If you've read my journal, you'd know I just got out. But the government (well, the lady at Employment Ontario) wants me to go back, my family wants me to go back, my friends... everyone seems to think my best/only hope is further education.
Joy.
Specifically, a Bachelor of Engineering.
Funny thing about Canada, which I understand is different in the US: it's illegal to work as an Engineer, or even an Engineering Technologist, without the proper certification. The only way to get the proper certification, it seems, is to have the right education. The B.Eng. (If anybody's ever gotten around it, I've never heard of it... though technically, one could try.)
Everyone around me is convinced that the only way to get a job is to become an engineer, and that means 4 years of school.
Yeah, four years. None of my science courses count. A+ in Thermodynamics? Oh, you couldn't possibly comprehend Engineering Thermodynamics; you'll have to take the course. Vector Mechanics? Ditto. I've tutored some of these courses, gods damn it! Apparently it's an accreditation thing, again.
Okay, so my question is how do I figure whether this makes financial sense?
Say S2 is my post-college salary, and S1 the pre-. Let T be tuition, and t be payback time.
Then the cost of the degree, assuming I lose 8 months wages instead of the full year (working co-op over summers) is
C=4*(T+8/12)
but C=(S2-S1)*t as a condition for payback.
Looks like the average starting salary for a B.Eng last year was over 49k, according to
this. So let S1=49k.
I can rearrange those formula, then, to find t given S1, or the max S1 given t.
S1= (S2*t - 4*T)/(8/3 + t)
t= (4*T + 8*S1/3)/(S2-S1)
Example: If I want a five year payback, I get a pre-college salary of 28k. For a 40hr/wk and 52week/yr, that translates to 13.50$/hr... and I'm about to start at 13$/hr at a call center in January. So a five-year payback sounds about right.
Am I on the right track, here?
How about the time-value of money?
If I take C'=C*(1+r)^t -- compounding the cost after graduation annually (and applying no interest whilst in school, like a nice student loan)-- well, I have to chose an interest rate. What do I charge myself? A nice, non-urserous 5% says for the same 5-year payback, my pre-degree salary has to be under 31k for it to make sense. (or, full-time, ~15$/hr.)
There's probably some glaring flaw here. One class I wouldn't complain about being forced to take would be economics.