Are wages more important?

During my senior year of high school, I didn’t get into my first choice college. It had never really occurred to me that this might happen, and it left me very unsure about where to go from there. I was choosing between Northwestern, McGill and Minnesota. And then it sort of occurred to me that maybe I wouldn’t go to school the following year; I decided that I wanted to take a gap year. I’ve always been a dedicated student, so me returning to school after the gap year wasn’t really a concern. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the best way to appeal to my parents might be money. Northwestern costs about $50,000 a year, McGill (which is where I think I would have gone otherwise) is about $35,000, and Minnesota is less than half of that. I put together this whole powerpoint proposal, and said that if they let me take a gap year, I would go to Minnesota and they would actually end up saving money. This would end up being like 5 years of school, but since Minnesota is a quarter of the cost of Northwestern, they'd still end up saving almost a hundred thousand dollars. I couldn't believe it, but my plan worked. They agreed to let me take a gap year, and I accepted my enrollment at Minnesota. My stepdad though that I should use the year to learn a "skill." We're still not sure what exactly he meant by this- I would be an awful carpenter- but his point was that I need to learn to do something useful that will help me in the future, that I can use to my advantage and use to make money. “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life” (18) It was beside the point that I was still going to go to college (and am now planning on going to graduate school for art history, so many would argue that I'll never really acquire a "skill" of any sort), but he wanted me to do something useful with my time that would have a direct link to allowing me to make money later in my life. Nevertheless, my mom and I ended up winning the argument: I spent a semester in India, a couple months at an internship at home in Chicago, and then another semester in Scotland. The funniest part of the story, which is probably more related to Weber than the rest of the what I've been saying, is my uncle (the same uncle, Ben, to whom I wrote external writing #2). He is a stock broker. I don't know if he likes his job, but he is good at it and makes a lot of money. “He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well” (33) He is wealthy, but very, very frugal (he won't buy butter unless it's on sale, for example). When he found out that I was planning on taking a gap year, he didn't approve. Not because he thought it was a waste of time, or because he was scared that I wasn't going to go to college afterwards. He didn't approve because he saw it as me missing out on a year's worth of wages. I would graduate from college a year later, and so I would make one year's less money. “Whoever does not adapt his manner of life to the conditions of capitalism success must go under, or at least cannot rise.” (34) I think his point of view is ridiculous: I had a great time, learned a lot, and grew as a person: isn't that more important than earning wages a year quicker? But I don't know, I guess Weber would agree with him.