The Iron Yuppie

Last night I got in a fairly heated discussion about the value of a college education, and today I check out a magazine (a 6 month old magazine, but a magazine nonetheless), with a great study in there about the actual value. I love it when that happens. Anyhow, they say the value of the education, monetarily anyway, is basically 50% at 30 years old. So $50,000 becomes $75,000 a year. That's pretty good! (this is up from a 17% gap in 1979 btw).

However, I really have to play up the networking aspect as well. Since I've started 3 companies with a buddy of mine from college (the first one was with another buddy as well) seems pretty valuable to me. I guess the question is whether or not that's worth the cost of $180k (current cost!!). I'd say it is, if for no other reason than you get to figure out how many beers you can really drink in a finite period of time.

But the best part of the article was learning yet another economics term which fits perfectly to a term I was looking for (again):

"Signaling" device - basically it means that the person (or object) you're looking at has done something in the past that requires some quality - hard work, creativity, connections, etc

Mr. Spolosky talks about this when he mentions hiring software developers. And it does make some sense. The biggest problem is that it also leads to me-too situations. Like how VCs chase after a company only after it has a term sheet, or invest in businesses where there has already been a successful (and often exactly the same) business in the marketplace. Or movie studios all pursue (and release) similar movies at the same time (see Mission to Mars v. Red Planet; Deep Impact v. Armageddon; etc etc). It's got to be one of the criteria that other people have looked at it and viewed your object/etc as valuable, but it seems like far too much weight is being placed on the fact that someone else has given the ok on something.

posted by Iron Yuppie  # 10/08/2007 12:08:00 PM