So, now you've jumped from 40 to 60...
Because you used a 63-year old as an example.
Well, to your point, a 20-something pursuing their PhD isn't a professional either, and there's no guarantee they will be in their preferred field after graduation
Right, but it’s also
very very likely that this person will take their bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. and have a long and lucrative career.
The statistics on that are quite clear, and I posted them upthread. Over the course of a 40 year career, the average bachelor’s will return $1,174,752, the master’s will return $990,019, and the Ph.D. will return $1,650,534. That clocks in at over $3.8 million of earnings, or about $95,000 per year of their career —
because they started early. And tack on another million for professional degrees like law or medicine.
Waiting just 10 years to get that same education heavily reduces the ROI. Assuming retirement at 65, the person who starts toward a bachelor’s at 30 (meaning they likely don’t finish that Ph.D. until at least 40, unless they can somehow be a full time student at an age when that makes little sense) will be looking at something more like $1,600,000 in earnings. That’s a loss of about $2.2 million due to a simple 10 year delay.
I don’t need to tell you what this looks like if they get started even later, like the examples you’ve posted. Those people are inspirational, but getting a Ph.D. at that age is about personal achievement rather than money — it crosses into a
negative 21.5% ROI somewhere around age 50.
Those are just the hard numbers. It is a plain matter of fact that getting started on education early is a major determinant of lifetime earnings. You’re playing around with millions of dollars here.
Now, I promise, the average ROI for investment in elite sports is far, far, far into the negatives. In all but a vanishingly few cases, the greatest ROI on an athletic career comes from the athletic scholarship that leads to holding a degree when the sports track hits a dead end. And for people without the intellectual or financial means to acquire a degree any other way, that’s a phenomenal life-changing option.
But for those who could get the education regardless of sports performance, it’s almost certain to be a catastrophic decision to focus on sports at the expense of academics.
But, yes, God help anyone who pursues a career as a professional athlete until they're 60, and then attempts to get their PhD
I’m not even sure what this means. There is 0% chance this guy is getting the degree with intent to become a professional historian. His situation is the equivalent of someone getting serious about golf at 60 because they’ve always wanted to see if they could be a scratch golfer if they really tried. It’s not remotely comparable to trying to make the PGA at that age.