That suggests that students with tight financial constraints are more likely to end up having regrets, because their choices may be limited to high debt versus “‘free’ places that really weren’t up to their caliber”.
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Reading these comments makes me feel a lot better about my daughter transferring out of engineering. Since starting college last year, her joy has come from working with other students as a mentor and an RA, so after three semesters, she made a change to a major that she thinks will give her more opportunities to do that kind of thing in the future. She seems more at peace and excited about the future for sure, but I’m still a little worried that she will be under-challenged in the classes she will be taking next semester and that won’t be able to feed herself after graduation without graduate school or a professional program.
My English degree landed me a career in tech. We need to stop thinking so narrowly about education choices. I hired a lot of English majors into high-paying tech jobs. I could always teach bright applicants the technical stuff; I couldn’t teach them to write and communicate well.
ETA: Lots of English majors also did well in their math and computer science courses. 
Thank you! May I ask if anyone who has done a science related major and regretted it, why? Also, for anyone who did an English major and didn’t regret it, what do you like about what you’re doing currently, and how did an English major help get you there?
I’m a retired English major. I took a job as a technical writer out of college, became a principal in a successful computer services startup in the 80s, cashed out and went to Harvard Business School, and rode out the rest of my career at various Fortune 100 companies hiring lots of English majors along the way. None of them every complained that I knew of.
But then those who did not do well (and did not self-educate as needed) were not the ones you hired… Also, English majors should be able to write and communicate well about English literature, but not all them necessarily do that well writing on technical subjects.
In more technical computing jobs there is a non trivial number of people with unrelated college degrees or no college degree at all, but who were self-educated as needed (or took some CS courses while studying an unrelated major). But that tends to be a more roundabout way to get to a more technical computing job than to study CS in college.
Of those with unrelated college degrees doing more technical computing jobs, the majors varied widely (including humanities and social studies), although physics appears overrepresented, while non-engineering pre-professional majors (e.g. business) and biology were underrepresented or absent.
I hired many “plain” English majors and invested in them what I needed them to know. I was more interested in their ability to become strong managers than deeply technical individual contributors. Their career path in my organization was management, not technology.
I can comment on the path of a good friend who was an engineering major. He was an international student whose father insisted on the degree.
My friend graduated with his engineering degree, got a good job…and then stalled. He hated engineering and thus became a decidedly mediocre engineer despite having done well in school. After about 8 years he’d had enough, and he went back to school for an education degree. He became an inspired and highly successful teacher. He ended up making more than he was as an engineer.
I was an English major. First of all, I’ve always loved literature, so being an English major was a wonderful way to spend four years. But beyond that English, like many other LA disciplines, forced me to use my critical thinking skills and develop my abilities to communicate both orally and in writing, and exposed me to a plethora of ideas and worldviews.
I run an international nonprofit. I use the skills I mentioned above every day. I don’t think they’re skills one can acquire only through an English degree, but I do think my degree has helped me in quite a few ways.
ETA: My husband was an Econ major. Throughout our careers he’s made more than I but I don’t regret my choice in the slightest. I would have hated his path and I don’t think I would have been very good at it.
“engineering major” whose " father insisted on the degree. " “He hated engineering.” Bad vibes from the beginning . Of course, there are many people who find they don’t like engineering, but there are many who have had very satisfying careers in engineering.
Major/career field is probably the most influential factor in earnings. A ROI report that does not consider this most influential factor is near useless since you are primarily measuring the rate of students who enter such fields, rather than the ROI of the college. For example, the top 5 colleges from the ROI report are:
- Albany College of Pharmacy
- St. Louis College of Pharmacy
- MA College of Pharmacy and Health Services
- MIT
- Stanford
When seeing this list the primary conclusion is not that private colleges have higher ROI than public colleges. It is that some fields of study are associated with higher earnings than others. Pharmacy and tech appear to be 2 of the higher earning fields. Stanford students who major in english instead of tech probably have a much lower ROI than suggested by the table. The specific first year earnings for Stanford students as listed in the CollegeScorecard database are below (only federal FA recipients, so small sample size).
Stanford New Grad Earnings
Computer Science majors – $126k
English majors – $24k
Also when you look at the maritime academies Maine Mass and elsewhere - they always seem to rise, 100 percent related to the fields of interest. And the ability to avoid seasickness one would assume.
Polisci and journalism major here – wound up in pension administration and communications. Helped to have decent, if not terribly deep, math skills. What tech I needed I learned on the job or taught myself.
I was interviewing for editing jobs in publishing in 1984-85. Jobs were relatively few and not well-paid. Going to a mutual fund company to work in pension admin paid about the same and I figured that if I got some subject area expertise, I could work my way into the communications side of that industry. It worked. Was a good match for my education, skills I’d acquired while working, and project management abilities.
@Happytimes2001, $15/hr doesn’t get much in our area. Renting a room in a house is $1000/mo, with an hour commute to downtown. S2 was working at some of those $13-15/hr jobs and he had no choice but to live at home, despite a degree from a good school. That, and wanting to improve his language skills for the jobs that interest him, are part of why he’s now an ex-pat. He can afford to live there on a modest income.
It’s those who are very academic, loving the in depth study of all sorts of things, tending to score 30+ on the ACT who opt for free schools (often merit aid) where the average ACT is about 21-23 and less than 2% are in their range. Those schools can only teach to their clientele and there just aren’t the opportunities that exist at Top 100 schools. The students hear from their friends/peers who go elsewhere and get wistful.
For these students there are usually options between free and full pay. Choosing free if it’s not at a decent school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Some things are worth paying for if the fit is right. There are no do-overs and transferring afterward rarely gives one as good merit money, plus they’ve missed a year and the classes they took probably aren’t up to par with their new peers.
FWIW, those I know still graduate and go on to successful lives, but they definitely regret their undergrad decision.
Those really top students who pick free at a Top 100 ish school don’t regret not going to “better” schools for more money. It’s only when there’s a mismatch in ability and college offerings with few peers.
@Creekland Top 100 is such an arbitrary cut-off. A top student can be challenged and get a great education far below USNWR top 100.
Bank of America is 20 per hour minimum wage. Tellers. Custodians whatever. There’s no reason for a college grad to not make 40k a year if they are really squeezed. Always hiring.
It is so difficult to get an academic tenure track position, that those few who do are very well qualified, and end up teaching at all sorts of places. A student of even extraordinary ability should be able to find similar minds in the faculty just about anywhere.
College loans is a common source of regret, especially among newer grads. Payscale did a similar survey about college regrets at https://www.payscale.com/data/biggest-college-regrets . Payscale is also obviously a biased subgroup that is more focused on salary than most, but one thing that is different about this survey is it asked about the reasons for regret. The most common regret was loans, as summarized below.
Looking back on your education what do you most regret? (Highest degree = Bachelor’s)
- No regrets – 33%
- Taking out student loans – 25%
- Area of study – 14%
- Not taking advantage of networking – 12%
- Time to complete degree - 7%
- Academic underachievement – 6%
- Choice of college – 3%
- How many degrees earned – <1%
Note that the survey above is limited to persons who completed college. The majority of low and middle SES students who start a 4-year college do not graduate. If you instead survey this majority of those with financial constraints who do not graduate, I expect the results would look very different.
Some high achieving students who attend top 100 USNWR schools regret their college, as do some high achieving students who attend below top 100 with scholarship. I’d expect only a small minority to regret college choice in both cases, but I haven’t seen specific numbers.
Anecdotally, I grew up in an area where among students who attended college, ~80% either went to a nearby SUNY or a nearby CC. Quite a few of the high achieving students I knew well went to SUNY or a CC (started at CC to save money, usually transferred to SUNY and/or RPI after CC). All appear to be satisfied with their college choice.
Well if this article is to be believed there maybe a resurgence in demand for liberal arts type graduates, so perhaps those regret figures will change.
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/2020-workplace-trends-liberal-arts-major-hiring.html
Very arbitrary. I put it in so readers wouldn’t think I meant Ivy/Top 20 or bust.
For certain majors the Top school isn’t even in the Top 20 “generic” schools.
I would suspect all state flagships would have plenty of opportunities assuming they had the major the student wanted. In reality, I don’t know about some schools personally - just the ones students from my school attend and then it’s those who come back to share at some point in time. That said, I’ve been working for 20 years now, many students do return to share, and there are definitely common themes. College A is not equal to College B. It is worth it to find a fit that is financially affordable. There can definitely be more than one right college, but there can also be wrong colleges (right/wrong being student specific).
Along the lines of “right,” I’ve seen oodles who didn’t get or couldn’t afford their top choice return thrilled with where they went so it’s worth keeping that in mind too.
The stats listed in the previous post (6% of college grads have underachievement regrets, esp if combined with the 3% noting college choice) would probably mirror what I’ve seen. It only happens in top students who love delving into material who select a school really beneath them. That’s not anywhere near the majority of students. It’s top kids who thrive on academics.
YMMV
Former English major here. Married to a foreign language major. Neither of us regretted our major. HOWEVER, even during our undergraduate years we were keenly aware that we had to be more proactive about getting internships and creative in selling our skills. Both of these helped to put us on the road to good careers.
We also have friends who parlayed their English and foreign language skills into very good graduate programs which in turn led to good careers.
Interesting that the science majors disappoint so many people. And no wonder. I’d say a huge percentage of students picked biology or chemistry not because they LIKED the fields, but because they thought they’d go to medical school. Surprise. After graduation, their job prospects were limited to low wage lab tech positions and (with extra training) teaching in high school.
So maybe the REAL point of that study is: unless you’re in a small selection of majors, just having a bachelor’s degree doesn’t really get you very far career-wise.
And that’s a whole different discussion than what OP is suggesting.
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