[zdragnar]

College life in the US is a massive sink for those who aren't financially disciplined. Getting loans is easy for most who attended, including stipend loans for "living expenses" such as binge drinking on at least a weekly basis.

The lifestyle certainly isn't lavish in the sense that pop star lifestyle is, but taking out many tens of thousands of dollars in an attempt to become a librarian (one friend of mine did just that) is just stupid, financially speaking. Short of having family bail you out or marrying a high income earner, you're a prisoner to loans that's cannot be discharged via bankruptcy.

[mschuster91]

> but taking out many tens of thousands of dollars in an attempt to become a librarian (one friend of mine did just that) is just stupid, financially speaking

The problem is, society needs librarians and other "non-STEM" science - we're right now, for example in Germany [1], seeing with the cluelessness of politicians on Russia how utterly ignorant it was to cut funding for Eastern European studies back in 2005. And mind ya that's Europe where "student loans" aren't really a thing because we don't have absurd tuitions because the government pays for universities.

We haven't found a way to incentivize people to take up these studies, and we absolutely need to, otherwise we are going to lose so much knowledge over the next decades. My s/o for example has a brilliant master's degree in art history, but funding for positions that match her experience is scarce to say the least, and covid didn't exactly help. She's currently working for the government to help fight the pandemic, but it's a sad waste of potential how many people like her are simply left behind.

[1] https://www.pnn.de/wissenschaft/slawisten-kaempfen-fuer-ihre...

[Mountain_Skies]

It's not a question of if societies needs to have librarians, it's a question of how many librarians society is willing to support and if that's greater than or equal to the supply of librarians being created. Defenders of humanities degrees often imply that those outside of the humanities don't understand the need for it instead of debating the wisdom of using a 'spray and pray' approach to producing the number of people in those areas that society needs and is willing to support. It's not a situation where we have to choose between having no librarians and society supporting an unlimited number of librarians even though some try to present it that way.

[zdragnar]

I don't disagree that society needs librarians.

I am saying that librarian studies is, economically speaking, a luxury good when a librarians pay doesn't cover the interest on the loans it took to get the job- mind you that in the US, most librarian jobs require a master's degree, so you could easily be paying for 7 years of higher education to get it, and that's assuming that there are even any jobs available that require the degree in the first place.