Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
I don't necessarily disagree with most of this. Although many of the people I know who make the most money are those with the least education. People I know who went into trades or construction or work in their own or family businesses earn far more than my friends with University degrees. Many of them also bought properties 10 years ago, and have far more networth too.
This might change as I get into my 40s and the setback from taking time off for school is further behind us. However, education seems to have a lot less value than skills. And the people in construction are now getting appointed to managerial roles or getting seniority in unions now.
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Just to clarify, when I said educated, this does not imply University degree. This implies any technical education. I would go as far as to suggest that the earning potential of a STEM graduate or any technical trade education is far higher than most non-STEM bachelor degrees (with exceptions), but I digress. The point is, just over 50% of Canadians 25-64 have a post secondary education (highest in the world). This still means that 50% of adults do not have one of these. I wasn't able to find good statistics on this, but if we assume an even distribution of households that contain: 0/2 with post secondary education, 1/2 with post secondary education and 2/2 with post secondary education, this would imply that 66% of people would have 1 or less post secondary educated people in the family. I suspect the statistics are even worse because anecdotally I believe there is a tendency for educated people to connect.
The point of this entire tangent is strictly to point out that not only are we in a bit of an echo chamber here, but we are also misleading ourselves in the number of people that have an "average" income and what average actually is. For the record the median income in 2016 for Calgary/household was $67,700. By definition, 50% of households have it worse than this...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmon...ment-1.4574667