My bad experience with a college education
I have commented in numerous blog post, that for me, one of the worst investments in my life, was my college education. But my case is not the typical case, for me, the great boost in life was to move from Colombia to Canada at the age of 30. I think I got the right education, but other circumstances in my life, I wasn’t able to maximize it.
At age 35, when I finally graduated from University, I was a victim of racial discrimination (the Quebecois discriminated against me because my French was not Quebecois enough). I became an entrepreneur because I wasn’t able to find a job, and thus my path was not the normal path of going to school, get a job, get experience, and move into higher position jobs or move to higher-paying employers. As an entrepreneur in a different country with a different language and culture, I was happy enough just by surviving.
The well tested path of a college education and good-paying jobs
The traditional path has been well tested. We know that for the most part, it works. If you get good grades and graduate from a well-recognized school. If you get the right education, you are almost guaranteed to have a $100,000+ salary.
It’s not necessarily the right education that guarantees you a great salary, after all, how many of us can remember our calculus classes or our biology classes. It’s the signal that you are sending to future employers. You would be taking a well-proven path that everyone is familiar with and it’s already set on auto-pilot.
When you get good grades in high school, you are sending a signal to the top universities that you will follow through, that you will finish your four-year degree and that you will get a good job and a good salary. And thus the university gets bragging right when you boost their statistics of people who complete their four-year degree and who get a good salary after graduation.
When you graduate from a reputable university, your employer feels that he’s doing the safest thing by hiring you, versus someone who hasn’t finished college or versus someone who comes from a lesser-known college.
Once you are in the job market, if you put your head down, do the work, follow orders, and jump all the hoops, your employer will continue giving you raises because you are the safe bet. And thus most people with a four-year degree from a reputable university will end up earning $100,000+ after about 10 years of work experience.
Of course, not all the profession pay the same. The degrees with the highest salaries include:
- Aerospace Engineering
- Chemical Engineering
- Computer Engineering
- Electrical Engineering
- Economics, and
- Physics.
On the opposite side, the worst paid degrees are:
- Social work
- Music
- Education.
Yes, it’s unfair that some degrees have a starting salary of $80,000 while others only half $40, 000. But it’s not a surprise to anyone. As unfair as it is, a person going into social work or education, should not be surprised by the low salary. It’s well known that those careers don’t pay a lot of money. It’s the law of supply and demand, or maybe it’s the value that society places on different services. Whatever it is, students have all this information available to them before choosing a major.
There are always income outliers
Of course, there are many cases that don’t conform to the social script. There must be thousands of people who do everything right, as they are being told, and still, don’t make high salaries.
On the other side, there are the people who always did badly at school, or who didn’t graduate, and who end up with a great financial life.
The irony of money
The big irony is that some of the richest people in the world, some of our entrepreneur heroes, were either bad students or didn’t finish college. Here are a few examples:
- Michael Dell
- Steve Jobs
- Bill Gates
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Ted Turner
- Larry Ellison
- Kim Kardashian
- John D. Rockefeller
- Henry Ford
- Lady Gaga
- Tiger Woods
And the list goes on and on.
Conclusion
Nobody really knows how successful one will be in their careers. All we can do is work hard, work towards harmonious relationships, and try to put as many probabilities in our favor.
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