Growing up in Atlantic City, I learned plenty of life lessons about casinos and gambling., I learned first-hand that you can burn through your entire paycheck in less than an hour at a blackjack table. Although I was only 18 and the check was small (it was a summer job), it didn’t take me long to understand the potential damage of placing all my money on a single table.
So you learn fairly quickly that the best opportunity for winning is to walk past the slot machines and head straight to the craps tables. In essence, you learn to play the odds.
Playing the odds is a valuable life lesson not just for gambling, but also for choices we make in terms of academics and sports. When I encounter high school students that tell me that their career pathway is professional sports, I have a response at the ready:
“What are the odds of that dream resulting in you earning a living wage — enough to provide for you, your immediate family and your future family?”
Most adults know the odds are infinitesimally low. For starters, there simply aren’t enough positions in professional sports to accommodate the millions of teenage superstars who share this goal. Take the NBA, for instance, where teams can only employ 12 to 15 players per season. As a result, the NBA has only employed a total of 4,500 players in over 80 years — which should tell the 270,000 high school basketball players in the U.S. a little something about how hard it is to land one of these coveted jobs. And while NFL and baseball teams employ more players, the number on each team hasn’t grown.
In essence, these teams are no-growth industries.
Contrast those odds to the fast-growing career of data scientists. There are 290,000 employed in the U.S., and one study predicts the number to exceed 2.7 million in the next five years. This is more than the total number of students entering a U.S. high school each year. In health care, nurse practitioners are another fast-growing profession, employing thousands today with the promise of an additional 46% new jobs over the next decade.
While you and I may understand these odds, young people, especially those from economically disadvantaged communities, often aren’t provided this vital information. They may not know a nurse practitioner or data scientist, but they’ve certainly watched the highly televised draft days or heard reports on phenomenal contract values of, say, a Lamar Jackson, Russell Wilson or LeBron James. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when these students perceive professional sports as a sure path to lifting their families out of poverty.
But these contracts aren’t the norm for even the few that reach the pinnacle in sports achievements. Case in point: The average salary for professional athletes in the U.S. — based on 15,800 total jobs across all sports for men and women — was only $77,300 a year in 2021, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most professional athletes play for a maximum of five years, and only 50% of rookies get past their first NBA or NFL season. The reality is that many professional athletes earn less than $500,000 during their professional journeys.
By contrast, the average mechanical engineer earns $95,000 a year with a bachelor’s degree, and has a work expectancy that extends for decades. A 35-year career in this field could earn these professionals nearly $3.34 million in lifetime wages.
Educators and families should encourage K-12 students, particularly those in high school, to play the odds. That might mean encouraging them to take more rigorous courses even at the risk of lowering their GPAs. The odds are that college admissions teams will note the distinction between a “B” in advanced physics and an “A” in a standard science course, and reward the student for opting for a more difficult path. Further, research shows that rigorous academic journeys are highly predictive of a student persisting in college and attaining a credential.
In other words, these students will likely be better prepared for the harder science courses they’ll face in college.
Students are smart and will make great choices if given the information necessary to make the right academic choices. But we have to encourage them to move in the right direction: taking courses that are rigorous and focused on careers in growth industries is a nudge in the right direction. It plays the odds.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
Great article! Should be sent to all high school athletes.