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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.
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?
They didn't do enough research / made a bad choice?
Ok, that's really not fair. Job markets change dramatically over short periods of time, but I still see a _lot_ of people getting degrees in things with absolutely no plan for how to turn it into a job when they graduate.
I almost think this should be a requirement for any student loan... write an essay detailing how, in the current job market, this degree will result in a decent job. Look at local job ads, maybe even call a few up and see what kind of education they are expecting people to have and such. Are you willing to move? If so, where? What's the job market like over there?
Not saying people shouldn't persue something they are pationate about, but getting your degree in music therapy may not be the best choice.
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.
Develop a technical bent and become a technical writer?
Develop a journalistic bent and become a journalist?
Become a secretary, writing out reports on behalf of, and to be read by, people with other skills?
There's an astonishingly large number of very bad writers out there and the one thing a BA in English MIGHT be able to convince people of is that you're able to string sentences together.
well, I believe some sociology major with mod points just went over the comments here, thus you can see the results....
You can't handle the truth.
once you get past the race and gender tables. The actual facts about the comparative values of various majors starts around Table 30.
The problem with looking at this from a race/gender perspective is that the data tells us almost nothing about why there is a difference between these categories. For example, the study reveals that Petroleum is a specialty major, that 100% of the people who majored in it are men, and that this major has the highest median income.
OK, facts noted. Does this mean that men are better suited to be Petroleum Engineers than women? There's no way to tell from this data set. Maybe women would be great petroleum engineers, but they don't choose it because it sounds like it would be uninteresting or unpleasant or too inflexible.
What we _can learn from the data is that if you want a major that will bring in a steady, terrific income, Petroleum Engineering and other specialty majors are pretty awesome. The Study makes it pretty clear that people with "hard" majors make about twice as much as people with "soft" majors, so if money is your thing, pick a hard major. Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.