On April 15 2012 02:51 MVega wrote:
People live in some strange bubbles. I think it's because the average community member is so young and has very little life experience. Myself and one of my sisters are the only people in my family to have any sort of degree. When I lived in one of the largest cities in the US I made $80,000 per year, and I was comfortable. Now I live in a much smaller major city and I made $42,850~ last year - I'm actually living more comfortably with more stuff now than I was when I was making almost twice as much money because even within the same country (if it's as big as the US at least) the cost of living can vary greatly. In some other countries people make a fraction of what I make and are considered wealthy. One of my dearest friends got a Ph.D. several years ago and makes roughly the same amount as I do, where my sister dropped out after 2 weeks of high school and makes $10,000 per year more than I do, and I make $5,000~ per year more than my sister that has a degree.
College/Uni are not the only way to wealth, nor do they ensure that you will be wealthy, and don't think that if someone skips out on Uni their options are woefully limited and they're doomed to be poor forever. They often just have to start a little lower than someone with a degree and work their way up.
It is of course entirely viable to become a top-earner outside academia, but it is also a fact that higher education correlates strongly with higher earnings. There's no way around it even if differences between countries is taken into account.
You're forgetting that a progamer that is prioritizing gaming isn't building a career anywhere else either - people who do well without a degree usually build up their career from bottom-to-top over years of working. This means that, if they do not continue in gaming in some other respect after their initial career, they have to start from the bottom.
EPT
