Women make eight percent more than men, in any given field, until they have their first baby. Then family obligations intercede.
The humanities are no longer practical for study, as they have been co-opted by the left. Social justice has replaced critical thinking and scholarship.
Boys make up only 40% of college enrollment, yet no one seems concerned.
The primary purpose of college education is now indoctrination.
The cost of college far exceeds the benefit received. A disruption to the industry is soon to occur. It can't happen soon enough!
(9:23 EST)
15
Steve,
The cost of an education is much less than ignorance. I agree the cost of a college education is too expensive than it should be ( I have three daughters in college right now). However the benefits far out way the costs. There is a difference between being educated and being trained. Do you know the difference?
23
You get an education on your own time.
College is largely to show you can learn and for credentials, graduate school lays the groundwork for absorbing training, and post-graduate school training leads into your professional life. I decided to become a lawyer in 8th grade, went through college in three years and graduated law school at 23. I married my college girlfriend (she a year older) our last year of law school together. We have both been practicing for 37 years. We have had solid and enjoyable careers—we can’t complain. We both knew what we wanted. That included more work than many of our friends (and no children). But we got to choose.
While fate guides us all at points, if you have the power to choose your life’s work you should do so. It usually beats the alternatives.
9
Not sure why everyone asserts that a liberal arts major teaches you how to think. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think....
6
A spectacularly misleading article.
Regarding Myth 1. First, any statement with "always" is probably false. Second, being great at something is usually better than being average at something else. That is not surprising. However, if you are going to be average, being average at something more math related will probably improve your income level.
Regarding Myth 3, for the same student, choice of major does matter more than choice of school. It makes no sense to compare avg. students at minor public universities with career oriented majors to Ivy League humanities majors. Students aren't amazing because they go to Ivies, they go to ivies because they are amazing.
Regarding Myth 6. A major can really help with employment chances. Especially for lower income students. If you are a Trump kid, it won't really matter.
Sadly, a lot of less educated people will be giving low-income, and first generation students very poor advice because they trust the NYT and you printed this stupidity. Instead, consider telling them how to improve their odds of success in a world where the middle class is shrinking. Tell them to emphasize the 3 Rs throughout their education, that making an effort to achieve good grades in high school is important, and to help their student choose both a more employable major that they like, and a good quality college. For the average kid, who is not an outlier, that is very good advice.
12
I ended-up "majoring" in something I did not know existed. I am not sure Duke University knew it existed either. It is the Highest Ranked Department in the University System... The World University System. It is called: Thought. It is more generally known in Europe. Thought: Is also the highest paying major, and not the Stem Computer/Engineering majors that this article says "tops all the pay rankings". I am not sure what "pool" of pay ranking data was used for this article, but it is definitely lacking information. ---- So, when I say Europe knows about this major more than the USA currently does, that should be a huge alert/warning that Europe is "above" the USA. The USA University Higher Education system and USA Pre K-12 Education system needs to improve to catch-up with Europe. I expect that the USA School system will be adding Thought to its Curriculum, hopefully soon. A better educated USA population, is the most economical, of course. Note: The NYT and USA News Media also needs to catch-up also.
12
As a college teacher in STEM, I can tell you from experience that some of this advice is misleading at best. I won't quibble over every point but must take issue with one: the importance of selecting a major.
While not everyone can be certain about their plans for life, those that make commitment and plan are almost always way ahead of those that don't. I see countless students in college for YEARS longer than they should be. They are cutting out earning years, they are building debt, they are delaying their experiences and they are forming bad habits. Shifting around and changing your plan is okay, but don't be a rudderless ship.
Also I must confess that big name schools can make a difference in opening more opportunities for graduates, that's undeniable. But keep in mind that those schools are teaching the same laws of physics that the no-name school teaches and you get out of your education what you put into it. While a graduate from MIT has clear advantages over a student from a school like Montana State, that disadvantaged student can overcome. The secret is ATTITUDE. I've seen MSU grads with fantastic attitudes whiz right past the MIT grads in the workplace.
55
Re Myth 3: All good points, but the author should also point out selective colleges have 2 other advantages helping their statistics. 1. They can select for the higher perfoming, self directed students. 2. Because they are more expensive, the students are more likely to come from wealthier, education-oriented families. Success begets success?
42
Sometimes it is who you work for and it what capacity, rather than where you studied.
Work for a global company that is wealthy, then your compensation will be better than working for a local company. this is how it usually is...
15
I find a lot of truth here. I have two liberal arts undergraduate degrees and a master's in a more "employable" field yet my career has taken me to a place where, every day, I use my art history and fine art skills. My partner has a philosophy degree from an elite university, worked as a barista (there is some truth there maybe) but through internships and networking and on-the-job training, now works as an architectural designer. There is no set path, I think. We both benefited from our college degrees, but also from our connections (which I understand not everyone is lucky enough to have), interests, and hard work once we graduated.
27
I have been teaching at an expensive private university for a few decades now, and couldn't agree more what those who suggest some students are better served by deferring admissions and doing some kind of 'gap year' instead. Travel, work, service, even career exploration.
In a curious (and probably sad) way the first few years of college have become too hectic and high-stakes for young people to 'find themselves.'
57
As someone who comes from a working class background, I disagree with all the commenters who are discouraging students to choose a major that pays well!
Unless a young person has shown enough talent in their passion to have gained financial compensation from it prior to entering college, (or has well-heeled parents), they should concern themselves with making sure they will have a career that offers a level of financial stability.
I was once at a screenwriting info session with a guy in his early 30's who was an engineer. He said he was hoping to quit in a year and pursue his passion and in that moment I realized that I would much rather have been in the position of having paid-off student loans and several thousand dollars in the bank at the end of a "career I hate" than having been a starving artist for nearly a decade with loans in deferment and credit card debt.
Currently, I'm an English major working in digital marketing for an international engineering company. It's not my "passion" but I eat well and sleep well at night!
36
Universites didn't used to be for the purpose of getting a job after graduation; they were all about expanding one's ability to think and that's all.
Somewhere in the last several decades, we have transitioned into the mentality that we all need to go out and get a job. What ever happened to the entrepreneurial values that started this country? Even elementary schools are teaching students to be future employees rather than innovators and leaders.
I got a liberal arts degree and I am very proud of the thinking skills that I gained from it. These are not skills that are very well marketable for becoming an employee, but they are LIFE skills and serve me well outside of employment. Nobody ever taught me to choose a lucrative major, but rather to choose something that I was passionate about.
Life is not all about getting a job, and it certainly is not all about money. Our society needs to get away from these fixations on materialism and superficiality.
90
Dr. Jeffrey Selingo's degrees are in journalism (BA), government (MA) and education (PhD). So yes he is going to push the liberal arts. There will always be outliers with any type of background, even no degree at all, but we shouldn't let the outliers inform our decisions.
Regarding 1, taking someone at the 60th percentile and comparing them to the 50th percentile in another discipline is so silly it amazes me that he would push such an argument. Comparing the top quartile of English majors to the bottom quartile of chemical engineers is even sillier. Those bottom quartile of engineers just might be working for government - with a fat pension at the end instead of high current salary during their career. Plus, your A performers in any field will do better than your C performers.
As for #2, it is well-known that women prefer fields that typically pay less and that it is the reason women OVERALL make less than men. Within fields, those pay differences disappear.
Regarding #3, I don't think anyone buys into that straw man myth. Of course quality of college matters! That's why we freak out over where our kids go.
As for #4, you're saying that liberal arts majors are employable IF they get STEM skills to go with the liberal arts majors. Well d'uh! It's important that all students get writing and critical thinking skills and a lifelong desire for further education regardless of their majors.
24
The author is biased because his own degrees are in the Humanities? Okay, Jeff. Never let facts get in the way of making a confident assertion. A string of declarative sentences will do just as well, right?
24
1. "The top quarter ... English make more ... chemical engineers."
The difference has to do with graduate school. An English major graduate going to Harvard Law is going to do very well.
The presented chart is good, but it needs to divided into two pieces: Those who only have bachelor's degrees and those who continue their education into graduate school.
I am an engineer with a graduate degree, and my earnings just this, albeit exceptional, year is more than the median lifetime earnings shown on that chart. Many of my fellow engineering classmates with graduate degrees have been making mid 6 to low 7 figures. We attended elite universities.
2. So let's stop whining about a "pay gap".
3. Choice of major DOES matter, as I knew a Harvard grad in psychology who worked as a sales clerk at JCP and a UVA grad in religious studies who served coffee. The latter decided to go to law school and wages went from $12/hr to $85. But choice of school is not irrelevant except for education, nursing, and a few other narrowly defined courses.
4. So what this is saying is that liberal arts majors get their marketable skills from OJT, not the 4 years of party time.
5. At least choose general areas. I know a 3rd year liberal arts major who just figured out she can't make a living with her major and wants to switch to engineering. She is now 3 years behind.
12
Oh, please! In the mid-1970s, who knew that teaching, with its safe pensions, would be the profession of the 20th century? There's more to choosing a career than salary. These columns, along with the ones about college selection, student and parent anxiety, are space wasters. It's not where you begin, it's where you end. There's a journey in between.
9
The best advice I have heard is to search out the best teachers on campus and take their courses no matter what they are, then select a major. Is should open your eyes to new possibilities I a profound way.
25
My son is a freshman at a large state university today. He knew he wanted to be an engineer but no one in our family knew what that meant. We began a journey of college engineering tours and one on one meetings with academic advisors that lead to shadowing opportunities with generous local corporations who provided our son with “day in the life” experiences. Our son spent half of high school exploring his future and that is why he is a Matse major today.
There were plenty of times that he came away from a corporate tour/interview where he said, “i don’t want to do that” which was hugely valuable to learn.
Now we are following the same process with our daughter and will seek a summer engineering program that will demonstrate the disciplines and jobs of various programs.
College is $50K per year or more these days - if you don’t know what you want to do, you should take a gap year until you figure it out. Staying an extra year because of a major change can be catastrophically expensive.
22
I'd agree that students should not choose their major before they've experienced the smorgasbord college has to offer. High school does not prepare students for the wide range of disciplines available for study in college. Being able to explore options means students won't take an elective their senior year that makes them wish they'd majored in something else. One of my first semesters in college I remember taking classes in astronomy, anthropology, psychology, anything I felt I had any interest in. By the time I decided on a major, I didn't feel like I was missing out on other fields but was still curious about them. Being able to explore different disciplines will also allow students to gain knowledge about topics they wouldn't have known about otherwise and be able to inquire about a wider range of topics, making them more informed and aware about the world. If students choose their major too soon, I feel it is to their disadvantage by keeping them receiving a more diverse college education.
16
"Interpretive dance may not be in demand, but the competencies that liberal arts majors emphasize — writing, synthesis, problem solving — are sought after by employers"
This is often repeated, but always seems a peculiar portrayal. I'll certainly acknowledge that the Liberal Arts emphasizes writing, but it's hardly the case that problem solving is somehow unique to those majors. The Engineering department is supposed to be graduating professional problem solvers, after all.
20
But can they write? My engineer son learned to write well in high school, and in his early jobs he had to write all the proposals because no one else could do it.
21
Do what you like and like what you do.
I can't say the money won't matter, but it's not the be all and end all.
If you are not happy in your chosen profession, you will not be happy in life.
College should teach you how to learn a lot about different subjects that you might want to pursue. Also it should not be about grades.
A first year college student was recently home for a semester break and I asked her how she was doing. She said she was struggling a bit as she was studying pre-med and she was not a very good math or science student. But she wanted to study pre-med and see what it entailed. She comes from a highly ranked high school, is an excellent student, just missing out on an Ivy League acceptance and goes to a very prestigious university, and is happy where she is. And I encouraged her to explore whatever she wants, that this is the time to do so. Forget about your gpa for a moment and just absorb and learn what you can. Enjoy and make the most of your experience and hopefully you will find something you are truly passionate about. And hopefully that will lead to gainful employment.
14
I think these lifetime earnings comparisons to understand the value of undergraduate education is misleading. Instead we should focus on what happens the first 5-10 years after a student graduates.
College is only 4 years. A career is 30 more. An undergraduate education can open the doors to that initial job, and provide a student the tools they need to move forward in their career. But 10 years later, it is not what they learned in school any more – it is what they have learned since.
Consider an example: An English major who later goes to law school and joins a major firm. Are the student's lifetime earnings largely determined by the student's undergraduate education or what they did afterward (i.e. going to law school)?
In my view, lifetime earnings is not a proper comparison, because it ignores all of the other factors that determine lifetime earnings. A fairer comparison would be earnings 5-10 years out of school. Did the undergraduate education give the student the tools they need to jump start their careers?
I think you will find that English majors due much worse on the 5-10 years earning measure, than on the lifetime measure where a bright person can overcome whatever deficits there were in his or her undergraduate education.
12
The only philosophy major I knew in college became a partner at Goldman Sachs, and retired in his early 40's in about 2002, having made scads of millions after they went public.
He is brilliant, which is far more important than your major.
I also had a chemical engineer roommate who never did any engineering work, but also became a partner at Goldman and retired at 39. He also became unbelievably wealthy there, and it had nothing to do with his knowledge of organic chemistry.
15
It should be mentioned that when you graduate is maybe more important than anything else. Graduate into a deep recession and you'll never catch up financially to the person who graduates into a hot job market.
47
Intelligence comes in many forms. Great intelligence includes broad areas.
Any well executed major should lead to a great career for eager and hard working students.
You can be a great basketball player, but if you cannot manage your finances, then you will not reap the financial benefits of your skills.
9
Choose wisely. Your debt vs the reality of your future is a big question.
7
I’m always stunned by the conclusions drawn by education journalists. “The college matters more than the major” is proclaimed as insider wisdom as if going to a selective private (or public) institution is an option for all students. As a school counselor I have some shocking news for you. It isn’t. And even when one of my poor rural students hits the lottery and gets in, I still have to cross my fingers and hope they’ll be ok as a working class kid in BMW land. Who would have guessed that networking is more lucrative when you get to room with the children of the rich. What a revelation.
44
I started college in fall 1981, so quite a while ago, and had the good fortune to have parents who told me to take a wide variety of courses my freshman year. I thought I wanted to major in music ed, but I took their advice and took intro Sociology, Linguistics, Music History, Astronomy, Spanish, and English Literature. Learned a lot, enjoyed the classes (except Linguistics which I learned I did not like), and ended up auditioning for the school of Music and have had a great 30+ year career teaching public school music. You don't know what you don't know, so try lots of things before you select a major.
24
Regarding Myth #2:
"Dr. Carnevale wouldn’t speculate as to why women make their choices. But he notes that if the proportion of women in fields where men dominate increased by just 10 percent, the gender pay gap would narrow considerably: from 78 cents paid to women for every dollar men receive to 90 cents for every dollar men receive."
Or we could just value the work women do in fields where they happen to dominate.
35
It's nice when a solution is so simple. I wonder why no one's done that yet.
2
To study people who have been in their fields for 20 years is a great mistake. In fact it is ridiculous to think that the people who started out so long ago and made it are in the same fast moving technology driven world as today. My kids will still go into stem and stem graduates will continue to out earn all other majors. This author is stuck on a past that does not exist because he probably majored in liberal arts and feels the need to prove that those majors still come out ahead?
6
The data is actually compiled every year through the American Community Survey and follows recent college graduates. Computer science and engineering majors (but not all STEM graduates - not chemistry, biology, agricultural sciences or earth sciences, and maybe not math or physics majors) do out-earn other majors - nobody is trying to argue that. The point is that the differences aren't as large as people think they are - and when balanced against actual interest and talent may not be very important. Why force your kids to major in STEM if they'd rather major in English or history?
FWIW, I majored in psychology and I make more than the median salary for computer science and engineering majors, so there is that. (And I'm only 31, so I didn't graduate 20 years ago).
11
The best system is the military where your "major" is chosen for you, (appropriately) based on the needs of the service. Imagine how profitable the private sector world be if we'd select and assign all high school students to their careers this way. There would be no unfilled jobs due to a lack of qualified candidates.
Growing up during the Cold War, this is exactly how my teachers described the Soviet Union and East Germany. Funny that a proponent of Capitalism would be so fond of a Communist Ideal (no individual choice; compulsory service; what is best for the collective is best for individual...)
21
Hahaha.... I was about to reply the same to “Leave capitalism alone”.... He/she would be better off had someone chosen any education at all for her or him. If only to be educated enough to know the difference between capitalization and communism. Simply. Astounding.
5
The bedrock of capitalism is self-interested choice. Your suggestion runs contrary to your moniker. May I politely suggest you try again?
7
If/when I have kids, I certainly won't emphasize money as the end goal of college. Money is important for comfort and security, but it isn't the point of life. Life is about finding your passion so that you wake up every day excited for what's ahead, excited to contribute meaningfully to the world.
I have a liberal arts undergraduate degree and what essentially amounts to a liberal arts graduate degree, in the sense that it emphasized those indefinable but crucial-to-success skillsets emblematic of liberal arts majors. I have a huge amount of student loan debt because such is the cost of being a well-rounded, intelligent member of today's society, and I work a fairly low-paying nonprofit job so economic security is not always a part of my daily life. However, I am incredibly passionate about the work that I do, and wouldn't be where I am today had I followed a different educational path. I also have no doubt that I've been more successful as a student and professional because I followed my passions.
Beyond that, the life experience that I gained at a liberal arts college was invaluable to me both as a person and a professional. Reducing the benefits of college to those that are purely financial ignores so much of what a college education is supposed to be about: forming the next generation of thoughful, worldly, passionate citizens to lead our country and world.
16
good article that debunks some of the nonsense you hear about colleges and careers..I got laugh from governor Bevin..if I was him, I would stick to watching the 700 club and getting a university of Phoenix GED..I graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from a top 5 engineering school..but I took a lot of random classes in the humanities, philosophy, etc...I'm 37 now and retired..I never worked as a ChemE, but I have found it's the student, not the major or school.. smart, driven, intellectually curious people have access to knowledge now that has never existed in all human history..with a good plan, you could learn to program in C, learn Maltese, and learn to make gourmet meals all from the internet and online courses...it's the proper harrnessing of knowledge and putting boundaries around complicated problems that's the real intelligence...that's the real skill of the 21st century
6
I have nothing against liberal arts majors. In a perfect world, we would all be liberal arts majors.
But let's cut the crap about liberal arts majors being taught to be "problem solvers." Literature and art and music and philosophy and languages etc. teach and enable practice in many skills, but problem-solving ain't one of them.
If you want to learn or hire problem-solvers, concentrate on majors that assign problem sets. That is engineers. But also economics, statistics, some business, public policy, some medicine. And avoid law!
8
I was an architecture major at a liberal arts college. Definitely a problem-solving heavy major.
1
Part of problem-solving is being able to identify the problem to be solved in the first place so it can be turned over to those "practical" professions. Thanks, philosophers, sociologists, and historians.
15
I’m a social worker (MSW). The problem-solving method is a foundation of social work theory and practice. There are many problems across disciplines in this world to be solved. Problem-solving is something that should be integrated into education regardless of major. I work with people of many different educational backgrounds, including, law. They are excellent problem-solvers for their field of practice in health, civil and human rights.
4
My first degree was a degree in liberal arts that I would not trade with anything in the world . It taught me how to understand the world and it exposed me to many great thinkers, ideas, films, books that I had never heard about. I was not able to make a successful career out of it and eventually returned to grad school for a professional degree. In grad school, I was surprised about the rote studying and the little freedom I had in selecting my classes. It did lead to a fulfilling career though. Still, I consider my first degree as a crucial part of my education and I hope my own children will not be blindsided by the quick money and big salaries. A liberal arts degree should not be a luxury. Society needs clearly more well rounded citizens that can think outside of business plans and codes.
19
When my 30-year-old son was 5, a family friend, a Harvard grad, told me to "aim for the Ivy League." It was the best advice I ever got. He told me not only do Ivy grads do better overall, but that if you qualify for admission, they will pay your way. Ivy schools have the huge endowments and often pay full-boat.
My husband and I committed ourselves to our son's education. We took him out of a low-performing public school after first grade, home-schooled (for which we really economized and sacrificed so I could stay home) and for his high school years, footed the bill (after school grants from their large endowment again...) at a top-notch prep school. He worked very hard and did end up at an Ivy League school, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, with two liberal arts majors.
Unlike many millennials I see, he got a great job (in business) right out of the gate, through the career office/alumni of the school. He has now been working and doing very well for many years. All of it because of hard work, the best schools (it does make a difference) and a liberal arts degree.
10
There is another way to think about a career or selecting a major. How about choosing a field that makes you happy. Imagine going to work 5 days a week for 40 years. Don't you want to feel good about going to work? Maybe you're a natural social worker. Maybe you want to paint or be a teacher. Obviously you're not likely to earn a 7 figure salary.
We get one life. Happiness is underestimated in tge US because we are a capitalist economy. We are taught that higher earners are more successful. Is this what we want to teach our children.
Personally, I was a chef for 25 years and earned squat. Then I was a public school teacher and earned squat. Hen a social worker and earned squat.
I supplemented my income buying investment properties and renting them out. I found a way to earn money and also do the careers that interested me.
The point is smart people who receive holistic advice can earn money and be happy. However, college often presents career choices through a narrow lens. Parents may not emphasize happiness when their kids chose a major or career.
At the end of the day, happiness should be the goal because life is short and working in any field that doesn't make you feel good is unhealthy and a waste of time.
33
If I were to add my two cents into this, there are two ways to go about it. Either go to a cheaper University if you're undecided and then seek your second life in grad school. Or if you have your track in mind attend the most selective college you can.
3
I wished I studied arts or that I went to an elite school that supports it. The most popular majors of my school was probably biochemistry, biology, or computer science. It's a school famous for med school and computer science but those fields are very competitive and stressful for average students with average interests and intellect. I majored in some not-so-hot engineering major and the jobs are simply not where I want to live in and i didn't really like studying it. And I'm a woman so I won't be making as much as a male engineers anyways so I just didn't seek anything in that field. I'm just trying to enjoy life without thinking too much of my self worth from my jobs. At least I don't have debt from college so I can spend some money to study on my own time about arts if I want to. I can't go to elite schools and major in the arts since I don't want to do the stressful college applications again. But people too much importance on their careers without knowing their personality, so I just wish we can do stuff without worrying about how to live on particular incomes from specific jobs. To have any job and be happy about it, you have to be good at it too. Not everyone can do all kinds of jobs.
7
Just emailed my students this article. Best practical knowledge they may ever get from someone on my campus (though the College's Career Development services is a jewel but doesn't get much faculty support) and it supports what I have learned over the years. Opinion based on years of experience helping students enrolled in my classes. Believe journalism and media instructors OWE it to their students to help them to get the best possible jobs they can.
6
Especially these days when critical thinking skills in our country are in such lamentably short supply, I was surprised to see a piece in the Times treating college like vocational school.
I was the first in my family to go to college and entered seeking to prepare for a career in scientific research. But it did not take long to find my mind opened by courses in the humanities--courses often taught in high school (at least in mine) by football coaches, with the same enthusiasm for the subject matter as that shown by the jocks on the back row. After my mother's disdain ("ANYbody can be an English major"), I consulted my freshman advisor--who opened my mind to college as a place more for education than job training, a place for learning to think critically and creatively, for understanding what it means to be human.
It was the best advice I was ever given--not just because a broad-based humanities education gave me a greater understanding and appreciation of my own life and the milieu in which now we live, but because it also made me more valuable in the job market, with better communication, critical thinking and problem solving skills than I ever would gotten had I pursued more single-minded, job-focused studies.
The elegance of the periodic table of chemical elements still brings tears to my eyes, but it is an elegance I appreciate in the context of human history, human searching and the knowledge that many little girls are denied ever seeing it at all.
17
I think the writer -- and most people -- has a misunderstanding of the fields women choose to go into. They are lower paying because they are are traditionally women's field, the low pay is a reflection of how women's skills have been valued. Women choose work that is valuable and important. Its our male dominated society that has always felt it didn't have to pay women fairly for their work.
37
Marianne,
It is you who are missing something. It is neither that a certain job intrinsically pays less, nor that a job is somehow undervalued by some societal sexism because more women tend to have that job.
There is a third option, which is the correct explanation of why low paying jobs are correlated with jobs that women preferentially seek out: Women make less because they take more time off, and are less driven to achieve highly in their careers, in part because men in our society are still expected (read: forced) to be the breadwinners, leaving the women more leisure, and leeway to choose to work less (and focus on families, social activities, hobbies, etc.), and therefore earn less. Contrary to your chosen dogma, it is women who have choice and power in our society.
So yes, jobs that are preferentially taken by women will, on average, earn less, because women are, on average, more well-rounded in their life pursuits than men. Women don’t merely focus on career and income, when averaged as a group, as much as men do.
If you compare apples to apples, and compare post-undergraduate men and women who are unmarried and childless, the women make more. Only once they are married and/or with children (and therefore logically have the option of modifying their focus on family over career), do the women earn less.
2
Professions are valued by how much value they create and the supply of people with the requisite skills, not by their traditional gender.
5
I don't know any man who is "forced" to be a breadwinner. If you want a partner who will share equally in earning, choose your partner accordingly. That goes for men and women. If you don't want to be responsible for anyone but yourself, don't marry or have children.
2
My daughter, who often sought my advice, asked me what major she should pursue. I told her to follow her heart -- that a specific college major (unless it was needed for a postgraduate career, such as medicine) was unimportant, since I see college more as a place to explore and grow and less as a place to set one's future in stone. That, I told her, is what graduate school is for.
She double majored in French and Music (about as far away from the STEM core as one can get) and is now making a solid living as a musician in Memphis, as happy as I have ever seen her.
My son, quite the opposite, never asked me what I thought, but also followed his heart and majored in Political Science. He is now a successful teacher in Rhode Island and is considering going to law or business school.
I realize that many families do not have to luxury of being able to consider and pay for advanced degrees, so my advice does not fit all. But I am willing to sacrifice other luxuries for education (I drive a nine year old Prius), so, in my case, the choice is simple. Follow your dreams in college; prepare for your career in the later stages of your education.
As for me, I started out as a History major, but courses with inspirational Anthropology and Sociology professors charged the direction of my college career. I then went on to law school (mostly because I was not qualified to do anything else), and I retired a few years ago after a fairly successful career.
12
I thought the final paragraph about not choosing a major and the trend to meld majors in cross disciplinary fashion most helpful. In reality, English (literature and writing), social media and media studies, journalism, political science, education, sociology, psychology, science, business, and computer science--all go together! Undergraduates need to build their knowledge base before choosing a professional direction. In a more complex world, we need people who can synthesize from many fields of knowledge, who can conceptualize, work with people from a diversity of backgrounds, and who can think critically. Otherwise, it's questionable what an undergraduate degree really offers that an online course or specific skill training in a limited area could not. If you're going to put out the big bucks, get the real education that enables you to become someone different, better in many respects, a contributor to society.
4
Any student lucky enough to be smart, sophisticated, and able to afford a good MBA, JD, or MD can major in Chinese Poetry, for all the professional world cares, as long as they have the test scores to get into a good grad school, from which they will emerge with guaranteed high pay for life. Educated parents and students know this. It’s only students who are less smart, sophisticated, and financially endowed who are cursed with having to grind away at relatively boring but vocationally practical majors for kids at second-rate schools like accounting. Of course, kids from any socionomic background who are brilliant at IT can presumably write their own ticket right out of college, and double-major in Chinese Poetry as undergrads if they like.
7
This is data every High Schooler, College Freshman/Sophomore should be HANDED.
Perhaps use your high school graduating quartile and use that in the quartiles in each major/income.
Finding something that is interesting and financially rewarding is Key.
How do we look at the data if you pick more than one major?
CompSci and Econ? Stat and Physics? Add an MBA in Finance.
3
Oh, the irony. An article about education provides us with a bar chart that shows Education as the least valued major. I have an engineering degree, and I spent 18+ years as a computer consultant. I made my share of good money, but now I am a high school math teacher. Have you noticed how many people are offended when teachers make too much money? Usually it's the unions fault, as opposed to the free market, where the best school districts compete with each other for the best teachers. (And where does that leave school districts in poorer communities?) During negotiations, many parents will complain about the high salaries of the teachers, and then they will hire a calculus tutor (usually a teacher) for $100 per hour or more. Too many people view teachers as civil servants. After all, they went into teaching: they should do it out of the goodness of their hearts. You will see that teachers are actually valued--monetarily and socially--in the countries that are putting our education system to shame. It's simple capitalism. If you want the best education system, you need the best teachers. To get the best teachers, you need to value teachers. Take another look at that bar chart. If you are a college student selecting a major, why would you choose Education. Oh, yeah, out of the goodness of your heart. Sadly, we have evolved to expect low salaries for our teachers.
46
Teachers make a “low salary” only when you fail to consider the fact that they only work just over 7.5 months out of the year.
A $50,000 salary for a teacher is really an $80,000 salary for anyone else.
I would gladly take the corresponding cut in my salary, if I got 3 months off each summer, 2 weeks at Christmas, a week of fall break, and spring break, the smattering of other single-day school holidays (Labor, MLK, Memorial), plus 2 days “in exchange for evening conference,” plus an occasional snow day!
9
"Evolved," my eye. Expecting teachers to work essentially for room and board goes back in this country to colonial times (see Richard Hofstadter's
"Anti-Intellectualism in American Life") and, going back even further in world history, to the religious orders that demanded "poverty, chastity, and obedience" from their members.
5
How long will these ridiculous arguments about teaching persist?
1. $50K per year is *not* really $80K per year. Another preposterous argument. One might as well argue that the teenager who earns $50 for mowing the neighbor's yard in 30 minutes is actually earning $208K a year.
2. Teachers do not work for 9 months and get paid for 12. They work for 9 months. Period. And they can't file for unemployment like other workers who are not employed year around. Having one's 9-month salary distributed over 12 months costs teachers real money in interest and opportunity cost.
3. If we're going to argue this way, what will the poster have to say about CEOs that make a lifetime of money in a few weeks (hours?) of actual work in a given year? Where's the jealous outrage about that which would match the "underworked, overpaid teachers" silliness?
18
The purpose of college should be to educate. Anyone who even glances at the state of this country now has to conclude that too many citizens are poorly educated and incapable of critical thinking. Money is fine, but it ought to come second. There is a big difference between getting rich and living richly. My education is worth much more to me than all the money I never made.
Any major that disciplines the mind, in other words that teaches the student to PAY ATTENTION, is fine. Those include the study of statistics and the study of poetry, and everything in between.
9
When four years at a private college can cost a quarter million dollars, the ONLY goal is a high income career that provides a solid return on that investment. Anything else is just liberal gobbledygook.
Straw man.
The author takes an argument he dislikes: stem majors, on average, have higher salaries than humanities majors.
He then inserts the word "always", and now he has something he can argue against.
A good humanities major will see the straw man and point out that the author is just arguing with himself.
A good stem major will ask to see the distribution of salaries for the two majors and compute the mean difference.
Neither one would accept an argument this weak.
38
Best comment. Ever. Just what I kept thinking as I read the comparisons, referring to the charts: "Wow, this writer is really stretching the stats to try to sell an essentially hopeless argument. The charts already pretty much tell the story of what most grads in these areas can expect.
7
At some point each person needs to decide if the purpose of college is to become educated or if it is a vocational school that teaches a skill leading to a specific job. The latter has become the predominate view of politicians, educators, and students alike, but it's worth remembering that humanities majors teach one what it means to be a human, while STEM majors teach one skills to perform a set of tasks. The loss of interest and support in the humanities is therefore a very sad trend -- we don't really need new ways to get a ride to the airport or to order carry-out; we need to understand ourselves and the world around us and those abilities will vanish with the humanities. These are the primary bases of the world's problems, not ways to pack more gadgets into a smart phone but how navigate emotionally and intellectually through the world. By the way, I write this as a scientist and former physics major who now realizes that history, English, philosophy, etc are much more important to me as a human being than the ability to solve differential equations.
27
Dead right, of course, and typical, in my experience, of smart physics types, who are often the most curious about the unique profundities explored by the humanities of all.
4
With the high cost of college and a shrinking middle class, for most Americans, the choice has unfortunately been made for them.
5
I just posted a comment with similar sentiments--but would not have had I read yours first. You said it far better than I.
3
I would argue that one's major does matter. I'm still waiting for my BA in Dance to pay of and I'm skeptical of the value of those 'soft skills'; problem solving, communication, etc. because the only thing waiting for me after graduation were the same crappy jobs that chased me back to college in the first place (waiting tables, bank teller, call-center). -and those jobs certainly aren't worth the debt that kids are taking on these days. After about 15 years of the starving-artist routine and waiting on more tables than I will ever care to admit to, I went back to VoTech and this time and got a practical skill. I'm still underwhelmed by the money I make but at least now I know I can work until I drop dead behind the chair doing someone's hair. My degree was definitely not the fast lane to a better life that I was lead to believe.
9
It's a little different for first generation or students without wealthy parents. I had classmates who took out student loans and majored in English and struggled for 4-5 years out of college working at baristas or temp jobs. There are some majors that make you more marketable for that very first full time job. Of course, you have to have some interest, but telling everyone to follow their passions and major in philosophy could lead to defaulting on student loans if one is not careful. Only the wealthy can truly afford to not care and expect to go to graduate school or rely on family connections.
20
By the time you enter college, you are generally at least 18, making you am adult. As an adult, you should be mature enough to know that you don't get to decide what job you'll do based on your wants and likes. The lack of self-discipline among so many today is the cause of absurd levels of turnover in business which costs the economy dearly.
1
No matter your major, you should always take some classes that will give you hard skills, or at least something that can be put on the "relevant coursework" section of a resume. I recently graduated as an International Relations major, which was not my particular passion, but included courses I enjoyed such as modern history and foreign language, as well as a more practical focus in economics. I was immediately hired in a job that paid a fairly generous salary, and am now taking graduate classes at night with the assistance of my employer.
I agree that you can do anything with a liberal arts degree: however, it can be much more difficult to get a foot in the door with an English degree rather than Accounting or Computer Science. Those who do immediately get great jobs outside of the traditional fields for that major tend to have connections and/or have graduated from an elite school. Unfortunately, college is too expensive for most students to "do what they love" without seriously considering their future employability.
10
Regarding Myth 1, the article failed to account for advanced education after a liberal arts degree, namely law school. That can be the only reason for the wide salary spread for political science majors. A BA JD should not be directly compared to a BS (ChemE) when considering earning potential of a particular major. Especially because you can go to law school with any four year degree.
5
These data on salaries only include people with undergrad degrees.
1
Eclectic, I took numerous college courses in disciplines as disparate as chemistry and English. I ended up majoring in psychology but by my junior year, I'd become disaffected from that field. In the spring semester, I took intro to cultural anthropology: it was love at first sight. Senior year, I applied to a number of graduate programs in anthro, with only that one intro course under my belt. I was accepted to all but one program, and received a full scholarship and grants to a top-notch school. I knew that few jobs awaited anthropologists, but I did not care. My studies took me to a 2-year sojourn in Lesotho, southern Africa, where I had the most transformative experience of my life. After receiving my doctorate, and realizing that job prospects were in fact few back then, I found a job in the video industry, pursuing my love of film. I carved out a successful career, working for many years at a top company with an extraordinary clientele, and finally moving on to my own business. Over the years, many people asked me if my years' long academic investment in anthropology was a waste of time. I always answer: not in the least, and on the contrary. My pursuit of my interests and passions have made me who I am and have afforded me success in all my endeavors. (I have even tutored chemistry over the years, still maintaining a passion for that field.) So yes, in the words of Todd, follow your dreams and the rest will take care of itself.
15
There you go. The classic example of someone in the upper half of the ambition, drive, guts, grit, whatever you want to call it curve. Half of everyone is a slacker compared to the other half. If you are a slacker, don't go get an anthropology/ dance/ English/ whatever degree and expect apples to roll into your lap. If you've got drive, major in whatever you like and keep pushing where you find openings to make a life for yourself. It's getting less and less ok to be a slacker though, and the ambition bar is being raised all the time by automation, outsourcing, etc.
5
After 33 years as a mathematics professor I feel compelled to put my two cents in here.
1) Regarding earnings for mathematics and statistics. It is a grave mistake to lump mathematics and statistics together in one category for the purposes of earnings. The job possibilities for someone who truly majored in statistics are far greater than those for someone who majored in mathematics. Statistics is but one area in mathematics, and one, when combined with allied subjects in other areas, such as economics, provides students with employable skills immediately upon graduation. A major in mathematics, broadly construed, is more similar to a major in philosophy. It is what you take outside your major that will determine your employment opportunities in that first job.
2) Interpretive dance is NOT a liberal arts major. It is performance art. Once again, liberal arts majors are employable if and only if they actually have mastered the liberal arts of writing, speaking, and effectively communicating and defending complicated positions and opinions, and have the analytical skills to develop such positions and opinions. History, philosophy and English majors offer a framework in which to do this, but students have to avail themselves of this framework and apply themselves. This experience is open to all students, regardless of major, advice I gave to hundreds of mathematics majors over the decades. If you cannot write and speak, no one cares if you understand Galois theory.
81
Life and death decisions, before you leave high school. Not.
Most kids choose their major once they have had a chance to actually take some courses. And grow up a little. Meanwhile, they might accidentally learn something in courses that are not going to be part of the major.
They can take rock climbing or photography or theater or ethics or hiking or art and discover something that launches a life long hobby or avocation.
College is meant to be time used for education. Not just for a transfer of knowledge but to learn to work with others, to learn communication, problem solving, analytical and critical thinking skills. To learn to analyze ideas before accepting or rejecting them, whether they are academic, social, religious or any other orthodoxy.
Choosing a major is just part of the package, and there is time.
9
A mediocre student I was advised to take a major where I would get good grades so I could go to graduate school. I ignored that advice and stayed in and area I was interested in but the competition was stiff and my grades were mediocre. If the grading is on a curve somebody has to get that C! My college adviser, after I'd made the decision to major in a field were I wasn't going to be an A or a B student, had some good advice - examples of what other students he'd known had done, how I could succeed without immediate graduate school, what some possible trajectories might be -looking for an employer who would pay for further training was an excellent suggestion- and it turned out to serve me well. I hold several technical certifications, but no academic graduate degree, and have been satisfied with my results.
I was fortunate that my father worked at a University and had seen enough unemployed Graduate students to advise me to not accept a graduate degree as the Holy Grail. I have sympathy for students who're the first to attend college because they don't have other credible opinions coming their way as to their futures.
Go to college, learn to think and research, make an effort to write and speak suitably for the kind of work you think you want to do, and keep talking until you find someone who offers advice that will work for you.
14
I advise taking a major in something you are "good at", because if you're mediocre you get nowhere. Only experts get the jobs and the people that are "well connected". I was good at numbers.
2
It may be difficult for Mr. Selingo to believe, but some of us went to college for reasons other than to make a lot of money,
4
Perhaps you did, but if you look at the results of the annual UCLA survey of first year students nationwide, given the state of the economy and the cost of higher education, the number one reason they go to college is to get a "good" job.
1
There’s nothing wrong with going to college to better improve yourself as a person, even if that doesn’t include earning a lot of money. But there’s a difference between realizing that money isn’t everything and pretending that a liberal arts degree financed through student loans is a good idea. As a society, we should not be allowing teenagers to rack up tens of thousands of dollars of debt pursuing degrees that are not likely to give them the marketable skills necessary to repay that debt. And the government in particular should not be making loans to these people who obviously won’t be able to pay them back.
The idea that college does not need to be vocational only works for those wealthy enough to pay for it outright.
3
The question left unasked: does anyone even need a college degree to be successful in life?
Ask Bill Gates.
1
So we all could be Bill Gates? Even though he had brains, connections, most of the courses needed to do the thing, and some money, at least enough for a garage? Yeah, no. That's stupid. Most people don't have a tenth of what he started with, and half of everyone is dumber, poorer and/or less ambitious than average.
3
Sod money. Sod money. Sod money. Have you got that? SOD MONEY.
2
The unstated premise of this article is that the primary purpose of an education is to make the maximum amount of money. Perhaps we need to debate that unstated premise. In short, what is, in turn, the purpose of making the maximum amount of money? If making the maximum amount of money is it’s own end—then the world is insane.
8
Wait... the "gender pay gap" doesn't compare women to men in the same positions? I always figured it might not consider variables like women working fewer hours to care for kids or taking time off slowing their career advancement, but wait...It just compares general average salaries? That's either the dumbest or the most politically manipulative statistic I've heard in a long time..."Dr. Carnevale wouldn’t speculate as to why women make their choices. But he notes that if the proportion of women in fields where men dominate increased by just 10 percent, the gender pay gap would narrow considerably: from 78 cents paid to women for every dollar men receive to 90 cents for every dollar men receive." Anyone heard of limiting variables in your science? Sorry if I am missing something- I must be- it's too unbelievable... who is this phantom woman who works the same hours at the same job in the same position for just as many years and STILL gets paid less? Has she filed a complaint that has been denied? Let's all just get riled up over the very idea that some women choose family over career and so bring down our precious pay statistics. We better breed more female engineers and convince them to choose job over family to make sure our statistic goes up!!!
2
It would be interesting to see a comparison between the experiences of American college graduates with graduates of European universities where what we refer to as majors are chosen before even applying. In most cases in Europe you lock into a course of study when you enter university and if you want to change you have to start all over again from the beginning. Is this a better or worse approach to higher education? For some students it surely is and for other it surely is not, but what about at the societal level?
1
The chart regarding earnings by major does not indicate how those findings were calculated. It seems unlikely that the numbers are well-grounded, prospective forecasts. Liberal arts fans often use data referring to the experience of older graduates, when college was more elitist. Unsurprising that in the past, a rich white history major from Wesleyan may have done very well even compared with a math major from a state college.
But the times, they are a-changing. With an increasingly technological society, it is very hard to believe that the gap between such majors as sociology and physics is not going to grow exponentially.
9
Beginning sophomore year in 1949 I was interested in pre-law. I went to a Franciscan Friar on the faculty who had been a successful Manhattan attorney before becoming a Friar and asked his advice for a major. He said "Learn to think, to discern, to discriminate, to articulate, to communicate. Study the liberal arts. English Literature, philosophy and history are important starters". I followed his advice and never regretted it. It has served me well in my professional, leisure,social and family lives, and could well serve those interested in other careers.
6
Many universities are now offering formal support for cross-discipline studies leading to a degree, less a traditional "major" than "multiple minors." The PPE degree (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) that Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai is pursuing at Oxford may be the best known.
Academic advisement by experts is vital. Chosen well, with complementary and reinforcing disciplines, multi-disciplinary studies can produce graduates who are supremely well educated, not just trained in a skill that will be obsolete in a few years..
10
It's true. As a lit major who moved into the sciences later on, I would argue that it's all about skills, not about knowledge. Sure, the mastery of skills include knowledge areas, but what's really important in the computer age? Someone who is familiar with information that can easily be accessed online? I argue that skills like problem solving, writing, speaking, critical thinking, data synthesis and statistics, programming, psychology, and a foundation of literature (because stories teach wisdom we would otherwise have to learn the hard way), is what is really important. After this, then you can spend a few more years mastering a knowledge area. This was the original credo behind liberal arts, and somehow we have forgotten this. First you have to learn how to think, and then you can more to mastery.
18
The IRS lists many thousands of job descriptions in its books, but campuses only teach a few dozens. Yet if you think about it, you will realize that the great post-war economic boom had to owe SOMETHING to all its English and History majors (among others). The fact is that educational institutions (whether they like it or not) teach skills that go beyond the immediate major. In fact, as I recall, something like 60% of MIT graduates aren't in a field related to their major five years after they finish college. College is about learning how to learn, basically. I also like to say it's the final step in learning how to read. (The final step in learning how to read is taking the most difficult texts out there, slogging through them, and getting something out of it, without help.)
12
You need to study something you like or at least are extremely interested in. Otherwise you won't be any good at it. I happened to be extremely interested in computers and software so I really liked studying it. And I think I got pretty good at it and I'm having a nice career and definitely in the top 10% in career earnings already twenty years before my retirement age. But there's no point in trying to study STEM if they don't interest you at all.
9
Both of our kids chose to go to unis in the UK. Not only does it cost about 1/4 what it would in the US, but they knew they would have to "choose a major" before they applied to a "faculty" rather than general admission. This got them thinking in high school (in France) and determined their courses of study there in terms of prerequisites. They began to specialize at age 15. While this does not work out for everyone - and changing courses at uni here is very difficult, if not impossible - it did for them. Our daughter studied archaeology, our son is studying medicine, which is undergraduate in Europe.
3
I have always chuckled at the liberal arts being unemployable myth. I was a theater major. Worked as a low paying theater tech through my twenties. Enjoyed my work and got great skills. Around the time I turned thirty I switched to museums. Created exhibits for a number of major museum. No problems with employment, theater had given me great skills. Ended up at the Smithsonian for a few years. Got hired to do exhibits for private firms, and even designed events for the US government and United Nations. Completely unemployable.
38
Yes, it is possible to make a lot of money as an engineer. I know. I was one ... until my late twenties, when I finally took positive steps toward doing what I really wanted to do with my life. And though I don't lose sleep over it - the past is over! - I've always regretted wasting a college scholarship (plus years of my younger life) getting a 'sensible' degree instead of pursuing what interested and engaged me most strongly.
People scoff at that latter approach; they call it 'following your bliss' - but that's baloney. My experience & observation tells me that people thrive best when they're doing something they care about and enjoy. Which for some people may be engineering, a great field for anyone who loves it ... but my goodness, any profession or demanding activity, when practiced properly, is more than just a job: it is a life choice.
And of course one needs to mind the money. But are you gonna choose a life on the basis of what pays the most?
15
i know many who did choose a career based on money.
1
As a professor of computer science, let me share: Myth #7: That expected life-time earnings should have anything to do with choosing a major.
23
I wish people would stop using that wretched acronym, "STEM". It lumps together too many unrelated things. Mathematics is one of the liberal arts and shouldn't be separated from them. Someone good at arithmetic is not the same as an auto mechanic. A technician trained in the army or in a for-profit specialty school is not the same as an engineer, and neither an engineer nor a dental hygienist is the same as a research physicist. Is the idea to make students shudder at the thought of "STEM" and walk away, possibly missing out on something that could be a real pleasure to them?
31
While I have no doubt things like networking and access to top graduate schools make a difference, isn't it possible that students at selective colleges earn more because they get a better education? After all, these schools have more financial resources per student, the ability to attract top faculty, smaller class sizes, and a lower student:faculty ratio. It's okay to point out the non-academic advantages, but let's not overlook the fact that there are significant academic advantages to attending a selective college.
9
No they do not earn more money BECAUSE they get a better education.
Hyperbole. Selective is too broad of a word.
Even if you give a suitable definition there are too many variables. For example,the students that get selected can be highly driven and so you are over emphasizing the education they get and minimizing the student's abilities.
Etc
1
Or they earn more because selective colleges select the most talented.
6
A peer reviewed research study a few years back (sorry cant recall source) compared earnings of graduates of state universities to earnings of ivy league graduates and found only a very slight difference (ivy grads earned more) when scholastic achievement was controlled for. In other words, the state school grads that performed at scholastic levels comparable to the ivy students (based on test scores, academic rank etc) earned only slightly less than their ivy counterparts. That difference disappeared after 5 years on the job. The point being that these findings refute the myth perpetuated in this article that attending more 'selective' schools provides an earnings advantage, Motivated and capable undergraduate students will realize greater financial success regardless of school choice. The effect did not hold when similarly comparing graduate level students. Graduate students from the ivys did significantly better financially than their state university counterparts, hypothesized in part, due to their more extensive networks with other ivy post grads out in the world.
6
"Society" doesn't decide what different professions are paid. Supply and demand determine what professions are paid. Chemical Engineers are well paid because they are in short supply. The profession requires abstract, analytical thinking, the use of mathematics, and knowledge about a broad range of science. The chemical engineers I know did not choose the field because of the salary. They chose it because they found it challenging, and enjoy practicing because a wide range of interesting problems are placed before you. Chemical engineers, as a whole, are grateful that they found the profession.
.
Why do we have a shortage of chemical engineers?
1. Most middle and high school science and math teachers are terrible; they teach their students to hate and fear those subjects. Science is the study of nature in all its beauty, and math is the language of science. If we could teach youngsters that, more would pursue STEM courses. The media and entertainment industries, filled with science illiterates, contributes to the problem.
.
2. Chemical Engineering is a far more intensive program than most majors. Students have to be prepared to work much harder than liberal arts majors, because they have to learn many more new concepts and ways of thinking. Many of the people who major in liberal arts do so because they came to college to have a good time, not because they had any intention to broaden their minds. And then when they need a job, they go to Teachers' College.
16
I went to a liberal arts college. I didn't "go to have a good time", and I studied intensively, as did most of the other students on campus. Otherwise you quickly flunked out.
Most of us went on to graduate school. I have two graduate degrees, one in statistics, and the other in information systems with a concentration in security.
Teachers' College? Not anyone I know.
6
Yes, the chemical engineering curriculum is hard; however, the supply of chemical engineers is many fold more than the diminishing national demand.
3
In Canada where I attended one of the top engineering schools in the 1980s, the pecking order for engineering pecking order for prestige went something like Computer Engineering->Electrical Engineering->System Design->Mechanical Engineering with Chemical engineers at the very bottom. Students who were performing at the bottom of their group were "demoted" into Chemical Engineering. How the tables have turned now, as Chemical engineers are in big demand and jobs in the more abstract fields - computer, electrical systems design - turned out to be the most easily exported to low-cost centres in Asia and Eastern Europe.
5
In my experience, people who are driven to succeed do so; too many good students burn out in the competitive atmosphere of the work place; the article doesn't touch this subject, and personal drive is a key component of success irrespective of college major or institution.
11
Speaking of the majors women choose, the article states, "what women choose tends to segregate them into lower paying fields." That suggests that fields have a built-in monetary value, independent of who is in them. It could be the reverse: it isn't that women are choosing lower paying fields, it's that fields dominated by women are seen by our society as fields of lesser value, and women and men in them are paid less.
140
"It could be the reverse: it isn't that women are choosing lower paying fields, it's that fields dominated by women are seen by our society as fields of lesser value, and women and men in them are paid less."
Conisder that in the US, the ratio of female to male physicians is 1:3. In Russia it is 3:1 (doctors are overwhelmingly women). This is due to the fact that the medical profession is held in much lower prestige in Russia than it is in the West. As a result, many professions with low pay and low prestige end up being "women's work".
9
Maybe women don't want to waste their lives with people who look down on them, feel threatened by them, and constantly stress and test them. Don't people want to work where they're respected and can assume their salary is based on fair metrics?
2
I think women are less likely to have an attitude of screw you, I got mine, Jack, because life doesn't reward women with that attitude the way it rewards men with that attitude.
This article is very misleading due to neglecting the impact of one's background and social class. In an ideal world, the best option is to avoid specializing too early and instead get an outstanding broad-based undergraduate education. This would then be followed by internships and graduate school where finally one chooses an actual career. However in the real world, many students do not come from a background with enough resources or connections to make this a viable option. Many of these individuals can only afford a bachelor's degree (and need to go heavily in debt even for this degree). In this case, one's major does become important and I would suggest something along the lines of a STEM degree, nursing, or accounting. These students only have once chance to get it right. To tell all prospective students that they can pursue any dream and be anything they want to be is simply a lie and doing people an enormous disservice. The brutal reality is that humanities degrees and the like are a luxury for the few. I wish we lived in a more equitable society but we should not compound inequality by giving people unrealistic advice and setting them up for failure.
22
" I would suggest something along the lines of a STEM degree, nursing, or accounting. These students only have once chance to get it right. " Not true ... I think many of us know science and engineering graduates who have never worked in science or engineering, nursing graduates who are no longer nurses and accountants who have moved on from being accountants. Such is the pace of change in the workplace that people are hired into or create jobs that require wiggling out of the straightjacket of convention and using their experience and skills honed over the years to find niches in the new economy.
2
DN: I think Krawitz is right that students who can afford only an undergraduate education need to get it right the first time. But I agree with you that the suggestion that a STEM degree is the right path for all such students is incorrect. Getting it right requires that the student sort out a path she or he can sustain for the long haul, which might well be far from STEM.
3
"Only one chance to get it right," .. and then what, the buzzer rings and it's onto the next contestant? Because we can only learn one set of things? Because career 'tracks' are shackles? This assumption is perplexing.
2
I majored in biology, minored in chemistry, and I took a lot of literature courses. If I had it to over, I wouldn't even bother with a science major despite loving science. Why? Because the truth is that this country doesn't now, and didn't when I graduated in 1980, need science majors (or STEM graduates).
I have watched as good jobs in every field have disappeared to other countries, become temporary or contract positions, or been left unfilled because corporations don't want to pay, hire, or train Americans. I have worked in jobs that didn't need a college education: a good solid high school education with an apprenticeship or special training would have sufficed.
The best reason to go to college is not to make more money. The best reason is intellectual curiosity. Making a college degree a requirement for most jobs is a waste for employers and students alike. College should not be used to make up for the deficiencies of our current high school system.
41
I am someone who took a 2 year gap, followed by 2 years at BU (sociology), I left and worked at various jobs until I landed at a bank. Once there I went to the local university. I loved History, majored in that with minor in accounting (Bank paid for accounting and core courses). Stayed in Banking, earning mid 6 figures the last 12 years of my career (retiring in 2018). No college debt.
I wish you would do articles on trades -- I have friends with kids who are not 4 year college material, who insist they must go. The kids want to go into a trade. We need them to go into trades. They earn decent livings, many open their own businesses and they can start their lives with minimal debt--living good lives with enough income to support families and buy houses.
60
Totally agree on the trades. I frequently think to myself "If I had to do it over again..." I study history, and it's something that I'm interested in. But I am thinking about making a career change and getting into the trades--specifically, the electrical field--next year. The trades are a solid field, and there is strong demand for skilled journeymen who can pass a drug test. Plus, I think that by the time they invent a robot that can snake a drain or rewire a building, they'll have automated just about everything else and we'll have some form of universal income.
It would be nice to see the Times cover the trades more.
34
This article hews the destructive line that the purpose of a college education is to earn more money. I have always and still think it is to create rounded and educated people who can get more out of life. When I was in college, eons ago, I purposely avoided courses that would relate to what thought might be my future career: I took courses in English, history, art, and aa few other fields. I have never regretted this path. Many younger people I meet today are often piteously ignorant of our cultural heritage and world history. This is a shame, and it is a result of being told by parents and colleges that the purpose of college is to position yourself to earn more money over your lifetime.
55
Given the huge rise in the price of an education, particularly if you are borrowing the money, concern for future prospects needs to be in the mix. The best programs should give the student exposure to other fields, and still instill enough technical skill for a beginner to get a foot in the door in the work world -- without requiring further years of expensive study.
1
The most important decision in one's life is your mate - wife - husband - whatever the fashionable term. Get it right, a good chance of happiness. Get it wrong, no chance. Re education: study something that maximizes the control of your time = like what you do and whom you do it with. Repeat 3x and click your heels: don't live someone else's life.
22
Regarding an education: Information is your best friend.
1
Sorry, Shady, judgement beats information 97 to 3, and guts scores somewhere in the mid seventies.
4
The fact that the value of these majors is being measured in terms of earnings is a demonstration of this country's total misunderstanding around the value of higher education. (And if it's harder for liberal arts majors to find a job out of college, blame it on backwards hiring practices that require bachelor's degrees even for secretarial jobs.) EVERYONE should be able to think critically. EVERYONE needs to learn new software, solve unconventional problems on the fly, and stay aware of subjects and topics OUTSIDE of their hyper narrow career field of the moment. And just because social workers and educators get paid less doesn't mean women should find new majors; it means our society needs to pay those jobs better.
73
I have two STEM degrees (undergrad and Master’s in geology; both on scholarship, so graduated with zero debt) that I’ve never technically used in a professional context — my first job out of grad school was as a management consultant. Then a couple of years in marketing and, well, by 30 I’d found my calling as an economist at a think tank.
Your major really, really doesn’t matter.
8
I also earned a B.S. and M.S. in Geology but went to work for a major oil company. After 2 heard I went back for a Ph.D. In Geology and joined a research lab with a major mining company. After a number of years, including working on a major environmental project, I took a faculty position at a university. I will retire in a couple of years a full professor of geology. Sometimes you do use your degrees, particularly in STEM fields.
2
The money in STEM is in the creativity that it requires. The money is a reward for taking risks and solving problems. The risks are in proposing solutions that are new and innovative to problems - the higher the chances of failure of a solution, the higher the rewards when it succeeds. Those who make it in STEM are of a breed and mindset that is different than the norm. The love of Engineering and Computer Science (and Mathematics) can not be taught or learned, but it can be nurtured by encouraging independent thinking and exploration at an early age.
If you are looking to STEM as a means of making big bucks you will be disappointed - sales people make a lot more money than STEM and work a lot less hours with a lot less stress.
Having spent 43 years as an engineer including interviewing and hiring engineers, I can tell you that the College absolutely DOES NOT MATTER. What matters is whether you have a particular degree and what you have done with it. The only people who give a rip about whether you have a degree from MIT or UCLA are the academics and academia does not pay any money.
3
Sales is less stress? I don't think so. Some of the most tightly-wound people I've ever met work in tech sales, especially about the time the sales quarter is about the close.
6
Sales is less stressful?? You don't have an idea. When you are an engineer you just need to do what you can, if you are a good one there isn't much stress. But when you are a sales rep, you have to prove yourself every quarter. Q after Q, year after year. it never ends, every fiscal year starts from zero. One bad year and you probably need to find a new job...
3
One aspect which the article (and most of the commentators) don't note explicitly is the need BOTH to have an aptitude for what you choose to study AND to derive enjoyment from it. It is all very good advising people to be pragmatic and to choose a field which promises big earnings, but if you aren't any good at chemical engineering (and not everyone is), it just isn't going to work out. The same applies with an inability to enjoy something: I knew one person who was majoring in business for pragmatic reasons; he made "A"s, but he loathed the subject. He was miserable, and I couldn't begin to imagine how he was going to cope with a lifetime in a career which he couldn't stand. These comments apply mutatis mutandis to majors in the humanities even if it will be a rare situation that someone is really good at, say, Latin, but can't stand the subject. More common will be the situation that someone loves a subject like drama, but isn't any good at it. My general advice is always to find something which you enjoy AND for which you have talent. Graduates with good marks, no matter how abstruse the field, in my experience tend to get jobs (even if these jobs have nothing to do with their major) because employers evaluate good marks as tokens of an ability to work hard and to master material. And if graduates' jobs are completely different from what they enjoyed at college, well, for four years they did get to do what they enjoyed. They'll always have Paris.
13
Unfortunately with grade inflation, good marks mean less and less. But I'm actually replying because I appreciate the Latin phrase -- mutatis mutandis. There are many times I've needed just that phrase, but didn't know it existed.
1
My education in the humanities kept me going through dark times, knowing that for thousands of years, others have been there and have given me the words and grounding I needed. I expect that education to support me when I approach death. There's no price for that.
29
My daughter graduated from a top-five engineering school. I was fortunate to be able to pay the $200,000 for her four years of tuition. She’s now a software engineer in the Silicon Valley. In her first two years after graduation, between her salary, bonuses and stock options, she’s earned an amount equal to her tuition. That’s quite an ROI. She was free to choose any major she wanted, but if she chose the liberal arts, I was going to make sure she took a minor’s worth of business/accounting/finance courses. As the old saying goes: “The worth of a thing is what it will bring.”
8
Your daughter did indeed enjoy a superlative ROI ! Outlay zero [dad paid the tab] and $200k in the first two years on the payroll.
1
You're missing the point. I earn the money but is far as I'm concerned it was hers. Her choices and her hard work is what made it all happen.
2
And as Oscar Wilde wrote, a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
10
On the value of having a major, I disagree. At least in the humanities, a good major can provide you with a durable body of knowledge. This is valuable in itself, even if the subject isn't an especially practical one, and I would recommend this a consideration for students chosen a major. Not just what will you know how to do, but what will you know about? Most graduates will need to continue honing and acquiring skills throughout their careers, but if you come out of school knowing a lot about Asian art or European history, that's yours for life. And with it comes not only a collection of skills with wide application, but also, ideally, some understanding of how to master a body of knowledge, which may be the most important high-level skill to have in today's job market.
7
Don't obsess over money, but don't ignore it either. You don't have to make the maximum salary, just a good living. My advice to young people who are considering higher education: You want to have a clean indoor job with no heavy lifting. There are a lot of good choices. I worked 35 years in tech, but I have respect for all information-age jobs, from anthropology to zoology.
2
I started UCLA when I was 17 and it took me 10 years to finally graduate with a degree in architecture from Cal Poly Pomona. Started with geology, switched to biology, then physical therapy at CSUN before I did. Practiced as an architect for 20 years before getting a teaching credential and taught special ed for the last 18. Nothing is ever simple for some of us. Whatever path I took I’d still be as old as I am right now regardless. Thank God college was inexpensive in those days. I feel sorry that students nowadays who don’t have the luxury to explore anymore because the cost is too prohibitive to.
8
I have degrees in Sociology, Journalism and "Mass Communications." Over my 30+ yr. working life, except for real estate investments, I have earned essentially ..... nothing.
6
The liberal arts now, as always, teach a student how to think. Can't beat it with a stick.
27
Sorry, but STEM majors do indeed teach one how to think.
1
I have a couple of liberal arts degrees (political science and English) and retired after years as a teacher and journalist who never made much money.
I made enough.
My time in the Army was a start. I've lived and worked in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia and have been able to travel a lot (cheap buses and trains, often with a pack).
I feel sadness for new graduates, many of them deep in debt, many of them destined for sad years in corporate cubicles, comforted only by their too-small-anyway bank accounts.
A good liberal arts education doesn't rust.
Take a chance, kids. Get out and stretch.
16
The almighty STEM! Meh. I tried to break in by going back to school to become a web developer and learn to write code. Couldn’t stand it and had no aptitude. Not everyone is meant to be in math, science, or engineering. After I finally embraced my humanities-loving heart, which I had denied for so long, I realized how valuable my writing, art and language skills are. Now my liberal arts skills are earning me a living in PR and communications...for a vibrant university arts program no less. All this after two music degrees and a career in music. It hasn’t been an easy but staying true to my path has been essential ingredient for success and happiness...and making a living.
18
Web design and "coding" are NOT STEM. The money is in the architecture, math, creativity, and the risks involved in creating something new and different. That is what Engineers do - we take an idea, often on the back of an envelope, and turn it into something that solves a problem. Coding and web design are the implementations of those ideas and more and more are being done by computer programs.
3
I was an English major...in fact, I went to grad school in an English PhD program.
Then I worked for 35 years as a computer programmer. I had to start at a low salary because I had no experience, but I did all right. I programmed in Cobol, CICS, Adabas/Natural, DB2, C++, and Java over the years.
I made just a little over $2.6 million over my career.
So, you just never know. What kind of jobs will today's graduates have in 20 years?
5
Funny that an article that focuses on lifetime earning potential of different majors don't even mention pathways to medical school and career as physicians. In this country, no STEM nor any other discipline (except high finance and may be law) can beat what physicians make, period. Depending on the medical specialty, it is easily 1.5 to 3 times what a top-tier STEM professional can ever hope to make. Granted, you have to "do the time" initially and may have to take out large loans, but compared to the earning potential over a lifetime, loan amount cannot be an obstacle. It is even better if you get your medical education overseas which tends to be much less expensive than in the US, and pass the required exam for foreign medical graduates and complete residency. Bottom line - if earnings are the only criteria (which seems to be the assumption in the article), look at stats on the make up of the 1% - I doubt you will find very many STEM majors there,
3
Too many programmers and stats people at google, amazon, facebook and wall street to buy your argument without actually seeing the data...plus those guys don't need to pay malpractice insurance or any loans back. I suspect what the data will show is that the average dr makes more than the average STEM major who doesn't go to grad school (but this is not a fair comparison) but adjusting for grad school and non-academic career options (a high percent of STEM PhDss stay in academia) they're probably both pretty high in the top 5 and 1%.
3
Doctors earn substantially more than tech people or engineers. Give me a break.
2
STEM majors do go into medical professions. What classes do you think comprise the pre-med track?
5
Meany commenters rightfully mention cost as a big part of the education/major equation. I don't think free college is the answer we can't afford it and there is no evidence that a lot of people wouldn't waste their time and societies money. How about something like this? "Free" college after public service. 2 years in the military gets you 4 years of college or trade school tuition. 3 years of public service (ccc type stuff, inner city work, peace corps type stuff, whatever) gets you 4 years. The difference is that it has to be compulsory. EVERYBODY has to contribute. People named: bush, Cheney, trump and everybody else. Don't want to go to college you get a free small business loan or something similar. God knows we have a ton of stuff that needs to be done and it might keep us out of a few foreign misadventures. Obviously a lot of details would need to be worked out, but as we continue down the road to an oligarchy and society with rigid social/economic strata we might find the mixing of the 1% and the rest of us leads to the meritocracy that America used to talk about.
17
The column didn't comment on the fact that nursing, a field totally dominated by women, is right there in the mix with the hard sciences as a top paying career. And I would guess that this is a career path whose opportunities are only going to increase over time.
9
As someone who works in higher ed, I can say this article is aa breath of fresh air. Reading the comments, especially those denigrating non-STEM majors, it is clear that a number of the commentors did not read the article at all. Ironically, these comments are drawn from the myths in the article. Just amazing.
5
I understand the financial pressures that burden today's college students, but I fear that the overwhelming emphasis on preparing for the job market is depriving them of a precious opportunity to develop into educated whole people.
Fifty years ago, when college was a lot more affordable, I followed my bliss as an undergraduate, studying Russian language and literature and music history and theory. I spent the next four years "finding myself" -- working as a teacher and taking courses that I'd skipped in college -- anthropology, political science and constitutional history at Columbia, economics with Robert Heilbroner at the New School (wow!), not to mention cooking classes with Cordon Bleu-trained teachers, also at the New School, and traveling in the Soviet Union -- and the three years after that learning a profession (law). Those eight years of pre-career intellectual, emotional and spiritual exploration were as vital to my development as they were baffling for my parents, neither of whom went to college, and I'll always look back on that time as a uniquely exciting, if sometimes deeply unsettling, chapter of my life.
My experience may not be a viable model for most students today, but the college years come at a time of life that only happens once. It would be sad indeed if the experience of those years were shaped only, or even predominantly, by a spreadsheet analysis of prospective lifetime earnings.
18
The "liberal arts" include the sciences and math and have been since the original trivium and quadrivium. Humanities and the fine & performing arts are, in many circles, collectively known as the Letters; thus, the Letters & Science make the modern liberal arts. Check the list of majors or departments in the leading US 'liberal arts' colleges and you'll find chemistry, physics, biology, math and the like.
Of more import is the idea that "the liberal arts" are those that are key to ensure and extend the liberty of a free person in a free society. That's why this biology major is happy to insist that his is a liberal arts degree and a liberal education.
21
According to a study done by the psychology dept of Harvard, in 1968, the variable that correlated most strongly with the ability to make money was the ability to look someone in the eye and lie at the same time.
Educatation is positively correlated with wealth; but IQ is much more strongly correlated with wealth.
In any event, since the facility of lying is so important -- after all the essence of the capitalistic act is taking something worth 50 dollars and convincing someone it is worth 100 dollars -- the best college major is playing poker which teaches one how to con and manipulate more than any academic discipline, e.g., when Richard Nixon served in World War Two, he was far away from combat and made 10K playing poker with other soldiers.
7
Yes, and he became President of the United States. He opened up China and held the Soviets at bay. By the by, only 4% of soldiers ever see combat. "Thank you for your service". I mean doing the laundry, driving a truck-pushing papers.
I keep hearing that there is little or no no sex-discrimination in the workplace. Women make less money than men because women choose lower-paying career fields.
I "chose" a pink-collar profession after being repeatedly harassed and frozen out in a male-dominated field. How many other women "chose" lower-paying fields for similar reasons?
13
I'm old enough that I was told I could be a teacher, social worker, librarian or nurse. On a test to evaluate what course we would be most qualified for, I scored 98th percentile on mechanical engineering. No way I would have been allowed to be a mechanical engineer in 1960.
11
Is it supposed to be encouraging that you have to be above average in English to earn a little less than an average business major? Further, this article writes that more liberal arts majors go to better schools than business majors, a more vocational degree, and still there is an earnings mismatch.
I am graduating this year with a business major, and I've spent a lot of time contemplating my decision. I can't genuinely say I am passionate about business in the way that I am passionate about the elective liberal arts classes I have taken, but I am pragmatic. My degree, with its focus on career exploration, acquiring technical capabilities, and developing social soft skills, has helped me secure decent to well-paying jobs and internships, and I am not dealing with the anxiety many of my friends in arts have right now as they try to determine what comes next.
For me, as a first-gen college student, I prioritized financial security and played the odds with my major, allowing myself to enjoy other subjects through my electives. I have always advised prospective students to study something they like, and also to look for ways to build their resume from first year (join clubs, volunteer, build leadership activities, work part-time/in the summer). No major will guarantee anyone a job, but it's certainly fair to say some are more helpful/marketable. It's all in the spin and the hustle. (Yeah, I guess business does fit me...)
4
I do wonder how many of these commenters defending the liberal arts are of an older generation when college was cheap or went to super elite colleges and struck it big.
Because as a Millennial who graduated with a liberal arts from a top 10 research university during the height of the recession, upwards of 90% of my friends had to go back to graduate school to get on any kind of reasonable career path - that includes some bio and chem majors who went to med school or got doctorates. For most of us, that meant some debt (after many of us already got 100k+ from our parents to do the bachelor's degree). The ones who've done well with just a bachelor's typically did some kind of engineering, economics, or computer science.
I loved my college experience, but if I could do it all over again, I would have chosen a more practical major and studied the humanities as a minor, so that I didn't have go to spend another 70k just to get a mid-5-figures office job that I tolerate.
78
Regarding the myth about liberal arts majors and Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin's disparaging remark... Bevin took a Liberal Arts degree from Washington& Lee.
3
So much of the supposed conflict between earning money and having a good education goes back to our failure to distinguish between job training and education.
Higher education has been subjected to a steady stream of highly public Federal anti-intellectualism ever since Reagan’s presidency. And even he didn’t invent the attitude. It goes back to colonial times, when America’s universities were seen as seats of British authority, which of course they were. So there’s a very long history to Federal suspicion of academia.
Job training will help students make a living. Education will make them smarter. Students need to resist being told these are mutually exclusive. This is what I tell my students.
16
As the global economy grows, the proportion of it that Americans control is going to diminish, and in order to remain a very wealthy country requires having more Americans in globally competitive careers than most other countries. Those kinds of jobs are going to be with STEM majors careers, so as a country we should be educating a lot more Americans in these majors. Unfortunately, our society does not produce even enough of these graduates for America's domestic needs.
1
And they graduate with $100K debt, and they compete with Indian engineers who aren't as good but are willing to work for peanuts.....
1
...and they age out incredibly fast. Thirty in the tech field is considered old, and you start looking over your shoulder for when your employer replaces you with two recent college grads.
1
In this country, high school students are mostly unprepared to study math, science and engineering, so much so that many colleges can only offer these subjects because of foreign students. However, all employers in this country are pyramid shaped hierarchical organizations which can only reward good work by anybody with managerial position which require people skills, not technical skills, and at higher levels negotiating skills, none of which math, science, and engineering knowledge helps much. So to have above average paying jobs, STEM are good, but to really make a lot of money, any liberal arts majors are fine.
One big problem with liberal arts majors is that they are pathetically weak with respect to math and laboratory science, and this weakness is not being addressed by any institution in this country. Many graduates have to return to school later to meet the needs of their jobs.
3
That may be so in old line Fortune 500 firms and the financial sectors, but not so in some specific locales, such as the aggressive, SFO bay area and tech industry with its startup milieu, and the Boston area. People educated in technical fields who also possess a high level of creativity rule the roost there.
1
Automation is the single most existential threat to employment. Based on OECD figures for 2015, only 6.5% were self-employed in the US (https://data.oecd.org/emp/self-employment-rate.htm). Bulk of today's graduates will see their jobs taken over by machines programmed by software/artificial intelligence. In fact the future machines will constantly be learning and adapting to new inputs. Highly honed thinking skills coupled with subject matter knowledge, and ability to customize (configure) software/artificial intelligence (reconfigure the machine algorithm, based on changed sets of inputs) may be helpful. Constant updating of one's skills and gaining new knowledge/skills may provide some relief. We are entering a new era of career uncertainty. Ability to learn and adapt to new circumstances may be the biggest asset.
7
KB makes a v good, if depressing point. By any measure, the u.s. and the world at large are in a permanent, over supply of humans and labor. Our economy shows this every year. Wages are mostly flat. There is little to no job security and benefits are becoming a thing of the past. We would do well to not only look at the possible careers of the future, but what kind of world we want to live in.
6
It seems as if there is a calendar somewhere indicating when it is that a newspaper needs to produce the yearly column about choosing a major. Lots of students fret about it. Some parents do too. Even some faculty - although I suspect for different reasons. The problem is that if you consider college majors, the problem is that there are only myths - like the turtle problem - it is myth all the way down.
With a few well known exceptions (hard subjects for which there is a persistent hiring demand and clear externally determined specs - various engineering areas, accounting, finance, etc.) is it reasonable to think that majors determined by academics and approved by administrators will have any constructive relationship to constantly changing labor market realities?
Given the complexity and change throughout the working world today, how is it that 18 and 19 year old kids can figure out what direction they wish to take with their lives on the basis of a few survey courses and lots of chatting among their peers about what they want to do? Sure, some choice will end up getting made but how can this be better than a coin flip?
Don't forget the either-or comparisons between general perspectives and high employment tracks. If one is free from worldly concerns, then it can be all liberal arts - but who is free that way? So you want a career? OK which one?
Students must place their bets, choose, and learn from their choices. Anything else is just myth.
1
A technologically oriented society places premium on scientific and engineering education. Liberal arts are no more than secondary subjects in this scheme. The gap between "The Two Cultures", so named by C. P. Snow in the early 1960s, has not grown any narrower since then. It has only increased, as aided by the email, texting, and other means of gibberish communications.
Perhaps the psychologically healthiest choice of a major by a prospective college student is to choose the field the student likes. But, the statistics of future employment and earnings loom large, with the fully understandable lust of the lucre gaining the upper hand.
I love STEM and English literature equally which is fortunate. I chose a STEM field for a career which I enjoy and thankfully pays the bills, and indulge in my thirst for literature whenever I find time, mostly weekends. I am not sure why it has to be an either or proposition.
10
I always advised my students to avoid picking a major for as long as possible especially, since at my large state university, students changed majors something like five times, on average. The college I attended in the early 1960s did not let students list a major until the end of sophomore year, a great idea. However, there are problems with this strategy. Often, classes needed for major field X have a lot of prerequisites that require stressful catching up. Advisors feel a need to pressure students to declare a major early and to narrowly focus on it. This inevitably causes students to undervalue and resent general education classes that, in fact, if embraced, help with a choice of major as well as with learning critical thinking. Misguided pressure from advisors reinforces pressure from parents to pick what parents perceive as career-enhancing majors before a student can grasp his or her strengths as well as knowing what one wants to do. Doing well in a high school computer class may not translate into excelling in college computer science.
4
The benefits of liberal arts goes beyond the development of writing, speaking, and thinking skills suggested in this article as valued by employers.
At some point -- maybe as late as the last few decades of life -- every thinking person wants to know what living and life is all about. It would be great if at some point that person had some exposure to world literature, fine arts, philosophy, sociology, history, political science in order to see how others have dealt with the questions of existence. Liberal arts courses are a good place to gain at least a vague understanding of where to look for answers to troubling existential questions.
Once you've gained all the creature comforts of our materialistic civilization, you might ask yourself why you bothered or what's next. A broad exposure to the liberal arts can offer some guidance in seeking answers about your own personal experience.
10
This is the advice I gave my daughter when she entered college and was considering majors. She was torn between a technical degree, an area in which she has tremendous natural gifts, and a liberal arts degree, in which she has great interest. My advice was to remember that she has a very short time (and a limited amount of money) to build the foundation for a sustainable career but the rest of her life to indulge her love of studying history.
15
K Allison,
I wasn't arguing against getting a technical degree.
I do believe that the liberal arts give a person the tools to deal with their broader interests. I hope your daughter, in getting a technical degree, had the chance to take a history course or two to see what a serious treatment of history means so that she can pursue her own history interests with some skill.
Having tuition free college would go a long way in letting young people pursue whatever interests they have in the liberal arts while also pursuing a practical career.
4
As an alumni interviewer for an Ivy school, I almost always ask applicants what they think they want to major in, and why. To those who are unsure (most) I tell them that, at my alma mater, 2 out of every 3 undergraduates major in something different than what they thought they would when they applied.
This is important in Brazil, where I live, because the university system here only admits undergraduates to a specialized "faculty" like law, medicine, chemistry, engineering, etc. There is no such thing as "liberal arts" here, and that's what my university and others in the US are promoting--the chance to decide what you want to do with your life after you begin university, and have had a chance to explore the possibilities.
8
Ever since the steep drop in crude oil from $100/barrel to $50, college recruitment of chemical engineers from oil, petrochemicals and other chemical industries have dried up. Large chemical manufacturing companies have been forced forced to merge (eg. Dow-Dupont). Recent chemical engineering graduates have had to look for jobs in other fields such as computer science. With dwindling professional opportunities, the future lifetime earnings of chemical engineers may be far lower than displayed in the article.
4
Chemical Engineering is excellent preparation for a general Engineering career. It's not just chemical companies and oil and petroleum industries that hire ChemEs but also semiconductor equipment makers and the vast pharma industry. Chemical engineers are also valuable in the design, manufacture, and testing of implants and prosthetic devices. One needs to think more broadly when choosing a career after graduation.
4
"Chemical engineers are also valuable in the design, manufacture, and testing of implants and prosthetic devices."
Bio-medical engineers perform those functions.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (US), only 2500 new jobs are projected to be available for chemical engineers over a period of 10 YEARS (2016-2026) (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/chemical-engineers..... There are roughly 160 universities in the US that offer an undergraduate program in Chemical Engineering (http://www.findengineeringschools.org/Search/Majors/chemical.htm). Assuming each university produces 20 Chem E graduates/year (very conservative estimate), each year will see an out put of 3200 (160X20) new Chemical Engineering graduates. There are not enough new jobs for Chemical Engineers in the US to keep up with the supply.
1
I had no mentoring or anybody to talk to when I thought of going to college. I was very intimidated by kids that seemed to have it all figured out with supportive families, a clear path ahead and stable circumstances. . I figured I'd try it and wash out quickly and get on with the business of survival. I tried some general ed classes and barely survived, then put a toe in a couple of science classes as I'd always liked that stuff. I soon found out I had a natural talent. I went on to finish at the top of my class in chemical engineering and got the top offer upon graduation. Why mention this? Because I don't think this is the way to do it. Dumb luck or a throw of the dice is not a plan. find something you like and enjoy doing. How to do that? Get exposed to different possible careers. I have friends who's kids ask to come by and chat about and observe me at work. I always make time. It may not do any good but it sure can't hurt. I'm thinking many people reading this article would make great people to follow around so some kid with with no idea what the possibilities out there are could get started in the right direction.
53
amen...I was a chemE major in college too..cool story
Explore and find your muse in the first two years may work in other disciplines but not in most STEM fields; certainly not engineering. Even starting in the sophomore year, engineering curricula build on a rigid set of pre-requisites. You miss those, you're behind the eight ball. It will take you lot longer to graduate from college which adds up tuition bills quickly.
7
Regarding Myth 2: "what women choose tends to segregate them into lower paying fields, such as education and social services". The problem is not that women choose these fields. The problem is a society that underpays people in those professions.
408
Pay in the fields you reference is subject to market forces. If a skill set is in high demand but there are insufficient persons with that skill set, compensation increases to chase the limited fatale the pool. If a field is flooded with persons with a skill set, compensation stagnates or lowers.
Combine a skill set with an over-abundance of labor with a disproportional number of labor from one sex, then you will have both below national average compensation with a disproportionate impact on a particular sex.
1
" .. The problem is a society that underpays people in those professions."
No one is forced to stay in those jobs. They don't like it, they ought to quit. Stop blaming others, it never works. Thanks.
1
Supply and demand.
Too much of the advice offered in the debunking of these persistent myths is misleading and simplistic, and too many readers' comments just regurgitate romantic cliches about the value of a liberal arts education and downplay the very real issue of how graduates will pay back their loans and support themselves in the future. So, for instance, thought it's true that STEM graduates do not always earn top salaries, engineers and programmers with GPAs above 3.0 earned at top schools have great earning potential. Skeptical about that claim? Check out the University of Illinois website for statistics about the average starting salaries of computer science graduates. Also, while it's true that many liberal arts majors end up with comfortable incomes, it's also true that those who do were almost always good students as undergraduates. But young people who do not get good grades studying history or English or philosophy should not take out loans to pay for college. Speaking of money, I wish that college was about intellectual discovery and growth--and surely it can be!--but it's naive to advise teenagers to follow their real interests if they have to pay top dollar for the opportunity. I remember the brutally honest advice I once heard a professor give to a college senior contemplating graduate work in the humanities: Don't do it if you have to pay for it. As the cost of college has risen, that counsel now applies to decisions about what to study as an undergraduate.
7
B Magnuson,
You've offered some good arguments for tuition free post secondary education. Why should young people leaving high school have to choose between expanding their intellectual experiences and finding a career? Those shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
2
Engineering may be the worst possible example of forcing students to make early selections of their majors, especially in public universities that can be hard-pressed to open up additional sections for over-subscribed classes, including required classes for degree programs.
My son is currently in his junior year in a CS program at a private university that didn't require an election of majors until his sophomore year - a remarkably liberal liberal standard as for as engineering schools are concerned - and wound up happily in a program that hadn't even been among his top-three educated guesses when he was applying to schools in the first place.
But had he been applying to Berkeley or UCLA, he would have been required to designate his major at the time applications were due - November first - or six weeks after he turned seventeen. Which is of course nuts.
8
As a retired professor and an Ivy league grad, does anything an undergraduate majors in matter? It has been my experience that economic advancement generally requires an advanced degree such as an M.B.A., LL.D., M.D., or Ph.D.. I presume the economic data omits which students obtained such a post-graduate degree and how that impacted their income. It's truly sad that in this era students don't engage in a liberal arts education, except for that imposed by diversity or distribution requirements. To focus early on a narrow career often robs them of exposure to areas that can expend their thinking and enrich their lives. This is especially unfortunate when an advanced degree is almost a requirement in most areas and when this will be last opportunity most students will have to learn another language, read some classic literature, or study the great ancient and modern philosophers. I know; I made that same mistake over a half century ago and have spent my retirement years catching up on what I missed. So, students forget about a major or major in the great courses taught by the great teachers at your college or university. You'll be happy you did.
17
There are many ways to advance yourself economically, and many people with no degree at all have gotten rich.
Maybe there are college students who should have taken that $150K and bought a couple of gas stations instead of spending it on tuition.
Where can you buy a couple of gas stations for 150k?
I am not sure I understand this advice of major not being important. In highly technical careers, the major is critically important. If you are going to be working as an entry level engineer in a petrochemical industry, they are looking to hire someone with a Chemical Engineering degree, not an English major. If you going to join a semiconductor design team, they are looking for Materials Science or Electrical Engineering majors, not Theater majors. I am sure there are jobs where the major is not relevant, but not so in STEM fields.
12
There is no doubt that engineering is a guild profession and, at least outside of CS, few people traditionally advanced without the equivalent of a BSE, whether or not they had undergraduate degrees in math, physics or chemistry.
But STEM is broader than engineering. Consider that Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study. Who is widely regarded as the world's leading theorist in string theory, was admitted to Harvard's PhD program in physics with an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago. Where he majored in history.
All it takes is having the chops.
4
Instead of picking a major, why not pick a career. Then you can work backwards to determine the type of training required. It may or may not include $100k of college debt.
10
Enigmatology, eh? Is it possible to assign Mr Shortz to one of the biggest enigmas in the current world: why 62 million people in the US ignored all evidence that suggested that Donald Trump was a lying con-man, that he would ignore their interests and pursue his own, and that he would destroy everything admirable about American society, and voted for him?
Seriously, choosing a major by focusing solely on the financial rewards is a recipe for a shallow and unfulfilling life (exhibit A: Donald Trump). I have taught undergraduates for 36 years at a second-tier public university where the vast majority of students enter with this narrow plan. Often they have made the decision because their families have influenced them, projecting their own financial insecurity onto their children. Frequently, these resource problems mean that the students must work 30 or more hours per week while trying to keep up with the demands of college courses. Any thought of extra-curricular interests is wildly unrealistic. Is it any wonder they make bad choices that are inconsistent with their skills and interests, and often leave disillusioned and without a degree? Beneath the elite tier of universities, much of modern American higher education is a chaotic mess that fails to prepare students holistically for the range of life's experiences.
38
Students have to make up their own mind, use the "Gut Feeling," respect "Trial and Error," and do not lean on the advise of High-school- or University Advisers - they are a generation older thus out of it. If you have the money get a Masters; a Bachelors is weak, from the good old days and no longer respected (which explains why so many company leaders are from Europe or Asia - a Bachelors is a "Nothing".)
5
Years ago, I was in graduate school. Greek and Latin. I had a professor. He got talking.
"Oh yes," he told us young 'uns. "I was pre-med. At Boston University. I studied away like anything. Then the light dawned.
"All I ever ACTUALLY wanted to do was read Greek. All the time. So--I switched majors."
What he was like as a pre-med student I couldn't say. But boy! he was one fine Greek scholar. (I had him for Greek prose composition. A class of one! He would scrupulously write out his own version of whatever I was supposed to translate.)
AND--he was pretty highly regarded in his own field. I doubt if he ever had the slightest qualm about giving up medicine.
And ME?
I pitched upon a classics major back in high school. Which I got through half a century ago. Nineteen sixty seven. (Time flies!) AND--I got periodic warnings--"I don't think you're likely to make a fortune, studying Greek and Latin. . . ." Even my college advisor sounded the same doleful note. From time to time. And he too was a classicist.
A top money-maker Not this child! Sorry!
Regrets?
None.
64
Your grades and the selectivity of the undergraduate and graduate schools you attend are far more important than your major in terms of your career earnings. I am a proud alum of a highly ranked national liberal arts university where political science and philosophy are two majors with the highest career earnings. Rigorous small undergrad classes in these majors prepare students with top-notch analytical and writing skills so they can excel at the nation's top graduate schools (which are the gateway to the highest earning careers in law, business, medicine, etc.).
21
Let's compare apples to apples, oranges to oranges.
Majors, institutions and, indeed, students differ. The median SAT score of admitted students, admittedly an imperfect measure of academic preparedness, at "elite" schools is often greater than 2 standard deviations above the national mean. Students at highly selective schools do well financially regardless of major because they are stronger students. (Studies have shown that students admitted to highly selective schools who matriculate to less selective schools also do well.)
From a financial standpoint, the selection of a college major matters if one attends a less selective college.
1
When I was going to college, we weren't obsessed with how much money we were going to make. We wanted to learn how to be the best at what we do.
Majoring in interpretive dance or any of the arts is important. Education should not be about how much money your career is going to bring you. It is about kindling and encouraging a passion for knowledge in all areas of life, and developing skills in whatever field each individual excels in.
Believe it or not, the world needs interpretive dancers just as much as it needs chemical engineers. And if you doubt that, think of the psychological relief that the creative class and its work brings to people who are oppressed by the overwhelmingly narrow-minded, psychologically confining, and physically polluted environment created by our money-grubbing bosses.
Over and over, our psyches are assaulted by others trying to exploit us for their own gain, and over and over, the arts come to the rescue. Who has not left the theater at least once, filled with joy and inspired by life? Without the arts, we would be another Orwellian nightmare society, without the ability to even articulate what is wrong with living in such a society.
We have been taught by the plutocracy that runs the country that making money is the be-all and end-all purpose of living. It's a grotesque, severely crippling way of looking at life. This anti-humanism is going to destroy the egalitarian society our founders wanted to create.
179
" .. We have been taught by the plutocracy that runs the country that making money is the be-all and end-all purpose of living .."
The working class doesn't give rip, what you do. Just pay your bills, and we're OK. You don't, you expect others to pay your bills, it is going to get unpleasant, guaranteed.
1
I graduated from a fairly selective public university. (UC Berkeley) I ended up in the upper income bands of my last careers. This was in contrast to some colleagues who attended less selective schools but with similar career paths who stayed around the median. It had nothing to do with network, or alumni considerations. I think it really had to do with the quality of my undergraduate education.
18
I see that my major, Journalism, didn't even make the cut. Lol!
8
Most (if not all) colleges and universities require all students to meet a “liberal arts” education requirement, even those students majoring in engineering, nursing, accounting, computer science. All students are required to take X number of credits in English, history, humanities, social and physical sciences, etc. Quit with the viewpoint that students who don’t go to a “liberal arts” elite college/university aren’t educated with a breadth of knowledge — they are! With the added bonus of some sort of technical education.
23
Yeah, General Education requirements are built into every major, true. But as an instructor of one such GenEd at a public state institution, I can tell you that my students (the majority who take my class do not major in my discipline but are there for the GenEd credits) absolutely fail to understand the importance of Gen Ed skills. They even think it'll be "easy" *because* it's not in their major. Lo and behold, 4 credits is 4 credits, so I got news for them: there's plenty to read and write. Some thank me, but a small minority.
3
How sad, all anyone cares about is how much money they might make.
Whatever happened to striving to be an educated human who can contribute to society and culture?
85
I know, it's very sad to see.. America is slouching towards inevitable decline in all aspects
2
I taught at a University for 38 years and part of my duties was advising. I gave the same advice to any new student and I still think it is the best advice. It goes something like this:
Don't pick a major because you think you will make a lot of money. Instead, treat your first two years as a smorgasbord. Don't be afraid to take courses in a variety of areas. If you find something you love, major in that. In the end, you will be a happier person for it even if you don't get rich doing it.
The truth is, college is not like a supercharged technical college that teaches you a professional skill set allows you to slip into a job fully trained. There are a few exceptions to that, but not many. A well rounded education in liberal arts is just as valuable to most businesses as someone with a degree in business. Avoid getting trapped in a major (or a career) you hate.
123
Here's the trouble with that advice: some technical degrees require a sequence of eight courses beginning in the fall of a student's first year. Miss the initial enrollment and you're one or even two semesters behind, and that can add up to big bucks for a degree-seeker. My daughter, who is pursuing engineering, is facing that issue right now. She's weighing her options, which include coming back home and taking a couple of fully-transferable classes at the community college, so she can get in on the ground floor next fall and finish in four years without spending an extra $25k or more to do it.
11
Like anything, the devil is in the details. Make sure you research your options. That said, community colleges offer excellent value. Courses designed to transfer to universities are taught at the same level as the university courses, often from the same textbooks, but usually with smaller classes and more support services--all for far lower tuition. Freshman and sophomore classes at many universities are taught entirely or in part by teaching assistants who have little teaching experience and often lack even masters degrees. Every transferable community college class is taught by an educator with at least a masters degree, and many faculty have doctorates. There are no teaching assistants.
5
You've made an excellent point about the quality of community college instructors. Franky, I'm less than impressed with the graduate students who teach most pre-requisites for STEM degrees at large universities. Not all are horrible, of course, but unfortunately, the really good ones are few and far between. It seems that most are too involved in finishing their own graduate or doctoral studies to have much energy for becoming truly effective teachers.
2
If you ask a roomful of 100 young people: Would you rather be rich? Or happy? How many will say”rich”? Probably many more than will say “happy.” The point being that we mistakenly assume that “rich” = “happy.”
Of course we would all be better off being happy rather than rich, if they had to be mutually exclusive. But that doesn’t mean that people choose their careers accordingly. I am guessing that many people opt for money, believing that they can work for happiness AFTER they get the money. And, as we know, many people get the money but never find the happiness.
I was lucky. I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought I would be good at it, not because I could make a lot of money at it. As it turns out (after 30 years), I am good at it and I am not rich. But I feel fortunate for all the good things I do have. And I am happy. And I wouldn’t do it any other way even if I could.
12
Mentorship.
Anyone can acquire knowledge or competency, but training leaders requires person to person learning, what ever major you choose. Without it, college is a lost opportunity.
7
Myth: your major is the determining factor in salary and career earning
Reality: terminal degree (MD, JD, PhD, MBA vs. MS, MA, BS, BA, AS) and general competence/diligence (hard to define) dominate your career earnings.
An A student in English or other humanities can be admitted to and graduate from MD/JD/PhD programs, while a C/D student in Chemical Engineering or another major will likely not be able to. Terminal degree accounts for roughly a factor of two in ultimate career earnings.
A student without a terminal degree will likely have their career prospects limited but can rise through the ranks based on competence and commitment . As an employer, you know it when you see it, and people who never drop the ball and go the extra mile ultimately tend to succeed and are viewed as 'irreplaceable' as long as they don't burn out. This can overcome lack of degree but takes more time and is not a sure thing.
48
Myth 7: You need a college major.
Those with neither the interest in nor aptitude for the subjects and ways of thinking presented in college classes have been convinced that college is the only path to economic stability and social respectability. Unfortunately, most of society holds the same set of beliefs. Many current students would be happier in, and have greater chances of success in, programs offering short term vo-tech training. Until we get honest with ourselves about the characteristics of our economy and our population, higher ed will continue to fail both students and society.
31
For whom does this paper write articles? For students and their parents who are concerned about effectiveness and usefulness of excessively high-cost college education for the uncertain future? Or for many of the colleges represented by so called ivies who are eager to earn easy money from so many helpless people?
The luxury of relaxing and enjoying in choosing majors is only for a handful of fortunate ‘one percent’. Those who earn money with liberal arts majors are those who do not need to go to college if somewhere else provides corruptive ‘networking’ environments for those ‘selective’ kids without any education at all.
This is an exemplary fake news with most deliberation and sophistication backed by elites who are from ivies and parents of ‘Trump Era’.
11
Effectiveness to what end? Usefulness to what end? Making money? That can't be the point of life, or the standard for knowing if you've lived a good one.
For what it's worth, most of the Ivies have very generous financial aid programs for those who get in, from all socioeconomic backgrounds; working-class or poor children usually go for free. The key to being in the "one percent" who get in is to be among the most promising achievers, not the wealthiest.
Notwithstanding this article's economic take, the main value of going to a good school is not networking. It's the chance to be among people who are working really hard at things they love. Anyone who takes college seriously, anywhere, is working really hard no matter what they choose. There's no "luxury" in getting an education even if you're studying, say, Egyptology, or interpretive dance. Education is a way to enrich your life, permanently, in every way besides money. For example, one loses oneself, even if only a little, in the disciplined study of something much bigger than yourself; it changes how one sees the world. Your "fake news" meme just demonstrates that you missed out on yours; sorry.
7
I quit high school, got my GED, worked some odd jobs, and then started college at a community college. After transferring to university, I explored many different majors before settling on history. Around that same time, my junior year of college, I decided to go to law school. I loved history, loved my history classes and got great grades. I got into a good law school, and have had an exciting and invigorating career that I could never have imagined. What did my history degree do for me? Besides a broad based, liberal arts education that has made my life interesting and exciting, history gave me a leg up. Studying dates, places and the time sequence of events gave me a tremendous advantage as a litigator and lawyer over my colleagues who studied business or other similar fields. Getting good grades in an area that I loved rather than gutting through something that I thought would make me more marketable got me into a good grad school. In sum, follow your dreams and study what interests you. The rest will take care of itself with hard work and perseverance.
344
Superb, Todd !
2
Buddy, I'm an honest to shout Historian. Documented, degreed, all of that. Thanks for your work. It's just wonderful that you have studied, learned and cared about this. It's exactly all and everything that I've ever wanted for you and all - it's why the study of History matters.
Thanks. A whole hell of a Lot.
3
Todd-
Thanks for a great response. I'm a HS History teacher, and I always lead the year off with a letter from a man named James Grossman, the exec director of the American Historical Assn, who says pretty much what you just did. It's essential that my students think laterally about themselves, and I'll make sure they see your comment.
Cheers, and here's Grossman's piece from the LA Times: http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grossman-history-major-in-de...
2
It would be interesting to see pay scales by the field of work rather than just by the major. Are the highest paid English majors working in a field requiring that degree? Are the lowest paid chemical engineers working in a chemical engineering field? Maybe it is more important what field you end up working in rather than what major you get in college.
65
We CHOOSE as a society to pay "pink collar" professions less. Nursing, teaching, and social work are integral to society. In Finland, teaching is one of the most respected positions, and it's highly paid. According to stats, it's almost 80% female. We just do not value education or women in the US.
I second Rosalie's comment that men have historically overtaken the few "female" professions that were highly paid.
203
Not sure what you are trying to argue - women are equally represented in medical and legal professions and simply opt out of pursuing engineering despite being eminently qualified - so "women" have overtaken the few "male" professions that were highly paid.
And when they do, we pay them less...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-domi...
7
Wow, sounds terrible, why don't teachers quit today? Is it because, when there's an opening, dozens (hundreds?) of qualified candidates apply?
I never went to college; I went to work. I did talk to a very bright man I knew who felt nearly everyone should delay picking a college major until after their sophomore year of college, maybe later.
He suggested taking all the basic classes required to get a BA or BS during the 1st two years. By then, you hopefully will be exposed to a variety of subjects and will be in a better position to pick a major, which may be your life's work.
Don't lock yourself into a field about which you know nothing while you're still in high school. Many fields require a Masters or PhD, so re-evaluate your choice often, but definitely before graduate school.
I worked with many recent college graduates whose parents insisted (in exchange for paying tuition) that they get a job and work for at least two years before graduate school. These were wise parents. They didn't choose their child's field of study but made sure they had enough experience to choose sensibly.
Don't lock yourself into a field you don't know and may quickly learn to hate. You've got lots of time to pick a major.
15
"I worked with many recent college graduates whose parents insisted (in exchange for paying tuition) that they get a job and work for at least two years before graduate school.".....First let me say that I strongly agree with your general approach that students should be willing to "shop around" for the first few years of undergraduate work to find a field of study that fits their abilities and interests. However I strongly disagree with taking time off between undergraduate and graduate studies. In graduate school the student will need total concentration and all of his study skills to be at their highest level. Taking time off dulls the skills and it is hard to go back having to live hand to mouth as a graduate student after a period of time having money in your pocket and free time to spend it. Further, graduate school is often something of an endurance test, dropping out for a couple of years makes it that much longer. Finally, if you are not getting a fair amount of financial assistance from the University where you intend to go to graduate school, maybe it is a message that you really shouldn't be doing it.
6
@W.A. Spitzer.
Yours is a somewhat rigid suggestion regard how to approach grad school. I've known quite a few successful people who have 1) gone right on from under grad to grad school, 2) have taken a few years off and 3) have worked while going to grad school. What made each successful was finding the fit that worked for their individual career goals, study patterns and work/home status, especially if they're a breadwinner.
4
@Agent Provocateur.....I generally agree with you and the concept of finding the career goals that are right; but I know people who took a year or two off, maybe got married, and then found it very difficult to go back and finish rigorous graduate studies.
5
The authors says women choose majors that command less pay. I say: consider that the causality may be reversed, as in the historic case of computing and computer science.
62
...or how about the high paying fields of medical school and law school - oops - women now form a majority now there in many cases.
1
Although the author shows some pretty clear biases, I think he is generally right that majoring in the humanities is underrated. When combined with a few STEM courses, these young people certainly have good job prospects.
The real problem of a humanities education is at the graduate level. Getting, say, a Doctorate in Literature is a disastrous employment decision. You get extremely specialized training, and the number of job opportunities is extremely limited. I have known many of these people working as adjuncts or in low paying, unrelated jobs. They are generally disillusioned and angry.
32
Disastrous unless you love literature and want to teach. Then it is a key to a wonderful, enriching, academic life helping young people discover the wonders of literature. Teaching even at the community college level can pay pretty well. The key is not going into too much debt getting that PhD. Do what you love. Life is too short.
9
"I think he is generally right that majoring in the humanities is underrated."....I agree an educated person should be familiar with the basics of a range of humanities. However all degrees are not equal and they are certainly not equally challenging or demanding. From my own experience, obtaining a degree in chemistry or physics easily requires twice the work, time and effort of a degree in education or social studies. Or put another way, a student should not consider majoring in a stem field if they want to party on the weekends.
13
It's disastrous no matter how much you love the field as long as you also need things like food, shelter, and medical care.
8
Are there regional versions of this article in which the examples given under "Myth 6th" do not include Indiana University?
1
Liberal arts majors .. Are more interesting too!
31
To some people.
4
It is dispiriting to see the choice of major treated in this article in strictly financial terms.
We really need a different way of talking about it. And "do what you love" isn't sufficient.
Students need to choose something that, after long consideration of their interests, aptitudes, and values, they can reasonably predict will sustain them through a lifetime.
So let's say you're smart enough to be a very successful engineer of some kind. But you care more about Classics. You fervently believe there should be a few people around to keep ancient Greek and its intellectual traditions alive. (You can plug in anything here--knowledge of beetles, architecture of playgrounds, the history of interpretative dance).
Do you really want to wake up 20 years from now in the middle of the night, worried about some engineering problem you hate, colleagues you don't care about, wondering why you're trapped in this life? Even if you're waking up in a very expensive and beautiful house?
Or do you want to wake up in a modest little home near the prep school you work at, excited about getting your students excited about some passage in Sophocles?
Choosing a major you don't like for financial reasons is a good way to create a future miserable rich person.
245
“Choosing a major you don't like for financial reasons is a good way to create a future miserable rich person.”
So THAT’S how republicans are created!! ;)
10
I majored in engineering, which I no doubt would have loved except for the sexism, since I'm a grrl. Data analysis makes me happy though, so it was a good switch, which did not need an extra degree, since I already have the math and mind for it.
5
Not only that, but if you are competing with people who really love a field, you won't be able to put in the time they do, or match their quality.
4
These sorts of pieces rely on some pretty incomplete and biased data to make their points. For one, very few graduates are ever contacted to determine what their earnings are, and even fewer in a way that would identify what school or major they were in. Most data is collected and presented in a self-serving manner by schools trying to use it as a recruitment tool, and massaging of data is common. While government agencies may also collect some data, it focuses on those employed within certain fields, and often ignores details about percentages of former students working in fields they didn't need a college degree, or at least their college degree, to pursue. Very rarely do such statistics include reference to the relationship between how well one did in school and how well they do in their subsequent chosen profession. If you squeaked out a degree in chemical engineering you are unlikely to be working as one, I hope.
Private, highly selective schools collect the most data. While such students may do better in the long run regardless of major, they really should. As the author pointed out, their students tend to come from wealthy backgrounds and less frequently need to work while attending. Their selection in the first place suggests that they may be better students and have family contacts that ultimately shape everything from their major to their eventual employment prospects. They are a very small cohort, and representative of nothing really.
9
When our economy collapses from bad leadership in a mountain of national debt, what with all those finance majors do? Answer: work as serfs on my farms, because I’m a liberal arts major with a flexible background who learned ag, acquired mechanical skills, and started my own business on the fly.
73
Well, unless you also own and know how to use a gun, be prepared for the vigilantes that will be roaming the lands of your dystopian future to come and rob you of all your hard work and be lucky if they spare the lives of you and your family.
3
The pressure to choose a major early, placed on students by colleges and universities, has always been based on faulty logic of the type that would earn a failing grade in any first semester statistics course. The argument goes something like this: Students who choose a major early graduate at higher rates, therefore, if we force students to choose a major early, they will be more likely to graduate. Correlation is not causation.
17
Can we pause a second to think about the fact that Education is the field with the lowest lifetime median income and the second lowest income in the 90th percentile? What message does that tell potential education majors in college? Why message does that tell children sitting in K-12 classrooms?
365
It tells me that a lot of people who claim that children are our greatest resource don't believe what they're saying.
If we really valued the developing brain above all else, teachers would be paid much, much higher than they are now and given much, much more respect.
But that would require higher taxes, which no one seems to want.
Personally, I vote for fewer military weapons and more money for education.
But I'm "soft."
16
I agree with your concern about what message it sends, but on the other hand a degree in education takes a lot less work and effort than a degree in chemical engineering. I knew lots of people in college who could easily get a degree in education where as a degree in chemical engineering would have been well beyond their ability. At some point supply and demand has to play a role.
3
@Blake
Your lament about the low pay (and commensurately low status) in the filed of education merely affirms the old adage - those who can do; those who can't teach.
I'm an English major from the university of Washington and for 25 years been a Technical Sales Representative in the photography lab supplies. After a few years I asked my boss why he hired me. He said I had experience in photographic lab but mostly it was your English degree. I can was surprised and why that made a difference. He said it means you're well read, probably know how to communicate and express yourself well and can write a letter with correct grammar and without spelling errors. I laughed. I hadn't even thought of any of that.
131
I'm afraid your boss may have been correct, but it is still a bit disappointing. I would like to think that any college graduate would be competent to write a letter.
3
Are we past the point of gentle ribbing considering the point made and the actual printed comment?
More power to you and I am sure that everything you write is true. But reread *how* you wrote it.
Is it just that because you are /could be on a cell phone that we don't hold you to 'I can was surprised...'
Sorry, English majors are sticklers...and I am not one.
4
Selingo's piece on choosing a college major was interesting, perhaps marginally helpful to some but overall frustrating in its not so subtle bias towards liberal arts and selective schools.
It was helpful in demonstrating that career earnings often overlap regardless the major chosen. But, I think Selingo is a little glib in downplaying that the "hard" sciences generally will deliver higher career earnings than the "soft", aka liberal arts, when it is clearly what the chart with the article demonstrates.
A quick example:
Two engineers, one at $125K, one at $75K = avg of $100K.
Two English majors, one a lawyer at $150K, one a DNAInfo journalist at $50K = avg $100K.
And Selingo should have been much more explicit that any of four factors - intelligence, well off background, selective college, strong social/professional networking skills - stands a student a better chance to succeed in the career game no matter what major is chosen. Any combination of the four gets you to second or third. All four is almost a guaranteed home run.
Finally, while it was interesting to learn that Will Shortz chose enigmatology (?!) as his college major, this is one of those black swam examples that is not representative of an average career path. It's like an inner city kid knowing that LeBron James didn't go to college so he may be just as successful doing the same. It in no way recognizes the gifted talent James has as an athlete and his unique personal strength and will to succeed.
34
As a person with a degree in Political Science, my question becomes what is the educational level required to achieve significant lifetime earnings in some of the Liberal Arts majors? I recognize that a liberal arts education can give you many "soft" skills, which may give you the ability to work in a number of different fields, but for the most part if you are going to be employed in the field of your major, you are going to need something more than your undergraduate degree. While you may be able to find a position at a think tank with a B.S., to be something more than a office drone and to be quoted in the New York Times about some profound question of the day, you are going to need to have PhD. behind your name and/or have one very impressive resume, with massive quantities of experience in the field. That, or I suppose you can just graduate from one of the Ivies and I guess then everyone is supposed to believe everything which comes out of your mouth as the gospel truth.
7
It's so ironic. As colleges increasingly offer specialized vocational training, our students are entering a world where jobs and their demands are constantly changing (rendering such training obsolete), one in which the only true steadfast skills needed in virtually all meaningful employment will be those "that liberal arts majors emphasize — writing, synthesis, problem solving."
And those three skills make for better overall citizens, no matter what they choose to do with their lives.
101
Those skills are needed although not sufficient for health care or trades. "Vocational" education is crucial to go into the these areas.
In response to Tamra:
True, but people with those skills can learn a new vocation far more rapidly than those who are lacking. And, as I noted, job demands change constantly, and those in vocations often need to be "updated" in their training, lest their skills become obsolete. Synthesis and problem solving become critical in one's ability to adapt quickly.
7
so true
Undeclared Major. That's the label I was given to study as a transfer student at The University of Buffalo. It was the best choice for me since I was able to work with a researchers in exercise science as well as work with a young beginning novelist in a writing elective course. Although I didn't choose my career major until graduate school, I find that my experience led me to two of my favorite hobbies. Exercise and writing!
5
Given that grad school is expected for almost all careers today, there is far too much discussion here about major and not enough about fit. How can an 18 year old or a college freshman at 19 discern their place in the world? Internships, research, open-mindedness, and a focus on the distribution requirement are ways undergrads can forge their sense of calling. Talking to mom, a brother or even a counselor can help but the loudest voice ought to come from within. Give students space and encourage academic curiosity and inquiry. Discuss learning style and personality to help discern the best higher ed opportunity available. This article addresses none of those which are far more important for a 'successful' life, however defined. As a college admissions counselor, I see far too many undergrads derail due to focus on the wrong attributes. Major? That's the last consideration.
24
It isn't true that only a "handful" of colleges allow students to pick a major. Many colleges offer this option--it just isn't well publicized. Unfortunately these concocted majors often come from students who tries something and found they couldn't get through it in its entirety. Think psychology majors who could not pass the statistic requirements. Also, sometimes unique majors are hidden--students ostensibly major in one field, but do so by getting a bunch of course waivers, making the discipline or track their own.
I am glad to see this article. I am so sick of our students thinking that they need to go into STEM even if they are not good at it. The world also needs folks who are good at the humanities and social sciences.
20
“I am glad to see this article. I am so sick of our students thinking that they need to go into STEM even if they are not good at it. The world also needs folks who are good at the humanities and social sciences.”
_Thank_ you. It doesn’t make sense to advise students to enter a demanding field they have no talent for—or desire to do. Careers are tough enough when you love/are good at what you do. They are hell on earth when you have no aptitude for them.
7
I was a liberal arts major, political science, and I became a college professor teaching graphic arts (printing presses, and such.) Much more fun than sitting in meetings.
57
It's all very well listing expected earnings and employment figures for various majors; with the cost of a college education, these cannot be neglected. Nonetheless, when selecting a major, students must follow what they are interested in and find enjoyable. There is no point in becoming a science major if your heart lies in literature or languages. It means nothing to have a well paying career if you spend 9-5 wishing you were somewhere else.
228
True, but I am interested in a career playing for a rock band.
Or reading literature. Should I ignore market realities so I don't end up not enjoying my 9 to 5 job?
1
I've been a software engineer for 20 years and here's what I've learned when it comes to making money. First, change jobs every few years. Each move gives you a 10 to 20 percent or more bump. Second, don't stay at a company that isn't growing or doesn't continue to develop new products, even if it's comfortable. Your skillset will suffer in a company that only sustains old products and this will have a very negative impact on your future earning potential. Third, do the work you enjoy. Coming to a job you don't like each day will depress you and cause you stress. Your output will suffer as a result and this make you less desirable to other employers. Especially in niche fields, word gets around about people and you don't want to be known as the person who only does enough not to get fired. Think Office Space. Finally, if you're doing good and quality work, ask for raises and promotions frequently, but don't get greedy. You know how your performance stacks up against others and if you're a star, demand to be compensated for it accordingly.
I also wanted to mention that in my field the 20/80 rule seems to accurately reflect job performance. 20 percent of engineers do 80 percent of the work. I didn't believe it until I saw it with my own two eyes. These engineers get compensated much, much better than the rest and I believe they deserve it. Four average engineers can't produce a quality product faster than one start engineer.
105
I own a science and engineering company. If your resume came across my desk, I would put it in the no pile. I don't look at "jumpers". Not worth my time or effort to train you if you are just going to leave in a few years.
13
so many employers refuse to train these days...
10