The Most Regretted Majors All Had One Thing In Common

Parents Forum
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This is certainly consistent with my observation over the years, and the assumptions behind the 3 step process I talked about earlier.

Economics is an odd duck. Many students use it as a business degree substitute. It has become so popular that itself has become a limited enrollment program in places like Toronto. For those who are serious about the subject and intend to do graduate studies, it is preferable that they earn the first degree in math/physics. I have been told such on more than one occasion by faculty members. It is easy for them to teach students economic principles; it is not so easy to teach these students advanced math. I suspect @shawbridge was alluding to that in his last post.

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“I really don’t get the point of your LinkedIn search and how it has bearing on Fidelity actively seeking grads with liberal arts majors.”

My point was to add context to your point that Fidelity would prefer liberal arts grads to grads with quantitative backgrounds, which they clearly do not. I know people at Fidelity, it’s filled with people with quantitative backgrounds, at least in the core product groups. If a high schooler said I want to work for Fidelity or a similar company, you wouldn’t say major in English, you’d tell them to see if any of the quantitative majors is interesting to them, if they’re not, then talk about a liberal arts or social science degree and the path they’d have to take, maybe a econ minor or MBA.

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If you’re among the best in your field and machines can’t do a better job than you in that field, regardless of what field you’re in, you’d be fine. Any company needs people with complementary skills: some generalists and a lot of specialists in a variety of areas. To be most flexible, a specialist should be equipped to think more broadly and not lose the bigger picture, while a generalist should educate him-/herself with relevant specialized knowledge.

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It is worth asking folks like @blossom what fraction of companies screen resumes electronically and, of those, to what extent the companies screen out folks without technical skills before their resumes even see the light of day.

My suspicion is that, Fidelity’s one program aimed at liberal arts folks aside, many of the screens likely rule out people who have no technical skills for many positions – not HR or recruiting, but other positions like project management, etc. In any case, the employers can say nice words but the proof is in what their screening software does.

I think I said this earlier, but technical skills does not mean major. A student can acquire technical skills in other courses or outside courses. And, someone majoring in sociology might well have the opportunity to develop skills in data analysis.

Also, companies have hired (and I assume are still hiring) young folks to do social media work. Are they hiring for technical skills there or do they assume bright people can figure out what they need to figure out?

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As a practical matter for the current college student, is the issue not merely whether the student has some technical skills (has taken a number of helpful courses) but that their resume actually reflects this in some way, e.g. a minor? That is, in the current employment market, how common is it that a transcript accompanies the resume for new/recent college grads or for summer internships sought by current students?

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There are also many people who learn the skills online ( and can get assessments by taking online tests). These skills can often exceed skills from some of the weaker schools. This is becoming more in more prevalent in many fields not just technology. So the trend may be that AI filters out those who don’t have the “certifications” and the certifications are not going to be coming from colleges but from third party services who create systems that employers want to test.
There are many kids for whom getting a job is a mystery. They mistaken believe that their degree is a gold ticket. They often end up behind the wiser kids who have enhanced their degrees with experience, practical knowledge and real skills.

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In other words, the history degree is nice but you better enhance it with outside certification of marketable technical skills and experience so you can keep up with those who acquired those skills in college

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  1. You do not have to be world class in math to go into a math-heavy major and associated career (e.g. computing, engineering, actuarial, etc.). Many who are merely good at math do well in such majors and associated careers. However, those who do not enjoy such things are unlikely to do that well in such majors or associated careers.
  2. More accurate is that it is very helpful to have a good knowledge of at least basic math and statistics for any career (basic as in high school and frosh-level college level). This does not necessarily require a "math heavy math light" major, but it could mean taking elective courses in such areas outside of the major. But note that other skills (not just math and statistics) can be generally useful: sales (not typically offered as a college course, but almost anything in one's career involves selling something, whether it be products, services, ideas, or yourself), logical thinking, communication skills, etc..
  3. While law school may incentivize grade-grubbing, it is not necessarily true that cultural studies or gender studies will be the easiest A majors for all students. For business school, work experience between BA/BS and MBA is desired, so choice of BA/BS major can be relevant to getting such work experience.
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Or perhaps they end up behind those who have well-connected parents, or at least those in the SES level of the desired professions, who have more specific knowledge of how employment markets for the desired jobs work.

The first generation to college students may have no family members who are familiar with college graduate jobs and employment markets, so they may not have knowledge about them that is commonly assumed for those with college graduate parents. Perhaps that may be why such students benefit more than others from “prestigious” colleges that attract more on-campus recruiting from some types of employers and/or have better-resourced career centers to assist them.

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@ucbalumnus already responded to this with one thing I’d have said, but I’d also like to point out that there are two separate claims in the quote above, and they need to be better supported:
[ul][]Is it actually true that Millennials change jobs at a more rapid pace than previous generations? I remember reading news pieces back in the day about how insanely frequently early-career Xers were changing jobs—so is this just the kind of editorial hazing early-career folks get, and then we forget they were subject to it? In any event, for this claims to hold we need to see whether early-career Millennials were more likely to change jobs quickly than those in previous cohorts. (Bonus issue: Those currently entering the workforce from college are Gen-Z, not Millennials, so a discussion of whether early signs are that they’re acting differently or not needs to be a part of the conversation.)
[]Whether the first claim is supported or not, is there any evidence that employers are less willing to undertake early-career training than in the past? I’m not certain precisely how this would be measured, but I would think that with all the research into Human Resources over the past few decades there has to be some way that this one can be evaluated.[/ul]

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Google has many sources for median job tenure for those aged 25-34 as 3.2 years, compared to over 10 years for boomers. It is rational to spend less on training accordingly, and I can offer anecdotal examples of such cutbacks only.

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This is one I’m struggling with at the moment too. One of the factors that went into DS19’s decision to chose a major in Physics over Engineering was the rigid structure of Engineering degrees that would leave him with very little room to explore any electives as he has broad interests. This year he opted for Classics and History for electives. When I was discussing other potential elective courses with him I suggested perhaps it would be wise if he picked up some CS courses but he was resistant. His program already requires one course with an option of a 2nd. Having taken 3 years of CS in high school he didn’t want to take any more. He is planning on taking additional math courses however potentially enough to be able to declare a minor. Well fast forward and he has been reviewing the requirements for qualifying for the various research awards offered in the faculty and the one thing that stands out is the desire for students with programming ability. That was enough to encourage him to consider taking some elective CS courses after all (really what do parents know?). The question then becomes should he take sufficient courses for a minor? If he wanted to declare minors in both Math and CS that would take up all his remaining elective space and then some (he’d need 4 additional courses above his degree requirements). That would also then rule out taking anymore humanities courses. So even with the additional flexibility of the Science degree over Engineering he’s still going to be hard pressed to fit in all the courses that would serve to enhance his degree. He’s going to go discuss it all with his academic advisor so I’ll be curious to see what they recommend.

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I think this too often is lost in these discussions. As a first generation college student - not just in my immediate family, but in my extended family, people really underestimate the transition. I often cringe when people are very cavalier about directing a first generation student away from a pre-professional path with platitudes of major and/or college not mattering. For THESE kids it absolutely can matter. They don’t have the safety net of parents who are connected or understand how to leverage a degree. They often do not have the luxury of time to develop other skills when they are expected to help the family financially. I imagine it’s much, much easier now with the plethora of information that wasn’t as readily available when I was young adult - but kids may still not know what they don’t know.

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I work in a pharmaceutical company. Our company has 130,000 employees, of which about 8000 employees in IT department. Maybe less than 5% of those have a true CS degree. The rest has degrees anywhere from business to finance to chemistry, communication, supply chain, history, English, humanities. We also have IT VPs with degree in history, English, humanity, supply chain. It was a somber experience when the LT shared in the power point showing different degrees that made up the LT.

The reason I brought that up is because somehow this threads turned into anti liberal art college which is ridiculous, and so wrong. As I said before, I have done a lot of hiring, and I care VERY little what degree you have (as long as you have one), and where you went to school means absolutely nothing to me. I am in IT and I have never done coding or take any programing courses. But I am the best at developing the most efficient processes for people to follow, listening to business challenges visualize it using flow charts, mind map, visio, power point, whatever tool available to me, present it in a way that a VP with 1 minute attention span can understand and appreciate and approve my proposed solutions. The execution piece is often the easiest part, that’s where the technical guys can do. And it is relative easy and inexpensive hire developers (compared to other skills needed to build a validated application). If you have leadership, communication, ability to break down complex problems in simple terms/visualization/flow chart, proactive in any situation, get the stuff done or ensure things get done by someone else, don’t drop the ball, etc
You will go up in the company, it doesn’t matter if you had a degree in garbage collecting or CS from MIT. No one ever asked what degree you had to give you the responsibility, and it didn’t matter too much what you got hired for initially.

It’s not a coincidence that in my company, the contractor rate for different skillsets are: Developer<Validation/tester<Business Analyst<Project Manager. It’s also not a coincidence that consulting firm like KPMG, McKinsey has their hourly rate of 200-500 per hours. Do you really think we paid them that much for their ability to program? It’s definitely NOT for their technical skillset, but for, typically a liberal art type skillset (I know this is very narrowly defined, and note for that I said “skillset”, not “degree” or “person). Liberal art folks tend to be better at communication and presenting ideas (it’s the same as saying STEM folks tend to be better at Calculus. So don’t get all upset on me here. Of course this is NOT to say STEM folks can’t communicate, nor LA folks can’t do math). Note that the Validation/tester, Business Analyst, Project Manager type of role do not required technical or STEM degree. I could find cheap developers easily by outsource (same work for 1/5 of the cost). But I couldn’t outsource BA/PM type of roles easily. Much harder to find a good BA than a developer.

Related to @doschicos point about hiring someone and training them. That’s exactly what I have done. I encourage more hiring managers to do it. I had/have a budget of about 20-25 M to manage the applications I support. That includes building new application (we would have additional capital budget for that); enhancements, upgrades, but fixes, and operational support. I hired a ton of contractors to do the work. I was paying around $80-$100 an hour for validation specialists (people who write test scripts and execute them). I always got the resources from this Indian company, they sent people over here on visa, take 30-60% cut depending on the negotiation. It was during 2008 where a lot of women I know in my town lost their jobs. The validation/testing work is relative easy, they need a little training, and certainly does NOT need a STEM degree! I have an epiphany – why not hiring those stay at home moms? I presented to my boss a plan to hire 2 resources who had never done validation work before at the rate of $30/hour (this was a huge increase from what they got before). I personally trained them, after 6 months you couldn’t even tell these 2 resources never had validation experience before working for me. I doubled their rate. And eventually they found permanent jobs within the company making solid 6 figure salaries because of the skill and experiences they had working for me. It went on for years I would hire people from the town including college kids with no experience and trained them. And I saved the company a ton of money. Did I ever look at what degree they had? NOPE! And of course we have internship program and it’s a whole other topic.

A lot of you seem to imply that Pharmaceutical companies only hired chemist or Pharmacist, finance companies only hire accountants, or tech companies only hired CS/tech degree. That is so far from the truth. A company needs all sort of people to run. And those who show leadership, communication, and the ability to get things done will come out on top, regardless of what you went to college for.

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https://www.ebri.org/docs/default-source/ebri-issue-brief/ebri_ib_474_tenure-28feb19.pdf has some historical trends in employee tenure mostly since 1983 (when the Boomers were 19-37 years old).

Figure 2 (which goes back to 1951, but covers only male employees) shows that 25-34 year old male employees had short tenure for generations, but tenure for older male employees was on a downward trend until the 2000s. Figure 3 indicates a smaller upward trend in tenure for female employees of all age ranges.

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@gwnorth I haven’t written a resume in a long time. But, thinking out loud, for the college student who doesn’t have a ton to put on the resume anyway, perhaps the Education section could include some sort of bullet point list of the helpful side courses. As an example, perhaps a line underneath the spot where the major(s) and minor(s) are stated, like “Additional coursework: Computer Programming I, Data Structures, Financial Accounting I, Linear Algebra,” with multiple courses grouped by subject area. If anyone has thoughts on such an approach, I’m all ears.

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^That’s actually exactly what I did.

Even though I was a science major I still wanted to emphasize my technical and business classes.

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Did I say that? I did not say they “prefer”. Don’t put words in my mouth. I said they, and other large firms, hire and value liberal arts majors. They have a range of jobs and value different backgrounds.

I know plenty of Fidelity folks as well. Many don’t have quant backgrounds. In fact, in certain areas, Fidelity uses teams, incorporating people from different backgrounds, all bringing different perspectives and strengths. That team might incorporate a quant who has a PhD from MIT, as an example. Not all have or need that quant background.

Having an entire career in that industry, I am confident in my knowledge. I’d also speculate that companies like Fidelity, and other companies who do continue to invest in training, have less turnover than many others.

Love your post, @Nhatrang. It rings true with my experiences and observations and reflects the non-narrow thinking that companies desire and has surely led to your own success.

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^^ Write that you are proficient in simple MS tools (ppt, excel, visio, mind map, etc
), and make sure that you do.

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When I first started working in the early 90’s companies would pay for or offer classes to enhance skills. Almost all had tuition reimbursement. That slowed after the dot.com bust and stopped after the great recession. It’s a catch-22. Investing in employees and loyalty is a two-way street. Companies don’t invest because employees leave. Employees leave because companies don’t invest.

One of the reasons for job hopping is money. Companies no longer offer “promotions” after a certain level. If you apply for an internal job it’s a “lateral move” even if it’s more responsibility. The only way to get a significant raise is to leave the company. It’s really a terrible concept. You have internal people who can do the job and have proven themselves but companies will go outside and hire people for more money and take a risk on whether they’re actually qualified or not. And they wonder why employees aren’t loyal?