At a time when Maine is struggling for teachers and health care workers, including physicians, Rep. Jared Golden’s jeremiad (Aug. 18) against college-educated people is wrong on so many levels.

In both his tweet on X and his follow-up essay on Substack, he insults college-educated people and overestimates how much income they typically make. Do schoolteachers in Maine make six-figure salaries? Not even with a master’s degree in well-to-do Cumberland County! Do nurses typically make a six-figure salary? Average salary is under $74,000, and it’s much less for the new college graduate who has had to amass over $100,000 of college debt.

If your monthly student-loan payment is more than your monthly mortgage or rent payment, you’re in trouble. And if you don’t foster people’s getting bachelor’s degrees, you won’t get people who can be physicians.

Golden says that young people wanting to get “free” college tuition can go into the military. That most young people are not suited for the armed services seems to escape him. Nor is it the case that if you’re from a low-income family, you necessarily should aim for going into the trades. Why stereotype low-income folks? Why shouldn’t low-income people want a college education? Why does that make them “privileged”?

My undergraduate college education, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, cost me a small fraction of what my daughter’s cost her. The difference back then? Federal support for college education!

Eivind Boe
Nobleboro

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