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The worthless college degree

It’s time for someone to say it loud and clear: a college degree is a waste of time. Remember, you heard it here first.

Everyone “knows” that people with a college degree make more money. The only problem with that fact is that it is false. It’s easy to make it seem like a college degree will mean more money in your pocket when you balance the salaries of college-educated people with everyone else. That doesn’t make any sense. The guy who has no interest in doing anything more challenging than flipping burgers shouldn’t be in this discussion. The best approach is to compare specific types of work. In other words, the question is not whether college graduates make more money than those without sheepskin; The question is, do biochemists (for example) make more money than bricklayers? The answer is no.

The average income for a senior biochemist is just over $ 59,000 per year; a bricklayer can expect to earn a little over $ 54,000 a year. But that’s not the whole story. The biochemist will spend at least $ 50,000 to collect his bachelor’s degree at a state school and more than $ 100,000 if he decides to attend a private school. [1]After that, you will need to complete a graduate degree and gain “at least 5 years of experience in the field or related area” before you can expect to achieve the national median income for your profession. [2] The cost of the graduate degree will be in the neighborhood of an additional $ 100,000.

We must also consider lost wages during the four to six years it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree (very few students complete their degree in the “normal” four-year time frame). Calculate that and you will see an additional loss of $ 60,000 to $ 160,000. This assumes a loss of only $ 7.50 per hour at the low end and $ 13 per hour at the high end, with no increases. (We will give the biochemist the benefit of the doubt and ignore the fact that he would not be earning a market salary while completing his graduate program. However, he may be able to live off the stipends he receives as a graduate student. To facilitate this comparison, let’s ignore the graduate years and focus on the years spent earning a bachelor’s degree.)

Simply put, the biochemist leaves the university at least $ 110,000 behind the bricklayer. Meanwhile, the bricklayer has been working as an apprentice (with a starting salary in the neighborhood of $ 10- $ 13 an hour). [3], and if reasonably competent, will have attained officer status by the time the biochemistry student earns his bachelor’s degree. This means that you will start earning the annual salary of $ 54,000 when the biochemist is starting his graduate program. The biochemist won’t reach the median salary of a “biochemist III” for another five years or so. In short, the bricklayer is between $ 110,000 and $ 200,000 ahead of the biochemist, an advantage the biochemist can never overcome.

“So what” can you say. “Comparing a biochemist and a bricklayer is arbitrary. It is no more relevant than comparing all college graduates with non-college graduates.” Perhaps: However, take a look at these randomly chosen examples from the Monster.com site.

When we consider the professions that require a degree, we see that the median expected salary in the United States for a typical:

Biologist V costs $ 88,625.

Staff Nurse – RN is $ 58,924.

Accountant III is $ 58,866.

Social Worker (MSW) is $ 48,845.

Engineer V costs $ 102,298.

Activities Director – Nursing Home is $ 34,385

High School Teacher is $ 50,562.

Biochemist III is $ 59,100.

When we consider professions that do not require a degree, we see that the average expected salary for a typical:

Electrician III costs $ 48,739.

HVAC Mechanic III costs $ 50,591

Carpenter III costs $ 44,793.

Machinist III costs $ 49,075.

Bricklayer, Sr. is $ 54,019.

Plumber III is $ 50,138.

Insurance agent is $ 41,287.

Automotive Mechanic III costs $ 49,563. [4]

Additionally, “business administration and economics / finance graduates” receive an average of $ 38,254 and $ 40,630 “annually, respectively, upon graduation.” The median starting salary for marketing graduates “is $ 34,712 and $ 41,058 for accounting specialists.” Liberal arts graduates “earn $ 30,212 per year upon graduation.” The starting salary for English learners “is $ 31,113;” political science students, “$ 32,296 and” psychology students “enjoy an entry-level salary that averages $ 28,230.” [5] Meanwhile, responsible workers are already earning double after four years on the job.

As you can see, most college degrees are amazing waste of time and money. The exceptions are professional titles; law, medicine, engineering and the like. Even those occupations don’t really require a formal degree, but that’s another article for another time. And remember, these figures do not address the cost of the title and lost wages.

In addition, vocations without qualifications tend to be more welcoming to the entrepreneurial spirit. The above figures reflect the circumstance that a skilled worker earns a salary, not business owners who have the urge to write their own financial ticket. Truly, the sky is the limit for a self-employed plumber, electrician, mechanic, or insurance agent who wants to build a business by employing and managing others to improve their own bottom line. Those people cut six-figure income. I personally know insurance agents and carpenters who were making more than $ 100,000 a year in their mid-thirties. Your typical biologist or engineer would still be trying to pay for his college department at that age, while making substantially less money than the insurance agency owner or construction contractor.

A college degree is also a waste of time from an academic point of view. Everything that you are supposed to learn in college, you can learn on your own if you really want to. But of course, most people don’t go to college to learn. A large percentage never graduated. Those who do are not really educated in the classical sense. Rather, they are trained to embrace the servile, anti-intellectual, self-centered, and ungodly worldview that is required to maintain the current bureaucratic state.

Honestly, college is for people who are unwilling or unable to cope with the responsibility of the real world. It’s a place where people go to extend their childhoods (and generally ruin their lives), using daddy money or tax dollars confiscated from plumbers, bricklayers, and insurance agents who are responsible enough to make a living.

The main reason our society places such importance on college education is because people have been brainwashed into believing that you cannot live without a degree. This fiction is driven by big business and the government because it gives the establishment more time to drive the population mad, thereby creating the sheep-like servants needed to maintain the bureaucratic state.

The fact is that anyone can acquire the education that the system promises (but never delivers). All you need is a library card and access to the interlibrary loan system. Do you want a degree in history, literature, or sociology (etc.)? Get a reading list from one of the best colleges and then take a look or buy the books you see on the list. But don’t stop there; To have a true education, you need to go beyond the politically correct college curriculum. You want to learn to think critically, so you need to read the classics and modern authors like Paul Johnson, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Michael Denton, Michael Behe, GK Chesterton, Otto Scott, Theodore Dalrymple, etc. If you need someone to guide you in your quest for knowledge, buy or consult a guide to the discipline of your choice (for example, the Politically incorrect literature guide). If you prefer a guide who lives and breathes, hire a tutor when necessary. If you want the system to “validate” your learning, take your knowledge to Excelsior College or Thomas Edison State College and test your way to an accredited Bachelor of Arts or Science degree.

If you are not able to do this, then you obviously don’t have the intellectual firepower or discipline to do many things in life, so you can also get on the treadmill, complete your worthless title, and get a job pushing papers for ” The man. ”

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1. See: MoneyCentral online.

2. See: SalaryWizard online.

3. See: HelmetsToHardhats online.

4. Figures obtained from Monster.com

5. See: MoneyCNN online.

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