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Entry level salaries suck... It's true you can make more money doing other things, like working at UPS..

But five to ten years later, it swings the other way.

And if you make it to directorship, it swings big time..

College grads need to have realistic expectations that they will have to put in time to get more money.. If they are too focused on "now" money, then college may not be required..

(But college is a good insurance plan, many white collar jobs require a degree -- any degree.)

Spending $150k on a degree, however, is excessive unless one has definitive plans to excel in school and after. If one just wants a job, then community/state college is fine.

But college is a good insurance plan, many white collar jobs require a degree -- any degree.

Yup. I quit college with 96 hours completed. Twenty years later, it doesn't matter that I can run circles around the majority of college graduates in my field. No four-year degree equals a closed door a great deal of the time. So even though I work for myself, I'm going back and will have a BS in digital forensics in about a year and a half.

Exactly, and a college degree ensures a bit of transitional worth. A friend of mine from childhood, only finished HS, and worked his way up in a tool and die company in Colorado. He was making pretty good money for his educational level at about $20 an hour.

However, when he lost that job that, he found that his salary was pretty much based on his longevity with that company, and he wasn't worth near what he was making to other employers. He wishes now he would have gone to college.

I have a career that no college grad would ever aspire to. Yet I make more money than most of them will every make.

I started out repairing copier machines at about $8.50 an hour. Listened to people bitch about paper jams all day and came home with filthy hands and clothes (toner, grease). People back then would have said (and did say) that I was in a dead-end job and that I should have gone to college and made something of myself.

Today I run the service department. I have about 80 people under me and I am responsible for $18 million in service revenue each year. My income is comfortable to the point where I can contemplate retirement in my mid-50s - a comfortable retirement at that.

Didn't need a fancy college degree to get to where I am. Just got my hands dirty and worked my way up. There's lots of jobs out there like that. People start out driving forklifts and a few years later, they are running the entire warehouse. People stock shelves at Wal-Mart and in a few years, they are managing the store (Wal-Mart managers make into six figures).

But none of those careers would interest a college-grad. They want a white-collar job right off the bat because they believe that a blue-collar job is beneath them. So they end up stuck in cubicle-land in some faceless office park with some meaningless job title where they either get laid off eventually or they kiss enough butt to get bumped up to the next level of glorified pencil-pushers.