What are your opinions on how education should affect wages. Say for instance a 10 year degree should yield $200,000 annual while a 4 year should yield $100,000. What do you feel common perceptions of this are on the average?
Education in what fields?
What should affect wages is the particular skill set, how fitting it is to the position being filled, how scarce such skill set is in the population seeking jobs, and what are the costs of training a newly hired worker to the peculiarities of the workplace.
Education somewhat correlates to this, but it is not what affects wages.
What I am actually getting at is that if the U.S. Goverment starting hiring medical proffessionals at all levels for a government run healthcare system would they have problems filling the positions at reasonable wages? What would reasonable wages look like for Dr’s, nurses, techs etc?
Pay a GP $170K salary and you will get a lot of takers. Depending on location a bit.
Well, for one thing, the wages should be high enough to easily pay off whatever debt was accumulated by getting the education. (That’s assuming the education itself wasn’t fully subsidized.)
In the general sense, the things that affect wages are the same things that affect the price of goods and services:
supply and demand.
Want a high salary? Mold yourself into something relatively rare for which there is a relatively high demand. This does correlate to some extent with education, but only inasmuch as the skills provided by that education are in demand. A person who spent six years acquiring a Ph.D. in chemical engineering will be in strong demand when he graduates, and should have a fairly easy time finding a job with a high salary; A person who spent six years acquiring a Ph.D. in comparative literature, not so much.
They shouldn’t have a problem filling positions at “reasonable” wages, where "reasonable is defined as “whatever prevailing wage is for comparable jobs in private industry.” There are already a number of government run healthcare systems, for example the VA medical system and the Indian Health Service, that employ doctors, nurses, and techs, so presumably the government has already demonstrated an ability to fill positions.
I think the question itself is a bit wrong-headed.
Education may correlate to higher wages, but there should not be a straight education-to-salary ratio. It would certainly depend greatly on what the education is (a 4 year degree in mechanical engineering is probably going to pay more than a 6 year BA + MS in French Literature).
But more importantly education is about getting you skills, and it’s the skills that you’re paid for. If someone wants to be a web designer, did not go to college, and had mad skilz at web design, they should get paid more than someone who went to college but is only so-so at web design.
As far as your question about government run healthcare - I assume they would pay market wages, much like VA hospitals or military hospitals do, and I am not aware of any shortage of professionals for those positions.
Do people not understand the concept of “free markets”.
What “should” happen is what typically does happen. The market decides based on the demand for jobs and availability of qualified candidates. There’s no central board that decides wages and nor should their be.
There is enough information out there on salaries and education costs that most people can make a pretty informed decision as to their career path.