I am a victim of the private school education system. A 99.90 ATAR, but at what cost.
When I was in Year 10, I wrote a piece about the education system. I distinctly remember it because I topped my class in economics quiz scoring 29/30 after a poor Term 1 performance. I studied moderately hard for this quiz, but not intensely. It felt unfulfilling. Essentially, it was just knowing definitions and basic theory around demand, supply, fiscal and monetary policy. It was positive because it set me up for Year 12 by putting me into economics, not business studies class. But nonetheless, it was clear it was a rote memorisation quiz. Unfortunately for me, I still decided to study incredibly hard from October 2022-23, proceed to get top 0.1% of the country in high-school & get three state ranks in Economics, Modern History & Religion Studies.
Paul Graham says you don't see people pulling all-nighters in week 2 of the assessment. This is one part of the problem. The other part is simply that exam-taking & learning are completely different things. Even on humanities topics, an individual that writes a well-memorised essay on the course of the European war is different to someone that understands the European war, can form opinions on it & relates it to other disciplines.
Even if they weren't hackable, the knowledge is not useful to begin with. There is a debate around whether should be a vocational asset, or not. I'd argue beyond ages 15, it should be. You should certainly be learning skills that make you an asset to the economy. Largely because Students don't use school as a "learning" opportunity anyways. If you somehow changed human DNA to have intrinsic motivation & discipline to learn constantly, than high-school wouldn't necessarily be horrible. Students would explore the various topics to great depth, and cultivate theses on certain topics. However, they do not do this. They party. They drink. And that's about it.
So, what should matter for most university students is that you're able to utilise some skill in the workforce to provide value to a company, and thus extract some % of that value. The core competencies in any company are selling the product: sales & marketing, delivering the product: can be anything but typically blue-collar, digital services, coding, engineering & the back-office: law, IT Services, recruitment. Very few of these are covered by university in a practical way.
It feels like 50% of Australian private-school graduates do some form of a commerce degree & then go into the Big 4, Company-side Finance, or Marketing. There is no way this many people are passionate about finance. I refuse to believe it. They weren't checking the stocks, or reading PE statements when they were little. It's the safe option. You get your $80k salary which slowly becomes $200-250k over 8-12 years. It's easy, it's straightforward. Most people don't want to think. This gives them that option.
Otherwise, it's largely about status signalling. Places like Goldman, JP Morgan, FAANG, MBB. Even people like Marchione fell into this trap. Playing the status games of other people & trying to dominate those. After a certain point, you cannot play every status game & just have to pick one. Or else, you risk becoming trapped in a local minimum.
This is not an issue in Australia. The opportunity cost & forcing function is more important here. However, it's absurd to me, that Lucy Lapierre will pay $400,000 AUD for an engineering job that will pay her $80-120k out of college. 600 colleges across the US charge >$60k AUD. 300 charge $80k AUD. So, if you pay less than $80k per year you will not even be going to a school in the top 300.
Your average engineer is paid $70k USD straight out of college. Hence, let's say Lucy pays of her degree in full minus living expenses (20k per year). It would take her 6 years. Thus, to merely be at break-even, most people would have to work until they are 28 years old to have $0 in their bank-account. While there are degrees with high upside like most ivy-leagues, and then finance, law & medicine roles, most jobs like engineering do not have high upside. Still only 16-25% go into the roles, meaning that the other 75% likely have all this debt that only gets paid off by the time you're 28. By that time, you're probably going to start paying off a mortage. Based on this, my general sense is going to university to study social sciences, humanities subjects has low ROI. If your dad worked corporate, fine. But that doesn't mean it's a wise economic decision.
That's not even mentioning the norm of doing Masters, PHDs & MBA degrees in the US. Emmet is doing 6 years at Stanford to the tune of $600k USD. Even a $100-150k USD job at a good investment firm would mean he doesn't break-even until he's 28 years old, assuming he could spend all of his money on that which isn't true.
I have the graph ingrained in my head of the starting salaries of graduates remaining the same against the inflationary pressures of tuition. It's ridiculous. Then the institutions go and give them to Bill Ackman & Stephen Schwarzman.
It would take 1.2 million years to consume all of internet's content. There is a plethora of content on every single youtube channel. You could learn more about any one topic on the internet than university degrees have time for, especially in a 26 week term with 4 classes per week. Literally 200 hours of class time. You could do that in one month of intense study. The arguement that you can "learn" more at university is certainly not from the course content. How could it possibly be?
Aside from these, university is the largest info-course known to man. You will not find a bigger one. Even though I knew this before the 99.90. The limited capabilities that this 99.90 has given me is more profound that I realised. It took a year off in a period where my brain is very plastic.
Lots of entrepreneurs talk about not going to university. This is ironic considering virtually all of them did go to university. Nonetheless, the options are to become self-taught in monetisable skills: sales, marketing, design, coding, recruiting. All of these are not taught at university. Practical skills taught at uni are law, finance, medicine, engineering; unless you are in these fields, it seems pointless to do one of these degrees.
Now, to talk through my decisions for the moment. I am in exploration mode once again. I was at the start of last year, but had some money demons weighing over my head. Now, I will intern/work at a few different companies, perhaps learn to code (I'm considering it). Worst case, if I fail at this for a long period of time. I'll start some sort of service business or worst case work a sales account executive role & be paid $150-200k. I'd have to work 40 hrs per week but at least I wouldn't have to go to University, and the good sales people can be paid $200-400k which isn't enough for a family but is fine for me.
With this said, these roles will never pay the salary of someone in corporate finance (Hedge, IB, MBB even Big 4), medicine or law. So, the vast returns will come from...