I have worked and work with millennials and did not find this stereotype to be true for most of them.
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Oh it’s a gross overgeneralization. I too have worked with many who are great. But I’ve known more than a few that fit this stereotype. And I don’t find it to be at all true of the youngest generation who have only started entering the workforce a few years ago.
Of course, doing as suggested increases the inequality of both opportunity and result in the following generation, since those with wealthier parents have more of a parental financial backstop against personal finance setbacks. Or just have more options for colleges rather than being financially limited to a much smaller set. Or have the option of trying a career path that starts with very low paying jobs or unpaid internships.
But also, parents may want to be careful to avoid giving too much financial assistance that can promote dependency or subsidize things that are futile.
On a national basis, marketing majors have a lower median starting salary than other comparably or more popular business subfields such as business (general), management, finance, accounting. However, there are far smaller and in some cases insignificant differences in portion finding employment. I’d expect a similar statement could be made about new hires being let go. There is obviously a wide variation from company to company, as well as from college to college, or individual to individual.
For example, in the UTK stats posted earlier, the highest reported salary among all the ~1000 business college grads that reported was a marketing major at $200k. Marketing median/mean salary was similar to several others, such as management, but maximum reported salary was higher. Looking up stats at Penn, marketing majors had the 2nd highest mean salary among all majors at Wharton, after statistics / data science. However, median was often lower due to a skewed distribution with mean being pulled up by a few outliers.
A large portion of the job titles do not have a direct link to marketing. For example, the most common employer for Penn marketing majors was Morgan Stanley, with job title similar to “Wealth Management Analyst.” MS lists marketing as one of the 4 preferred majors for this position. In contrast certain other majors, like accounting had no high outliers and a larger portion with job titles more directly related to accounting. All reporting accounting majors were employed, and the overwhelming majority of accounting majors all had a starting salary in the same narrow range.
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Here’s a couple good examples -marketing lowest and not close. It’s always been this way. And yes, when job cuts happen, marketing is often the place you don’t want fo be. It’s an easy place to cut spend and therefore people.
Only generic majors like management fare worse.
Marketing is more quant driven today but still expendable etc
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Did you look at the salaries in your 2nd link? Or just assume marketing was lowest salary by a wide margin? Screenshots are below. Marketing had similar average salary as overall for the business school. In any case, my earlier post qualified the variation. One can find specific colleges for which marketing is lowest or not lowest.
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Dunno, but surely she wasn’t the only marketing major in her cohort, but she was apparently the only person without a job. There could be another explanation.
I didn’t.
Back in the stone ages when I did my MBA, Kelly was well known for marketing and for sending lots of students to P&G and other consumer brands to become brand leaders. I appreciate that this data is for undergrad, but I do wonder if the marketing path for Kelly is well-known enough to still drive undergrads into those types of consumer marketing roles.
Of course, in the discussions today on these boards, I hear more about finance and accounting from Kelly, so perhaps this is old knowledge.
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At Kelley, marketing is the 3rd most popular major. Top 2 were the 2 majors you mentioned hearing about more often. Marketing seems to be common among female students. In most recent class, 78% of marketing majors were female compared to 26% of finance majors and 37% of accounting majors.
The most common path for marketing grads at Kelley was working in sales, as pictured below. This pulls down the reported salary stats for marketing since Kelley only includes base salary, not commission. Next most common employment position was consulting. P&G was one of the nearly 200 companies hiring the 321 Kelley marketing majors. I expect only a small minority of students went in to the type of role you describe.
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I think sales jobs that are commission based also have a high attrition rate. My firm–CBRE–the largest commercial real estate brokerage in the world hires new college grad sales people every year due to the high mortality rate. Pay is crap (35-40K) and basically you are a slave for a senior broker who may or may not throw you a bone from time to time. Those who stay over 5 years start making real money but attrition is at least 50% or more over 5 years.
As to income by major–very similar to Indiana. Location matters a lot too. Career Data | Undergraduate | Wisconsin School of Business
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Sales jobs vary greatly. At my company, we have about 80 external sales people. The top sales person makes about $4 million. The median is about $1 million and the lowest is about $300k. The person making $300k will probably be fired because they are literally at the bottom.
The caveat is these jobs are difficult to get and it’s basically a Hunger Games type competition to get these extremely coveted roles. People who get these jobs never leave unless they are either fired or a competitor lures them away.
See gift link https://wapo.st/4fyd6Sp to a WaPo article focusing on CS grads, jobs, and AI (among other things). It focuses on recent Carnegie Mellon grads. I don’t think there’s anything Earth shattering here, but figured I’d share.
FYI gift link didn’t work
Huh. I thought I clicked on the right thing to get a gift link. I tried to make one again, and it gave me the same exact thing. No idea what I’ve done wrong!
Looks like WaPo requires email addresses for gift article. So it is a gift article, you have to input an email address first.
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Thanks for the link.
On the article itself, I found it surprisingly shallow for WaPo - just a collection of anecdotes and not a lot of journalism/analysis? At least they went to CMU and not some random no-name CS school.
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Right? It wasn’t much. Frankly, I found greater insights and interest from the WaPo article this morning about the “best” children’s tv show for the ages 3-5 set.
I couldn’t open the article either but when I looked to find it for free, I found this instead: Outpacing the Nation: Carnegie Mellon Graduates Find Job Market Success - News - Carnegie Mellon University
Their outcomes dashboard looks pretty darn good to me. For their CS school it is says only 2% are seeking (although it looks like it’s '25’s data).
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