Does Being An Elite Student Mean Elite Income?
Once again, looking at the income benchmark is a humbling experience. Yeah, I agree with the author of Salary.sg about the arrogance I had when I was a student, simply because I was in the Top 10% of my cohort, taking Higher Chinese and German as a Third Language, and thought that I was really great, until I realised that everyone else was far better than me when I went to secondary school and beyond.
This benchmark shows that by the time I hit 30, I should have a net worth of 441k and an annual income of 147k. With not that many years to go, there is no way to reach this target if I continue as what I am doing now. I am not being a wealth accumulator yet.
To reach my goals, I need to brush up on my investment skills, which are currently languishing because I don’t have the time and proper tools to analyse properly.
Oh well, I know of many other people with less qualifications who are much richer than me. There are lots to learn from them. However, just because some of these people managed to make it in life, it does not mean that education is not important to them. They want their own children to make it to the top as well. They send their children to all sorts of enrichment classes. It all has to boil down to how pragmatic they are in our society.
While at the gym yesterday, I caught a rerun of Jack Neo’s talk show on whether students wanted to be the elite. A large majority of them wanted to be. When it came to interviewing parents, more than half did not want their children to be elite. How fake. Unfortunately I did not have my headphones with me, so I couldn’t catch the entire content. Well, one sobering thought is that people need to manage their expectations.
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I guess you do realise why the comparison with the education system is not entirely appropriate.
There are fixed upper limits in the education system. Thus an extremely brilliant student and an extremely, extremely, extremely brilliant student have only equal ability to inflate the requirements to be in the top 1%. (Both students will just score a max of 11 A1s …. the extremely, extremely, extremely brilliant student will still not be taking 20 subjects and scoring 20 A1s.
There is however no equivalent cap when it comes to income earners. Therefore the requirements to be, say, in the top 1% can be grossly inflated by a small handful of super top earners (eg a pop star like Stefanie Sun or Kit Chan).
The effect is even more pronounced when it comes to net worth. Eg suppose your billionaire grandfather Khoo Teck Puat dies, and he gives you, his 35-year-old grandson, a small fraction of his wealth.
You get, say, just $100 million of assets from him. Instantly you’re in top 1% by net worth. Furthermore, you just massively raised the average net worth, of everyone in the top 1%.
On a less grandiose scale, if you have rich parents and they give you a house worth say $1,000,000, you’re instantly a huge wealth accumulator already.
Hi Mr Wang, Definitely. I think it’s just a good reminder to those who think they are great because of their educational qualifications. There are many others who have either caught up with them or have overtaken them.
Many of us love to have such inheritance, but I’ve seen how families fall apart because of this.