8 Reasons Why An Education Doesn’t Always Guarantee A Good Income

Scott Groza is a career educator known for co-founding Groza Learning Center that aims to help students. He is a firm believer of custom-made studying plans that can help individuals with specifically-tailored learning lessons. By being inclusive in his methods, Mr. Groza has helped hundreds of diverse students.

Unfortunately, even with talented people who teach others for living like Mr. Groza does, education will not always foster a lucrative career. College is known to be the first step towards a very successful profession filled with promotions and bonuses, but there are more than a few reasons why this does not always work out.

When a person graduates with any type of degree, it is unlikely that they have formal experience in their field. Sadly, employers who are not specifically looking for college graduates will rarely trust someone with zero experience to handle non-entry-level positions. Often times, however, those types of positions are the only ones available. This vicious cycle will then lead to underemployment and, in turn, earning less money than one is really worth.

As unpredictable as the economy is, trying to foresee when the next downturn will happen might be a lost cause. If it does occur, however, it will mean that job opportunities will be viciously reduced and unemployment rates equally increased. For those who just graduated, this results in a period without any income. Any loss of income will decrease the average earnings over a lifetime.

Getting an education focused in areas not sought out by the employers is the equivalent of not getting an education at all. With the market being interested in STEM graduates more and liberal arts less, for example, not every education will yield in matching earnings.

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In order to attend a traditional 4-year university, an average person will have to pay thousands of dollars. Such an investment is an opportunity cost reflecting every other alternative that could have been chosen. When a person decides to put their professional career on a pause for a few years, they are missing out on potential earnings while experiencing high education costs. This type of set back will bring down the lifetime earnings significantly.

Typically, education will specialize a person in some specific area they decide to go with. Sometimes, that area will be altered by the economy or politics and all of their knowledge will become unusable. Think of those who studied tax accounting for the tax code utilized prior to 2018. With the latest laws that are made to completely rewrite the way taxes are done, people will have to relearn everything. This means more time studying in order to get a high-paying job.

It is no secret that the United States has an education system that relies on various types of core classes. This is why people in every state will have mandatory classes like history, English, government, and more. In case that someone is trying to become an astronaut, for example, none of those would be applicable to their field. This issue sometimes creates incompetent professionals who lose jobs due to lack of proper education.

Many universities never teach people basic life skills like retirement planning, budgeting, saving money, and so on. The lack of this knowledge facilitates bad decisions that result in wasted funds. Earning more after getting an education and wasting money simultaneously is the same as earning less without an education.

Most higher-education institutions still require students to know countless math formulas, many historically-important dates, and grammar rules. In reality, if someone has access to a calculator, Google, and simple autocorrecting software, all of these problems become meaningless. Education is out of touch when it comes to needs of the workforce, which is why a lot of people who get a degree will need to keep doing additional studies in order to actually learn something. Others will have to settle for mediocre offerings from employers.

Those who get job interviews based on their education will often be asked about their extra-curricular activities more than their GPA. This is because employers want to see what has someone done in their life, not what they scored on exams. Spending hours studying in order to have a high average will lead to fewer job opportunities as they will professional versatility will be lost.

Naturally, there are exceptions to all of the aforementioned points. Many people have found high-paying opportunities after getting a respectable education. The issue of education being old-fashioned and out of touch with the reality stands. Millions of people have found work to be a better solution than time spent studying useless concepts. After all, Bill Gates is the richest man alive and he dropped out of school!