This is a very touchy subject for me.
My experience:
Go to private school, costs $23k/year, get part scholarship when I start, push myself hard, honors GPA, multiple internships, graduate during the worst recession since the 1930s (2009).
My loans were $65,000 at the time of my graduation.
It’s now 10 years later. I have been paying ~$500 a month for 10 years. I have paid back $60,000.
Know how much I still owe? FORTY SEVEN FUCKING THOUSAND DOLLARS.
This is beyond ridiculous, this is beyond moral, this is just regod damn diculous and I want to riot and burn down government buildings.
Meanwhile, the banks that caused the recession all got bailouts, nobody really went to jail, and these rich fucks are doing stuff like this with our student loan interest money (aka modern slavery):
Now… do I think it was worth it?
That’s going to be a big NO from me, dawg. I’ve worked for a lot of companies, and one thing I learned is that designers aren’t the decision makers. It’s always someone higher up on the food chain that gets to make the shots, and generally they have no design education. These people are paid 2-5x higher than what designers/engineers get paid, and frankly, I really don’t understand what is difficult about their jobs.
Example: To be a good designer, I need the following hard skills: Sketching (hand), Adobe Creative Suite (ps, il, id minimum), CAD modeling (solid/surfacing), rendering, animation, video editing for stitching animations together (premiere!), completely comfortable in a shop environment with all power tools, and you also need the knowledge of manufacturing, materials, sourcing, draft, textures, assembly, service, ergonomics, the list goes on and on and on. And we get paid $60-80k.
Meanwhile, the executives, who don’t ACTUALLY create anything, just get to sit around and listen to presentations of work created by others and make calls. They don’t have knowledge of materials, manufacturing, assembly, design, etc. They absorb that knowledge from the people under them. They sit in their offices, check email, go to meetings, and get paid 2-5x more than us.
I don’t get it. What skills do they actually need, compared to the mountain of technical knowledge, talent, and skill that we have? Why are they paid more, for doing less?
Take that as you will.