One Snarky Chica with Issues

Every Thursday deals with issues related to jobs, career and school.

It’s official. If I was going to spend the money on a fancy-pants degree, I should have gone into the medical field. (is it too late?)

One of the top stories this morning on MSN is a look at America’s Worst and Best Paying Jobs. While the list of occupations on both ends of the spectrum is not altogether surprising, some of the other statistics are. The average salary for the highest paid occupation is $184,340 while the average for the lowest paying is $15,230. That leaves the overall average around $39,000. Here’s the kicker – a whopping 15.6 million people in America are working in the 25 lowest paid occupations, while only 3 million people are working in the best paying occupations. Yikes.

A full list of the best and worst paying jobs can be found at the bottom of the article.

Clearly the gap in the salaries is rather astounding, but in some ways it is good. I like seeing that people with specialized knowledge are getting well compensated for their skills. On the other hand, the system is set up so that a lot people have no way to gain that knowledge, leaving them working in the worst paying jobs. It’s much like those job ads that say they only hire experienced people, but how do you get the experience without working? Or my favorite, you can’t get an apartment unless you have a job, but you can’t get a job unless you have a home address.

If I had a college bound child, I would try to steer them towards the medical field. I think that in America we do a real good job of shielding kids from the real world. We let them go to college and major in useless things like philosophy and anthropology. Along the way no one ever tells them to get their heads out of the clouds because they’ll be working in a crappy office job or worse, as a retail store manager. It’s nice to be a dreamer, but at some point there needs to be a reality check. I have a friend that has a degree in philosophy. He’s around 35 and currently working as a call center manager. Before that he was a retail store manager. Ever since college it’s been nothing but retail stores and call centers for him. And he hates it, but he’s stuck with it unless he goes back to school.

I have a brother getting ready to go to college. He’s going to major in Art, and he is a decent enough artist. He is under the impression that he will graduate with a piece of paper saying he’s an art major and sell drawings for thousands of dollars. I tried to explain to him that it doesn’t work that way. Then he said maybe he’d major in music so he could be in a rock band. He thinks if he has a degree in music that he can move to LA and get a record contract. I try and try to tell him that the world doesn’t work that way. He asks my parents and they tell him he can be anything he wants to be. That kind of love and support is great, but it’s also stupid because they are setting him up for a world of hurting. Yes, there is a possibility that he will make a lot of money in art or music. But there is an even greater chance that he’ll get his degree and become the manager of a cell phone store, like our other brother.