One clever life strategy is to carefully select your post-secondary education to maximize its ROI in your personal life. I’m not talking so much about monetary earnings as I am about the utility of specific skills in your life when they are used for you.
For example, my degree is in Anthropology. This was a highly intellectually stimulating subject for me, so I really loved it. But it does not translate into high pay (or much of any pay at all), and it’s unlikely to save me any costs. How it is likely to affect my life, in the sense that I mean in this post, is that it has given me broad-based cultural awareness that will likely help me to adapt to life and potentially earn money in foreign cities, something I hope to capitalize upon some day. Mostly, it’s still an intellectual subject 🙂
One subject I’ve been interested in studying is Appliance Repair. My parents’ refrigerator has crapped out twice now, but I was able to directly solve the problem the first time and made an informed guess that turned out to be accurate the second time. This has saved them the hassle of paying for a brand new refrigerator, probably in the range of ~$1400, and in the first case, it saved them from the lie of the repair guy that the compressor was bad and would cost $800 to replace. That’s substantial savings, but let’s think about this more. Your value as an Appliance Repair person comes from your work on many people’s appliances. The chances of your specific refrigerator dying are fairly small in any given year, but let’s say that over the course of your life, your refrigerator dies three times and you replace it each time. If you love what you do, that’s fine, but as far as personal ROI goes, you may be lucky to be saving yourself $5,000, maybe a little more if you consider other appliances and maybe rising prices or refrigerators with more features. HVAC training would have a higher personal ROI, but even then, a few water heaters and maybe a furnace are not going to save you a tremendous amount of money as a factor of your earnings over the course of your life.
Programming, surprisingly, is only marginally better. You could potentially design your own website, and if you are a crazy beast you could even build an e-commerce platform, but in the case of the latter, you’re still likely to hacked into oblivion because programming and security are done in teams, and solo programmers are rarely able to do everything themselves. In the former, you need specific technical skills that may not be a part of your “stack”, or base of knowledge. This blog that you are reading right now is built on WordPress, which is written in the PHP programming language. I don’t know PHP. I’m probably capable of hacking through it, but it wouldn’t be fun. There are tons of sites that have all of these pieces already put together for you, and they are very often a better use of your time and money than going solo, even if you are a professional programmer.
If you can see the trend, it’s that in order to make money in a particular occupation, you have to be highly specialized in that occupation, which has the side effect of being less useful to you, in person.
Accounting is not bad, but you don’t need a degree in Accounting to keep a budget. I have no training in Accounting, but I did go full geek last month and learned how to calculate my paychecks, taxes and everything. It took some reverse engineering of last year’s tax return to double-check my logic, but it was pretty fun for a few days. Likely, Accounting WOULD be extremely useful if you owned a small business.
Art is interesting in that art is expensive, so if you can do your own, you can likely style things exactly as you want for much less. With graphic design, you can make your own business cards, do your own photo retouching, etc. As for design, I have a distinctive international style I use for decorating the living room, and I’ve always thought it would be sweet if I could hammer and cut metal to keep that style going. This will scale with your needs, though, so it only saves as much as you were determined to have in the first place. I also suspect if you love artsy things, it’s easy to find and love cool things made by others, but that’s sort of beside the ROI discussion 😉
I would argue Nursing has high ROI as you become highly trained in many subjects of general health, you can perform your own bloodwork, and especially if you have kids, you will better know when they really need to go to the hospital or when they will be fine without special treatment. These savings can add up significantly over the years, and the knowledge does not require the extensive education that becoming a doctor does, which again, requires a great deal of specialization that may not be directly relevant to you or your family.
Probably the highest personal ROI of any occupation I can think of at 1:00am is Auto Mechanical work. Since most people own a vehicle and enjoy doing so, it makes sense that a mastery of automotive knowledge will help you save tremendous amounts of money keeping your cars running or finding good deals on used cars. Since maintenance is routine and parts can and will fail, this provides a steady stream of work which will create a higher ROI for your knowledge each time. I pride myself on doing most of the work on my car, but I don’t have the special training (or some of the gumption) to do everything, nor the experience to feed my decisions when I set to work. If I were financially independent, I would seriously consider doing an automotive program, and would love to rebuild my own engine some day. The ROI would be lower for mechanic work on heavy machinery, since you are not likely to need knowledge of heavy machinery maintenance for your daily life.
I also suspect that an Associate’s Degree in Business is one of the highest ROI degrees. You learn some accounting, some finance, some law, some communication, all in one package. It may not have the prestige of a Bachelor’s degree, but dollar for dollar, you’re getting a lot of great knowledge for very little time and money cost. Even if you never used the degree in a job setting, the knowledge would probably pay for itself many times over.
Carpentry would also be very high on the list, especially if you own a house.
There’s no science to all this, just some perspectives. There are many, oh so many, occupations that we could sit down and talk about. I especially like the Occupational Outlook Handbook, but the sort of analysis I’m doing here is fairly rare. Typically, people only look at either compensation or personal reward (e.g. intellectual stimulation, as with my degree). These are really great to consider, but don’t be ashamed to be strategic with your education 🙂