I read Jim Iyke’s intervention on education and the popular “school na scam” debate, and it stopped me. The Nollywood actor wasn’t just giving an opinion. He was holding up a mirror to a question we all dodge: what do we really measure a person by, knowledge or money? That tension became the spine of this piece.
The truth is uncomfortable but plain. In society, a person’s worth is often read, consciously or not, through economic power. We say education is the source of knowledge, and under normal logic, more knowledge should mean more comfort. Yet in practice we equate value with what pays. Look at any university. The messenger or security earns the least because the role requires no formal degree. The professors, the Registrar, Bursar, Medical Director, and the Vice Chancellor earn the most. Without saying it, the system is telling us a story: status climbs with remuneration. Value, in that moment, becomes synonymous with monetary reward.
This is not accidental. It is rooted in how societies organize themselves. Sociologists call it, *social stratification, the ranking of people by access to scarce resources. Max Weber argued that class, status and party all shape prestige, but in a market economy money often becomes the fastest shorthand for all three. Pierre Bourdieu went further with his idea of capital*. He said people don’t just chase financial capital. They also carry cultural capital like degrees, and social capital like networks. But when the public is in a hurry to judge, financial capital speaks loudest because it is visible. A car, a house, a business-class ticket. You don’t need an explanation.
Money matters because it buys survival and choice. Basic needs, protection, decisions, influence. Knowledge can exist without cash. People learn to count, to trade, to speak, through observation and socialization long before they enter a classroom. But you cannot eat a certificate. You cannot pay hospital bills with citations. That is why any evidence of wealth becomes a greater magnet for appeal than any abstract gift of knowledge. Reward in the formal world is tied to contribution, impact, and scarcity. So when someone radiates riches, we read it as vindication. As proof that their gift matters.
By that logic, a professor brimming with knowledge should be rich. Knowledge should, in theory, translate into ability, wisdom, influence, and then into wealth. But life refuses neat arithmetic. That is why we have artists who fly private while a professor takes economy. Jim Iyke captured this rawness when he said, “I’m doing better than all my professors, lecturers.” He recalled meeting one of them on a flight. He was in Business Class. The professor was in Economy. “There’s some truth to school na scam,” he said. “Most wealthy men in this country didn’t even go to school. Nobody can win me in this argument.”
The internet exploded. And the reactions revealed the fault lines. @its_Miguel04 argued that measuring education only by money misses the point. “A professor spends their whole life choosing to research, teach, and build the minds of the next generation rather than chasing business deals. If everyone abandoned classrooms, there would be nobody left to train the doctors, lawyers, and engineers.” @Mdyor87 added that universities were set up for research, not to make individuals rich. @wayveeofficial put it bluntly: “School is just for enlightenment. It doesn’t guarantee wealth creation.” @DocSodium asked why money became the metric. “Divine wisdom and gifts differentiate us all.” @UcySunshyne fired back: “Every invention, innovation, and theory was championed by academia. That business-class aircraft he flew was designed by an engineer who studied for years.” @_wabily concluded: “The researchers who built the modern facilities that let you act in movies are not millionaires. They are teachers. That’s it.”
All of these voices circle the same irony. Psychologists call this *cognitive dissonance*. We praise knowledge in speeches, but we reward wealth in practice. Research in behavioral economics by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people use heuristics, mental shortcuts, to judge value. Wealth is the easiest shortcut. It is tangible. It is immediate. A 2018 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology also found that people infer competence and morality from perceived wealth, even when no other information is given. That explains why a well-dressed man in a good car commands respect before he speaks, while a scholar struggling for a meal has to argue for attention.
Jim Iyke’s outburst did not invent this reality. It named it. And he is not alone in the data. Economist Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, showed how returns on capital often outpace returns on labor and knowledge. That structural gap means that a trader, an entertainer, or an entrepreneur can out-earn an academic even when society depends on that academic’s work. The market pays for what is scarce and monetizable now. Universities pay for what is valuable over a generation.
This does not reduce the importance of education. Without the engineer, there is no aircraft. Without the teacher, there is no actor who can read a script. But we must be honest with ourselves. Financial strength has become the public’s default measure of impact, significance, progress, and even blessing. Not because it is right, but because it is what we live for, work for, and use to solve problems. If knowledge is sacred, we keep asking, why doesn’t it translate into comfort and influence?
The irony is sharp. Knowledge is not always synonymous with wealth, and that is precisely why schooling does not automatically make us rich. In the university, even research is rated high when it attracts grants, because money makes ideas feasible. The emphasis, then, should not be on certificate alone as a ticket to wealth, but on output, on gifts that can be converted into value for society and income for the self.
I am not despising those who earn less. I am exposing the tension we live in. We pursue education hoping for independence and comfort, even while we know money alone does not buy happiness. Jim Iyke’s provocation forces us to sit with that contradiction instead of drowning it in moral arguments.
Finally, the contest is not really between knowledge and wealth. It is between how we define worth. Society will keep clapping for both the professor in the lecture hall and the star in business class. But until we build systems where knowledge reliably converts to dignity and livelihood, the crowd will keep measuring a person by the weight of his wallet. That is not philosophy. That is the world we are living in.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
