Education and Pay

[Adam]

Sparked by something I saw in another thread...where to start. Jobs and pay seem to be so heavily based on your education and if you went to college. Not everyone is as intelligent as others and college is not right for everyone. Do you bieleve a construction worker, whos job is much more physically demanding and therefore arguably more difficult than a doctor who has gone to college for eight years, should be paid equal or more? Lets say the construction worker tried equally hard in high school but he was just not as intelligent and his grades did not get him into Med. School. Anyone else thoughts on education and pay? Should job payroll be so education based?

[carrotderek]

Education enables a person to learn many skills. In College/Univerisity, people learn new skills that are specialized.

Why should a doctor who spent 8 years learning specialized skills in an area where few make it to be paid the same as the construction worker with satisfactory knowledge of basic skills?

It's tragic that some people try so hard and make it no-where, but if salary was based on effort, a genius could waltz into med school with little effort, make a lasting contribution to humanity and get paid less than a computer scientist (muah) who broke his balls studying and still have below average programming skills.

If salaries were equal, than that would be Communism, and we all know that wouldn't work out :P Why would a person bother spend 8 more years than a construction worker and still make the same amount of money?

I feel Doctors also have a more difficult job, even after 8 years of cramming, depending on the type of medicine practiced, they could be expected to work long long shifts and still have to put people's lives on the line.

[Kidd]

I agree with you to a certain degree Shurai, salaries should not be equal, but they should be based on job difficulty. How can you say that a doctor has a more difficult job than a construction worker, have you experenced at least a day of work that construction worker would go through. True doctors have to think but they have books for refrence, laborers have to use thier bodies for thier work, and for that no book can help. So I think that peoples pay should be based on how difficult thier job is not how much they have to think.

[snap]

I think you should get back what you put in, qualification wise. if you went to med school for 8 years and got paid a construction worker's wages, i can guarantee you'd be pretty pissed off.
It's also what you contribute to society; imo, a doctor contributes more to the economy, so he gets a higher pay. A construction worker's job could be done by a wider range of people, so the wage for that job is not as big as that of a doctor.

[Ben]

Don't believe that.

Generally yeah more qualifications mean higher paid job.

But i know a few examples.

My bro is 25 owns a few business and has just bought a nmew house, he is dumb as hell and only got a few GCSE's i think.

My mates Dad owns his own business to and he is on about £100,000 and he left school therefore didnt get A GCSE.

Most high paid jobs are specialality jobs, like brain surgeons etc. They shouldnt really care aslong as you are god at that job, but you can argue that to get good at that you need to go to Uni where you need to do have qualifications to get in