DGS49
Diamond Member
One of the great frauds perpetrated on our society by the Education Establishment is that "Education is the key to success."
Statistics are trotted out about income levels of those with degrees versus no degrees, and we all take them as proof of the underlying axiom.
But my belief is that education is INCIDENTAL to success. As a general proposition, succeeding at school requires, (a) a bit of intelligence, (b) a bit of perseverence, and (c) a willingness to meet challenges. But you don't GET these things from your education, you bring them with you when you go to school.
When you look at the success, for example, of the Harvard Class of 1960, you might be inclined to attribute that success to Harvard, but you would be totally off the mark. Harvard selects ONLY people who are brilliant and accomplished, most of whom have family money and other resources that everyone else simply doesn't have. Those people would have been successful in life if they had been put on an island someplace and picked up four years later and given Harvard diplomas.
And what to we mean by success? Most financially successful people are small businessmen. In fact, nobody really knows how financially successful they are because being an entrepreneur often allows one to hide large amounts of income, while reporting very little. I know dozens of people who could write a check and pay for my lifetime of accumulated wealth, and yet they have never reported income over $50k in their lives.
And for most small businesspeople, nothing they learned in school has anything to do with their success.
Other financially successful people include salespeople and investors. Again, school has nothing to do with their success.
There is one fairly large group for whom financial success is facilitated by education - the "learned professions." But again , the most financially successful doctors, lawyers, architects, and so on, are not financially successful because of what they learned at the university, but because of the business skills and their native intelligence, that allowed them to take their learned knowledge and exploit it to the fullest.
The false promise of Education is that if you get good grades from a good school, you will be able to get a good job from a good corporation and live happily ever after. But to get beyond mid-level management, you have to have resources that no college can give you.
The pity is that with so many people going around waving their worthless bachelor's degrees, employers have stupidly concluded that they are better off hiring a short order cook or truck driver with a bachelor's degree (or a Law Degree!), simply because there are so many of them around. This holds back the people who could be the best short order cooks and truck drivers, and they end up unemployed or grubbing for anything they can find.
The most promising road to financial success is entrepreneurship. Getting a degree is a ticket to the middle-class, but the people at the top of the corporate world are relatively few; you are more likely to get rich as a small businessman (and more likely to go bankrupt, but nothing good comes without risk).
Statistics are trotted out about income levels of those with degrees versus no degrees, and we all take them as proof of the underlying axiom.
But my belief is that education is INCIDENTAL to success. As a general proposition, succeeding at school requires, (a) a bit of intelligence, (b) a bit of perseverence, and (c) a willingness to meet challenges. But you don't GET these things from your education, you bring them with you when you go to school.
When you look at the success, for example, of the Harvard Class of 1960, you might be inclined to attribute that success to Harvard, but you would be totally off the mark. Harvard selects ONLY people who are brilliant and accomplished, most of whom have family money and other resources that everyone else simply doesn't have. Those people would have been successful in life if they had been put on an island someplace and picked up four years later and given Harvard diplomas.
And what to we mean by success? Most financially successful people are small businessmen. In fact, nobody really knows how financially successful they are because being an entrepreneur often allows one to hide large amounts of income, while reporting very little. I know dozens of people who could write a check and pay for my lifetime of accumulated wealth, and yet they have never reported income over $50k in their lives.
And for most small businesspeople, nothing they learned in school has anything to do with their success.
Other financially successful people include salespeople and investors. Again, school has nothing to do with their success.
There is one fairly large group for whom financial success is facilitated by education - the "learned professions." But again , the most financially successful doctors, lawyers, architects, and so on, are not financially successful because of what they learned at the university, but because of the business skills and their native intelligence, that allowed them to take their learned knowledge and exploit it to the fullest.
The false promise of Education is that if you get good grades from a good school, you will be able to get a good job from a good corporation and live happily ever after. But to get beyond mid-level management, you have to have resources that no college can give you.
The pity is that with so many people going around waving their worthless bachelor's degrees, employers have stupidly concluded that they are better off hiring a short order cook or truck driver with a bachelor's degree (or a Law Degree!), simply because there are so many of them around. This holds back the people who could be the best short order cooks and truck drivers, and they end up unemployed or grubbing for anything they can find.
The most promising road to financial success is entrepreneurship. Getting a degree is a ticket to the middle-class, but the people at the top of the corporate world are relatively few; you are more likely to get rich as a small businessman (and more likely to go bankrupt, but nothing good comes without risk).
