Does education matter?

"We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classrooms
Teacher, leave us kids alone
Hey! Teacher!! Leave us kids alone!!
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall."

are the lyrics to Pink Floyd's seminal song "Another Brick In The Wall". It struck a chord with me and I would imagine myself singing it defiantly - I never did, I was too much of a model pupil, with rather angelic looks that meant I could and did, get away with murder.

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, is a college dropout, Michael Dell is too. Richard Branson left school at the age of 16 and yet all three of the aforementioned men are multi-billionaires. So, is education overrated? In this day and age of fast food celebrity, where it's possible to become a millionaire on the back of notoriety a la Big Brother's Jade, I would have to say yes.

I have 2 degrees, BSc and MSc, and at one time or another I could trail my name with 4 sets of TLAs* and FLAs**. I have spent 17 years of my life in full time education, I'm under 40. My Masters degree and my certifications were self funded. I have invested a lot of time and money in pursuing an information security career and yet the ROI has been pretty poor. After completing my Masters in 2002 and gaining a prestigious industry certification along the way, I couldn't find an information security role, despite the fact that I had pre college industry experience. To pay my mortgage, I went to work in the call centre of a wine club, where I was working alongside kids who were using the job to earn spending money for the obligatory round the world trip after finishing school.

Despite my education, qualifications and industry experience, I lived from pay cheque to pay cheque. Could I have handled my money better? Absolutely. I really enjoyed my MSc course - it was everything my BSc wasn't; entertaining, educational and very relevant - I had completed a journey that begun 16 years prior when a friend gave me a scifi book for my birthday. What's more, because of its international renown, I can holiday on the most popular continents and not have to worry about accomodation. The MSc is one of the reasons I ended up working in the iconic building on the right. However, it's been almost 5 years since I finished the course and yet I'm still paying off the CDL I took out to do the course.



TLAs* - three letter acronyms
FLAs** - four letter acronyms