Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies
Biological and biomedical sciences
Computer and information sciences
English language and literature/letters
Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics
Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities
Mathematics and statistics
Multi/interdisciplinary studies
Philosophy and religious studies
Physical sciences and science technologies
Psychology
Social sciences and history
Visual and performing arts
The rest were in majors that were more obviously preprofessionally oriented. Obviously, if some of those choosing the liberal arts majors above were choosing primarily for preprofessional reasons (e.g. computer science for computing jobs, biology for pre-med purposes, etc.), and they could be counted as such, that would skew the count even more toward preprofessional choices.
No one is saying that preprofessional majors are automatically better (as you say, many are poor choices) – just that they are more common (outside of the forum demographic).
@ucbalumnus, you’re making the assumption that, e.g., business majors are necessarily preprofessional in a way that, e.g., history majors aren’t. As I said in my post you were responding to, that’s an assumption that isn’t defined well enough to be accepted without further investigation.
Is that because the growth in the percentage of HS graduates going to college has mostly come through growth in preprofessional degrees for jobs that previously wouldn’t have required a degree at all?
A generation ago would you have needed (or wanted) a college degree to work in “parks, recreation and tourism” or “hotel management”?
As an FYI kinesiology has become a popular pre-med pathway.
This is my preference as well. Unfortunately for many that’s not a realistic expectation for financial reasons and for others the only reason they’re in university is because they perceive that employers won’t hire them without some sort of degree. All they want is the credential.
As to whether or not Canadians are inclined to think of university vocationally I tend to agree. There are several reasons for that I think:
the influence of first generation immigrants from cultures who tend to be more focused on practical degrees and professional pathways especially those from China, India, Pakistan, and the Middle East
employers here seem to be fairly conservative in their hiring practices and seem to be less willing to think outside the box and consider more non-traditional degrees when hiring
the challenging employment landscape that Millennials seem to have graduated into re precarious work and the gig economy. My kids' generation, Gen Z, see this and are feeling much more pressure to gain practical and employable skills
an ever increasing percentage of the population attending university means that employers can afford to be more selective in choosing applicants with specific credentials
“computer science for computing jobs, biology for pre-med purposes, etc.), and they could be counted as such, that would skew the count even more toward preprofessional choices.”
Agree, most CS majors are pre-professional, you could argue that CS at some colleges are also partially vocational, as you do a lot of hands-on projects jr and sr year.
@shawbridge I agree that Canadians are more vocationally focused. I also agree that economics is taught as a tool in business school rather than as a discipline. To me, it is not really a problem.
As I have said earlier, for those truly interested in economics should be doing math/physics as an undergrad. They would be better prepared for the vigor of grad study in the discipline. They can also take economics as a minor if they so choose. Both of mine have minors in the humanities, one in Asian studies and the other in English. Like you, I believe it is a good thing, but likely for very different reasons.
Ever since my early teens, I was deeply impressed by Dr. Johnson’s concept of the Renaissance Man. I know this is no longer possible, seeing how knowledge is exploding right in front of my eyes. Being a minimalist at heart, my suggestion to my children was that they should be as competent as possible in two- English and math. Then I wanted to throw in some physical training as well, for I also believe that the body is the temple of the mind. Beyond that, they were given the freedom to explore and discover. Once my basic demands were met, the rest of the time was all theirs.
My philosophy has always been this: education is my servant but not my master. It helps me form judgements. I then put those judgements to the test. If it works, I keep it; if not, I would tweet it or scrap it, depending on how faulty it is. My hope was that this iterative process will improve my decision-making process and it has.
Over time, I learned I can improve my judgements by thinking in probabilities instead of using the on/off switch of the mind. I also came to understand that good decisions can have bad results, and bad decisions can have good results. No, my thinking is more nuance than many posters may think. My apologies for any mis-communication.
My observations largely track with the WSJ article: elite colleges matter more in professions where credentials are more qualitative (e.g. investment banks and elite consulting firms are looking for a confirmation that a person is smart overall as opposed to a particular skillset), while major means significantly more in quantitative professions.
The obsession with elite schools isn’t necessarily misplaced, but rather that going to an elite school is what actually allows a student to engage in the more qualitative “life of mind” education without much detriment to their employment prospects. Essentially, one of the biggest benefits of an elite school is that a student really can major in whatever they want and explore topics with a lot more freedom while still coming out fine in the job market.
Once you get past those top 20 elite schools, though, major simply matters a lot more in terms of job prospects (starting at, say, the Michigan/Berkeley-level of the rankings).
We see so many questions about academics, lifestyle, programs and general job prospects on these forums, but I’m amazed about how few questions there are about what will become one of the most important aspects of the life of a student: the career services office. Is there a central career services office for all majors or do different programs have different career services offices? (Many schools beyond the elite tier are going to have separate career services offices for, say, engineering and business majors that no other majors can use.) Which companies recruit on campus and which majors do they actually seek out? What is the outcome hiring data for those career services offices (e.g. geographic distribution, industries, companies, breakdown by major, etc.)?
Here’s my own personal experience: I studied finance and economics at a Big Ten school. To the layperson, those might seem to be fairly similar or connected majors. A lot of the CC community might look at the economics major as being more quantitative and rigorous than the finance major… and it was in many ways. However, at my college, the finance department was in the College of Business, while the economics department was in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The College of Business career services office BLEW THE LAS RESOURCES AWAY AND IT WASN’T EVEN CLOSE. The College of Business would bring companies directly to campus, set up meetings and interviews, and providing many other levels of support. Meanwhile, the College of LAS career services consisted of job postings and do-it-yourself applications that might as well have been doing job searches on Monster. This is a pretty well-ranked college, too, so I can’t imagine what the differences would be farther down in the rankings. (As a result, I cringe whenever I see suggestions that majoring in economics would be better than majoring in finance or accounting at schools that offer those latter majors… and I love economics! It’s great to major in econ at elite schools like Harvard or Stanford where undergrad business programs don’t exist, but telling that to someone that is going to places even as highly-ranked as Notre Dame, Michigan or USC is just flat out wrong. The career services support difference between business programs and liberal arts programs is a wide gulf at most schools.)
Frankly, as I’ve worked with multiple companies that hire scores of college graduates, the focus on major has become even more important over the years. The screening process for any desirable job with a large number of applicants is going to demand essentially a person that matches the job description exactly (which includes “preferred major(s)” being a de facto requirement).
Also, everyone wants better writers… but they want better writing from job candidates in addition to the core skills that businesses need (e.g. programming, accounting, etc.). I say that as someone with a finance and economics background that now spends most of my days writing as a lawyer. I unfortunately see quite a bit of terrible writing skills from my colleagues (who are mostly engineers and computer scientists), but the business reality is that their quantitative skills are hard-to-find “must have” skills, while writing skills are more of “nice-to-have” item. When there are 20 programming jobs available for each marketing/communications job, the supply and demand for quantitative skills vs. qualitative skills are simply totally different.
Note that the WSJ linked article was not talking division between top 20 elite schools and others. Their highest selectivity grouping included colleges like SUNYA and UC Boulder that are not among USNWR top 100, as well as colleges like Harvard and Cornell. The next tier down in selectivity included colleges like Northern Illinois and CSU: Sac. They found the following the following regression coefficients for difference in earnings between the top selectivity and next tier down, as described above, The higher the number, the greater the earnings associated with college selectivity. The controls include both family income and SAT score, among other things.
College Selectivity Boost in Earnings: Graduated in 1992 Sample
Business Major: +0.120**
Social Science Major: +0.105**
Engineering Major: +0.077*
Education Major: +0.61*
Humanities Major: +0.55
Sciences Major: -0.36 Significant at 5% level
*Significant at 10% level
Most majors had a small, but statistically significant difference in earnings. with the greater selectivity However, humanities and sciences majors were an exception and did not have a statistically significant difference in earnings after controls.
As I hinted at, there are some limitations with this study including the selectivity groupings and using a sample that graduated in the early 1990s, when the job market differed. Another issue is some missing key controls. For example, the Dale & Krueger studies found a difference in earnings when controlling for stats, but that difference in earnings became “generally indistinguishable from zero” after control for colleges applied to. Being the type of person who applies to selective colleges was associated with a significant increase in earnings, even if the student does not attend the selective college. This makes sense to me, as I’d expect students who apply to highly selective colleges over local alternatives are also more likely to target high salary type positions in high cost of living cities over local alternatives.
A comparison of median first year earnings by major and selectivity based on the CollegeScorecard database is below. Only students who had federal FA (includes both grants and loans) are included. Unfortunately I have no way to control for student characteristics, so most of the earnings differences by college tier likely relate to things like students at highly selective colleges being more likely to be excellent students who were successful in their major, as well as more likely to be the type who applies to higher salary positions.
Beyond this effect, economics, math, and CS appear to have significantly higher first year earnings as college selectivity increases. There was a notable difference between USNWR T20 and USNWR T21-50. In contrast several other l fields like engineering, nursing, and education had little difference in earnings between T20 and T21-50. Part of this effect may relate to influence from “elite” IB and consulting, which have hiring that is sensitive to prestige of college name. SV CS is generally not though of as prestige sensitive like IB/consulting, but may be more sensitive to differences in both student quality (problem set interview based hiring) and rates in applying to high cost of living SV vs local.
The first year earnings below and college post graduate employment results generally do not suggest that majoring in econ over accounting is “flat out wrong,” from an employability perspective, although I don’t doubt that many individual colleges are exceptions to this generalization. Of course there are also many important considerations beyond just employability. Within employability, one should also should consider what types of work they’d like to do after graduating. Accounting is great if you’d like to do something involving accounting after graduation, but I’d expect most students do not want to do accounting for a living.
T20 = T20 USNWR that are not Ivies
T50 = T21-50 USNWR
All = All 4-year colleges in database
------------------ MEDIAN FIRST YEAR EARNINGS BY MAJOR -----------
Major Ivies T20 T50 Pri T50 Pub All
Computer Science+ $110k $104k $86k $81k $66k
Computer Engineering $81k $84k $76k $70k
Electrical Engineering $83k $73k* $75k $76k $67k
Mathematics $82k $78k $61k $50k $46k
Economics $74k $75k $59k $49k $47k
Mechanical Engineering $71k $72k $66k $66k $63k
Engineering (All Majors) $70k $73k $69k $67k $63k
Nursing $74k $66k $74k^ $62k $64k
Business $62k $70k $61k $54k $42k
Accounting $64k $66k $58k $48k
All Students $60k $57k $51k $44k $41k
Political Science $50k $44k $43k $35k $34k
Sociology $45k $35k $38k $31k $30k
Psychology $42k $36k $33k $29k $29k
English $36k $34k $34k $28k $27k
Biology $36k $34k $32k $29k $28k
Education $32k $37k $37k $35k $33k
Chemistry $31k $38k $36k $34k
Drama/Theater $23k $22k $21k $21k
Music $21k $24k $24k $26k
+Includes Computer and Information Sciences Major
*Electrical Engineering increases from $73k to $101k, if you include MIT EECS
^Nursing drops from $74k to $67k without NYU
This is a little hard to believe that ivy grads in CS and EE get more in first year than grads from Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech et al, which is why I’m not sure MIT was excluded in the first place. It’s possible that grads from Chicago, NU, Duke WashU got jobs in lower paying areas of the country, and CMU not being in the top-20 probably hurt the number as well. Or maybe those Stanford and Cal Tech grads forgot to include stock in their earnings reporting
The thing that grabbed my attention as a possible reason for some of the variation was
which made me wonder if local salary averages have something to do with it, since college graduates who don’t go immediately on to grad school are most likely to take jobs relatively near where they went to college.
This could explain part of the Ivies being lower than the T20, since the Ivies include some fairly rural colleges, but the other 12 of the USNWR T20 colleges (with the possible exception of Notre Dame, if you’re unwilling to allow that it’s within Chicago’s gravitational field) are in or adjacent to at least medium-sized cities.
What would interest me: The results normalized by cost of living in the area surrounding the college. Not sure how to obtain those stats with enough granularity to be useful, though.
I excluded MIT EECS from the EE grouping because MIT’s EECS major primarily is composed of students working in software engineering type CS positions, rather than Electrical Engineering positions. The coursework also primarily involves CS for most students, rather than EE. In another thread, ucbalumnus linked to a report showing that the vast majority of the MIT EECS majors that year chose the “Computer Science and Engineering” subcategory of EECS that is described at https://www.eecs.mit.edu/academics-admissions/undergraduate-programs/course-6-3-computer-science-and-engineering . EE isn’t listed in the title for this subcategory, and little EE coursework is required . The 6 MIT EECS students who chose the “Electrical Science and Eng” that does not include CS in the title had a median salary of $86k in the MIT report.
The CollegeScorecard earnings are based on federally reported tax filings, so stocks would not be unlikely to included for any of the colleges, but sign on bonuses would be included. If you’d like to look up specific colleges, the user interface is at https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ .
The median earnings listed in my earlier post are influenced by the number of students in the sample. Colleges that have many students within the major have the greatest influence on the overall median listed in the summary. Colleges that have too small a sample size to be significant are not included in the database. Unfortunately EE has too small a sample size to be significant for nearly all T20 colleges, so the results are not meaningful. T20 colleges often have few EE majors, perhaps because many students favor the higher starting salaries associated with CS (in SV).
However, CS has a significant sample size at most T20 colleges, so most colleges are included. The highest first year earnings CS colleges listed in the database are as follows. 3 of the top 5 were Ivies, so it is not surprising that the 8 Ivies combined have a high median.
Cost of living is key factor, particularly for CS above. However, in many fields, this can have more to do with the student population than how rural the college is. For example, Brown did surprising well in the CS first year earnings above. Part of the reason for Brown’s high CS earnings is because almost all Brown CS grads take a first job in high cost of living areas. The percentages as listed by Brown OIR are below.
Almost no Brown CS grads remain in the area near Brown. Instead almost all CS grads move to one of the highest cost of living areas in the United States. Highly selective public colleges tend to have a much larger portion of CS grads who remain in state, and their in state salary may go a lot farther than in SV where a basic home can cost >$2 million
Someone needs to do a study that controls for cost of living differences. These stats tell you very little without controlling for cost of living differences. A NE school can boast an average $100k starting salary where most grads stay in NY and Boston but those grads aren’t financially better off than the SE kids earning $65k working in Atlanta and Houston. So I don’t get comparing starting salaries Iike this.
@FranktheTank We don’t have elite schools here so it is a non factor. Once that is eliminated from the equation, your experience is a duplicate of mine, even though we do not have work experience in common.
My point is that admission into an elite is a Hail Mary, particularly for those without a hook. For almost all students the odds are far better to focus on the best paying majors that one can manage and let it go at that.
I don’t think English is a good major but a great minor (to have). Employers seem to assume they can all write. My kid certainly got a lot of traction because of it, but it is still her quant skills that bring in the dole.
I never regretted majoring in English Lit in college because it was the only major which allowed an undisciplined student to graduate without going to lectures for many classes. Just write papers and maybe show up to take finals. One thing I looked for in colleges where my kid chose to attend is that the college very good to excellent in all major departments because I know my kid was likely to change intended majors.
I like the fact that my kid is majoring in an area which he enjoys even if the field may not offer that many job opportunities. I told my kid that his dad worked hard to give him that freedom/flexibility, the level of freedom I thought I didn’t have when I applied to college. But on further thoughts, I realized I sucked in all majors except for English Lit. I found out I was bad in Physics, Engineering. Comp Sci, Biology and Econ even though I had 800 in SAT Math. So I was forced to find a major which allowed me to graduate in 4 years because I could not stand to be in college for longer than 4 years. I told my kid when he was a freshman in high school he didn’t have to go to college if he didn’t want to, and I think this had an unintended effect of scaring him to do well academically and improve his writing so he can apply to one of those top colleges.
There was a few posts earlier in the year regarding Bloomsburg University vs Pitt for preparation for Med School. Bloomsburg is advertising their acceptance rate for Med School at 93%. Not sure how that measures up?
On a personal note, I know a kid that was hired by Deloitte upon graduation with a Business degree. Perhaps it is more about the individual and their drive than the schools name? One of the interesting things was that they were looking for employees with more diverse background. Who really know.
Good point! And for some people money isn’t a consideration. My SIL’s sister works as a cashier at a family owned hardware store. Her husband makes a ton of money and she doesn’t need to work, but she likes to stay busy and earn a bit of fun money.
