There are many avenues one can pursue to tack onto the current annual incomes they already make. You can work overtime, you can start your own business, you can invest in stock. However, one reality that applies across the global population consistently is that the salary you’re able to earn goes up the more of an education you acquire.
If you can speak a language that’s needed within a given industry or within your government, or if you know how to assess the geological assets that particular land masses have, you’re going to be valued more, you’ll be worth more money to companies, and you’ll have the knowledge to make more money yourself.
Sure we all have the opportunity to read the books and materials ourselves and we may indeed study a lot more throughout our careers and first hand experience, but not everybody turns into a self-taught Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Very few people actually acquire a well-rounded foundation on their own. And many people who do totally space out on a lot of important blind spots. Also, supply and demand apply very tangibly in the real world. If you have more of an education than your competitors for a job, they’ll have no choice but pay up.
Without further ado, we take you through how much money you can expect to make, based on what education level you’ve completed.
Highschool Diploma or GED
Completing highschool is an honorable achievement and it is always worth it for anyone who was impeded in any way from accomplishing that during their childhood. The OECD reports that people who complete it make 18% more on average. First of all, secondary education gives you a lot of foundational knowledge that will help you in adult life, such as math and understanding our biologies and geography.
Geography can tell you where certain opportunities may lie for you. If you want to be a fisherman on a boat working long hours, Alaska is especially lucrative. If you want to run a business that requires raw materials. Developing nations in Asia, Latin America, and beyond specialize in catering to such ideas.
In USA, people with a high school diploma earn around 40 grand per year typically. Some common jobs people work at with this education level are:
- customer service reps
- construction workers
- machine operators
- store clerks
- blue collar jobs like automechanics
Trade School and Associate’s Degrees
This level of education can be completed rather quickly and can have you in the job market in no time. These also cost a lot less than full-blown universities usually charge. Most of the sites these programs are completed at are special technical schools and community colleges. The range of careers one could go into right after completing several months to 2 years of training here is practically endless:
- dental hygienist
- paralegal
- registered nurses
- web developers
- electricians
- welders
- industrial designers
Just by obtaining an associate’s degree, most people earn from 50 to 60 thousand a year, a significant bump on top of the previous level. If you’re a respiratory therapist or a dental hygienist, you could easily top 70,000 dollars in the USA just like that.
If you have an associate’s degree, and then you also decide to go for a bachelor’s you’ll be half-way there, and you won’t have to pay full price for 4 years at a university. Conversely, while on your way to that university degree, you could net yourself a job with a sweet salary on your way to paying for your undergraduate degree.
Bachelor’s Degree
Now we come to what’s considered the standard for most professional careers. A particularly broad range of fields require this degree to be onboarded. We’re talking about engineers, software developers, company managers, department heads, and scientists. The median salary here is about 63,000 in America.
In the meantime, a lot of students like to partake in:
- fraternities
- gambling leisure like on odds96
- university sports teams
- professional clubs to forge connections
- seminars to influence the community
The real big moneymakers are the most in-demand fields though, the STEM fields. If you are fascinated by science or you love working numbers and building high-tech, you are going to have the red carpet rolled out for you. It’s important though to have a plan before you study. Not all majors are created equal. Some of them are very competitive since the job market isn’t quite the same, though they are nonetheless very rewarding in pursuing your life interests and work ambitions.
Companies do value having a well-rounded staff and they look at your dedication in getting that degree as a sign of your work ethic. That said, having completed business and humanitarian projects through your own initiative is going to pique employers’ interest in determining the good that you can do for their company.
Master’s Degree
This signifies an advanced education level and it means that you’ll graduate with deep expertise and perhaps some leadership skills. In programs like these, you usually have to do some practical experience and get prepared for executive roles. If you are studying engineering or programming, that means you’ll have particularly profound awareness of your field, stemming from a lot of research that you had to complete and experiment with.
A lot of that research and experience isn’t directly pursued by people that simply worked in the field, since that experience had to be directed at completing the assignments set out for them in their jobs. If these people worked independently, that could of course be a totally different story. The leap is pretty substantial when you get this degree though, as it tops bachelor’s degree holders’ incomes by 20 to 30 percent. A lof of people with these degrees hold six figures, the average sitting just under that at $90,324 in the states.
Law and Medical School
These are the highest paying career fields one could study for, as they’re super in-depth. The salary for people who get these have shot up substantially in the United States, which far eclipse doctors and lawyers in any other country. Lawyers make nearly 200,000 dollars per year in America, and US doctors averaging more than double the income of any other country’s doctors’ median income. Tuition fees are of course sky-high as well, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ph.D.
This is the highest level of academic achievement one can reach, revolving around researching and doing field studies for years on very narrow topics. You have to uncover a lot of original information that you contribute to the academic community and write a dissertation. How much you make in this case depends on your field as well, but the median is 99,290 USD per year. It’s also extremely rewarding intellectually to have this type of knowledge in an area you care about and be able to contribute it to the world to change it for the better.