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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of Ivy League students come from relatively wealthy families, which means they’re able to take on meaningful work with lower salaries. Or they’ve learned that money isn’t the only measure of success![/quote]

They work at NPR and will inherit millions.

Sincerely,
Their state school coworker[/quote]
If NPR wants to live their values, offset increasing inequality and support social mobility, they should hire state school graduates who are qualified and come from honors and academic scholarship programs. This is what my organization does. NPR staff should be advocating for this along with their EDI initiatives, unless it makes them too uncomfortable given their own backgrounds.[/quote]

Most of those graduates cannot survive on the salary at NPR. Target pays better for entry level. [/quote]

+1 seriously PP, do you not understand that plenty of very bright state school grads would love to work at NPR or at an art gallery, but they can't afford to? Whereas kids from rich families can work a nonprofit job and still inherit millions; their low-paying but "meaningful" career path has no financial relevancy in their lives, and their kids will be attending summer camp, getting dental work, traveling to europe, etc etc., no matter what. That's not true for middle class people. [/quote]

Plenty of us not rich people can and do afford to have NPR type-jobs. I am married to a journalist and am in public health. We have no wealthy family, and we've paid back our grad school loans with our salaries. What you are missing is you can't become wealthy working at NPR (or its like) if you don't start out wealthy. But if you decide to live within your means it all works out fine. It is pretty weird to say you can't survive on a salary that is solidly middle class. Maybe you can't, but those of us who grew up middle class and have no expectation of being wealthy sure can.[/quote]

This. The number of people on this thread saying "only rich people can afford to take low paying jobs at 80k a year, first gen working class students have to focus on money" is astonishing to me. 80k isn't peanuts to a lot of us. Of my friends from one of these schools who were on financial aid (so a big range, about 50% of students, and my friends ranged from "have to support their poor immigrant mom" to "flyover country middle class,"), i have two friends who went into law, and pretty much all the rest of us felt like making enough to pay rent, have health insurance, and not live completely paycheck to paycheck was good. 80k was that AND MORE, at least until kids came into the picture, NONE of us had a frame of reference where that was anything but an excellent salary. Also, my husband and i feel like we are more risk averse than our wealthier friends, for instance taking lower paid but more secure jobs. [/quote]

I was a middle class kid from a LCOL state who went to an Ivy-Plus UG and Ivy law. $80k is a good amount of money, but even I call BS on most people not realizing it would be hard to support a family on that in a HCOL city. What I’ve observed is that the NPR types are often very self righteous about their decision to go into the public sector (“money doesn’t matter to me” was the common refrain) and now that they’ve realized life is expensive/their colleagues are trust funders, they plead ignorance about the cost of life.[/quote]

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