Hey college grads: Expect to make slave wages in your first job out of school. That’s not news, I know.

Just make sure they’re not too slavish, because the salary you settle for in that first stint could set a trend for you, career-wise:

These data confirm that people essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up. The recession graduates who actually do catch up tend to be the ones who forget about rising up the ladder and, instead, jump ship to other employers.

Your pay range is established early, and becomes part of your permanent record, so to speak. I can attest to that: I think I swapped monetary compensation for security too often in the past, and consequently, found it hard to credibly demand more money in subsequent jobs. And naturally, one of the first things prospective employers look at salary history, as a shorthand assessment of someone’s worth and talent (fair measure or not). When matched against your peers, it really becomes a handicap.

Of course, “jumping ship” to another company strictly for advancement opportunity is standard practice nowadays. At least for white-collar workers, the chances of committing to one company for your entire working career are laughably slim (unless, say, you happen to own said company — and even that’s no guarantee). So a payscale legacy reinforces the need to be nimble in personal career development. But again, that salary history does follow you around.

So what’s a fiscally-disadvantaged young worker to do? Aside from free agency, s/he can go the office tell-all blog route, which is fraught with reprimandable risk but also offers lucrative satisfaction:

Busted bloggers like Jessica Cutler (a former Capitol Hill intern whose blog, Washingtonienne, is now a novel), Nadine Haobsh (a former beauty editor whose blog Jolie in NYC earned her a two-book deal) and Jeremy Blachman (a lawyer whose blog Anonymous Lawyer is being released as “Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel” this summer) were all interns, entry-level employees and worker bees who traded up on in-the-trade secrets.

The generation entering the work world has noticed.

“Everybody I’ve read about that got fired for having a blog is on to such great things,” said Kelly Kreth, 36, who was fired from her job as the marketing and public relations director at a real estate firm in Manhattan last fall for blogging about her co-workers.

“I’ve had my online diary for six years, and it is very important to me,” Ms. Kreth said, calling the firing the best thing that happened to her. “It led to me opening my own business and making triple what I was making before.”

A book or movie deal is not a bad way to exact revenge. Of course, for every jackpot, there are thousands of unemployed crapouts.

My advice: Stay in school for as long as you can. You can blog from your dorm as easily as you can from a cubicle, and the meal plan is probably better!