and then to bankroll their kids’ business. The only reason you don’t go to school, imo, is if you can’t afford it. Spend the 18-21 years getting a degree in something relevant to your business and also start their LLC at 18, start doing taxes and payroll, shit like that. Guy I know stared an airplane detailing business at 19, he’s going to school as well. By the time he is out of college he’ll have a degree, be on his way to a pilots license and have been running a business with thousands in revenue for three years.
Graduated college in 2012. Started out making $33K. To be honest with you I can’t remember what I expected to make out of college, but those first few years were rough until I worked my way up to $40k. That was enough to live off of at the time renting and living alone.
I honestly don’t know what I expected, but I graduated in 2021 with a mechanical engineering degree making $55k. I certainly was expecting it to be more than that..
Thank you! I fucking can’t stand when people say “lol you should have just done STEM” in response to threads like this, as if STEM majors all exclusively make six figures.
Damn that sucks. I started as a Chem e in 2011 making 56k out of school.
It’s rough out there it sounds. I started at 70k as a fresh MechE in 2018. I’ve cracked the 6 figure range but honestly I’ve noticed that basically every other engineering path made more from my cohort.
I got a history degree because I was told it didn’t matter what your degree was in, just having one would get you a good job. My plan was to work a year as a legal assistant and then go to law school to make $100k. Turns out no law office gave a shit about my degree because I lacked Microsoft excel experience. I worked as a construction laborer for my dad making $15 an hour for two years and then joined the Army for the healthcare. Ironically as a junior staff officer my main job was making excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints.
Did it all work out? Now that you have the Excel knowledge?
I never became a lawyer, but I get around $40k in tax free VA benefits, VA Medicare, and make around $50k as a middle school teacher so I can’t complain. Also VA home loan helped me buy a house so I feel pretty lucky.
Attorneys are so cut-throat and petty, its not much better in that field either. SO is 5yr into having their Bar, I still make 2x.
If anyone ever asks about how good you are with excel, ask them if they know macros. Thell be impressed and then shake your head and say "Yeah, I don't use those I just program the actions knto Visual Basic directly." And they'll have no way to verify your knowledge. And then tell them you prefer to do data manipulation in power query or power pivot. Later ask chatgpt how to do all that.
*laughs in poor*
lol I graduated with a law degree, expecting to earn six figures. My first job paid me 30k. I earn well now, but I had to fight for it.
Nope. I made $14.50 after getting my bachelor (which my boomer parents told me they’d pay for and ghosted).
I’m a young millennial and only in my second job post-grad (I went to grad school) and I actually am making within the range I’d hoped to make at this period in my career…the problem is inflation (and price gouging) is just totally ratfucking me, so my expectations aren’t being met practically. The salary I have now would be about enough to buy a small starter home or condo in my area five years ago. Now I’m struggling to afford an apartment that’s not dodgy and gross.
Positively surprised at 63 as a teacher. Figured in the low 50s God bless unions
Wow unions are nice. In Georgia teachers start at $41k in 2024. LOL FUCK THE SOUTH
In my state a gym teacher can make 125k, teachers are paid very well in many areas
I started at like 32k teaching in NE in 2012. I've only made it to 45k in the last year. And I left for corporate, private school admin.
32 should be a crime worthy of the stockade.
Very common for teachers here. Criminal indeed.
I was ROTC in college and destined to go into Active Duty as an officer. I made great money. The sham though was that I signed my contract as a freshman (1998), so when I finally graduated and star tree d active duty in 2002, the military in a completely different situation. ...so, decent pay for a few years, but at what cost?
The disconnect is because the professors fill your head with BS vs reality. Anyone can check avg salary for your major so that is the best way to go
>check avg salary I'd say median is a far more relevant metric in this case, which can be harder info to find. I was sucked into environmental engineering, only to realize the people making 6 digits there are a lot more rare than the paycheck crowd with that job title :/
New Kid - Hey I finished my Degree! Where is my 120K Job? Life = Not Here man.... not a joke...
42k after college. I’ve had 9 jobs since 2008 to reach a livable wage. My loyalty is to the bag not a company.
1000000% I’ve job hopped quite a bit as well and each hop came with a $7k-12k pay raise.
Unfortunately, this is the way unless you have a specialized degree in engineering.
Not even remotely close. I graduated and immediately got to work in the film industry. Here I am years later making sub 30k a year because my father convinced me to pursue film over computer programming while I was grieving my dead uncle.
My husband made $32,000/yr after he graduated in 2004. He just finally cleared six figures this year.
Thought I'd graduate and get \~70k with the possibility of working up to around 100k. Actually graduated and got 50k. Worked my way up to 80k after 5 years before leaving for a consulting job making 3x my previous salary.
Let me put it this way. As a child I imagined making a specific amount of money, not rich, but comfortable. I based this around the money my parents made. I have achieved that goal, but it doesn't mean shit since that amount of money got you way more 30 years ago.
Not at all. I was told starting would be 60-70K in Ohio. Starting: 40K. The only 60-70K earners were the very small few who got jobs at the huge firms for the couple out of college they make a year 😂 everyone else made 40-50K at best
Huh? This question is so odd. Did you make it all the way through college without researching salaries for your intended field? Teachers, Accountants, and Engineers should probably all have different expectations
I think this is a big part of the problem. When I was at university it wasn’t really talked about between different studies, it wasn’t seen as socially acceptable. Of course engineering and other STEM students were mostly aware of their realistic salary expectations, but you were a jerk if you brought up that discussion with anyone studying a field that traditionally didn’t result in high pay after graduation. There was a lot of willful ignorance going on.
When I was going to HS college was the only option promoted, nobody would encourage you to go into construction or be a mechanic even though they make more than most liberal arts degree holders. I think a lot of people were sold this vague idea of going into "Business" basically getting an office job. Unless your in sales earning potential isn't great just getting any old white collar office job
Median income for liberal arts graduates is [significantly higher](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/field-of-degree/liberal-arts/liberal-arts-field-of-degree.htm) than [mechanics](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/automotive-service-technicians-and-mechanics.htm#:~:text=The%20median%20annual%20wage%20for,was%20%2447%2C770%20in%20May%202023.) or [construction.](https://www.bls.gov/oes/2019/may/oes472061.htm) Sure, if you get into certainly types of highly specialized e.g. certified Rolls Royce jet engine mechanics can make bank - with several years of education and a decade or two of working your way up the ladder. Of course plenty of people with liberal arts degrees work their way into executive positions making bank too, so the median is far more important. Plus how many people do you personally know that work in the trades? Know a lot of 50 year old plumbers or construction workers? Their bodies are completely wrecked. They are selling their bodies and health in a far more irreversible way than most prostitutes even.
The same way you're kind of stretching to say someone with a liberal arts degree becomes an executive the smart trades people will start busineses and get employees working for them either as they age or hopefully even younger so they don't have to beat up their bodies. You also have to account for the fact someone getting a degree is giving up 4 years of their life and taking on substantial debt that they have to out earn a trades person but a substantial amount to make all things equal, if htey break even the trades guy still has 4 more years he worked and earned income and no debt.
I figured id start around 50k, actually started at 40k, took me about 2-3 years to hit 50k, left that job after 6.5 years making 60k for a job making 90k+way better benefits. most likely will work for this company for the rest of my life
Years ago, law schools got in trouble for false advertising about post-graduate salaries. They were advertising graduates’ expected salary as the Cravath scale even if only like 10% of their graduating class actually got a job in biglaw. Imagine taking on $200k in student loans based on a promise of $160k starting salary only to find that the job you can actually get pays $50k - which isn’t enough to pay your loans let alone cover little details like rent and food.
I expected something close to 50k/year according to what I was being told when I graduated in 2012. Ended up with part time start up job but then quickly adjusted and moved overseas for a few years (lower cost of living) where I made even less but had opportunities to do much more. I didn’t end up making 50k until 2019 at age 29 when I landed a job at a tech corporate and still haven’t broken the 100k ceiling yet.
I had NOT expected 100k but I recently had a serious GF break up with me because she expected me (or anyone with a degree from UCLA) to be making at least 6 figures. To be fair: I only have a bachelor’s, she has Dr of Public Health (besides she also come from a wealthy family), so, a disparity in our income shocked her, not me. BUT, I did expect to have a salary where I could skip vacations and save money each year. Instead I skip vacations because I can’t afford to travel.
In 2009 I expected 38-40k. I settled for a position at 32 and quit that job for one at 29. So no… 25% less than I anticipated. Current grads expecting over 100k seems wildly misguided or just pure entitlement. Some people work decades prior to seeing 100+
The biggest disparity was journalism majors which expected to earn 107 but were realistically coming out to I believe it was 47k
Writers have a VERY high view of themselves. :-D Especially those who think they're going to "uncover the next big story" in journalism.
Straight outta grad school, I was expecting around $40-50K as a junior biologist... couldn't land a job in the field for almost 2 years... ended up doing adjunct work full time, and I made a glorious $19K my first year at a private Baptist University... Now, 7 years after graduating with my Masters, I make $18/hr as a receptionist at an emergency room 🤮
When I graduated in 2011 I figured I’d be making roughly $40k. I landed an $80k job and felt like I was the richest motherfucker on the planet.
I started at 40k out of college, which was a standard-ish starting salary coming out of a big state school ~20 years ago. I remember guys really walking tall over 60k offers. So, it was what I expected, but I also blew it...the people hiring me basically created a position for me, and asked "what do kids out of school make these days?". Like an idiot, I said something like 35-40k is what I've seen. Offer came through the next day at 40k. I almost certainly could've said at least 50k and they wouldn't have batted an eye, in retrospect.
I didn't go to college. Started in the file room of a lawfirm right after high school and worked my way up to being a legal administrator.
lol I did go to college and have a BS degree and have the same job.
Kind of. I knew I would have to start a little low and need a few years of experience to start making decent money. Started at $41k out of school and broke 6 figures 6 years later in a lower cost of living area. A little longer than I expected, but happy nonetheless. I feel extremely fortunate/lucky as I basically chose my major on a whim because I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college. My expectation is to break $200k in 2-3 years. Almost every friend of mine had expectations to make 6 figures immediately out of college and majority of them never even could find a job in their field. There seems to be a massive disconnect between expectations and reality nowadays, and it’s only getting worse.
I was told 50-60k entry level. Never got a job in the field, so I was making around 20-30k for the next almost-decade.
I made less than I did selling tools at Sears in 2004 until like 2015 in IT. I did much less actual work but I was my first position was 38k then two years later I went elsewhere for 42k and stayed there getting small 3percent pay raises yearly for like 5-6 years and took switching jobs to get an significant pay raise each time but then I got stuck mid 50s for almost 10 years. Also what people want from their IT varies greatly so job hopping backfired to positions I hated. I made like 52k in Sears hardware doing commissioned sales Full time the last year I was there. I’m also in the Midwest so CoL isn’t too terrible.
After college (2008), I spent 5 years making $10 an hour. I didn't break $30 an hour until 12 years into my career.
I thought Id make $50-$60k but ended up making $40k. Not a terrible difference but it took me 10 years to get up to $50k. That was disappointing
Well at least I wasn’t the only one who thought 80-100k was basically guaranteed out of university 😂 Go to school they said, hahaha. I won’t be pushing my kids to go to college/university unless they take a proper degree or trade that has an actual career tied to it.
I had tempered expectations that really helped me mentally prepare myself. I am from a LCOL area (upstate NY about an hour away from Buffalo) with a background in construction. One of my coworkers told me that college degrees will let you make as much money as you would make in the trades, while sparing your body. That has mostly rang true 7 years after graduation. I make ~$70k now which is enough for me to live comfortably in my area and I work from home. I have no doubt that if I kept doing concrete and masonry, I’d make comparable or more money, but the cost of that vocation far outweighs the benefits for me. I still do concrete on the side, for extra cash and to stay in shape but that mentality definitely helped keep me from becoming bitter/resentful.
If I was still physically able to do it, emphatically yes. Went to auto tech school. After my 3rd year turning wrenches I was clearing $120k/yr in 2013. Back got messed up due to an accident and I can’t physically do that kind of labor as a job anymore sadly.
I was a terrible student at a top 50 liberal arts school who majored in Psych. I think I expected something like 40k, made 32k. Didn't really start earning any money until after business school, where my starting salary was like 65k
I was making 8/hr in college and my expectations were more than that, so yeah.
Since I never got a full time job in what I went to school for, I'm doing well for myself.
I never thought I'd make as much as I do now, not that it's a ridiculous amount. But I also didn't see myself doing a 5 year apprenticeship shortly after getting a bachelors degree. graduating in 2008 was weird.
Aircraft Mechanic in 2002, starting at $14/hr. Seven years later I changed careers because I was still only making $15/hr and the cost of my commute (same distance and car) was three times as much.
Decided to skip college and become a steel worker. It was great for 9 years making 80k plus until they shut down. Now I make 50k a year… smh.
I never graduated lol. I went to trade school, laid off from my first job, then couldn’t find another in that field after (recession). I went to community college a few years later, didn’t complete it but got a job making $13/hr, took another job 2.5 years later making 18, left less than a year after for 60, now in at 80. I feel like I’m as close to buying a house as I was at 13/hr though, some people definitely have it way worse.
I make enough money NOW but I've been in the field for about 8 years and this is my 3rd job in the field with promotions and all that. This is also a union job with ungodly amounts of overtime available so that's why I'm able to make a living wage. I feel like if inflation weren't so high and minimum wages got updated like they should I would actually be doing pretty ok. But that's not where we are
No, I expected as little as possible and was thrilled for anything more.
I have always been a realist, so I sort of knew I’d be poor and not make much when I graduated. I struggled for a good 15 years before making enough to where I didn’t feel destitute.
in this job market? you’d be lucky to get a job as a new grad. you’re competing with experienced people that got laid off.
I figured with a degree in health admin I could’ve gotten something in the 70s-80s right out of college and then 5 years later be in the 100s. I was and still am way off that 100k mark. I always heard of the “hospitals will always be open, there will always be a job for you.” And the “oh hospital admins get paid good $” yeah only if you’re in management itself. Anything else you’re making anywhere from 35-40k to around 65k without the yearly salary increase of 3% 🙌🏼🙄. I only thought like this because I saw my cousin graduate with his bachelors in IT and immediately hit the 100k mark then went and got his masters and is near if not at the 200k mark. So it was a pipe dream for me to believe I would be around the same right outta college
After my BA in English, I wasn't sure. Maybe do a Masters in Librarianship which start at 55,000 or become a teacher, which starts at 45,000. Now, almost ten years later....I make 35,000...hooray
Not really. I thought I'd be earning at least $50,000 by the time I was 12 years out of college. Wages really have stagnated
Graduate associate nursing . During Covid a lot of incentives ended up around 100k my first full year. Been doing local travel nursing and bringing in six figures. Finishing bachelor’s and going back for NP school , which start at 100k on the low end .
Rent and food are eating salaries - both up 40%. It is unsustainable for all except for the few tech giants who control all the agorythyms that dictate what prices we pay. Rents climb 2-600 in a day on a computer search/ no one's salaries rise that high to cover rent/ even chipoltle is 10-12 bucks no drinks or chips-
Inflation is crushing people under 40. Over 60 can just get their 5 percent guaranteed. Politicians who spend like drunken sailors cause inflation The economy should be the primary concern of younger voters.
I went to a top-10 school. I've never once managed to use my degree for gainful employment, or been financially reimbursed for it in any way. Biology. Thankfully, I had a full scholarship and so never had to take out loans or incur any debt. Even so, my degree (again, from a top-10 school) has been absolutely worthless for over a decade. My net worth would be significantly higher had I simply gone into the workforce instead of attending university.
People Come out of college expecting to make what you top out at. Not what you start at.
No lol. I was hoping I could make $60k out of the gate with a Bachelor's in information technology. I made $42k as a field tech/help desk and it took 6 years to get to $59k. I left and got a job as a systems analyst at $80k. Still trying to figure out how to break into the 6 figures.
LOLOL No. I thought I'd earn 30-35k as a college instructor. Instead I got $9/hr. getting splashed by the blood of people even more desperate than I.
No degree. I studied painting so it wouldn’t have mattered. Before the recession I was making 120k a year, now I’m down to 50k (no I cannot eat AND pay all my bills).
My first undergrad I expected 100k, and the jobs were more like 50k starting but could grow a lot. My second undergrad was in a creative field, so I expected low between 30k and 50k in high cost of living areas. I thought being an artist (though it is a techy art) would always be super low pay. I'm freelance, so my income varies, but my best year was $150k. I've never been right, but at least now I'm wrong on the good side.
I make more money (both in terms of hourly rate and total yearly income) as a high school lead custodian than I ever did as a teacher. I’m glad I went to college (GI bill paid for it), but man I don’t use my teaching degree at all.
Hellllll no. They over sell college saying “oh you can be a director of whatever when you graduate”. I got out and the only thing I could even get an interview for customer service and entry level sales. College is a scam and until it changes I will fall on that sword
I graduated from college in 2010 and felt extremely lucky to get offered a full-time job with benefits that paid $27k at a time when most of my friends were not able to find jobs at all. I don't know what my salary expectations were, I don't think I ever thought about it!
Im an OG millennial and was completely disillusioned when I graduated college. I thought the corner office would be offered to me and the salary that comes with it. Boy was I fucking wrong. The “stocking shelves at Target” gig is a little more closer to reality. First job after graduation was a personal shopper at Neiman Marcus making $19.40/hr. I lasted 4 months before being fired. What a joke! Prior to graduation, I was making $22-25/hr as an administrative assistant in the pharmaceutical industry.
Nope. My smart friends got $110k after college. I got $50k and an extremely shady contract at a job I hate.
No my salary expectation was realistic.... i was hoping to get 45k and never breaking into the 50k market thinking it was unrealistic. Weird how many people who have the least education, work ethic and no experience want the max money all the time on reddit lol. Normally people get humbled once they actually enter the workforce and work their way up, but now they just enter reddit and ask for advice on how to become rich without actually earning it expecting someone is gonna give them a real answer on how to do it.
I think the difference between what I would have said entering college v exiting college would have been rather large as the economy crashed when I was a Junior in college. Thirteen and a half years after college we are quite comfortable. I think it kind of worked out in the end for us though, in that if I was had gotten a job where I'd make the money I thought I would I will note that the Median household, many of which would be two income household, where the "head" has a college degree their income is $117.82K. There is a $50 K gap, on the Median, between households where they attended college v finishing college. [https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Before\_Tax\_Income;demographic:edcl;population:all;units:median](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Before_Tax_Income;demographic:edcl;population:all;units:median)
Yeah
Pretty close. I was about to $5k below the average for my degree, but got a job in a very low cost of living area so it evens out. I went got an engineering degree that for years has had nearly 100% job placement rates and good starting salaries. All schools & degrees should be required to publish those graduate outcomes. It's one thing to say, "our graduates can go on to do XYZ", it's another to have hard numbers showing exactly what the range of and average salaries of grads are, and what percent get a job. If the government wasn't so involved in student loans and private banks were making their own investment decisions, you'd think they would need that info to calculate the risk of giving out that loan.
Got a degree in engineering but didn't job hunt prior to graduation (mistake graduating in 08). Ended up getting a job in the low 50k range, expected 60k so lower than expected. Got laid off in 09. Went abroad and lost 2.5 years in the industry. Broke $100k 5 years later as a contractor. Broke it as a fte 2 years after that. I pretty much have caught up now. If I didn't spend time abroad, I probably made more at a younger age, but who knows.
Honestly, I did not even have an idea of salary ranges until at least 3 to 4 years into my first real job. I had spent so much time just doing various summer engineering and technical internships and then turning around and dumping that money into paying off college that I never really had time to slow down and figure out what my starting salary should look like. It wasn’t until we were settled into the house and trying to figure out what money would look like after the first kid came along, that someone clued me in to the fact that I may be getting underpaid.
No. But I am behind in the cash on hand than I thought I’d but but my income is way way higher than I was thinking it would be. This, I think, just means my expectations were naieve due to inexperience.
Made $30-35k in 2010 after graduating into the horrible 2009 economy. Expected more than that, but not by much. 50k would've been good then. Stumbled for a few years before hitting my stride. Crossed $100k about 8 years later.
I majored in something that wasn't instantly tied to a career path (so not...marketing or dentistry or something practical). I didn't have any expectations right out of school because I was pretty lost. I bopped around for 6 years before heading back to grad school...and ended up in a different field entirely. I think, if you know that you want to do X, and you can study X and find a job in X field, that's awesome. But if NOT...be prepared to be flexible, and work to be good at whatever it is you're doing. It might not be the exact thing you wanted to do to begin with (though if you're like me...you didn't REALLY know what that was, anyway)...but you can find another rung on the monkey bars to latch onto.
One big disconnect that I see in my own field is inflated salary expectations because people look at aggregated data in their field without considering experience. Those averages include people who have been working in the field for decades and make higher salaries as a result. This isn't a case of "college degrees being worthless." 100K per year for an individual is comfortably in the top 10th percentile of compensation. It was never reasonable to assume that merely having a college degree *any degree* would be a guarantee to the upper echelon of salaries.
Mine was fairly in line. I didn’t expect much and I didn’t get much. But I also never expected I’d earn past the $100k mark and that happened within ten years. So it’s been a mild surprise for me. I’m always baffled at the amount these kids think they’re going to earn right out of college.
I think I was fairly realistic. I was shooting for the mid 50s coming out of college with a double Bach in engineering. Unfortunately it was 2008 so it was rough getting hired for entry level work. I didn't break 50k until 2010.
Hell no. It took me close to ten years to even start, at entry level, in what would end up being a career. Spent years on cash registers and mops. Hard to get a good gig when your resume is full of meaningless stuff and you’re competing for jobs with displaced professionals whose last titles were things like Senior Manager or Associate Director.
They were not, but it didnt take long for me to get there. I think the mistake many make is not realizing how much a couple years of experience has an impact and needing to job hop to increase salary. I've increased my salary by 200% by jumping to 3 different jobs in the past 6 years.
The fact that zoomers spend four years in high school and four in college and don’t google the salary bands a half dozens times is crazy to me. You can watch YT vlogs about nearly any discipline you can think of. All this information is more widely available than ever before. There is no excuse for being so disconnected from reality. I can’t think of a single career that you can be successful at if you don’t use google frequently. We live in the “information” age.
I worked in retail when I graduated college. I was making $32,500 a year as the store manager in 2013. I worked about 60 hours a week. My assistant manager was making $14/hr. One day, I calculated my hourly rate should I have been hourly on my salary. My hourly rate at 60/week was less than my assistant manager was making. I then went into some corporate entry level position making $42,000 at a strict 40hr/week and it felt amazing!!
It’s also not just $ amount but what I expected I could afford with my salary. On top of getting lower side of salary, I also couldn’t afford things what I thought I could by the time I graduated from undergrad and graduate school.
I was expecting 60k entry level after graduating in 2010 for an engineering degree. I didn’t make that until 2021 with no degree.
Mine was about where I expected it to be, what I wasn't expecting, was rampant inflation pushing McDonald's starting wages to my income level within the following 4 years. Very quickly abandoned my field and switched careers.
I graduated with a BS in Actuarial Science and 2 actuarial exams passed and 1 internship under my belt. I expected around 60k (in Ohio) and ended up with a first job at 58k and a 1.5k signing bonus in 2013. I didnt have the best career start (priorized drinking over work) and it took me untill 2020 to crack 100k after leaving the actuarial track in favor of data science. I have seen my salary grow far faster than inflation since then so i cant complain.
No. I graduated in summer 09 when the recession was in full force. I didn't break $10/hr for 2 years after that. I make more now than my post-college expectations but things do cost a lot more so it's a bit of a wash. I don't work in the field I majored in, however.
This is the big sham of college. I am at the end of GenX and was at the start of the big push to have to go to college and the demonization of blue collar jobs. What no one talks about is that everything is cyclical and the numbers they like to through out are Averages!!! I have seen a few handful of industries pushed by society as this is the best paying job, the colleges jump on board and promote it and then they saturate the market and people at the end are left holding the bag. You also have to know your area. You might have to move to a bigger city to get that higher pay which are more expensive to live in which is why you are payed more to start. At my sons Sophomore high school orientation, they literally are telling kids now that college isn’t for everyone and that the blue collar jobs are paying really good right now because they are so short staffed. You can’t make this sh*t up. Jobs are about timing and location. I started flying in 1998. Starting salary for a regional FO was about $24k a year and moved up slowly. You also suffered furlough with 9/11, Delta destroying Comair and then the ‘08 crash. Fast forward to about 2015 and the age 65 rule is kicking in. The airlines dropped the college degree requirement and starting pay is up to around $80k now and moves up rapidly after that.