Slashdot Mirror
What's Your College Major Worth?
Hugh Pickens writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that with tuition rising and a weak job market everyone seems to be debating the value of a college degree. Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says talking about the bachelor's degree in general doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because its financial payoff is heavily affected by what that degree is in and which college it is from. For the first time, researchers analyzed earnings based on 171 college majors and the differences are striking: For workers whose highest degree is a bachelor's, median incomes ranged from $29,000 for counseling-psychology majors to $120,000 for petroleum-engineering majors but the data also revealed earnings differences within groups of similar majors. Within the category of business majors, for instance, business-economics majors had the highest median pay, $75,000 while business-hospitality management earned $50,000. The study concludes that while there is a lot of variation in earnings over a lifetime, all undergraduate majors are worth it, even taking into account the cost of college and lost earnings with the lifetime advantage ranging from $1,090,000 for Engineering majors to $241,000 for Education majors. 'The bottom line is that getting a degree matters, but what you take matters more,' (PDF) concludes Carnevale." Last week we learned that dropping out of college could earn you $100,000 in start-up money for your business.
As a grad student in engineering that has seen nearly all his friends at the BS, MS, and PhD levels all able to find good paying, stable jobs, I had grown pretty tired of the stream of /. articles from Ivy League tenured professors of religion ranting about how our education system is all wrong.
What about the ones that did not find the job in their field, and are deep in .... with a debt, low paid job, insecurity, wasted time, etc.....How are they measured in this statistic?
I'm just paraphrasing some of the comments on TFA here. Some of the fields need a Masters or PHD to enter the profession. Not surprising that a bachelors degree in Psychology gets you diddly squat, if you need a Phd to get licensed.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Everyone knows that higher education is in a bubble. This type of article just show that everyone now recognizes it.
The causes are clear. The government subsidizes loans, making it easy for students to take on more debt and for colleges to jack up tuition. Companies just use a degree as a proxy for basic competency. The list can go on.
However, the real question is how will the bubble burst. What will happen? I have no idea. But it can't go on. You can't have 18 year olds wrecking their entire financial future for a degree.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
FWIW, you can get a minor in what you love, and a major in what will earn. No one is forcing you to gear your entire curriculum to the Benjamins.
I did that eons ago, with a major in EE, but a minor in history. I've long since translated the engineering skills to the IT world, but the history I still have and treasure. It happens that I love the engineering side of things, so it fit me in either case (yes, I still have a bench at home, though time doesn't permit me much for playing at it).
If the field you truly love doesn't make any money, so what? Be happy with the less luxurious lifestyle, but living a life that matches your passions. FFS, if you love doing archaeology, even though the life would be pretty poverty-stricken, then by all means *do it*.
The guy who dies with a smile on his face is the one who wins, not the one whose bank account is the biggest.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I kinda said this in another post, but I think it should be a requirement of a student loan to research and detail how you plan to turn your degree into an actual job. As you said, a lot of people getting degrees are doing so because they've been told degree = better job. This is true where degree = computer science or engineering. This is generally not true where degree = music therapy.
Not saying oddball degrees can't result in a job.. and if you are _really_ pationate about something like that, then I think people should go for it... just do some research and figure out how you are going to make a living with it _before_ getting the loan.
I would also note that the ability to live very frugally for a few years after graduating and working a McJob throughout school/summers does a lot for avoiding the lifelong crippling debt thing.
The point of getting a degree from college isn't to learn vocational skills, it's to more generally broaden yourself and to learn how to learn. The whole notion that your degree should directly influence your earnings is reflective of how today many people go to college to get vocational training. If you want to teach mathematics, you shouldn't get an education degree in college, you should get a mathematics degree, and then go on to teaching from there. If you want to go into business, learn some more fundamental skills like statistics and critical thinking, intern over your summers, and then go to business school for your MBA.
Perhaps even more troubling is the notion that the sole goal in life is to make more money. What about doing a job that you enjoy, even if it pays less?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
I'm doing contract work and earning less take-home pay (after you figure in self-employment taxes) than I did the summer after I graduated from high school.
You're doing the wrong comparison. The relevant comparison is not "with a college degree, now (in a bum economy)" vs. "without a college degree, then (in a good economy)", but "with a college degree, now (in a bum economy)" vs. "without a college degree, now (in a bum economy)". The problem is that without a time machine, we can't do that comparison for your particular case.
But we can look at how people with and without a college degree are doing, and it turns out that unemployment figures for college-educated people are less than half that of those with only a high school diploma.
So if you're doing poorly because you can't find any decent work, even with a college degree, there's a fair probability that you wouldn't have *any* job if all you had was a high school diploma. I have no clue what you were doing the summer after high school, but it's a good bet that whatever it was wouldn't have been sustainable - that is, chances are you couldn't have made it a full time, long term job, or even if you could, you would have been handed a pink slip the moment the economy turned south.
So look at the glass not as three quarters empty, but as a quarter full.
that of all possible career paths, education has the lowest financial incentive? What does this portend for our future?
Uh, Bill gates and Sergei Brin were smart enough (and worked hard enough in school) to get into the most selective undergraduate, and graduate programs in the world.