Or rather, get educated for the right reasons and with full knowledge of the payoff.
College probably is all right to pursue. The payoff is decent for the money and time you spend. Financial Freedumb has a good discussion. The less money and time you spend in college, the better — if you can test out of the first year or even two years before you graduate from high school, so much the better from your wallet's standpoint.
I have had plenty of formal education — so much that I'm all formal-educationed out. Four years of college and six more earning a PhD in physics. Twenty-three straight years of school.
Thankfully, there is a market for physics PhDs outside of academia. Otherwise I might still be trying to get tenure. One graduate student in astrophysics while I was still in school had sent out 200 resumes and cover letters to various places for employment. With the humanities it's even worse. In many of those fields there are way too many candidates chasing far too few jobs. The degree might as well be useless with regard to better salary.
This was a mistaken mindset I had for quite a while after I was on the job. I think I even went so far as to say (when I was younger and a lot cockier) that I would be able to “buy and sell guys with only a high school diploma.” Actually, the opposite is true, at least where I work. PhDs don't often get the higher-paying jobs; they do the technical work for the group leaders, who might have a PhD but more often have a Master's or even a Bachelor's. Being highly educated is no longer a golden ticket to riches. There are too many highly educated people in this country, let alone in the rest of the world.
Again, I don't think stopping at high school is the answer. But think very carefully about pursuing much formal education beyond college. Financial Freedumb's post linked above talks about the Forbes article on MSNBC:
The five reasons:
- You'll be losing four working years. This is true. But it's what you get into during those four years and what you learn on the job that will make the difference whether it was worth it or not.
- You won't necessarily earn less money. This is also true. With the job I'm in, it only took a little while longer for folks with a Master's to get to the same pay that I had entering with a PhD.
- In fact, you could make more money. Especially if you enter a business and carve it out yourself. Lots of education tends to take away your ability to make mistakes, because in the formal education system, you fail if you make mistakes.
- You can learn outside a classroom. I would argue that you have to learn outside a classroom.
- Plenty of other people did fine. And those that did, did so because they learned new things all the time and made the skills they learned bring money to them.
So to add to what FF wrote in his post, if you want the security of a job as an employee, by all means go to school. Quitting school will probably cap your income pretty low until you go back to school. But if you have a marketable skill and it's something that people are willing to pay you for, then spending a lot of time in school earning letters after your name is probably not as valuable.
I question pretty often whether my education was worth it. It can't be taken away from me, but sometimes I can't help but wonder how things would have gone if I had started working for myself (at least part-time) ten years earlier, right out of college.
Does your education nag at you (either because you feel you have too little or too much) or are you satisfied with how far you've gone?
I'm looking forward to continuing my education. I have 2 semesters for my B.A. then about 3 more years for my Master's and PhD. I feel it is worth every penny I've spent. Good post.
John, I guess no matter what decisions we make in life, there will always be "what ifs…" My friend once said that the degree is really just proof that you can make it through this thing called "college"…Kind of like a general pass to get a job. Having a PhD is proof your really know what you're doing. Plus the PhD looks really good at the end of your name!
BTW, thanks for the link up John!
There are plenty of reasons to skip college, but if you want to give yourself plenty of opportunity, you will go to college.
Sure, you could lose four years of working, thus losing the opportunity to gain experience, or, you could go to college while working in a job related to your major. This will give you the best of both worlds.
Plenty of people may have done well without college, but that is changing as our economy is placing greater demands on educated employees.
In Indiana, they are working on a program that would give high school graduates an associate's degree. Essentially, the high school curriculum will utilize the capacity of a growing community college network to offer those courses in place of various high school courses.
So, there goes two years off of getting that four year degree. Of course, I think it is entirely optional.
I almost went on to get a PhD after my masters, but not doing so was the best thing I could have done. I would not have made any more money that I make right now. Additionally, I would have further pigeon holed myself to industry eyes. Top it off with three years of lost wages and it's pretty easy to see I made the right call. I am a proponent for education though. I recently completed a three year part-time MBA (which my employer paid for) and that has helped with opportunities within the company.
I wrote about this a little on my blog (in the weekly round-up post), but in response to John K's comment — how can you be sure? You don't know that you wouldn't have made more money. In addition the the education you would have received, you could have made contacts you otherwise wouldn't have made. You could have been inspired to do things differently. Maybe the averages for your industry say one thing, and your gut feeling is you did the right thing, but the truth is that you have no idea what your experiences would have been had you made the other choice.
There are plenty of people with PhDs I know who say that they made the right choice. There are others in the world who chose not to and say they made the right choice. The chance is that if someone is doing well, they're going to believe that every choice they made that contributed to their success was the "right choice," simply because it's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise.
Additionally, there is enormous non-financial benefit to partaking in more education, in my opinion. Although we personal finance bloggers would like everyone to believe that all decisions should be made by looking at the bottom line, that's not really the way the world works. As it turns out, money isn't the most important thing in life, BUT it is what we choose to write about. 🙂
I just wanted to mention I love reason number 4, with the key word CAN, many people find themselves unable to learn without a classroom and and assignments.
I do however think you misnamed your article, there is no such thing as over educated, there is however 'overlettered', or 'overpapered'. Getting so many letters after your name or so many papers piling up in your filecabnet is not the most useful thing in my book, however stopping learning and canceling all attempts to grow is much dumber.
"Overeducation" is a problem if people don't have sufficient job experience to go along with a degree. As a MBA student, I've seen that many of the jobs that need a MBA degree also require 5+ years of job experience as well. Without that experience, you're not going to be considered for that job. Getting an MBA right after your Bachelor's degree is a bad situation because, besides the lack of job experience, most Human Resources departments think the MBA degree makes you "overqualified for lower level jobs.
All very good points. Glad that this has gotten a lot of discussion.
PrincessPerky I think you're right that I mistitled the article. Constant education (learning) is essential. Being a professional student might not be worth it.
And as is true with most things, one's mileage may vary. Life is full of choices and some are better than others.
Dus10, interesting that HS students can get associates' degrees. That's a big advantage — and a big money-saver, especially if they do it through CLEPs.
FF, actually I don't often use the Dr. or PhD. I don't know — it just sounds strange, and then people will say, "Oh, you're THAT kind of doctor." Not using it lets people make their own decisions about who I am a little more.
cool, i did not know that