I think you’d be better off being working for four years as a plumber who had a wide range of interesting knowledge and training and then going to graduate school than being an underpaid and underutilized white-collar worker in a struggling think tank or community non-profit frustrated by the dysfunctions of your organization and by the drone-like quality of the work you’re assigned to do. Better off not just financially but intellectually.
I don't read Tim Burke's blog regularly anymore, but this entry caught my eye, and this paragraph particularly.
I'd even go so far as to strike out the "and then going to graduate school".