World Musings

Why go back to school to get an advanced degree? If you think about it, you are putting out extra work, extra time, and extra money towards a job career that you do not own, you cannot buy, and you cannot sell when you retire. It really makes no sense. Maybe some people go back to school to get that Master’s degree simply because they enjoy going to school. Most people do it because they think it is going to earn them more money or a guaranteed promotion. Most of the time, this just isn’t the case. All too many times I’ve seen people in the corporate world get promoted or hired into management positions that didn’t seem to have an advanced degree, or hardly any degree at all.

It would be more beneficial to you to put forth extra time and effort towards generating extra income on the side through a hobby or interest. Or basically start you own little small business. Putting forth the time and effort to build a company for yourself, even if it fails, is actually more valuable than to go back to school. If you already have a Bachelor’s degree in a particular discipline, and then instead of going back to school, spending your time and effort on building your own business would not only give you a better education, but also might even make you more attractive to an employer if you ever applied for a position in management or as an executive. If you were an employer, who would you hire for a management or executive job? A guy with a Bachelors degree and a Masters degree in Business Administration. Or a guy that has a Bachelors degree and has actually run a business before. Maybe even a successful one. I’m not saying I would definitely pick the guy that has started his own business, but it would be a tough choice between the two.

I’ve worked at two different corporations. In both cases, most of the managers we had did not have an advanced degree. Yet, a lot of employees beneath them did. There are some people right now that I work with that achieved MBA’s along with a Bachelor’s in the career field I work in, but never go promoted to anything other than the job positions they are working at now. I never did go back to college to get an advanced degree because I was never told that it was a guarantee that I would get a salary raise or a promotion if I did. No, it wouldn’t hurt for me to get an advanced degree, but is it worth it? Once again, you cannot own the job that you have, you cannot buy it, nor can you sell it. And any extra revenue you generate for you company, you are more than likely not going to see any of it.

There are a few younger people that I work with that have only been out of college 5 years or less. They seem to think that if they spend the extra time and money going back to school to achieve a Masters degree, that somehow, they are going to get a promotion or make a lot more money. And normally, if you did get a huge salary raise at a job because you achieved something, it usually amounts to no more than $10K at the most anyhow. Big deal. After taxes, and after all the misery you went through to get that lousy Masters, you now can afford to drive a newer car than what you have. Or now you can afford a house with 50 extra square feet of space. That’s about what a salary raise amounts to.

In short, I’m not knocking going back to college or spending your free time in classes to achieve a Masters degree. Some people do it as hobby. But it makes more sense as a business model to spend your extra time for yourself on a venture to generate extra income. Stop giving your time and your freedom away to a corporation. You are a corporation within yourself. Your goal should not be to get an advanced degree so you can get a promotion, but rather to fire your boss before he fires you. It would be more rewarding to me to be able to walk off my job because I’ve already earned enough money on my own venture to retire on, rather than to receive a piece of paper from an online college program that says I have a Masters in Business or Engineering or Management.  It’s time to start working for yourself, and not some corrupt monopolized corporation.