Hypothetical

[idad]

<p>From Andrew Abbott:</p>

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Within the narrow range of occupation and achievement that we have at the University, there is no strong relation between what you study and your occupation. Here is some data on a 10 percent random sample of Chicago alumni from the last 20 years. Take the mathematics concentrators: 20 percent software development and support, 14 percent college professors, 10 percent in banking and finance, 7 percent secondary or elementary teachers, and 7 percent in nonacademic research; the rest are scattered. All the science concentrations lead to professorships and nonacademic research. And biology and chemistry often lead to medicine. But there are many diversions from those pathways. A biology concentrator is now a writer, another is now a musician. Two mathematicians are lawyers, and a physics concentrator is a psychotherapist.</p>

<p>Take the social sciences. Economics concentrators—this is today identified as the most careerist major—are 24 percent in banking and finance, 15 percent in business consulting, 14 percent lawyers, 10 percent in business administration or sales, 7 percent in computers, and the other 30 percent scattered. Historians are often lawyers (24 percent) and secondary teachers (15 percent), but the other 60 percent are all over the map. Psychologists, surprisingly, are also about 20 percent in the various business occupations, 11 percent lawyers, and 10 percent professors; the rest are scattered. And there are the usual unusuals: the sociology major who is an actuary, the two psychologists in government administration, the political science concentrator now in computers.</p>

<p>As for the humanities, the English majors have scattered to the four winds: 11 percent to elementary and secondary teaching, 10 percent to business occupations, 9 percent to communications, 9 percent to lawyering, 5 percent to advertising. Of the philosophers, 30 percent are lawyers and 18 percent software people. Two English majors are artists and one is an architect. A philosophy major is a farmer and two are doctors.</p>

<p>With the exception of those planning to become professors in the natural sciences, there is no career that is ruled out for any undergraduate major. You are free to make whatever worldly or otherworldly occupational choice you want once you leave, and you do not sacrifice any possibilities because you majored in something that seems irrelevant to that choice. There is no national evidence that level of performance in college has more than a minor effect on later things like income. And in my alumni data, there is no correlation between GPA at Chicago and current income.

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<p>[The</a> University of Chicago Magazine: October 2003](<a href=“http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml]The”>The University of Chicago Magazine: October 2003)</p>