The follies of our lives - part IV

Folly #4

Overschooling or underschooling 

I definitely erred on the side of overschooling by obtaining the shiny degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biology. However, the mistake of expanding my study years started earlier: I also went to a “special” high school that added a year to the regular schedule (I immersed myself in a year of foreign language studies prior to resuming the regular high school schedule). 

After high school, I obtained a BS/MS in five years, and for the next two years I went through a fellowship in a now defunct research institute. My mentor “disappeared” at the beginning of my appointment in the Institute, but eventually, I was admitted to a real PhD program in Biology.

The PhD studies in the U.S. take up to six years (unlike many other countries in the world, where a PhD degree takes only three years), and at the ripe age of 32, I was finally a PhD graduate. My first “job” was a post-doctoral fellowship with the accompanying payment of $24,000. In the year of my PhD graduation, 22-year old college graduates with software engineering (BS) degrees were starting jobs with $50,000 in salary.

Currently, I am lucky to have a better paid position. However, if I sum my compensations since I started working as a post-doc and divide the total payment by the number of years I was supposed to work (if I had graduated with a BS degree), my annual earnings come to $35,000/year.  Within the same period of time, the software engineers who started with $50,000 after college continued to increase their compensation and ended up with the minimum earnings of $70,000/year. Clearly, obtaining a PhD was my financial downfall. 

Add to these financial “benefits” the fact that I had to postpone starting a family (read on the dangers of late motherhood), it is quite clear why overschooling was a terrible mistake.

Underschooling could also become an obstacle to one's career; however, there are more success life stories among people who took this path. Think about the young founders of the most successful tech and social media companies - many of them quit college or grad school.

Underschooling can be easily remediated; whereas, overschooling cannot be compensated as the lost years cannot be "recovered". 

Have I learned anything? I did, but my understanding came in retrospect, and I cannot get back the years invested into schooling. Based upon my experience, I could advise my child to skip any graduate school, but the system in this country is such that I cannot encourage my child to skip college. If I were filthy rich and could guarantee the financial independence of my child for life, then I would have given her the opportunity to do anything she likes: homeschooling, un-schooling, no college/grad school or any college/school, etc. Life should be a path of unrestrained exploration of the human intellect and capabilities; however, the more we institutionalize life, the more it feels like a pre-charted prison. 

Part III