I know linemen that make 100k, but I know engineers that work for the same companies that make double 200k plus.
lowsound
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Is a College Degree Absolutely Necessary
- Thread starter greekorican
- Start date
lowsound
Where do those lineman work? It sounds like a lot of traveling, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I read on some website that tells you salary averages by career, and it listed lineman at less than 40k in Chicago.
I do know that the ComEd training course is three months long. I'm sure I won't make very much right at the beginning (hopefully enough to move out), but I think if I have the potential to make six figures, my parents will shut up about me not going to college. I think I could live with 100k if it means getting to work outside and not at a desk.
I'm also keeping my eye on when the next fire department test is. My grandfather (police officer for 30 years) swears by government jobs. He retired at 50 and gets a nice pension.
The question to ask yourself is do you really want to be a lawyer.
Advanced degrees are a whole other bag. Law School regardless of where you go is probably in the neighborhood of 50K a year, which means that whatever aims your start with will probably have to come up to the harsh reality that you can only make a return on your investment in private practice.
IANAL, but for most lawyers I've met, private practice is a vicious competition to make partner that has most lawyers connected to their blackberries working all sorts of hours.
They work for Hydro One in Ontario. It is a four year apprenticeship in Ontario and a bunch of work. You are basically an electrician that works with way higher voltage and you are 300 feet up in the air. Talk to people that actually do the work, not some website, as they are usually not all that accurate.
lowsound
I'd love to talk to some lineman, but I don't know where to find one. I figured the websites couldn't be completely accurate, with such a wide range of salaries. I do know that location makes a big difference in how much you get paid.
I'm hoping that there is a demand for lineman in Chicago. We've got tons of power lines and a few electric companies located in the city, it would be nice to not have to move somewhere to find work.
On the mechanical engineering side of this, according to one engineer I talked to, I'm probably going to have to relocate to find work. Since technology has improved, the mechanical things they are designing are being heavily computerized. He explained that he is currently working himself out of a job, because what he is designing (water heaters, which are being put in every high-rise in the city) can be maintained with a computer. The demand for the engineers will drop when this project is finish, according to him.
This is completely irrelevant. Those on this forum are not Bill Gates or Carl Icahn. You need to be looking at averages!
According to the gummint site Invalid Link Removed, in 2006 the median annual income (for males aged 25-34) of high school diploma or GED graduates was $30,000. The average income of those with a bachelor's degree or higher was $50,000.
What is HARD to understand about that? On the average, your lifetime earnings are hundreds of thousands of dollars higher with a bachelor's degree or higher. And note - those numbers were for ages 25-34, which is hardly prime earning years. The difference increases as we get older.
My daughter is about to graduate with a bachelor's in Business/Marketing, and is about to tie up a position with a commercial firm earning $40-$45,000 to start. She's a better than average student and a great interview. I expect her to be making as much or more money than I do within 5 years, as I work at a university...so my salary never keeps up with inflation.
Law has always fascinated me and the study itself ties into a lot of other subjects I find interesting like history, politics, social liberties, and law itself. Because of that, I do think I could see myself being a lawyer just out of interest in the field and because I like the idea of being able to help people in some way, shape, or form.
Plus (for me, at least) I think I`d see a significant return on investing in a law degree, and not just monetarily. Again, it`s something I actually am interested in and I think there`s a lot of personal benefits I could gain from accomplishing such a task. Another thing to consider is that I don`t want to pursue a masters degree in business... I just find the study to be far too mundane and bland.
I`m really only asking what people think about it because I want to see what others who`ve gone through the process think about it. Was it worth it to them? What`s their standard of living? And perhaps most importantly, are they happy doing what they do?
Besides, even if I got a law degree and passed the exams and decided to not become a lawyer, I still think that degree will carry significant weight and make me much more sellable to businesses.
As far as being able to pay for it, let`s assume that most of it is already covered for arguments sake.
I'm not sure if that was meant to be sarcasm, but it's sort of the point I was making: Higher education unconnected to the job market is worse than waste, and the connection is always hugely more tenuous than the matriculating student and his advisers believe.
Your only hope is that what was a hot job major for you when you started isn't in a total glut state by the time you graduate, as it has been over and over and over since I've been watching.
Education does not equal money.
That lie is a statistical game. The personality qualities that go with successfully completing college are those that usually append to people who know how to get with The Program, and those people usually do reasonably well in life as opposed to those who smoke ice and stop showing up for class in tenth grade.
A degree promises you exactly nothing except the ability to go to a big city and work yourself to death for less money that it takes to keep up your wardrobe and pay your rent on a crappy studio apartment, in a dead-end job in a fancy building which will be immediately re-filled by another anxious new arrival when you finally go broke and go home in six months to a year. This is the labor racket on which places like NYC and SF and LA have run forever. You'll be back in your nowhere home town working at Starbucks for the guy who started there when you were in college.
Most of my friends are not only college grads, but they graduated from elite schools -- Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley -- not from the pathetic state U to which I went. None of them are working in fields they studied except the ones who recycled themselves back into the cesspit of academia, and none of them are making any real money. The people I know with the big bucks (including the kid I raised) are mostly ambitious, entrepreneurial types who blew off college as a waste of their youth and found the niche that worked for them and their unique talents. They developed the practical sure-footedness and nose for money that they don't (and can't) teach MBAs.
Can you get a real job with a degree? Sure, maybe, if you catch the demand timing right. But seriously, what normal kid wants to look forward to forty thrilling years working in Healthcare Administration or scutwork engineering?
Really? It's completely irrelevant to the question
Seemed like a pretty relevant answer to that query to me.
Nothing is hard to understand about it. What is hard to understand about someone asking a question and someone else answering it?
Did I advocate anything? Nope. Did I say people shouldn't get a college degree? Nope.
All I did was answer a question that someone asked.
Seems pretty easy to understand.
Most of them.
That is what people fail to realize.
90% of people in the world AREN'T entrepreneurial, don't have great ideas, and just want a job to provide the basic necessities they need to live and enjoy life.
The great majority of people don't live for their job/career - they have a job/career so they can live... and they're perfectly happy with that state.
It depends on your skills and yes, a bit of luck helps.
I ditched college after 1 semester when I got a full time offer as a software engineer. I had the skills already so college seemed pointless. My mother was upset until I showed her the offer letter.
That was 12 years ago.
Nowadays I make a very healthy salary, own a house, a comfy chair, a big tv and a big amp
There are some fields you can get into if you can teach yourself. others are vastly more difficult (and illegal - ie medicine) without a degree.
Throughout my career I've interviewed a number of candidates and I've met some guys with impressive education who were dumb as bricks. Or in some cases they interviewed very well, but when put into a "real" situation they fell to pieces.
If you've got the skills and a bit of luck, you don't need it.
And yes, I realize I'm not the norm here.
I ditched college after 1 semester when I got a full time offer as a software engineer. I had the skills already so college seemed pointless. My mother was upset until I showed her the offer letter.
That was 12 years ago.
Nowadays I make a very healthy salary, own a house, a comfy chair, a big tv and a big amp
There are some fields you can get into if you can teach yourself. others are vastly more difficult (and illegal - ie medicine) without a degree.
Throughout my career I've interviewed a number of candidates and I've met some guys with impressive education who were dumb as bricks. Or in some cases they interviewed very well, but when put into a "real" situation they fell to pieces.
If you've got the skills and a bit of luck, you don't need it.
And yes, I realize I'm not the norm here.
Where I live, having more education is a curse and most businesses will not even interview people with a Master's Degree or higher. If a company does require at least a bachelor's degree, they usually also require you to list your GPA or provide transcripts as proof. They don't want somebody who just barely made it through college. I have 3 business degrees including an MBA and in my region, I am constantly told I am over qualified and they will not offer me a job. When I did not have an MBA, I always had a good job and my friends who never went to college or have a bachelor's degree have good jobs. I am not alone in this situation and many people I know locally who tried to further their education with a master's or higher degree have found that they are now unemployable in this economy.
My friend did this, the IT field is one where studying seems completely pointless as what you learn is redundant by the time you finish, and you can self teach if you know what you are doing. seemed like a good idea at the time.
He is 23 now, would have finished Uni about now. He is earning about 40 grand a year, pretty average wage, and he is very good in his field.
If he had a degree, he would be earning 60k +, simply because of the peice of paper, he would have no more skills than before, and would be doing exactly the same work, but earning an extra 50% ontop.
Now i don't know about in the states, but here most jobs will pay extra simply because you have a degree, not other rhyme or reason, if you get a doctorate your probably going to push your pay up another 20 grand, depends of course on the field ect. Seems like a worthwhile investment to me
6jase5
Mammogram is down but I'm working manually
Assuming that you aren't starting your own business and you do want to work for company X while receiving 1-5 weeks vacation, benefits, blah blah blah....you have to look at the statistical averages.
A degree helps your lifetime earning potential, stated many times before and totally true. That's just a fact.
I have a friend with a Harvard MBA that was out of work for 6 months last year after not getting her $225K + bonuses 2 year contract renewed. She wouldn't have had that job in the first place without the paper and her current job which is about the same pay.
A degree helps your lifetime earning potential, stated many times before and totally true. That's just a fact.
I have a friend with a Harvard MBA that was out of work for 6 months last year after not getting her $225K + bonuses 2 year contract renewed. She wouldn't have had that job in the first place without the paper and her current job which is about the same pay.
Well from what I've heard about the IT field, they don't want to pay a qualified person what they are worth. I suppose this has more to do with experience than with a degree. I've heard countless stories about IT guys with many years of experience losing their job to a first year grad simply because they will work for less. Nobody wants to pay for something good anymore, just whatever is cheaper.My friend did this, the IT field is one where studying seems completely pointless as what you learn is redundant by the time you finish, and you can self teach if you know what you are doing. seemed like a good idea at the time.
He is 23 now, would have finished Uni about now. He is earning about 40 grand a year, pretty average wage, and he is very good in his field.
If he had a degree, he would be earning 60k +, simply because of the peice of paper, he would have no more skills than before, and would be doing exactly the same work, but earning an extra 50% ontop.
Now i don't know about in the states, but here most jobs will pay extra simply because you have a degree, not other rhyme or reason, if you get a doctorate your probably going to push your pay up another 20 grand, depends of course on the field ect. Seems like a worthwhile investment to me
For the record, my brother has been doing IT work for around 13 years now and with his experiences he should be running the IT department of a major business. Instead, he can`t even find work outside of contractual stuff that pays crap simply because he never got a degree. He`s better than most people in that field and can`t hold a job just because of a piece of paper... and to me that`s crap. I think our society really needs to rethink things.
You make some good points. While I enjoy my job, a portion of that enjoyment comes from the fact that it is a 9-4 situation that afford me the opportunities and time to take care of the things I really care about.
On the flip side, I'll likely be either buying out my current employer or starting my own business in the next 5-6 years, so I'm not positive I fit your example.
Mike
Bitter much? Good lord. I don't even know what to do with that it's so out of focus.
Contrast that with friends of mine from Stanford and brother's friends from Harvard (including brother)- a number are millionaires before hitting 26-27, others are in top professional schools (medical, law, business) training for their dream job, and most of my engineering frends got hired straight into engineering jobs paying over $100k. A few that went into business are making in the mid-6 figures (one as an engineer!).
They are all working in the fields they studied.
They all have jobs. (Save for the ones still in school).
And some of those jobs would never have been available without going to college. Would you want to have a doctor who didn't have the minimum 8 years of post-high school training (12-16 if you could residency)?
You can get by just fine in many jobs without a degree if you luck out or are driven. But being driven will still not allow you access to many jobs, or even entire professions that require higher education.
The first statement is true about any market, but at least with the degree you'll have access to jobs that other people won't. And quite honestly, most jobs require college-level training because a high school education hasn't provided anywhere near the level of science training and background that many job require.
What does "science training" have to do with anything?
Believe it or not, most people don't major in the sciences and they have nothing to do with most jobs.
The thread is about "college degrees."
Most college degrees in most majors will do exactly nothing for you except get you past those "grads only" want ads for overworked and underpaid dead-end jobs.
