Who else wants $23,000 a year WITHOUT going to college?
I hope you will excuse my double post, but I originally wrote this on my investing blog.
I tend to be fairly opinionated when it comes to college and whether or not it is a benefit financially, so I was intrigued to read this article over at FreeMoneyFinance which referrences this article on Yahoo news. You can read both articles for youself — and I hope you do — but in summary they point to studies that show that college grads earn about $23,000 more a year than non grads. I think this is terribly misleading. Let me explain why.
What is not mentioned is the work sectors that make up the survey, so we must assume that they cover all of them. This means that high paying jobs that definately require a college degree such as medical professions and lawyers, are going to skew the results. Everyone pretty much knows that if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, chemist, etc. that it is more or less impossible to get a high paying job without having a degree. Therefore those career fields should not count.
Why? Because you can not compare a doctor’s salary that went to college against a doctor’s salary that did not go to college. What you can compare is the salaries of individuals in the same career fields that have and have not gone to college. Take the classic business degree graduate. While it might be hard in some corporate environments to rise to the top without a degree, it is not impossible, so therefore you could find two CEOs with one having a degree and the other not and see what the difference in salary range is.
Ok, so the CEO position may not be realistic because they tend to make millions so 23k isn’t that big of a difference. So let us take my current career field which is software development. I have met and known a lot of people with computer science degrees of various levels and I have found no correlation between their skills as a software developer and their degree. I have worked with PhDs at national laboratories that really knew their stuff and some that couldn’t program their way out of a room with an open door. I have met people that have masters degrees that admited they couldn’t design an enterprise level application.
What is interesting about the IT field is that the average salary is right at the average salary for college grads as stated in the article, $78,000. Do I make more than they national average? Yes I do, enough to be noticable, and in case you haven’t guessed yet I do not have a degree. The IT field also has a good mix of college graduates and non-college graduates.
I did say that I do not have a degree, but I did start go to Devry many years ago because I fell into the trap of thinking that I had to have a degree to get a job (I had recently left military service at this point). What really frustrated me was the school wasn’t teaching me fast enough what I needed to know, it was teaching me 20 year old technology. Anyway I got my first job, and ironically it wasn’t my going to school that got it for me, it was my military background. My boss told me later that he hired me for my military background (unrelated to IT) over college graduates because he figured that if I could take the military then I could handle a corporate environment.
What is really interesting though is that the survey also doesn’t show the number of people with degrees outside their current career field. I have met people that went to college and gotten degrees in architecture, electrical engineering, phycology, business and a few others that are not working in their degreed field. So with maybe a few exceptions the money they spent on a degree has no bearing on their current salary.
I am not naive enough to think that everyone can do well without going to college. Some people don’t learn well on their own, they need someone to teach them, and that is fine. What I have a problem with is the notion that if you don’t go to college you won’t make good money or be successful. You can make up some of that $23,000 difference even if you don’t have a degree by either striving for a better job or even better, maybe you can start your own business and go beyond that 23k. Yes I do know a few people who own their own business and they personally make between $80,000 to about $200,000. Degree required? Nope, not one has a degree in their business of choice.
While I don’t mean to offend any college grads out there, I am reminded of one of my favorite movies. From Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character makes a comment to another about how his high priced degree could be had for a buck 25 in late fees at the local library.
So does a degree earn you a significant amount more than your peers without a degree? I would certainly be interested to find out.
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I don’t have a degree either, although I went to school for a short time until my need to make a living became more pressing than my need to learn about Turbo Pascal. So I quit and got a job instead.
I won’t say I’m glad I don’t have a degree, because I feel sometimes like I missed out on something by not getting one. But I’ve been working at this stuff for almost 16 years, and I haven’t run into a situation where I thought “Gee, if only I had a degree, I could fix this compile error” or whatever. I wonder sometimes though: If I had a degree, would I have been working at this stuff for 16 years?
I’ve always kind of enjoyed conveniently leaving the fact that I don’t have a degree out of general conversations with co-workers that do, and hearing what they have to say about non-degreed people when they don’t realize they’re talking to one.