<p>
[quote]
Are we going to get fired after 15 years of work in a large company if we only have a BS degree and nothing else
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sure, that can happen.On the other hand, how many careers are there that you can get with just a bachelor's that will guarantee you more than 15 years of job security? </p>
<p>Look, this is not our parent's generation. With the possible exception of working for the government, the notion that you are actually going to be able to find an employer who is will protect you from the vicissitudes of the economy is simply fanciful. I think we as employees have to walk into any future job with our eyes open and understand that we're probably not going to be working at any one particular employer for more than a few years, either because we'll want to do something different, or they will probably lay us off. Hence, it behooves us to be constantly updating our skills so that we can maintain job mobility. The economy is highly dynamic; new jobs are created and old jobs are destroyed all the time. For example, it was merely 15 years ago when practically nobody outside of academia or the military had even heard of the Internet. Today, the Internet and related technologies have created boatloads of new jobs that never existed before, but in the process have also destroyed boatloads of old jobs. {For example, how many specialty collector stores have gone bankrupt because of Ebay? How many local bookstores have been bankrupted by Amazon?}. </p>
<p>Hence, 15 years in the future, who knows what new jobs will exist and what current jobs won't exist? Obviously nobody knows. Therefore, what really matters is having a flexible education and skillset that will allow you to transition to whatever happens to be the jobs of the future. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Do a lot of people make it (as in work) to the retirement age?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Again, the notion that you will be able to work for one employer until you retire may have been something enjoyed by our parents' generation, but almost certainly not by ours. It is up to us as individuals to take responsibility for our own careers such that we are always employable. We can't trust our employers to do that for us.</p>
<p>
[quote]
2. How much would graduate school help after 12 years of work to keep up with technology?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Depends on what you do with grad school of course! Grad school obviously provides you with the potential to greatly improve your career mobility. But the potential is just that; it is still up to you to exploit that potential. </p>
<p>From what I have seen, one of the greatest dis*advantages of grad school, or any education for that matter, is that it can modify attitudes towards work such that you consider a wider range of jobs to be beneath you and hence become 'too proud' to take jobs that you were willing to consider before. In other words, education may actually *reduce your ability to properly manage your career because it reduces your willingness to manage your career and increases your sense of entitlement, such that you'd rather take no job at all rather than take a job that you now consider to be 'beneath you'. </p>
<p>To quote Thomas Sowell (1994):<br>
*Formal education, especially among peoples for whom it is rare or recent, often creates feelings of entitlement to rewards and exemption from many kinds of work. In India, for example, even the rudiments of an education have often been enough to create a reluctance to take any job involving work with one's hands. In the 1960s it was estimated that there were more than a million "educated unemployed" in India, who demonstrated a "remarkable ability to sustain themselves even without gainful work, largely by relying on family assistance and support." Nor is this social phenomenon limited to India. Other Third World nations have shown similar patterns.</p>
<p>Such attitudes affect both the employed and the unemployed. Even those educated as engineers have often preferred desk jobs and tended to "recoil from the prospect of physical contact with machines." In short, education can reduce an individual's productivity by the expectations and aversions is creates, as well as increase it by the skills and disciplines it may (or may not) engender. The specific kind of education, the nature of the individual who receives it, and the cultural values of the society itself all determine whether, or to what extent, there are net benefits from more schooling. Blindly processing more people through schools may not promote economic development, and may well increase political instability. A society can be made ungovernable by the impossibility of satisfying those with a passionate sense of entitlement - and without the skills or diligence to create the national wealth from which to redeem those expectations..."*</p>