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What's Your STEM Degree Worth?
Jim_Austin writes A recent study by economist Douglas Webber calculates the lifetime earnings premium of college degrees in various broad areas, accounting for selection bias--that is, for the fact that people who already are likely to do well are also more likely to go to college. These premiums are not small. Science Careers got exclusive access to major-specific data, and published an article that tells how much more you can expect to earn because you got that college degree--for engineering, physics, computer science, chemistry, and biology majors.
I was hoping it would show the fields and the difference, such as between CompSci with and without degree. Not. It is CompSci degree vs Burger King? Well, duh...
>> My phd?
No, your STEM undergrad degree, dumbass.
From TFA: "Webber excluded from his sample people with postgraduate training."
A significant portion of the cost of any degree is the opportunity cost. Often it is most of the cost. I'm not saying your PhD was not worth it, but it is disingenuous to say it was free.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
At the risk of using an ad hominem fallacy, a university professor personally benefits when people choose to attend college. An economist at a university should recuse himself from issuing reports that encourage people to contribute to his pension fund.
Even for those in the bottom quartile of 'ability' (people that just limp into college).
A quick calculation based on this data says that the break-even point in opportunity costs (include any foregone earnings over 30k) is $215k for an undergrad in the humanities and 320k for the social sciences, and $460k if you do anything in a STEM fields.
So there you go: if your opportunity cost is less than 50K a year any under-grad degree, even if you are are not all that bright, may well pay off.
We're kind of assuming that if you are in the bottom quartile graduate school is a bit out of your league; though I'm sure there are a LOT of bottom quartile business majors who get reasonable MBAs and totally throw off our expectations about income and smarts.
He only looks at cohorts in decades following 1955, 65 and 75. Relevance to today's graduates could be zero because the labour market has changed a lot in the last 30 years. Since 1975 average wages haven't even tracked productivity growth.
As for less income by women, a study in Australia recently found a >10% difference, but correcting for occupation, time in the force and hours worked the difference was reduced to 4.4%.
My chemistry degree got me in as a process engineer in specialty chemicals manufacturing. My starting pay wasn't as high as an engineer's, but it was definitely more than what my friends with biology degrees were making. And after a few years of experience, I've caught up to the engineers in pay range.
Then how does one put a dollar value on that? In addition you need to offset that with what I was paid as a research assistant each year.
It gives me a paycheck every two weeks but the work is utterly devoid of personal fulfillment. If I had known fifteen years ago what to expect from a career in software I would have spent my time getting a completely different degree.
Love sees no species.
Our politicians (Obama included) continue to say we need more STEM education. They also continue to expand H1-B visas. What does this mean? It means a hypersaturation of the workforce. This merely reduces the value of the most passionate and educated people in the country. We don't need more STEM. We need more reasons for STEM educated people to exist.
Assuming "lifetime earnings" has the obvious meaning (the actual article is paywalled), the small advantage STEM degrees have in this study is probably more than made up for the loss of a decade of investment and compound interest; it's even worse if you have taken on debt while getting your degree.
Other studies also concluded that both college and advanced degrees are probably largely break-even financially overall.
Take note that the study only looked at undergraduate degrees. Getting a Bachelor's degree in a STEM field opens up a lot of doors for you. However, getting a STEM Ph.D. closes nearly all doors except becoming a researcher or teacher in your field.
Industry research jobs can pay well, but they tend to be rare relative to the number of Ph.Ds competing for them, not to mention they are often subject to geographic constraints.
Academic jobs these days require a lifelong vow of poverty.
Attempts to find a job that doesn't involve being surrounded by other Ph.Ds will typically be turned down and met with the standard "overqualified" line.
Regardless of what job you wind up with after getting a Ph.D., you will have wasted the better part of a decade earning low pay and practically zero work experience that will be recognized outside of academia. That's a large opportunity cost.
Go ahead and get that STEM Bachelor's degree if you are so inclined. But take it and run straight into the job market after graduating. Don't let your college professors talk you into grad school unless you are already independently wealthy.
tl;dr: Bachelor's degress in STEM, if nothing else, show employers that you are highly intelligent and trainable. A Ph.D. in STEM, however, closes more doors than it opens and usually costs far more than it is worth.
IANAL, I am however a statistician. This exact study has long been considered impossible because there is no good was to quantify the selection bias. The linked article does not explain why this is suddenly possible. I give an 80% chance that the result is bullshit.
I wish there were licensed software engineers who had to sign off on certain types of software projects. Similar to other engineering disciplines. People wouldn't push shit through if their license/career was on the line vs upsetting the next level of management which would only place their current job on the line.
I often wish I'd pursued EE or another of the engineering disciplines rather than CS due to the complete lack of apparent ethics, etc. in many dev shops.
Are you kidding me?
This job market is changing faster than you can earn your degree.
Sounds like you made a poor decision. In general getting a BS or MS in a pure science is a bad idea if that is where you plan to stop. The jobs in science where you're anything more then a lab monkey are basically all in the PhD realm. I seen this play out during my employment (with an engineering degree), and before that I was warned about this by EVERY chemist I talked to when I was thinking about getting a BS in chemistry.
It bugs me that so many articles about STEM fields leave off mathematics majors.
I've burned through over 1.5 million dollars in a 'STEM' field, with no degree so far. Even 'managed out' two phd's during that time. So anyway, fuck the system, etc.
Well, it doesn't really take much intelligence to simply get the degree to begin with.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And the geology majors get dissed again...
But hey... It's a great major for getting your conservative parents to pay for you to go co-ed camping every weekend...
Well, not really.
My degree was "free" as well. The price is a different one. I don't know about your university. What's your dropout rate? Ours is 95-98%. Yes. 2% actually get through the whole deal. They can easily afford that. With the university being "free", there is by no means any kind of shortage of people wanting a degree. So they upped the requirements over and over because .... well, just 'cause you tenfold the applicants, there ain't a demand for ten times as many university educated people.
Getting in is easy. Getting through and out is terribly hard. A bit like a marriage, when you think about it.
They don't hold your hand, they don't pamper you, they don't organize anything for you. Get it done or GTFO, either get your act together or move over, someone else will.
What gets out of there in the end with a degree is, with no false modesty, the absolute best of the best in the field. If he wasn't, he could never have gotten through it. Whatever comes out of there is not only one of the best people you could get from a professional point of view, he's able to plan and organize, he knows time management, he knows how to get projects from conception through to presentation.
When I compare that to universities that pamper their students 'cause they're dependent on them staying and paying their tuition fees... I can't help but prefer graduates from my university. I don't care whether your parents were rich enough to send you to school. I care whether you were smart and organized enough to get through.
Even though I have to say that most people working in my team don't have a degree at all.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
3.98 GPA and a more awards than you can shake a stick at.... And the only job I could find is with a shitty timeshare marketing company. No degree required for this job.
Lol.
FML.
They should either remove the "M" from STEM or stop telling gullible young smart guys that a STEM degree will lead to a higher paying job.
http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/whatsitworth-complete.pdf
see also
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/30/1554235/Whats-Your-College-Major-Worth
"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,' concludes Carnevale."
I personally found, if you have ability, managers don't want you. They are concerned more about their ability to rise in the corporate ladder then building a team capable of building a good product. They are scared of individuals who know what they are doing.
Seen this way too many times for this not to be the norm.
I went to my Social Security statement and added up my income since I graduated (Electronics Engineering degree (BSEE), 35 yrs. in my career until I retired). I stayed in the technical field (avoided management). The number: $2,727,247 I went to a community college and obtained my general education, later transferring to a state university. I'd estimate my total education cost at around $3K maximum (tuition was a whopping $59.65/qtr. when I graduated in '77). Starting salary was about $1.2k/month. Ending salary was about $10k/month. YMMV
Will dumping $80,000 into an educational institution for a piece of paper let me get any sort of semi-stable career?
You're going to spend your 20s doing something, the postgrad lifestyle isn't all that bad, neither's the workforce assuming you studied something that someone somewhere actually wants to pay you for.
Getting a PhD does pidgeon-hole you as a bit of an academic, though. It's not always necessarily an asset when applying for a job.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Add to that, it's also possible to consult during your PhD. A PhD student in the UK gets a stipend of £12K. That's non-taxable, which means that any other income that you make during your PhD starts at the bottom. The tax-free allowance is £10K, so the first £10K you earn consulting is also tax free. If you're working in a commercially interesting area, then you can take home £22K/year tax free during your PhD, which is equivalent to a taxable salary of £28K ($47.7K). You're still eligible for student discounts on a lot of things, so your cost of living is a bit lower too and you may be eligible for (university subsidised) student accommodation. And, of course, you don't need to stop consulting when you use up the tax-free allowance, but it's a fairly good benchmark of where you should stop if you want to have enough time to finish the PhD in a reasonable timeframe.
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Wow, I really hate looking at life in purely monetary terms. I didn't really think (much) about money when I decided to go to college. I was looking forward to the life experiences; the learning, the discussions with the professors, the companionship, last but not least, the parties.
It's important to have enough money to get by, beyond that, it's the life experiences that matter, not if your college degree was "worth it" in terms of money lost vs. money gained.
From TFA: "Webber excluded from his sample people with postgraduate training."
I wonder why: it's very unusual to get a PhD or Masters in STEM without that undergrad degree in STEM as well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But it's even harsher for people in their 30s with no substantial industry experience to speak of
I wonder if the $120,000 for petroleum-engineering is not due more to the fact that the jobs tend to be located in harsh climates and remote locations. Yes, the waitresses working in a North Dakota boom town might not be pulling in big bucks, but might in fact be a guy as few women feel safe in these towns. I hear that these rough neck natural gas sites tend to be lawless and full of hidden surprises & toxic spills and fire hazards. I don't know if you will find the girl you want to marry there, if you are interested. Your wife might worry about getting raped going out for groceries. Housing is made up of used FEMA trailers and living amongst people who will rob you at night. The locals know that you have a petroleum degree, so they will charge you more for services.
Petroleum-engineering work tends to be in the Middle east. I have a friend who worked in Abi Dhabi, who said that his wife could not stand to live there, despite the affluence. Maybe the Middle Eastern women learned to put up with outright sexist shit, but she could not. The cops were there to shake you down, not to help you.
and I ain't no damned loch ness monster!
Well played.
I got through about 2.5 years of college before I was too poor to continue. I lucked out, got a job doing exactly the type of programming I wanted to do (custom automation control systems) but making next to nothing doing it (about $15k/year). Eventually being poor got old and I took a job with a "real" company making $60k. Six months in they bumped me to $68k and took me on as a full time employee.
Eventually I went back and finished my degree (BS in Comp Sci). I lost my job at almost the same time I finished the degree (I wasn't willing to move then the company did). That's why I know that the degree gave me a 10-15% bump in pay.
I learned almost nothing in college about programming. To this day I am of the belief that it is a certificate attesting that when told to do something silly you have the fortitude to actually get it done. Oh, and maybe you have the ability to learn new things...maybe. In the end I'm glad I got it, but only because of what it means to other people. Directly to me it means almost nothing.
Obviously not every cost can be given an exact price; just take the value of customer satisfaction as an example. But it isn't that hard to come out with a rough approximation when it comes to a college degree.
Simply calculate what you could have reasonably made without a college degree to come up with the true cost. For instance, I was making $13 an hour working as a low level network admin in the summer after high school in 1998. This is obviously a very high wage for that level of education, but it goes to show that many highly paid college graduates probably would have been fairly highly paid high school graduates as well.
By leaving for college, I had to leave that job and work for $7/hr part time. If both jobs would have increased in salary by 5% per year (reasonable for low paid positions early in a career), my Bachelor's would have cost me $60k in lost wages. That $60k saved in a mutual fund making 8% above inflation would equal $1.77 million by retirement.
That sounds like a lot, but it would only take $3600 extra per year (with the gap increasing by 2% per year), to equal the same amount of savings for the college student. Of course this doesn't take into account the cost of the degree, but it shows that even a "free" college education isn't really free.
The comparison for a PhD is much harder, because now you are comparing yourself with someone that already has a decent degree. The math usually works out that a PhD will not make you more money in the STEM fields, but you are still making a very good living and probably doing work you love more (or else why did you get the PhD in the first place?).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
For the kind of work you go into with a PhD, the work done during the PhD itself counts as work experience. During my PhD I was doing the same kind of work I would have been doing in industry, but at a University.
with probable bankruptcy to boot.
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From:
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/20...
Another issue with the job markets for STEM and engineering degrees is that there is a lot of involuntary retirement from about age 35-40, in aggregate based primarily on age. Any gains realized up to that point tend to get thwacked pretty hard in the process of readjusting and finding other employment. The point being that majoring in STEM or engineering, and even performing well in STEM or engineering, is no guarantee of anything.
Many employers really don't know what they are hiring for and frequently have hiring practices counter to their stated wants. In fact, most people making hiring decisions have little to no actual knowledge of the disciplines they are hiring in.
As for what constitutes 'public support' - we've already voted with our taxpayer dollars for zombie studies. There is no greater form of express support than subsidy. Furthermore I guarantee you that there are at least three industries outside academia that will consume the products of 'zombie studies' - publishing, film/TV, and internet-based media - and it is no doubt pursuit of income from these sources that will enable 'zombie studies' to flourish. Like I said before, one does not buck the public purse with impunity.
H-1B workers are not "trained by the government," at least not through any kind of formally established program.
They are not paid "premium salaries," at least not according to the US Department of Labor: "...the Department's regulations require that the wages offered to a foreign worker must be the *prevailing wage rate* for the occupational classification in the area of employment.
The prevailing wage rate is defined as the *average wage* paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment...
The requirement to pay prevailing wages as a minimum is true of most employment based visa programs involving the Department of Labor. In addition, the H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 programs require the employer to pay the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid by the employer to workers with similar skills and qualifications, whichever is higher." In short, they are supposed to be paid "prevailing wage" or going rate for that position with that employer. In many cases these minima are not met by the employer.
Let's read about that "crying demand for engineers" from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers:
Anio, Monica "Are Engineers Really In Demand," IEEE Roundup, 2/10/12 ... and from senior editor Patrick Thibodeau of Computerworld, who has reported on IT and engineering employment issues for over a decade:
Thibodeau, Patrick "What STEM Shortage? Electrical Engineering Lost 35,000 Jobs Last Year" Computerworld, 01/16/14.
As for "lies" about "domestic staff being displaced," the displacement of US citizen engineers has been documented for well over a decade by Dr. Norm Matloff, Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis. Distillations of his research on visa programs have appeared at Bloomberg.com ("How Foreign Students Hurt U.S. Innovation," 2/11/2013) and Barron's ("Where Are the Best and Brightest," June 8, 2013).
In these articles he takes the current president to task for his support of expanding green card giveaways as well as California Democrat Zoe Lofgren for her support of the H-1B program. The "people who hate the Koch Brothers" reflexively vote Democrat and don't go after the party faithful in op-ed pieces.
New Economic Perspectives
Would someone who actually has a Ph.D. refer to it as a "phd"?
Sorry for not holding your hand. Welcome to the real world where nobody gives a shit about your learning disability when they try to hire you.
On the upside, our schools tend to be brilliant at finding such people early and helping them to overcome it. We don't simply stuff Ritalin into our kids with attention deficits 'til they're sitting in the corner like good little zombies just so they aren't a nuisance anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Probably because (a) the awful salary numbers for most PhDs skew the numbers in a way that the researchers didn't like, (b) they couldn't find the cardboard boxes postdocs live in to ask them how much they made, or (c) they couldn't find any humanities students who actually completed their PhDs for comparison.
That is all.