You aren't being a dick at all, I think that the paycheck/work schedule is just totally different depending on the job. And I think there is also a risk factor- I know very few entertainers who make enough at their performance jobs to make a real living, most of them have day jobs or some other support structure as well. I know a few performers who can support a family or themselves on what they earn just from performing. The ones who do hit that sweet spot of "stuff I rock at and stuff people will pay money for" make a good living. Occasionally they make a killing, like Lady Gaga, Penn and Teller, or Louis CK. But that's a risk you take when you go into the performance field. There is no quantifiable level of ability. It's all about how people who have nothing to do with what you do perceive you.

You take a smaller risk when you pay for a college education, because after, you have a quantifiable skill. There may not be as high of a possible payoff though. My dad is an actuary, and a damn good one... the chances of him getting thousand of people paying $30 each to see him work those Excel sheets is zero. (Which is a shame because he is pretty awesome at his job.) My daughter wants to go into biochemistry. She has absolutely no desire to be famous or well-known, she wants to work on a team that experiments within well-defined parameters. (Which is, I gotta say, pretty awesome)

I am looking at this from kind of the outside- I do what I do because I love it and I have a spouse who makes enough that I am a stay at home parent by day, "Strawberry Alarm Clock" level singer by night. I see the benefits of both sides- without people taking big risks, we wouldn't have Hendrix or "The Fridge" Perry or any number of whoever you may have had a poster of at one point.

Without other people taking different risks, we may not have the plumber who stopped my toilet from whistling, or the guy who designed the house I live in, or the woman who invented computer programming, or the fellow who spayed our cats so that they wouldn't yowl all night, or the person who figured out how to build the bridge that I go over over to take my kid to the guy that learned cello well enough to teach it to her... Those are all legit jobs, too.

Even in STEM, the figures most people know of like Neil Degrasse Tyson are not the norm. More people could tell you who Sheldon Copper is supposed to be than who is actually the greatest living scholar of string theory. And that's how it should be- science should not be a popularity contest.)