This started off as a response to a friend’s remark that a former business partner of his had insisted that “anyone with a college degree should be making $13 an hour.” My friend took exception to this; this difference of opinion may have been part of the reason the partnership dissolved.
It got me to thinking how unrealistic, selfish, and fantastical we’ve become here in The Future. Hell, anyone WITHOUT a college degree SHOULD be earning $13/hr+. We all SHOULD be bathing in honey and drying ourselves with spun gold whilst attended by bisexual nymphomaniac genius supermodels four deep on both arms. At least I think we should. Some folks may disagree if they don't swing that way.
As much as I can get behind the idea of paying a quality wage, it seems unrealistic to arbitrarily set a wage that 'should' be without first ensuring that the company's making enough money to PAY wages at that level. If it's not...tough luck, the folks drawing a check don't get paid what they "should," so you'd better hope they like the place or you have some other inducement to keep them around. When the only other option is to have a nice, happy, well-paid crew available to watch when you're forced to shut the place down because your payroll is bigger than your income, you gotta live within your means.
If a college degree is worth $26k/year out of the box, then I should be pulling a minimum of three times that based on my skills and experience...but if I was, the company I work for couldn't possibly survive.
Beyond all of this, I'm afraid I have to point out that there are plenty of drunken, incompetent, blithering, idiots out there with college degrees. People I wouldn't pay a quarter to shine my shoes, but who were fortunate enough to be born into enough money that they can afford to blow off four more years of their lives doing kegstands and conducting scientific experiments on the results of using various flavored liquids as bongwater.
These people usually turn out to be what we like to call "entitlement queens" - people who seem to genuinely believe that they deserve a bonus just for showing up, because they spent four extra years partying on their parents' dime.
You know who has a degree? Dan Quayle. Kwame Kilpatrick. Marion Berry. Every elected official who's ever been caught up in a major ethics scandal. Pat Robertson. Carrot Top. Andrew 'Dice' Clay.
You know who else has one is Steve Wozniak. For the non-geeks, Woz is one of the guys who invented the Apple Computer (along with Steve Jobs). For music fans, he was also the money mark behind the US Festival in the 80's in California. By all accounts the man's a genius of the highest order and a human being of rare quality...
...but he wouldn't be worth $13 an hour at a taxi company.
This isn’t to say that a degree is worthless, or even that you can’t reasonably draw at least a few conclusions just from the fact that a person has one. Unfortunately, more and more often the only conclusion you can REALLY draw is that the holder of the degree figured out how to play the system.
One of the many conclusions you CAN’T draw is whether they play it honestly.
I *should* be rolling in enough cash that I'd never have to worry about where my bills were coming from again and I could employ tens, scores, or hundreds of minions to execute my benign and perfect plans for world domin...er, peace.
Every marriage should be happy, every child should be safe, every heart should be cherished, every pot should have a chicken.
But that's not the way the world works, so what's left is figure out the way you think things should be, then bust your ass to make it happen. Which means a whole lot of long, underpaid hours doing thankless work that the vast majority of this planet's 7 billion or so inhabitants will never be aware of, and maybe if you're really good at what you do you'll manage to turn a couple of "what it should be's" into "what it is's" before you go the way of all living things.
If you’re really good AND really lucky, you might make a living for yourself along the way…and if you think luck has nothing to do with it, consider how lucky you are to have not been born a starving third-world orphan with a three-year life expectancy.