It’s time someone said 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 sound like a college degree will mean more money in your pocket when you balance the salaries of college-educated people against everyone else. That doesn’t make any sense. The guy who has no interest in doing anything more challenging than flipping burgers should be out of 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 sheep’s clothing; the question is do biochemists (for example) make more money than masons? The answer happens to be no.
The average income for a senior biochemist is just over $59,000 per year; a bricklayer can expect to earn just over $54,000 a year. But that’s not the whole story. The biochemist will spend at least $50,000 to get his bachelor’s degree from a state school and more than $100,000 if he decides to attend private school. [1]After that, you’ll need to finish a graduate degree and get “at least 5 years of experience in the field or related area” before you can expect to reach 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 also need to consider lost wages over 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 see an additional loss of $60,000 to $160,000. This is a loss of just $7.50 per hour at the low end and $13 per hour at the high end, with no increase. (We will give the biochemist the benefit of the doubt and ignore the fact that he would not earn a market salary while completing his graduate program. However, he may be able to live on the stipends he receives as a graduate student. For the sake of 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 college at least $110,000 less than the bricklayer. In the meantime, the mason has been working as an apprentice (with a starting salary of between $10 and $13 per hour) [3], and if reasonably competent, will have achieved journeyman status by the time the biochemistry student earns their bachelor’s degree. This means that she will start earning the annual salary of $54,000 when the biochemist begins his graduate program. The biochemist will not reach the average salary of a “Biochemist III” for another five years or so. Simply put, the bricklayer is $110,000 to $200,000 ahead of the biochemist, an advantage the biochemist will never be able to overcome.
“So what” you can say. “Comparing a biochemist and a bricklayer is arbitrary. It is no more relevant than comparing all college graduates with all college non-graduates.” Maybe: however, take a look at these randomly chosen examples from the Monster.com site.
When we consider professions that require a degree, we see that the expected average salary in the United States for a typical:
Biologist V costs $88,625.
Nursing Staff – RN costs $58,924.
Accountant III is $58,866.
Social Worker (MSW) is $48,845.
Engineer V costs $102,298.
Activities Director – Nursing Home costs $34,385
The high school teacher costs $50,562.
Biochemist III costs $59,100.
When we consider professions that do not require a degree, we see that the expected average salary for a typical:
Electrician III costs $48,739.
HVAC Mechanic III is $50,591
Carpenter III is $44,793.
Machinist III is $49,075.
Mr. Bricklayer is $54,019.
Plumber III costs $50,138.
Insurance agent is $41,287.
Automotive Mechanics III is $49,563. [4]
In addition, “business and economics/finance graduates” receive an average of $38,254 and $40,630″ per year, respectively, upon graduation. “The average starting salary for marketing graduates” is $34,712 and $41,058 for graduates of accounting. “Liberal arts graduates” earn $30,212, per year after graduation. “English majors starting pay” is $31,113; “political science majors” earn $32,296, and “psychology majors” enjoy ” entry-level salaries averaging $28,230.” [5] Meanwhile, responsible workers are already earning twice as much after four years on the job.
As you can see, most college degrees are a incredible waste of time and money. The exceptions are professional titles; law, medicine, engineering and the like. Even those occupations don’t actually require a formal degree, but that’s another article for another time. And remember, these numbers don’t address the cost of the title or lost wages.
Also, vocations without a degree are often more welcoming to the entrepreneurial spirit. The figures above reflect the circumstance of a skilled worker drawing 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 make six-figure incomes. I personally know insurance agents and carpenters who were earning more than $100,000 a year when they were in their thirties. Your typical biologist or engineer would still be trying to pay for his college department at that age, while he makes far less money than the insurance agency owner or construction contractor.
The university degree is also a waste of time from an academic point of view. Everything you’re supposed to learn in college you can learn on your own if you really want to. But then most people don’t go to college to learn. A large percentage never graduate. Those who do are not really educated in the classical sense. Rather, they are trained to adopt the subservient, anti-intellectual, self-centered, godless worldview that is required to maintain the current bureaucratic state.
Honestly, college is for people who are unwilling or unable to face the responsibility of the real world. It’s a place where people go to prolong their childhoods (and generally ruin their lives), using dad’s money or tax dollars seized from plumbers, masons, and insurance agents who are responsible enough to make a living.
The main reason our society places such a high importance on a college education is because people have been brainwashed into believing that you can’t make it in life without a degree. This fiction is pushed by big business and the government because it gives the establishment more time to brutalize the population, thus creating the sheep-like servants needed to maintain the bureaucratic state.
The fact is that anyone can acquire the education promised (but never delivered) by the system. All you need is a library card and access to the interlibrary loan system. Do you want a degree in history or literature or sociology (and so on)? Get a reading list from a top college and then check out or buy the books you see on the list. But don’t stop there; to be truly educated you need to go beyond the politically correct college curriculum. You want to learn how to think critically, so you should read classic 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 living, breathing guide, then hire a tutor when needed. 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 can’t do this, then you obviously don’t have the brainpower or discipline to get much done in life, so you might as well get on the treadmill, complete your worthless degree, and get a job pushing paper for “The Man.” .”
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1. See: MoneyCentral online.
2. See: Online Salary Assistant.
3. Check out: HelmetsToHardhats online.
4. Figures obtained from Monster.com
5. See: MoneyCNN online.