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Wow, H is in a 100+ physicians multi-specialty group in expensive Bay Area, and he said perhaps only 2 or 3 of his colleagues make that kind of money.</p>
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However, many of the new doctors have mega loans (friend’s child $200000) and won’t be making decent salary until they reach late 20’s or early 30’s. Medical school tuitions have gone through the roof.</p>
<p>Georgetown undergrad tuition: $34,110 for 2007
Georgetown medical school tuition: $41,304</p>
<p>University of Chicago undergrad tuition: $33,3336
U of C med school tuition: 33,624.</p>
<p>So yea, med school tuitions “have gone through the roof” just like undergrad tuition.</p>
<p>However, I think the median salary of physicians exceed those in finance related jobs. Only a small percentage of finance professionals receive Wall Street type bonuses.</p>
<p>cbreeze makes a good point: it’s like comparing ARod to a doctor and saying it’s smarter to play baseball than to get an M.D. - try telling that to a guy making $9,000 a year in the minors. And there’s hundreds of them for every major leaguer, not to mention all the guys who played through high school or college and then didn’t make the next “cut.”</p>
<p>But those finance guys aren’t saddled with 200K of debt.</p>
<p>And there are tons of young pups, straight out of college, who end up making a phenomenal amount of money in finance, in bond trading, on the floor of the NYSE. Some start as runners, and yes, they do work very hard, but we have known bunches who just clean up, and make ten times the money we have, with a third the years of schooling.</p>
<p>I’m not talking bank tellers here, when we are talking about finance guys. Just like your little local doc in a community hospital or practice is not making what a surgeon at Mass General makes.</p>
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<p>While that might sound mean-spirited, I think a lot of those old high-paying manufacturing jobs were living on borrowed time. The presence of those jobs warped the incentives of Americans in a bad way.</p>
<p>Let me give you a poignant example. I grew up in a town that used to have a lot of unionized high-paying manufacturing work. So I remember as a kid in school seeing other kids who were clearly uninterested in educating themselves. One day, one kid even got into a shouting match with both his teacher and the principal, where he loudly asked why he was being asked to learn anything, when he was just going to drop out of high school and take a local factory job, and earn more money than even the school principal was making. </p>
<p>And the truth is, he was right. At least at that time, he was. When kids know that they can get a very high paying job without having to graduate from college or even from high school, that inevitably blunts their incentive to learn anything. Why get an education, when you don’t have to? In fact, I later got to know that kid, and his parents were not particularly well educated, yet they made very good money anyway from working at the plant. So I understand why that kid had such a negative attitude towards education. He probably thinks: “Mom and Pop aren’t well educated, yet they make plenty of money, so that means that I can make plenty of money without an education.” </p>
<p>But in the last decade or so, those manufacturing jobs started disappearing. Painful to be sure. But I think that, sadly, that’s the only way that those people’s attitudes are going to change regarding education.</p>
<p>First I notice you didn’t address that the service sector jobs- don’t pay well yet we still need workers for them.
Should we just be looking at ever increasing waves of immigrants who will fill them for one generation until their children get enough education to be your boss? ;)</p>
<p>And actually the knowledge needed to be a highly skilled craftsman is not negligible. True AP tests are not necessarily relevant to someone who is building a stealth fighter- and I wouldn’t say that those who design tools to build sattelites are great essayists- but I wouldn’t say they are uneducated-
they just didn’t attend college.</p>
<p>I also don’t beleive that everyone should or needs to attend college- while I expect everyone deserves to have a good basic education-trying to fit everyone into the same peg- doesn’t work.</p>
<p>* some of the skills needed for aircraft manuafacturing job- ability to be precise within 1/10,000ths of an inch for example- thinking of “factory” workers as unskilled is pretty 19th century*
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<p>I’m not sure I believe the numbers, either. Wow, that’s a lot of money. I’m stuck back here at ‘working poor’, so I admit to a lack of sympathy for the sadly merely rich who are being left behind, and a certain amount of resentment towards the very rich. But not too much, after all, I am mostly responsible for the choices which led me here (although coming from a poor family with other problems in addition to a lack of resources does handicap your starting point).</p>
<p>The larger point that the article touches on is that economic inequality is growing, and that’s kind of scary. But are those assets real money or just theoretical money? Cash in the bank or stock options that may or may not reach their stated value?</p>
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Very true. Bright, engineering minded kids can have intellectually stimulating careers in the skilled trades. H works with toll & die guys for his prototypes & they are hi-tech/artist hybrids. We know one who developed a biomed device on his own & sold the rights for several hundred million. The finance guys would be drooling.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if your comment was directed to me, but I would say that there were (and to some extent still are) a LOT of unskilled union manufacturing jobs that paid quite well. In other words, you really could have a very comfortable lifestyle despite having few skills or much education. That reduces the incentives to learn anything. Why develop skills when you don’t have to? </p>
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<p>Well, in this case, it wasn’t “I” that was thinking that their jobs were unskilled. It’s the factory workers * themselves * who thought that their jobs were unskilled . I remember talking to one of them, as he was the father of one of my childhood friends. He worked at the plant. He told me that, frankly, he could teach me everything I needed to know to do his job in probably less than a month of training. He was a union rep and the conversation was in the context of the necessity of unions, and he was laughing at skilled workers in other parts of the country who were not unionized. He pointed to an example that highly skilled (but non-unionized) workers in other parts of the country who spent years in trade schools honing their craft and then spent years getting experience * still * didn’t make the kind of money that even the unskilled laborers in his union made as a starting wage. College graduates the same - unskilled laborers made more than the average college graduate for starting pay. Basically, the structure of the conversation was that he was basically laughing at all of these ‘foolish’ people who had to work hard to learn skills and get educated, when his guys in the union didn’t have to do any of that while still making more money. But what he didn’t realize (or perhaps he did, but didn’t want to say) is that that inevitably reduces the incentives for people around town to get skills or get educated.</p>
<p>Sakky, this is interesting to me about the unions. I met someone recently whose father is a union leader, but she doesn’t talk much about his work. There was a piece in the NY Times last week about how the Dems need to distance themselves from the unions if they want to succeed in '08…wonder if that’s true.</p>
<p>There are a lot of interesting points sakky’s union comments raise. </p>
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<li><p>many union jobs were quite skilled. To generalize from the comments of one union leader is sad, especially when that person may non himself appreciate the skills he had. Historically unions thrived because union shops were actually more productive than nonunion shops leading to a lower cost of labor. In recent years, this advantage slipped, due to a number of issues. For one, unions focused more on job retention (leading to all sorts of problemmatic , like job fragmentation). For another, management adopted many of the reforms pushed by unions like training and decent benefits. Finally, many of the workplace safety policies unions fought for have been made into federal law.</p></li>
<li><p>it is important to differentiate between the practices of some of the unions currently, which often seem to be focused on narrow self interest of the leadership, and the benefits unions bring to members if well run.</p></li>
<li><p>look at the inbalance in power between workers and management these days. Then tell me collective bargaining is a bad thing.</p></li>
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<p>sakky, my experience with unions has been very different. My father is a carpenter. He grew up in Galway, and started working as an apprentice when he was 11 years old (his father died when he was 9 and so he had to quit school when he was finished with the primary grades so he could contribute - as did all his siblings). </p>
<p>Unions started because management treated workers badly. And not “you can’t have 2 weeks vacation” bad, but “no safety equipment” bad. </p>
<p>My dad was never a union leader, but he was proud of his union membership. It wasn’t his ticket to ride, it was his certification that he was a skilled worker who had <em>mastered</em> the skills required to do his job. There are a lot of union rules that people scoff at, but there is often a reason why they were put into place, and that reason is usually safety related. </p>
<p>I think a lot of people are anti-union, either because they hold some stereotypes about union employees, have participated in or experience with a union that is corrupt, or because they feel that they are already treated well by management.</p>
<p>As usual, I’m coming to this discussion late, and my comment is directed at something mkm mentioned a few pages ago (about chemistry salaries.) I’m familar with the stats quoted about salaries for chemists (since I am one), but let me add that starting salaries vary widely depending on the field and the industry. Starting salaries for PhDs in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, hover near (if not cross) the six figure mark (and those PhD’s do not carry any grad school debt.) Those with a MS/BS degree are usually hired in around $65-70,000. </p>
<p>Our big concern is not salary but job security. There’s already an awful lot of outsourcing to India and China, and the future looks a little grim…</p>