“Did you just spend $100,000 on an education to get a $40,000 a year job?”

So this meme/ad is currently making the rounds. The idea is that a college education is a terrible investment. That we’ll justify spending absurd amounts of money on college even if we know that the promised land of high-paying entry-level jobs is gone.

The Value of an Education

The ad revolves around a simple assumption. We should be able to measure the value of an education, specifically a college education by measuring what we put into it financially and then measuring what we pulled out of it financially. It should add up in dollars and cents. Not just that. We should be able to measure dollars to dollars, inputs versus starting salary upon exit. Total malarkey. But in our world of instant gratification, what other metric could you expect?

Testing My Value as an Employee

As someone else’s employee, as a college and graduate school graduate, I never made more than $42,000.00 a year. That’s full time. In Michigan. Working somewhere around 45-50 hours a week. I was a project manager and I was paid market rate for the work I did, perhaps a little more. Today, as an entrepreneur, on the other side of that equation, I’m not sure I would be willing to pay more for an employee of the same caliber.

However, I remember feeling like this was a really crappy deal. To throw some salt in the wound…I was working at the same place I worked throughout high school, college, and grad school…for an employer who was not impressed by my degrees. I know exactly what it feels like to leave college, feeling like a big-shot, top of my class graduate…only to go back to the same small town to make the same average money.

Coming back to the meme…

Does that mean I wasted all that time and money on a college degree?

Like any good lawyer answers most questions, the answer is…it depends. On what? It depends on your metrics. If your metric is starting salary in year one, the math is simple and it will generally disappoint. But that’s kind of like buying an apartment building, and thinking of your returns only as what you got in year one of ownership. Dude, you’re going to own this thing for the rest of your life. FOREVER.

If your math is based on instant gratification, almost every investment you ever look at is going to look like a crappy deal. Not just education. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do the math, but almost no investment makes sense if your timeline is a one-hit.

Personally, college and grad school were the places where I made lifelong friends. It was where I met Natalie. It was my first time living on my own. Some classes I remember. Some teachers conveyed life skills I’ll use forever. And some classes were completely, utterly worthless. A good liberal arts education should convey with critical thinking skills and reading comprehension ability. It should give you the context for beginning your exploration of the world.

College should be where your education begins…not where it ends.

The successful entrepreneurs that I know…they didn’t stick to the one mistake I made when I felt sorry for myself upon graduation. I assumed that my education was over at graduation. That my diplomas meant that I now got to trade my knowledge for a job with a high salary. Malarkey.

College is a way to start you on a path of lifelong education. It isn’t the end of the journey. It is the beginning. The successful entrepreneur keeps learning. She keeps reading. She keeps seeking out a job. She doesn’t assume she has all the tools because of a few letters after her name. Maybe those letters will open a few doors for her. But she’ll need more tools to walk through them.

If you think you spent $100k just to get a job that pays $40k a year…there might be a problem with your metrics.