“therefore, they have both chosen to major in something that they like, but also has the salary to provide them the lifestyle that they would like to have.”
That’s sort of the best case scenario and not, I don’t think, what the discussion is about. If you like say a foreign language or a science (just to choose stem and non-stem interests), it would be hard to get a job right out of college that would provide for that kind of lifestyle. That’s why both show up in the most regretted major category.
LTmomof2 makes a good point. When it comes to regrets (as in the title of this thread), post-graduation income, while not guaranteeing happiness, can make a young adult unhappy if it doesn’t allow for a particular lifestyle.
People have different wants and expectations. Regrets come into play when there is a disconnect between those expectations and outcomes.
Some majors may simply have different expectations.
English majors who wanted to be screen writers or work for a publisher. Employed, gainfully as an x, but not happy. The social worker who wanted to work overseas for a NGO and work at the local clinic near home. The history major who goes to law school and learns it’s not at all like being on Law and Order.
Especially early on in their careers.
Most of the engineers and cs friends I have, work as engineers and programmers in that field. Not really as many surprises.
It’s a personality as well.
It’s not necessarily about the money.
And most liberal arts majors are trained to analyze things critically.
Why would it surprise anyone that as part of this type of poll, a group of social scientists would tend to consider the issues presented with the same type of reflection, as a percentage.
Another potential source of regret: student assumes that s/he can get an interesting major-related job at graduation (and is ok with the income level of such jobs), but finds out at graduation that such interesting major-related jobs are scarce and highly competitive, so that most students in the major end up in less interesting jobs (whether or not major-related) at graduation.
@ucbalumnus and @theloniusmonk, remember that these most and least regretted majors are those named by an almost certainly skewed sample, and also that the categorization of majors in the lists is nothing short of bizarre. Therefore, lines like “that’s why [certain majors] show up in the most regretted major category” or ascribing a “potential source of regret” can’t be based on conclusions from the study in the OP.
I don’t frown upon it. It sounds like your kids are following a path they like filling a niche where they fit.
What I frown upon is telling everyone that’s the only way to do things. I had a relatively lengthy conversation yesterday with a (capable) senior not heading to college. He wants to become a scuba instructor. We discussed various ways this can be done. He told me he’s happy in a shared shack or apartment on the beach doing whatever job he can pick up on the side to make it work.
Different people, different goals, both fine to follow to fill a niche in the world.
FWIW I also mentioned to the lad if it didn’t work out he can change paths later. This is true for the college bound too.
There are quite a few high school students who have decided they’re fine without a lot of things - by choice. This leaves them more options than those who need a lot of money to support their desired lifestyle.
I have just finished performance review for my US and ASPAC team members. Not surprisingly, the 2 out of 3 of our top performers have English and Criminal Justice degrees from TCNJ (I just asked them during our 1 on 1). The other has a Supply Chain degree from Rutgers. We have 2 measurements, Result and Leadership. These top performers got Exceeded in both Result AND Leadership. Only 5% of the employees in the company got such rating. The one with English degree is the go-to person to proof read all the PPT and SOPs, she is an extremely valuable member of my team. If she told us she is leaving today for another company, we would more likely to counter the offer if all possible. The exceeded performers will get 150% of planned bonus, Long Term Incentive stocks, and a huge boost in merit increase. Their total compensation could easily exceed their superior, and rightfully so!
She said the problem with English and humanities majors students is that they just don’t think to apply to companies like ours. It’s a shame, really. When I take over the internship program next year, I will certainly make changes. This is such an eye opening thread for me. And all the surveys shared here, reminded me of the presidential polls in 2016. Every single poll was so wrong, not reflecting reality at all. I wonder why.
Regret, like almost everything else in life, is relative to expectation. If the expectation was primarily monetary, a graduate may be disappointed if s/he wasn’t close to meeting her/his monetary goals. I suspect the motivation isn’t monetary for the majority of history or English majors. Some of them will succeed spectacularly relative to their modest expectations. On the other hand, some STEM majors will surely be disappointed when they discover they couldn’t keep up with the competitions as their skills and energy levels fail to keep pace with the younger crowd, especially relative to their compensation levels.
With the amount of data and studies presented on this thread, we should be able to come up with some tentative answers to some of the thornier questions mentioned.
Are there a lot of English majors in investment banking or consulting? A good way to start is to look at how they recruit. Based on Manzi’s article I posted earlier, one of the basic filters Bain/BCG uses is a min. of 750 on the math and 1550 overall. My tentative conclusion is negative. Any corroborating evidence? Well, data was presented up-thread that few Cornell English majors are actually recruited for the MBB firms. I suspect the 750 M is a first impediment.
Do standardized tests lose their virility over time? This sounds plausible, but Kuncel’s TED talk disabused the idea by quoting the work done by Lubinski at Vanderbilt (at 9:10). Just think, an SAT given at age 13, can predict life achievement 25 years later. While those who scored in the top 1% are an impressive lot, those scoring in the top quarter of 1% are significantly more impressive than those who scored in the bottom quarter of 1%. Who could have predicted that? (Remember: we are talking general tendency here).
Are humanities students afraid of math? Once again, the Manzi article is helpful. For an individual student, just have a recent grad of the school pouring over the transcript. Did he avoid all the tough courses/ teachers? Did the student take “math for poets” to fulfill the basic math requirement and never touch the subject again? Or did he earn a minor in theoretical physics? Corroborating evidence? Look at his M score on the SAT. Is it consistent with the course selection pattern? If we are looking at general tendency, have a look at SAT scores of LA students over a number of school years. Do they score below average (better still, the median) for all students as a whole? Or only LA students in certain majors are the culprit.
My point is simply this: we are dealing with empirical questions with empirical solutions; there is really nothing to get emotional over. I think we are too hard on each other.
^This is interesting; I had not heard this before. Thinking out loud, no students have yet graduated from college since the 2016 SAT Redesign. Scales vary of course, but for the past year and a half, they’ve been like December, math -1 780, -2 770, -3 750, and thinking out loud, it would seem silly to distinguish between 750 and 770, 1 question difference, though I suppose if they feel the need for cutoffs, they have to draw the line somewhere. (For the first year and a half of the new test, math -1 = 800, so for college class of 2021 - 2022, that will have been the case, 2023 mixed, 2024 will have -1 somewhere between 790-770.) Currently, math 750 is 96th “user percentile,” but the percentiles are entirely fake, computed from the past three years and then assigned per score in Sept for the school year going forward. For composite, the 99th user percentile currently starts at 1510 and has been as low as 1490 or even 1480.
I’m finding myself glad that the vast majority of the world doesn’t give a hoot about SAT/ACT scores, with an even higher percentage once past high school.
Hopefully this doesn’t get taken as political, but rather as what it’s intended as—a rebuttal by someone who does some survey-based research and feels the need to stand up for my field: The polls in the 2016 presidential race were, on the whole, absolutely correct. The analysis of those polls was generally quite a bit off, but the polls themselves? They predicted the results really astonishingly well.
But that’s because they were well designed, used properly constructed random samples, asked clear questions, and so on. This stands in opposition to the poll referenced in the OP, which was based on a decidedly non-random (and possibly highly skewed) sample, didn’t appear to ask clear (or at least unambiguous) questions, and possibly more.
^^ I don’t know much about survey based research, but here’s an article discussing a survey of 248,000 college grads that also shows a lot of regret and includes STEM, social sciences and humanities majors.
Just having casual conversations with young adults or the parents of young adults convinces me that regret over college majors isn’t really all that rare. Parents can help prevent regret by trying to paint a realistic picture of the nature of work in general and the specifics of the career paths for the chosen major. In general, Biology is almost always going to require advanced education unless the grad is satisfied with being a lab tech and with the relatively low pay that goes with it. Social workers are mostly under paid and over worked and that’s not likely to change. An English major who loves literature might not like working for a finance or engineering firm proofing documents and to do anything with literature, they might have to teach high school or get a PhD and hope they can get one of the few academic jobs available. I think a lot of regrets are about things that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Colleges have some of the blame. They pick up on fad majors because they attract students even when the job outlook and forecasts don’t show a demand for the number of students graduating in the field. An example is film studies.
“ the societal push to equalize gender distributions may be deeply dysfunctional, because it can succeed only by having the perverse effect of pushing people into fields they do not prefer.”
I agree with the conclusion that few English majors go in to “elite” consulting, but don’t agree with the reasoning that this primarily relates to English majors not getting past a SAT score screen. I know you are a fan of Manzi’s article, but I wouldn’t take a single article based on one person’s experiences long ago as gospel, especially when nearly every other source I have seen on the subject conflicts to some degree, including peer reviewed research based on interviews of many persons. For example, in the post at https://www.douban.com/group/topic/30117011/ a former resume screener at Mckinsey from a similar time period instead phrases it as below. He agrees with Manzi that many (not all) consulting firms filter resumes by standardized test scores of some kind, partially as a way to normalize GPAs among students taking different sets of courses at different universities. However, he also says there is no hard minimum score cutoff. Instead he says a ~750+ math is “ideal” for top 3, and lower scores are okay for others. He does not suggest a CR score screen and certainly not a 750+800=1550 combined minimum cutoff.
Considering how high the typical math SAT range is at typical “elite” consulting target colleges, this doesn’t sound like an extremely limiting standard for “ideal.” I’d make a similar comment about the 3.5 GPA listed in the post. He also mentions many other considerations when evaluating resumes besides scores.
If you look at more recent discussions, they often talk about giving the PST or similar new test to applicants (after passing resume screen)… a test that is more closely relates to consulting type business problems than SAT. An example PST practice test from McKinsey’s website is at https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Careers%20REDESIGN/Interviewing/Main/Problem%20Solving%20Test%20PDFs/practice-test-A.ashx . There are also numerous interviews, focusing on a variety of non-score criteria, which are critical in making hiring decisions.
It’s unclear what portion of English majors would get through this large number of varied criteria had they applied. However, the limiting factor is not just the hiring criteria. I’d expect one of the largest contributing factors to why few English majors at Ivy-type colleges go in to consulting is lack of interest. Lots of college grads have near zero interest in management consulting. Surveys suggest interest may even be low among the minority who do go in to consulting. For example, in Harvard’s senior survey, only ~10% of Harvard grads whose first job is in consulting said they hoped to be working in consulting 10 years from now. . Consulting is one of the most common first jobs among Harvard grads, yet appears to be one of the least desired categories for careers. Even if an applicant with zero interest does apply due to lack of alternatives, their resume often reflects this lack of interest, which can be limiting. For example, the resume might not show any relevant past experience, such as key internships.
Brown is the highest consulting target college I am aware of that provides detailed by major stats. Their office of internal research reports the following number of grads by major working in “big 3” consulting firms upon graduation. I listed all majors than had >1 grad working at a “big 3” consulting firm during the 3 year period. This survey had a ~70% response rate, so one might divide the numbers below by 0.7 to estimate for full class. Some majors clearly have better representation than others, but the numbers don’t closely follow average math ability expectations, or as Manzi says a “degree in something hard: math, physics, electrical engineering, analytical philosophy, computer science, and so on.”
Average Number of Big 3 Consulting Hires By Major: Brown University
Economics/Econ+Math – 10.3 (2.5% of Econ grads)
Biology/Bio+Math/Hum Bio/Neuroscience – 3.7 (3% of Bio grads)
History/History of Art – 3 (5% of History grads)
Political Science – 2.7 (5% of Polisci grads)
Independent Concentration – 1.3 (3% of IC grads)
Computer Science/CS+Math – 1 (<1% of CS grads)
East Asian Studies – 1 (18% of East Asian Studies grads)
Engineering – 1 (2% of engineering grads)
Business – 0.7
Environmental Science – 0.7
International Relations – 0.7
Math/Applied Math – 0.7
Some of the regretted major categories from the first post make an okay showing, such as history and polisci grads. None of the least regretted categories do particularly well, which likely relates to the least regretted categories typically being less broad liberal arts and more specialized toward a particular non-consulting career (education is an exception, which is specialized non-LA, yet appears on regretted list). Persons who choose CS or engineering are often great at math, but they almost certainly had a different career in mind when they entered the major. It’s not surprising to be me that history and polisci grads have a better showing, as I’d expect those majors to have a greater overlap with interest in consulting. It’s also not surprising to me how poor a showing English majors have. It’s not clear how much of that poor showing is due to not being eligible due to hiring criteria and how much is not being interested, but the end result is “elite” consulting doesn’t appear to be a common career path for English majors.
I went to an Ivy, and my major was English. (Oh, the horror!) Before deciding to pursue a PhD I interviewed with several top consulting firms that came to campus, and I received a very generous offer from one of the “elite” firms mentioned above. I never had to leave campus for an initial job interview because they all came to us. English majors were well represented in the applicant pool at my university, though for many of us, these firms were not our first (or even second, third, or fourth) choices. Career Services encouraged us to apply because English majors at the university had a great track record with receiving consulting offers. (Contrary to popular belief, we do more than analyze literature. Employers understood that.) Still, consulting was not a desirable option for most of the English majors I knew. I am currently an English professor, and I can say the same is true for students pursuing an English major at my college.
Of course, back then they never asked about my SAT scores. (Though I’m sure many on this thread would be surprised that my math scores would not have disqualified me anyway.)
While interesting, your experience doesn’t necessarily have much to do with recruiting in 2020. Several firms have stopped all on campus recruiting and most rely much more heavily on electronic submission and screening, which provides better metrics for the EEO and other folks concerned about hiring data. I am delighted your English majors are pursuing other options better suited for them.
“Surveys suggest interest may even be low among the minority who do go in to consulting. For example, in Harvard’s senior survey, only ~10% of Harvard grads whose first job is in consulting said they hoped to be working in consulting 10 years from now. . Consulting is one of the most common first jobs among Harvard grads, yet appears to be one of the least desired categories for careers.”
Consulting is an up or out career with huge attrition. Most people choose it to gain broad business experience before moving on to work for a company in something that isn’t called “consulting”. In contrast, white shoe lawyers who have a similar up or out career path still call themselves “lawyers” when they go to work for a company.