Worst College Majors for Your Career

[Hunt]

I think employers also care about "fit." There really is no such thing as the "top 1%" for all employers, and for all jobs. They recruit at the colleges where they believe they are most likely to find recruits who will meet their needs.

[Beliavsky]

Originally Posted by ucbalumnus

However, most of the "prestigious" colleges do not have very diverse students in terms of family economic background.

Parental income is positively correlated with a child's IQ, SAT/ACT scores and other measures of academic achievement, so this is not surprising or problematic at schools that admit the best students.

[Todestrieb]

Originally Posted by JonLaw

The only reason to go to law school these days is if you are masochistic and have a psychological need to lard yourself up with $200,000 in non-discharagable debt.

What happens to that debt if you emigrate? Just wondering.

[vonlost]

Sounds like an Interpol death wish.

[Beliavsky]

Universities Are Vocational Schools
by Richard Vedder

finds that the mid-career earnings of some humanities majors (English, history, and philosophy) are decent, based on a study "The Returns to College Education", by Coelho and Liu, available online.

[LoremIpsum]

Originally Posted by JonLaw
The only reason to go to law school these days is if you are masochistic and have a psychological need to lard yourself up with $200,000 in non-discharagable debt.

What other country in the world would want a US-trained lawyer?

[Todestrieb]

Hey, if you go to Mexico as a tourist, you can get resident status (allowing you to work) without having to go back to the US first. I'm sure some companies over there could use a US-trained lawyer.

[Canuckguy]

I think employers also care about "fit." There really is no such thing as the "top 1%" for all employers, and for all jobs. They recruit at the colleges where they believe they are most likely to find recruits who will meet their needs.

That is why I started with a disclaimer in my last post. If I am looking for salespeople, I want good looking extroverts with a gift for the gab. If, on the other hand, I am running a hedge fund, then I would like to have a Terence Tao on my team, because I am sure he can follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics.

I begin to think the recruiters in the Rivera study are not as shallow as I originally thought. Maybe investment banking and consulting are looking for people who belong to the same social and economic class as their clients, and pure smarts is secondary in importance. Where else do we find them if not in the elites? We do know that we prefer to associate with people who are most like us.

Students do not choose their majors randomly. The “worst college majors for your career” list, I suspect, is simply a good proxy for academic ability. With the exception of philosophy (and even that is confounded by religious studies here), none of these majors are known for sky-high GRE scores, which is NOT the same as saying that all students in these majors are academically weak.

[Consolation]

Students do not choose their majors randomly. The “worst college majors for your career” list, I suspect, is simply a good proxy for academic ability. With the exception of philosophy (and even that is confounded by religious studies here), none of these majors are known for sky-high GRE scores, which is NOT the same as saying that all students in these majors are academically weak.

Glad you added that final caveat, says the English major with 800V 760M on the GRE. (And yes, I know this is purely anecdotal and doesn't mean anything in the larger statistical picture, so don't start. But one can only take being called stupid so many times. I used to devoutly wish that there was such a thing as a job one could get with GRE scores. )

You might find this interesting:

Classicists are smart! | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine

[geeps20]

^ I guess you just can't help yourself

[Consolation]

^ I guess you just can't help yourself

I guess not.

[blossom]

It's lovely to speculate.

I've been in Corporate recruiting for 26 years, virtually all of that time spent in global organizations. For jobs which don't require content knowledge (i.e. when I was hiring aerospace engineers, they needed to have degrees in that field) I don't make assumptions based on major-- at least not the assumptions you're debating. I've hired hundreds of English majors with terrific quantitative ability and skill; I've hired hundreds of physics majors who write elegantly and concisely; I've hired hundreds of kids who majored in history who ended up acing our in-house finance and accounting classes.

The major isn't important; we ask for transcripts and we read them. My colleagues have recruited at enough campuses to know what a "gut" load looks like at Dartmouth or Yale, or what a heavy load looks like at UIUC or U Texas.

We ask for SAT scores; we ask for GPA (college, not HS), we have our own tests, developed internally, which we use for certain roles. (Analytical thinking, quantitative skills, writing and editing, foreign language competency, etc.) Most large companies have spent millions of dollars refining their assessment techniques- it's stupid to think that you can get lucky and end up with the 100,000 employees you need on any given day.

It troubles me not in the least to know that there are kids at Harvard who are dumb legacies (there are very few of them) or that there are kids at Princeton who got there because of their athletic prowess. As a citizen, I am far more troubled by the millions of kids whose abysmal literacy skills means that they will never go to college, and as a tax payer, I am far more irritated by the thousands of kids in my own state who couldn't graduate from our flagship even if they were admitted.

It's only on CC that the presence of legacies or athletes or AA admits to the elites is presumed to be a problem. If companies found the gene pool at the Ivy league so tainted, they'd stop hiring there.

I know, recruiters are shallow. We are too stupid to understand a college transcript, or to understand that pound for pound, U New Haven offers a student body every bit as qualified as Yale (and the parking is better.)

If a kid wants to be an English major- more power to him or her. Take a statistics course and do well in it; take both micro and macro economics and ace both of them.

Don't be an English major who says in an interview, "I'm just not a numbers person". If you're interviewing for an entry level job in PR or for a media company or to be a speechwriter or a journalist - guess what you'll be doing? Numbers. Interpreting economic data. Comparing inflation from this year to last in Brazil so you can write an accurate press release.

[bovertine]

It would sure be interesting to get a list of all these organizations that ask applicants for SAT scores. It is completely contrary to anything I have experienced, or frankly anything I've even heard of except on here and in news articles about strange hiring practices at companies like Google or some top-flight consulting group.

Some of the places I've interviewed - Intel, Hughes Aircraft (when it existed), Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Mattel, Applied Materials, I can name more. Not a single one of them indicated any interest in my test scores. In some cases I would have much preferred to issue them a score report than suffer through their interview process.

I suppose they could have been waiting to spring the old test score requirement at the same time they checked references. But really, is asking for SAT scores from mid-career applicants a common practice? I would really like some evidence because that's just bizarre to me.

[Bay]

What is a SAT score used for in a hiring setting? Are there any studies indicating a correlation between SAT scores and career success?

[cromette]

We don't ask for SAT scores. College transcript (w/gpa), copy of diploma, work experience, etc. Relative to where the applicant is NOW, not where they were there senior year of high school.