You probably have seen charts like this one that send a fairly simple message: More education means more money in the long run. If you want to think and grow rich, you’ll need to stay in school long enough for a J.D., M.B.A., M.D., or any other string of extra letters after your name. Insert alphabet soup here.
The problem, however, is that this chart only tells half the story. This goes back to the last post about how your electrician may not know differential calculus, but he must be intimately familiar with properly wiring complicated circuits together or his work may, quite literally, go up in smoke. Trades rely on skills that cannot be learned from a textbook. The training to become a master plumber and a Master of Arts take about the same length of time, but the plumber spends most of that time on the job site instead of in a classroom. For this reason, he is lumped together in the chart with McDonald’s fry cooks and Walmart cashiers, who vastly outnumber him and strongly skew the statistics.
Customers pay tradesmen based on their skill, not their theoretical knowledge. Furthermore, the longer a tradesman works, the more opportunities he will have to learn more specialized skills that pay even higher. Underwater welding, medical gas pipes, computerized precision machining, and solar panel installation are just a few of the rapidly progressing, in-demand skills for aspiring tradesmen. For this reason, many tradesmen at the top of their profession can earn six-figure salaries.
Meanwhile, let’s look at the other side of the coin and see what our erroneous graph predicts for the erudite holders of fancy degrees. For many of them, the dream job is a prestigious academic post—but often, these jobs simply aren’t there because the few jobs are already filled. This isn’t just the case in the arts and humanities—think about how many astronomers you meet. (Here’s a hint: They’re outnumbered by astrologers ten to one.) 73 percent of college faculty jobs hiring today are non-tenure track. For others, the years of school pile up student loan debt they may never be able to repay. There may be the potential to earn a little more as a Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at Yale than as a crane operator, but which is a more realistic goal for most of the population?
Trades certainly pay enough to live a comfortable life, to raise a family, and to save for retirement. They may not make many billionaires, but neither do the vast, vast majority of MBAs.