Today My Students Loans Are Due or The Realities of Paying for Architecture Education

I went to a private graduate school for architecture, the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). A three year program that costs a little over $30,000 a year just in tuition. On top of that you probably need $1,000/month to live plus money for model supplies, architectural travel (a large part of your education I might add), and books.

There are three types of loans available:

Federally Subsidized at 6.8% - you don't start paying interest until six months after you graduate. This caps out at $8,500/year.

Federal Unsubsidized at 6.8% - you start paying interest right away. This caps out at $14,000/year.

Private loans at 8.0% - interest start right away. This is what people use to live on and pay the remaining tuition with.

Note: the Obama Administration as of this school year (Summer 2012) got rid of the Federally subsidized loans in order to help close the budget deficit. Also, along with alimony, students loans are not eligible for dismissal if you file for bankruptcy. Basically, you will have to pay them back.

I got lucky in many ways and I owe about $38,000 because I was able to make many large sum payments thanks to a generous wife among other things. If I pay off my loans over ten years my monthly payment is roughly $440, and I'll end up paying $14,500 in interest on the $38,000 I owe. My current income is about $2,000/month after taxes and my living expenses are roughly half of that, so my effective purchasing power will be reduced by half for the foreseeable future. That is, until I get a raise or my ten years is up. Given the state of architecture right now I'd say it's a coin toss.

About 2/3-3/4 of the people from my class have jobs that pay money; many work for free or do not have jobs. For what it's worth less than half of the undergrads have jobs and most of them are not in architecture. An undergraduate degree in architecture at IIT is five years. Most of these jobs are $12-20/hour. After taxes that's $20,000 - $32,000 per year. The average debt for people who were in the three year program is about $160,000. Math time:

If the Federal loans top out at $22,500/year multiplied by three years that's $67,500. $160,000 (rough average just from talking to classmates) with $67,500 deducted is $92,500 in high interest rate loans.

Over a 10 year pay off period that's:
$777/month for the 6.8% loan - $25,715 in interest over the life of the loan
$1,020/month for the 8.0% loan - $42,175 in interest over the life of the loan
$1,797/month total for 10 years - $67,890 in interest over the life of the loans

Over a 25 year pay off period that's:
$469/month for the 6.8% loan - $73,050 in interest over the life of the loan
$714/month for the 8.0% loan - $121,680 in interest over the life of the loan
$1,183/month total for 25 years - $194,730 in interest over the life of the loans

Source for numbers. It's an amortization calculator. If you don't know what that is go learn. It'll be the most important thing you learn all week.

At an average of about $30,000 (probably high) salary after taxes that means the average person in my (three year, the two years students are far better off) class more or less must choose the 25 year repayment plan. If they bring home $2,500/month and $1,200 is taken out for their loans that leaves them with $1,300 to live off of.

$11,170 is the poverty level for a single person in 2012. They're pulling in $15,600 so technically they're not poor...?

To actually become an Architect one must pass seven tests (with a passing rate of about 60%-80% per test) which cost $225 each plus yearly fees and accumulate 5,600 hours of internship to become an architect. Until then you're an intern with a masters degree (Edit: to those who complain about this title, this is nomenclature from the AIA).

Note: The interest calculation is actually quite a bit simpler as I show it here. The majority of the loans taken out start to accrue interest the moment they're dispersed, so much of that money already has several years of compounding 6.8 and 8.0 percent on it by the payback date (Nov. 12, 2012 if you started in the Fall of 2009 for the three year program).

Also, a lot of people on Reddit seem to think this is me complaining or feeling I've been tricked or I work at a bad firm and I'm untalented or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. This post is more just a snapshot of a moment in time of a somewhat unique situation. I know more about grad. student loans at this very moment than about 99% of the population; three years ago that was not the case. Even so I was very aware of my financial decision and its implications. That's why I never took out the 8% loans and paid as much of as humanly possible as early as possible. The larger problem is that it takes increasingly more to get your foot in the door in the field of architecture while the starting salaries remain low. It's essentially an arms race for education and experience where only those with money or who are willing to live as working poor are going to advance. It's less than ideal.

Weekend Reading

Wired explains how large manufacturers test their products until failure and why this is important. I liked that it was essentially the cutting edge battle that's going on at large design and mass manufacturing companies - it's Henry Ford circa 2012.

Scientists think that the invention of cooking led to our ability to have large brains. That is, brains need a lot of energy, roughly 20% of all the food you eat goes to your brain. To support this "expensive tissue"cooking is essentially predigesting your food and allowing you to eat more of it.

Unlike most people who want funding for NASA, equitable taxes, and a strong social safety net, I like guns. Normally I don't link to stuff like this but this is the perfect case where maybe the guy shouldn't have shot, and more specifically this is the sort of incident where in court the shooter gets off because it occurred in his home. But the world isn't black and white and to me the who case seems a little bit like entrapment. It seems like he lured the guy there and was waiting. Everyone can sense it, even his cop dad, but Montana is extremely conservative; hell, the law protecting the shooter is called the Castle Doctrine.

All about wood veneer and terminology for my design friends.

The largest photo of the Milky Way that has ever been made was taken the other day.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics apparently keeps stats on strip club workers. They make a lot more than most people in the medical profession.

The account of a heroin addict during Hurricane Katrina. Just wow.

Scientists have a new theory regarding the best way to look for alien life; makes sense to me. The article references the Wow! Signal. I read the Wiki article... um? It's not conclusive but I mean, damn. Seems to me like somethings trying to contact us.

I really want one of these Float Desks from Human Scale. I saw one at NeoCon and they worked really well. Unfortunately they cost about $1800, and yes I'd build my own top.

I've long had an uneasy relationship with Apple. I both admire their products and design but loath how they cast a spell over consumers who are led to believe that Apple invented everything and their products are the best. In the UK Apple lost a court case against Samsung and was ordered to issue what was essentially an admission of error/apology to Samsung on Apple's website. Apple, of course, did it in a snide way so the judge ordered them to rewrite it and up the font size. Apple... they're like the smart, rich, talented, popular asshole of the tech industry.

Geo-tracking inhalers. The industrial design, the statistics it could provide, and how much it could potentially increase the well being of people afflicted with asthma are large. Things like this have been a soft nudge ever since smart phones became ubiquitous. I can only assume that in the coming years this will become more pervasive and inform countless other aspects of our lives.

An interesting alternative to one person one vote. You buy votes and each time you buy a vote the price increases by the square of the number of times you've bought. 1 = $1, 2 = $4, 3 = $9... Apparently it works well in experiments and most participants like it.

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This is a quote from Conan O'Brien when he was on The Nerdist Podcast.

...if you have a creative mind. I've described it sometimes as a very powerful lawnmower. It can do all this great stuff but every now and then it turns around and it rolls over you and chews you up.

When I heard that I felt an odd sense of relief. During school I would get that all the time. I'd have so many ideas and be doing so much research that I'd hardly produce anything. Information can be stifling like that. If you really consider the consequences our your actions, good or bad, inaction at times seems inevitable.

This is a reused liquid CO2 storage tank. The walls are 1" thick steel (I've cut lots of them with an oxyacetylene torch), the insulation surrounding the tank is about 4" of closed cell rigid foam, and the covering is fiberglass. They're actually fairly inexpensive. My dad uses them for hot water storage for the steam systems we build. This way we can spec a much smaller boiler and let it run overnight. Also, when you heat up water it drops all its solids, so by doing the heating in a separate tank we keep our boilers cleaner. Plus these are easier to clean out. We install the pipes which becomes the closed loop for the steam. Over a week the 180 degree water may drop just a few degrees in the dead of winter.

The Strike Is Not About Teacher's Pay

The Chicago Sun Times published this:

Chicago Public Schools starting salaries are among the highest in the region... But the annual increases for teachers in CPS are much smaller than the annual increases in many suburban districts. For example, a teacher with a master’s degree, 30 additional credit hours, and ten years of experience, can expect to earn $87,513 in Evanston this year; last year, in Oak Park, a teacher would have made $88,978. In Chicago this year, the same teacher will earn $75,711 — about $12,000 a year less than in districts to which he or she could walk or take public transportation from a home in Chicago. Over the course of a career, that difference amounts to over a quarter of a million dollars.

Except that average household income in those cities is far higher than Chicago's:

Chicago - $45,700
Evanston - $67,700 (48% more)
Oak Park - $70,600 (65% more)

If the citizens of those areas were to pay the same percentage as Chicagoan's then the respective salaries would be roughly (using the numbers quoted which I find slightly inaccurate):

Evanston - $112,000
Oak Park - $125,000

By that measure Chicago is actually doing quite well. If you figured in benefits it'd be even more lopsided. The strike is not about salaries. 70% of CPS's (2012) budget is spent on employees:

Textbooks - $74 million
Construction - $391 million
Teacher's Medical - $348 million
Teacher's Salaries - $2,085 million
Total Employee Salary and Benefits - $3,584 million
Total Budget - $5,110

... and 1.4% on textbooks. I know this may come off as anti-teachers or whatever but the real target here is the author of the offending article and the newspaper that printed it. It's bad journalism.

CPS vs Chicago - 2012 Edition

I've written a little about this before. This article doesn't address the social issues or milieu of other complexities the situation entails. The Chicago Teacher's Union asked for a 19% raise as compensation for an extended school day, and as of Sunday night they rejected a 16% raise over four years. I know there are other issues at stake, I just want to figure out what this means monetarily for Chicago.

Chicago's budget this year (2012) is $8.2 billion while CPS's is $5.2 billion (2013 proposed), so over 63% of Chicago's expenditures goes to CPS. That's $1920 per resident (2.71 million people in the city). Of that $5.2 billion, $2.7 billion goes to teachers and support personnel salaries; $3.6 billion if you include benefits. The 19% raise comes out to $510 million a year in additional salary, $190 extra per Chicago resident, or an increase of over 6% to the City of Chicago's spending. If Chicago's budget doesn't change that would mean the remaining roughly 37% of expenditures would go down to about 31%. Other items on the budget would need to be reduced by about 16 or 17% to pay for this.

I'm not saying that each resident will have to literally pay that bill themselves. I'm using that measuring stick t bring it to a human scale.

What does all this mean (this is where the opinion part starts)? It means there's no way the city can be fiscally responsible and actually give the CTU what it wants. At the same time how can you ask the teachers to work a longer day without more pay? It's like asking them to admit they've been overpaid for years. The point is, I don't see either side walking away from this unscathed. It's another example of Americans wanting lots of services but being unwilling to pay the necessary taxes.

Here are the sources, I recommend the first one, it's the most interesting:

CPS 2012 Proposed Budget Overview

City of Chicago Proposed 2012 Budget Overview

CPS 2013 Budget Press Release

Updating Education

I've long thought that the material taught in schools bears little resemblance to what is required of most in the workforce, so I posed the question to some teacher friends of mine whether or not certain subjects could be highly abbreviated or all together eliminated from high school curricula and what might be added. The short answer was no, it should stay the same. With the general retort being that a well rounded liberal arts education is best.

Since then I've asked several people to tell me one thing they learned in high school chemistry; I usually get silence as an answer. I actually didn't expect it to be that bad. Of course the point of chemistry is not to make you a chemist and it's purpose is to teach you another way of thinking, the scientific method, to expose those who love chemistry to their future career, etc., but why not spend more of that time on things that you will need to know?

Here's my list, please feel free to add you own in the comments section, I'm curious what others think should be on there.

Finance
Statistics
Nutrition
Economics
Computer programming
Microsoft Excel
How to be a better consumer - related to finance and research
How to find a job, write a resume, dress for an interview, how to act at an interview
Writing in general, and I don't mean papers. Blogs, tweets, cover letters, emails, etc.
A class teaching you how to research anything. Also, how to read a research paper and where to find them
Basic circuitry, computers, IT infrastructure
Neuroscience/Psychology/Neurobiology - sounds complex but this area is literally redefining everything

Of all the jobs on earth a teachers job really hasn't changed much from the 19th century. An auditorium and a chalkboard - not much different. The new variable in the equation is of course the internet. Not long ago books were prohibitively expensive. If you go back far enough in time a single book could cost more than the common person could afford. Knowledge was hard to attain and spread. The barriers to entry have been reduced to the point of a laptop or tablet and a small source of power, and indeed to people in rural parts of the developing world this is the cost of their tuition. I've always found that I learn best when I'm teaching myself (really just reading lot of articles online), and increasingly that may be the mode by which many people learn. The kid in the video below takes this to a whole new level. And yes, it's worth your time:

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"I want money in order to buy the time to get the things that money will not buy." - Carl Sandburg

This is my friend Derek on my roof a few months back. The buildings from left to right are Lake Point Tower, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Building, the Aon center, Two Prudential Plaza, Trump Tower, and the IBM Tower (333 North Wabash) - in case you were curious...

Links for August 12th

A wood worker I'm digging at the moment, John Houshmand.

The Japanese 5S method of organizing tools or really anything.

If you aren't familiar with Shwood they make wooden sunglasses. They're made of very high quality materials like Zeiss lenses and rosewood. Reading the article was a bit of a kick in the ass for me. Because of architecture school I'm adept at using a laser cutter and any other wood shop or design software they're using. Plus I should be better at design, but that's not what matters. They did it. Guess I have to do that at some point instead of making continual one-offs.

I'm not weird! From the NYT: “Cyclists have strange shapes: big quads, small waists and big butts. It’s hard to find pants.” Check out the Tumblr pic. Yikes.

Wiel Arets is the new dean at the College of Architecture at IIT. He's kind of a big deal so it should be interesting to see what he does to the program at IIT.

A teacher trips on LSD that a student gave him while on a field trip - wow.  (hat tip Ben)

I have this idea that I want to open up a multi-use store front that combines a few of the following: a coffee shop, venue, gallery, woodworking space, bar, sandwich/taco restaurant, etc. Obviously not all of those but say a place that's a coffee shop in the morning and a bar and live music venue at night, or a woodworking shop that has a glass partition so you can see the workers in the back and in the front they sell coffee and maybe sandwiches around noon (since we'd be making them for ourselves anyways, that's how potbelly started). Basically just any way to achieve efficiencies from things you already have or need. So much of that which we own sits idle a large amount of the time. I've always liked the idea of an architecture firm that has a storefront where they sell coffee and have a small cafe. The typical problem being that coffee shops don't make much money but if you already have the storefront and we're making coffee why not take advantage of the situation and drive foot traffic to your firm? Plus architects could use the exposure - I feel like they don't have enough interaction with the general public. That is, most people never get to just wander around and see what they do. Anyways, barista classes from Intelligentsia. One day, three hours, $200.

Podcasts

I finally got on the podcast bandwagon a few months ago while I was holed up in my room doing renderings and what not for finals. A podcast is essentially internet radio except you download them like songs and, at least in my experience, they're free. My favorites thus far are:

99% invisible - city flags. They also have a Kickstarter right now.
Freakonomics
Jay and Silent Bob Get Old Smodcast -  listen to 1-6.
The Nerdist - so far Bill Nye and Kevin Smith were both excellent.
Planet Money

George Nakashima's Woodshop

Who do I have to kill for this life/setting? His wiki. If you're into woodworking this is worth your ten minutes.

Mahogany Table

I buy most of my wood from a place in Chicago called Wood World. Anyways, my wife began accompanying me on trips there and every time there was this huge slab of Honduras mahogany that I'd always come up with a new use for every time I saw it. Huge, 10' long, 3" thick (12/4), 28" wide.

For our first wedding anniversary my wife bought me said slab... I ride a bicycle and the IIT wood shop is only open when I'm at work. Plus, huge chunks of wood are like diamonds. If they're huge you do not cut them. The basic concept is to use the slab as a table but without cutting, drilling, or otherwise mechanically altering it.

This is the photo I received in a card for my wife and my's one year wedding anniversary. I removed the price from the sign, but it's roughly 72 board feet worth of wood. 

These are just some initial sketches. I initially wanted to use channel iron but it was pretty expensive. In my experience it tends to be higher quality steel.

I borrowed the idea of the electrical outlets hidden in the steel structure from the tables in Crown Hall's Graham Resource Center library.

3D screen grab in Rhino. The table consists of three basic piece: the cast iron legs, the mahogany table top and the armature that ties it all together; which is also the part I have to make. It's essentially two custom bar clamps that are tied together with angle iron.

Orthographic projection. We actually used this drawing on an ipad while I was in the shop.

Actual fabrication was hectic, which I'm not used to. There's a translation from drawing to reality, "field fit," that needs to take place - especially since I'm not a veteran designer. We were rushing around the shop kind of fast because I made my friend Brian and his father, who show up at 6:45 AM every morning, stay until 8:00 PM, and it was really hot in the shop. Their shop is called Special Tool Engineering Company on the southwest side of Chicago. Brian is the third generation of his family to work there. I have to take photos of that place. You could build anything there.

This is a Bridgeport milling machine. It is to a machinist what a table saw is to a woodworker.

I'd never seen one of these before, it's drill bit that's essentially used for zeroing a measurement. It has a separate metal piece for the tip that's connected with a spring. It's exactly 0.2000 inches so that you subtract 0.1. As soon as the tip begins to wobble you know you're up against the piece that you're measuring off of.

This is the digital readout that gives X and Y coordinates. It does more than that but this was the first time I'd ever seen a digital readout on a Bridgeport.

Drilling the actual holes to a five 10,000 of an inch. Totally unnecessary and really cool.

Countersinking the holes to remove burrs.

This is essentially an automated swivel head bandsaw. You put in a piece of flat stock (bars of steel)...

... and it advances the steel and cuts it perfectly.

These are the holes being drilled for the bolts that clamp the table top. They got threaded after this but I didn't grab a photo of their threading setup. It was basically an arm that swiveled with the tap perpendicular at the tip. Much nicer than the typical hand tools I use because everything is square and flush when you're done.

Ugh... I fancy myself a good welder (at least when the work is somewhat level or on a pipe), but I was unfamiliar with their MIG and it was running way too hot.

Quenching the steel so I could get it home without lighting my car on fire.

I ran some simple electrical on the back. Typical 14 gauge stuff, three duplexes total.

Before I put the electrical on I steel wooled all the angle iron and rubbed boiled linseed oil  into it. You have to wipe off the excess after about ten minutes or else it will be sticky for the rest of its existence. The linseed oil darkens the steel and gives it a waxy finish that protects it somewhat from rust. On the left you can see the swagged cord that connects the outlets. I have a grommet on the other side too so I can switch it if need be.

Getting the slab in the room...

This is the connection to the legs. Two 5/8" lag bolts on each end. I should have welded a plate horizontally next to the angle, drilled another hole, and maybe put diagonal stiffeners in. It's essentially a point connection and isn't as rigid as it should be. I'll add it another time.

This is the fixed end of the armature on the back edge of the table. I may rotate the armature at some point too. You can see the slab isn't quite flat - I couldn't find a  30" planar (ha).

The electrical is hidden in the back so the cords can be concealed to some degree.

The 3" angle iron is slightly off center so that your legs won't hit the cross member if you cross your legs. The legs on this are from my lathe table except that this time they're turned the way they're supposed to sit. I chose 3" angle for two reasons: structurally it's spanning 6' 2" (74") and the rule of thumb is L/20 so 3.7" - which makes it undersized, but it's really only carrying a lateral load. Also, the table top really shouldn't be over 29" or 30" tall, the legs are 24" high, and the table top is 2-3/4" thick so anything bigger than 3" angle is going to make the table either too high or not leave enough room for your legs. If it's weak in any way it's torsion, but I don't perceive that as being a problem.

I did a time lapse of all the sanding just to show how ridiculously laborious it is. At some point I may actually put all the stills together into a time lapse video. As my woodworking/architecture professor (Frank Flury) once told me "finishing is 50% of the work." It seems like way too much but it's dead on. Finishing takes forever and there's very little joy in it. I hooked up my orbital sander to the smallest cheapest wet-dry-vac I could find. Win, literally zero dust. Tropical hardwood dust is oddly scary - especially panga, jatoba, and the like. Plus I got to collect some of the dust in case I wanted to fill in the grain at some point. In my world instead of getting buttons in little packages with shirts you'd get sawdust with your handcrafted furniture in case you wanted to change the finish and make your own filler (using dust from the wood makes the color match).

After sanding I raised the grain. That is, wiped the wood with a damp cloth to remove dust and  make the grain stand up.  After you sand wood and wet it the grain will feel different even when it's dry. If you sand it again it won't do this anymore. Even though I'm using an oil finish and it shouldn't be necessary. If the wood somehow gets wet later on it will no longer feel smooth.

I started with 100 grit, did a quick pass of 120 (I'm weird), then 150, 220, and finished with 320. The finishes will later get 320 up to 600 grit and a 0000 steel wool. Kind of unnecessary.

The finish for this ended up being about six coats of Watco Teak Oil wiped on, dried for one to two days between coats. It's not a protective finish and it takes forever to fully dry. First time I've ever used gloves, I recommend them.

The finish isn't done yet so this is kind of a base coat. The teak oil has an "in-the-grain" look and feel so you can still feel the grain.

This is after the second application of teak oil. it's still a little oily in this photo, but the grains starting to  show much better.

This is after it's a bit more dry.

The flange at the end is 1/4" flat stock butt welded to the end of the 3" angle. You can see where it's welded from the bluing. It's tapped to accept the 3/4" bolt which holds a 1/2" piece of steel that is milled to hold the end of the bolt.

 The wood edge is the rough-sawn side, if I rotate it 180 there's a much cleaner side and no protruding clamp.

Mostly finished. It's 10'2" (3100 mm) long, 28.5" (725 mm) wide, and the table top is at 29-1/2" (750 mm). The actual slab itself is 12/4. That is, 2-3/4" (70 mm). The legs are 76 lbs (35 kg) apiece, the armature is about 45 lbs (20 kg), and the table top is 220 lbs (100 kg) for a grand total of roughly 440 lbs (200 kg). Bucky wouldn't be impressed but the Vikings would probably approve.

The finish is oddly hard to photograph. It looks glossy but it has a satin look and feel up close.

Battlestation. My firm was selling their Aeron chairs so I picked two up for $40 apiece. I guess that's the upside to mass layoffs in the architecture field.

Belief That the Poor Are Lazy

I'll keep this brief and mostly anecdotal.

In an article in New York Magazine a patron at a Romney fundraiser had this to say:

Obama wants to take my money and give it to do-nothing animals.

And less to that quote and more to the feeling I get from my friends and peers. If you're poor it's probably your fault - you should work harder. People make some allowances but not many. At some level most people believe this to be true. A meritocracy is a comforting and dare I say, logical, thing to believe in. It takes quite a leap of imagination and distrust in humanity to believe otherwise. But it's just factually not true. Your income has little to do with how hard you work. I could cite statistics and show graphs but facts rarely convince people.

The evidence is overwhelming. The largest single indicator of future earnings potential for an individual is their parents wealth. Full stop. Not education, IQ, hours worked, race, gender, etc. It's your genetics. We have less class mobility than old world Europe.

The reality of the world today is that jobs that used to take dozens or hundreds of people can be done by one person. In the short term this hurts people but in the long run it helps everyone. It's what has made everything from clothing to food less expensive. Every time we destroy jobs in this fashion we free up workers for other jobs which raises worker productivity (money generated per person). In the last several decades these gains have more or less all went to the people at the top. About 90% of people have seen their wages/standard of living stagnate since the 1970's. Did people stop working hard? Of course not.

If you think the poor are any lazier than anyone else then answer me this: why aren't the Amish billionaires and why weren't medieval peasants rolling in the dough? What we want to believe and what is reality are different things.