Keyboard worrier

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Learned fools

Forbes suggests that college education can be financially ruinous. The association of education with wealth only works when both are in limited supply, otherwise the Hedge Schools would have made Irish peasants rich. A silk hat does not make you a Bradford millionaire.

A doctor friend often used to quote some factoid that if the average doctor had left school at 16 and become employed in some capacity suited to his abilities, his hard-studying medical counterpart would never catch up in terms of total lifetime income earned.

I've heard it said that after the Revolution, the French trained thousands more lawyers, in order to devalue the profession.

Man to the plough;
Wife to the cow;
Girl to the yarn;
Boy to the barn;
And your rent will be netted.


Man tally-ho;
Miss piano;
Wife silk and satin;
Boy Greek and Latin;
And you'll all be Gazetted.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find the doctor bit hard to believe. A friend of a friend is a doctor. He's about 30ish, and a GP. He earns good money, not sure if its £100K+ as some do, but certainly in the £50-100K range. He'll be able to earn more later in his career anyway. He'll have 30 years at least of outearning his non-medical self possibly by as much as £50k/year (being State employed there's no real risk of being out of a job). I can't see how that will not outweigh 10-15 years of 6th form and university. Plus he'll have a cast iron public sector pension at the end of it.

Sackerson said...

To be fair to my friend, that was before the recent contract that the doctors managed to get past the Health Secretary. As for cast-iron pensions, I've got one and it's a cast-iron peanut.