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No disrespect, but in my line of work I've been able to see into a lot of people's financial data, and I've never heard of a plumber making 130,000. The only exception would be the owner or director of a mid to large services company (doesn't really fit the definition of a plumber at this point though). Are you completely sure about this salary?

These are a few jobs that could be expected to make 130,000 (after bonuses and commissions):
Attorney at a reputable law firm (except for an immigration attorney, they make less)
Consulting firm manager
CPA with a substantial client base
Investment banking associate (not analyst, they make less)
Professor at a Tier 1 or possibly Tier 2 business school, law school, engineering school, or medical school
Medical doctor or dentist (partner of a small practice or hospital staff)
Commercial airline senior pilot

At any rate, when people say that blue collar workers can make more than white collar workers, they're generally talking about the low end of the professional income spectrum. For plumbers and electricians, 65,000 is possible if you have good business acumen. 85,000 is possible in price inflated areas, like NYC, but anything over 90,000 is doubtful.

When I said some blue collar make more than typical white collar workers, I was thinking of a construction foreman. How much do they make?

Also I hear certain welders, miners and oil rig workers make a lot. E.g. I was in contact with a 21 year old girl who was making a lot on an oil rig and I saw a documentary with a fifo truck driver on an open pit mine. She made so much money she was able to buy an investment property by the time she was 24.

He has 2 incomes from plumbing AND firefighting. I've seen the tax forms to prove it.

I'm glad your dad's making a good living doing useful things.

Now...how can we get you to stop being so angry with yourself?

fat chance

You do have a nice avatar, though. Looks like Elizabeth the First a bit.

A lot of blue collar work is performed on contract, which means that you're in charge of your own business, so essentially the sky is the limit. The question is, at what point do you stop being a worker and start being a manager? That's why this is often a difficult topic to discuss. A construction foreman could make as low as 45,000 and as much as 85,000, depending on his level of responsibility. The more he/she moves out of the role of a worker and into business development or contract management, the more he/she will tend to make.



For reasons that are pretty obvious, the oil industry is an exception. I currently work in the oil industry and the culture of excess is completely insane. Your friend made a wise choice by saving and investing. Others in this industry blow it in Vegas or go on Caribbean cruises and buy Ferraris. Of course then prices fall and the axe comes down and people lose their jobs. The oil industry is an exception, but the other industries you mentioned are more even keeled. Welders are in the same income category as plumbers and electricians, but in order to earn more as a welder, you have to become highly specialized, which exposes you to more risk in construction downturns (or whatever your specialty is).

These days, everywhere you look there are articles about how the trades are the place to be, and for a person without higher education, that's definitely the case, but the future is not kind to the uneducated. Electricians, plumbers, and welders will lose work as advancements in technology require engineers to provide service. Look at what's happening to the auto mechanic for an example.

Low skilled jobs were the first to go, and for the most part, they are gone. It used to take 15 people to staff a McDonalds, but now it just takes 3. There's an impasse with low skilled jobs now because the few people who remain fill in the gaps where technology is still, for the time being, inefficient. The next low hanging fruit is in middle skilled work, and some of the advancements in pipe technology and smart homes are going to put the pressure on.

Going back to the original topic, being employed in a trade is a decent option, and if higher education is off the table, then that's as good as it's going to get. Of course, in the time you'd spend doing apprenticeships and meeting certification requirements for your city and state, it's not necessarily faster.



This makes more sense. In any case, having multiple sources of income is a good financial strategy. I'd go into the reasons why a tax return doesn't always reflect reality, but then I'd be hijacking the thread.

Only 3? I'm sure I've seen more staff than that at Subway. I heard that very recently they'd introduced a computerized, self-serve checkout. I saw it as I walked to Burger King. I think this technology could be bad though.

I don't have anything against labour saving technology, even when it causes unemployment but I feel that some labour saving technology doesn't actually save labour. For example. I hate those self-serve checkouts at supermarkets. They don't save any labour at all. They just make it so that I have to do something formally done by someone else. I think that proper labour saving technology is NOT something that just passes the labour onto the customer.

Girlwithaspgergers, you should go to college anyway. I didn't go to college when I was your age and now I have a massive guilt complex about it. Even though I have a job that normally requires a college degree (they made an exception in my case), even though I'm currently in college... (but community doesn't count. It's fake college, right?) No matter how hard I try I still can't make up for not having gone to college in my late teens like most normal people do.

You're still young so go now and avoid the quarterlife crisis when you hit 25.

It depends on the scale and throughput of a restaurant. Sometimes it takes more than 3, but also many restaurants are smaller and have less frequent business. In a previous life, one of my first jobs was at Subway, and on weekends I ran the entire place by myself.



From the business perspective, if you can get the customer to do for free what you used to have to pay someone to do, then that's great! Of course, you can always take your patronage to Whole Foods and get as pampered as you like. The point is, there's a market for cheap groceries and a market for luxury, but the middle ground is quickly disappearing.



I probably learned more in community college than I learned in some of my graduate classes. CC gets a bad rep because it's not research ranked, but for most students, research doesn't matter. In fact, you would barely notice any academic difference between going to a well run CC vs a Tier 1 state school.

I live in SW Virginia, where one could live like a king for 130k/year. But in Northern Virginia (same state!) that's not that high a salary. It's still a good salary, but not like draped in silks and diamonds kind of salary.

What accommodations did you need? I'm asking so I can think of some places you could apply or some ideas for you.

Acht, I meant to say I've seen more than 3 staff at Mcdonald's. Most of the time Subway has one or two but I've seen a lot of staff in a McDonald's at the same time.

That's what my uncle said.

He told me I should end my studies after community. He told me he thought the stuff I'm learning now is better than what he learned in university (or at least more concise). He said that we he did his bachelor of software development, more than half of it was theory. He said he spent more time writing reports than writing code. He said community college is more hands on. He said if stop studying after the relatively cheap community college (first semester is free and if I qualify for concession it will be $1,000 per year) I'll stay out of debt.

So lately I've been thinking if I should follow his advice or not. I can confirm that in the six months I've been there, it's been 100% practical. But I wonder if I'd be missing something. I wonder if at university I'd learn something less tangible that doesn't directly apply to my planned career path.

I mean, the number of people I've seen working in jobs outside the field of their major makes me wonder if their studies served more to increase the overall intelligence or to give them skills indirectly, rather than to give them knowledge that applies directly to their job.

Think of how, in theory, you can enter into law school with any degree, yet you still need a degree. Sometimes they even let students into medschool who majored in humanities, not science. Even though nothing in their, say for example bachelor of music relates to law or medicine, even though a music graduate knows nothing of law or medicine, they would admit him but not someone with no degree who knows an equal amount about law or medicine (nothing).

It's the same as how they currently won't let me into university because, although I completed high school, I didn't choose the right subjects (funny how the counselors at schools in poor neighborhoods don't bother to tell students the subjects their choosing aren't recognised by any university in the country but in schools in good neighborhoods, they preach it like the gospel). The subjects I missed out on have nothing at all to do with the degree I want to do yet they say I need them to commence any type of degree. Does that mean the skills in those requires subjects would indirectly help, if not directly?

On a more practical level, while my uncle said he'd hire someone with community college and some freelance experience, while one of the managers from upstairs said I could join her devteam if only I passed an internal exam, there are some recruiters who wouldn't consider me without a degree no matter how much work experience I've had. Some who would never finish reading my resume. Some who would hire me but at a significantly lower payscale for the same job.

I forget who said it but someone on this board said he'd been an accountant for 30 years and then got fired for not having a degree. Common sense says he'd know more about accounting than a recent graduate but this man in his 50s had to go back to school.

I don't quite know what I should do. I can think of reasons to have a degree yet tens of thousands seems like a lot to spend on a whim such as this. Also, I find studying while working full time to be very draining. It would have been much easier for me if I'd completed a degree before I started working full time like most other people do.

Once again I apologise for hijacking your thread Girlwithaspergers.

I would agree with your uncle about everything except the bit about finishing up after CC. My advice would be to go to a feeder college to a university where you would like to go, complete your first two years there, and transfer to university to finish your undergraduate degree. It sounds like you're looking at a CS degree, or possibly MIS or ITM. In those fields, continuing on to graduate studies can be beneficial. In any case, more advanced studies, whether upper division courses or graduate courses, tend to focus more on theory and specialized knowledge, and in that sense they prepare you for professional management or SME oriented careers.



The short answer is yes. University provides a broader educational base that indirectly boosts your skillset. This is by design. Without getting into all that critical thought entails, most skills that are valuable and impossible to automate are skills that require synthesis of knowledge. So while you may be able to delve into a single area of knowledge enough to call yourself an expert, you'll have a more difficult time advancing the deeper you go into that silo, because you don't have a web of information to branch off into. This is not to say that the delivery mechanism for knowledge necessarily needs to be university, but it is a somewhat reliable package.



A university education serves three essential functions (maybe more):
1) It provides a broad knowledge base with some specialized knowledge in a field. This is intended to prepare you for the adaptability needed for most professional jobs.
2) It demonstrates to employers that you are reliable and consistent enough to finish 4 years of college without anyone forcing you. If you're lucky, it even shows that you're motivated and interested in your chosen field.
3) It places you in jobs. In the short term, this is the most important service a university can offer. University career placements are kind of like a job exchange, in which employers have negotiated agreements with universities to allow them to recruit on campus, provided they hire a minimum quota of students. In effect, this means that you're only competing with your classmates for jobs, instead of the whole world.



Fields like law and medicine, and a few others, have strict licensing requirements at various different levels of government. Most of these requirements include specific degrees or a minimum number of credit hours in particular fields. They will not admit people who wouldn't be able to license after completing their program.



Maybe they need someone with a particular license. In any case, for better or worse, university has become the outsourced provider of choice for job-readiness vetting throughout the US.



That was probably because the company he worked for wanted to scale up their CPA ratio. In corporate accounting, this would mean lower audit fees. In public accounting this is a PCAOB requirement to continue as a CPA firm. You can't get a CPA license without at least an undergraduate accounting degree, and in most states, also a master's degree in accounting.



To put the cost of a degree into perspective, I make three times as much as other people who do the same job as me, mainly because of my degree. Just the difference in income is enough to perpetually pay for full time university for the rest of my life. Hope that clears a few things up.