So basically, the Navy provided you with the equivalent of a tertiary education.
That's great, but there are also a lot of people who serve who
don't wind up with those kinds of job skills; or whose military service resulted in physical, medical and other challenges (e.g. PTSD).
Sorry, but that's basically nonsense.
Your experience is merely an anecdote, and is rife with problems. Your own experience obviously doesn't include the dozens of people who had drive and ambition and aptitude, but got some bad breaks, or wanted jobs that required higher education. Equally important is that we have no way to re-run your life as though you had gone to college, instead of opting for military service. It's entirely plausible that you could have earned much higher wages throughout your entire lifetime in that scenario. We don't know; we
can't know.
What we do know is that in the aggregate, people who only have a high school degree or less have much worse lifetime outcomes than those with more education. They are more likely to be unemployed; their average earnings are significantly lower. They did far worse in the wake of the financial crisis than those with a bachelor's degree. We also know that job opportunities for that cohort are increasingly put under pressure.
We can also look at income inequality statistics. If we lived in a truly meritocratic world, each person born into each quintile would have an equal chance of ending up in any quintile. E.g. if you parents were born in the bottom 20% of earners, you should have a 20% chance of staying in the bottom, 20% in the next quintile, 20% in the middle, 20% in the 2nd highest, and 20% in the top. In turn, kids of wealthy should have the same results.
The reality in the US is quite different. Specifically, the top and bottom are "sticky;" if you're in the top, you're likely to stay in the top. If you're in the bottom, you're likely to stay in the bottom.
This is not the case in many OECD/European nations, where mobility -- while far from the ideal flat results -- is far better than the US.
Yes, that's right. You have a better chance of moving up the ladder in France or Canada than in the US.
Meanwhile, research has shown that education is one of the few factors that can boost one's chances of moving up (or staying at the top)
http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pursuingamericandreampdf.pdf
Given a choice between the outcomes of
one person's life when the outcomes of alternatives are unknown, and statistics based on millions of Americans? I'll take the latter.