I know, there’s a lot that’s fucked up right now. Housing and kids are not affordable right now. Buying a home in particular, though market dynamics can change.

How long have you two had these jobs? Often the best way to get a big jump in pay is to switch jobs, and that’s easier when you’re young. Do you have a resume that lists your accomplishments and quantifies what you achieved (as opposed to just listing your responsibilities)? Are you keeping track of your achievements and praise you get in some kind of folder so you can use it to argue for promotion or in a job interview? Do you know how to advocate for yourself?

I am surprised a STEM field pays so low. Do you know your worth? Have you checked on Glassdoor and fishbowl and sites like that to get a general idea? Are you actually hourly, or are you salaried with benefits? If one of those benefits is a 401(k) with a match, you absolutely have to be contributing at least as much as the match.

But I keep coming back to, how can there not be jobs for a college educated math or science major that don’t pay a respectable salary? Can you change industries? You don’t have to feel great about the work you do, imo, it’s just a job. It’s not your purpose in life.

LW here, for added context: we both work in the natural sciences/conservation biology type of work. He works for the federal government (technically at $15/hr but I fudged his number by a dollar bc I was nervous about posting publicly initially) and I work for the state. People keep telling us about “amazing government benefits” but honestly they suck. We both got our degrees from the same school, a state college (ends in SU). I moved through four different states getting experience in my field, and I’ve moved through 3 different jobs already. My starting fulltime pay in 2020 was $12 an hour. At my most recent job I just moved laterally into a new role that’s less physically demanding four months ago. My field is both competitive and specific so I do have a good resume but job hopping too much looks bad & I’ve already done so much & moved through so many states. I think I’d have to go back to school to switch fields to something that pays well, and I simply don’t have the money to do that without student loans that all my current coworkers already have and I see them suffering under.

Also 3 different jobs by 30, sounds all right to me.

Looking further, it seems for many (most?) employers, you need an M.S. to qualify as a conservation biologist — otherwise you would generally be considered a technician. It seems relevant experience can sub for the M.S. with some employers.

I feel for you. The natural sciences job market is brutal. Too many academic advisors don’t give the true picture to their department’s majors — I think in part to keep enrollment up so the department isn’t closed or at least doesn’t lose slots. Back almost 60 years ago the valedictorian of my H.S. class majored in biology, got his PhD specializing in fresh-water invertebrates and had a teaching/research job at University of Michigan. When his grant wasn’t renewed, he lost that job at age 45. He loved biology and that job. It was very sad. Forty years ago, when I was working on a development project funded by Department of Energy, who sent a review team to meet with us twice a year, the only woman on the team was a PhD biologist. She loved her job and had a long tenure with DOE. Her daughter wanted to follow in her footsteps, but she said no, she wouldn’t pay for a bio degree. She explained it that DOE at the time accepted job application year-round for most college majors, but only for one month for bio majors. Get the app in early and it was returned, if received a day late, sorry, try again next year. Simply brutal.

I worked in environmental, health, and safety with a Fortune 500 chemical company. We interviewed college students with general environmental science or conservation B.S. degrees. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out exactly what skills and knowledge were taught in these programs. It made hiring chancy. Natural sciences job market has been brutal for at least the past 50 years.

If you and your husband are basically technicians in the environmental/conservation field, I can give some encouragement from observing the career arcs of a number of technicians (bio as well as chemistry and physics and machining or welding). Many advanced to well-paying jobs. Within the company they moved into more business-related jobs, some left for pharmaceutical sales, a couple became plant managers for smaller companies, some had long careers in R&D, one of whom became a principal investigator on his own analytical project. It could be done back then and I suspect it can still happen today. There is a shortage of qualified workers.

Adding additional skills is key as is looking for higher-paying jobs a little divorced from your current work.

I’m a little older than you, a middle-of-the-pack millennial. I get it. It often feels like boomers benefited from systems that they then fucked up for the rest of us. Life is really expensive — the cost of education, housing, childcare, etc. are all out of control — and wages haven’t kept up. Many of us listened to the advice of our parents when we were teenagers only to come out the other side with degrees that buried us alive in student loan debt and poor job prospects. Some of the things I’ve heard older folks say about people in my general age range feel beyond out of touch. Some of the advice I’ve gotten about how to find new, better-paying jobs over the years was laughable (e.g., don’t apply for jobs online, print and mail your resume). Anyway, yes, things suck. I can understand why you’d feel so bleak about the future.

But, I think you need to change your mindset a bit. Right now you’re bitter, telling yourself what you’ll never have. And again, I get it, but if you can focus on how you can pivot, you may be happier. Maybe that’s a master’s degree. Maybe that’s looking for a different way or environment to use your current skillset. I don’t know anything about your field so I can’t offer concrete solutions.

I’m someone who went straight from undergrad to grad school. I was making decisions of impact at 21. I hadn’t yet worked full-time, didn’t know much about the “real” world, and if I’m being honest, barely knew myself. I was in large part relying on the advice of others in my decision-making. Things started off shaky in my mid-20s because I had to do what I’m recommending you do — be creative in how I used my background to find a path that felt true to me and paid me enough to live comfortably — but by now, I feel ok about how things have worked out… but I know that if I’d had full-time work and real-world experience before making any kind of post-grad education decisions, I would’ve chosen a different path. I’d have been better equipped to understand realistic employment outcomes. I’d have been better able to research the true ROI of different degree programs now that my blinders off about how universities operate. Now that I am out from under my student loans, I can appreciate why you would want to stay debt-free, but I think with proper research and understanding, some debt to go back to school isn’t the worst thing. (Like yeah, it’d be better if it was very affordable, but that’s not our reality.)