And because it can’t be really measured at all for many jobs. What’s the economic value created by someone in customer support? What’s the value created by a janitor? A dish washer?
Most jobs are not directly generating revenue out of nothing. Only the company as a whole does and it cannot be mathematically calculated who generates what share. In communism, you’d probably argue that everyone is equally important and thus earnings should be distributed linearly.
But if you tell people that everyone should make the same no matter if it’s room keeping or an engineer, they mostly get upset. Because they derserve better than those dumb, lazy fuckers who didn’t even go to school blahblahblah. They rather fight those below their own socioeconomic status and dream of their breakthrough and becoming a millionaire themselves. People are often egoistic unfortunately.
I think that’s debatable. Personally, I went to university and had a great time there. Apart from learning, that phase of my life had lots of events, parties and spending time with friends. I always saw it as a priviledge that I had the opportunity to gather so much knowledge. Especially as school and university are paid for by the state where I live.
At the same age a janitor, someone in room service or cleaning dishes was already in the middle of their job. And while I today have a job where I get paid for solving interesting problems sitting at a comfortable desk in an airconditioned office or even at home, those other pals are still cleaning hotel rooms, dishes or scrape off bubble gum from the tables.
Personally, I think the job itself is more than sufficient of an incentive to justify higher-level education for people. That’s at least my take as long as the state pays for your education like in my country.
But independent from that I’m very aware that your standpoint on this is way more popular than mine. Also had similar debates with other people in my privileged situation and they are all eager that they deserve better than a random uneducated person because they did so much hard work at university. I find that pretty ironic, because I know some of these people from university and they barely learned for the assignments and the only hard work they did was drinking at a bar or club every other night having the time of their life.