Thank you @ucbalumnus and @data10, I had overlooked that the table referred to terminal bachelors only, which means numbers are skewed towards students with lower grades and/or ambition OR lack of funds for grad school. So in the non preprofessional STEM fields, such as chemistry, biology and physics, a PhD, while not a professional qualification, can fulfill the same function in making you employable at the higher levels. (As far as biology is concerned, probably only with a biochemical or molecular engineering component - just randomly spouting employable sounding fields here, not my area).
And for non stem fields - a PhD and tenure track, law school or an MBA, or huuuge luck.
This is indeed important. Our school not only has students thinking about future career possibilities starting in 9th grade - shadowing as juniors - they also have them calculate out a budget based upon average starting salary. They need to factor in all typical bills from rent to insurance. Itâs very realistic IMO.
For some, the debt is worth it because money really isnât everything as long as thereâs âenoughâ for what they want. For others, they start looking at other options. Those options can be other jobs they want or perhaps not aiming for that Ferrari.
I just googled money (income)/happiness correlation and found an interesting Princeton study that said 75K seems to be the sweet spot. Iâll have to look at it more later as Iâm on my way to school now. I know from what I see, itâs not those who have oodles who are the happiest (as a rule). Itâs those who are content enjoying their lives with what they have. Those who think they need more and more money tend to be very stressed whether that âmoreâ is getting up to the poverty line or getting up to the million mark.
Instead of Stem vs. Liberal art majors, when hiring I look for either Generalist or Specialist. I chose the person based on my need at the moment. In the case of generalist - I look for leadership quality, project management skill (not necessarily PM certified), ability describe complex ideas into simple terms and visualize them on Power Point/visio (not just a bunch of words and bullets), type A personality who has a strong sense of urgency, etc. If they have those skill sets, I can throw them into anything and they do it. Experience matters because itâs hard to have those skills without prior experiences. But for junior level, experiences are less important. The type of degree matters very little, where they went to school means almost zero to me (except when the person is fresh out of college I tend to gravitate toward certain colleges because I trust them based on previous experience with certain colleges).
In case of specialist â the above skill sets become less important, but they need to be good at their specialty (i.e coder, data scientist, etcâŠ). If they have specialty AND have the (above) specialist quality, itâs a dime in a dozen.
Very rarely that I met someone who does exactly what they went to school for. College teaches one how to think, not necessarily on how to do a specific task, and everyone can learn how to do a task in the work place as long as they can think critically, have the personality and the drive.
Yes, they do, but it means so much more than knowing starting salaries. You need to know that social workers donât get rich, but also that you donât have to live on the streets if thatâs your major.
While there arenât a lot of jobs with the title âhistorian,â there are jobs for history majors. I work with first gen students. They have had little exposure to the breadth and depth of careers out there and tend to think that a nursing major makes one a nurse but a history major who doesnât want to be a history teacher has no job openings. I often hear things like, I want to be an on-air reporter for the TV station. Do you have a reporting major? Eyes wide open means you understand that your training does not always translate into a specific job and thereâs quite a bit that can be done with a communications major. It means understanding that no matter how good a job it is in terms of starting salary, ânursingâ is a science major and if you donât like biology and chemistry (or arenât very good at it), itâs a poor choice.
Believe it or not, money is an even bigger issue for first gen/low income college students, and one that clouds all other factors associated with career choice. College does lead to better career prospects, but I donât think it does any of us any favors to make it all about careers and money.
A couple of thoughts. I run a specialized management consulting firm and co-founded a tech firm (and years ago helped with the founding of a quantitive hedge fund) and have been involved in/consulted on hiring decisions.
I always advise liberal arts majors to take a few courses to have a skill that is valued in todayâs economy. Likely data analysis, but could be coding. No reason not to study sociology, but augment it with something that will get you hired in todayâs economy. My sonâs first GF in college majored in poetry and CS. She graduated summa cum laude (for poetry) and was a competent but not brilliant CS student from an LAC, but she was bright, attractive, and a good communicator and easily got a job in software consulting. I suggested that my son, who was interested in behavioral economics, take a math course every semester so he became an accidental math major as well. Although his undergrad thesis was solidly in behavioral econ, the strong math background enabled him to get one of his grad degrees in computational and mathematical engineering. I do have a preference for majors that teach a systematic way of thinking so I am biased against majors that end in the word âstudies.â
Focusing on first year salaries may be limiting. I have seen studies that suggest that engineersâ salaries go up for about 6 years and plateau. I suspect new grads are learning the absolute state of the art in school and this knowledge fades over time. The exception to this is people with good soft skills who enter management and see their salaries continue to rise. So good soft skills, including writing and verbal communication skills, have market value, but they may be valued more later on down the line.
âClassical Studiesâ is a multi disciplinary major which incorporates languages (Latin, Greek, and often fluency in German and/or French), art history, linguistic analysis, literary analysis and more. âAsian Studiesâ can provide a student proficiency in at least two strategic languages as defined by the CIA- Mandarin and Korean, plus an in depth understanding of the history, culture, economic development, and natural resource infrastructure of the fasting growing/least understand region of the world.
I could go on.
Being prejudiced against âstudiesâ is ill informed. The last few roles I recruited for focused on my companyâs Asian subsidiaries were chock-a-block filled with superb âstudiesâ candidates. We can teach how to do a discounted cash flow analysis and the other MBA skills in a matter of weeks if the person has the âgoodsâ intellectually. We are not prepared to teach language fluency, or cram thousands of years of geopolitical history and societal composition/traditional family structure/colonial history and expansion into an employee onboarding, and then put them on a plane to live in Seoul for three years.
Shawbridge- you and I usually agree on so much. But not here. The world is flat, and the âstudiesâ majors are often the best interdisciplinary/analytical thinkers in their cohort- PLUS strategic language fluency. Ask anyone in the diplomatic corps or at a countryâs central bank ANYWHERE in the world.
Employees with strategic language fluency are best obtained by simply hiring native/heritage speakers, which the top consulting firms/banks/government agencies do quite well. Also plenty of reason to hire dual nationals who wonât object to living in Korea for 3 years. There are lots of smart grads who meet these criteria who didnt major in âstudiesâ; I am surprised you were unable to find them, @Blossom.
There are security clearances and related issues that are much harder to get for a non-US born âheritage speakerâ (to name only one issue) and someone who is in the process of getting US citizenship is not interested in restarting the clock by moving to Korea. But thanks for your concern for my employer.
I promise, there are literally thousands of native level speakers currently employed with the very highest level of security clearances in the US government. Some are US born heritage speakers, some are foreign born naturalized US citizens. Some work for the CIA and FBI, some work in the White House, and a whole lot work at DoD. And they are not worried about competing for jobs with any Asian studies major with 4 years of college language.
There do seem to be some long-term differences between men and women, but that may be influenced other confounding factors, due to issues tied to childbearing & childraising. In other words, the article seemed to show a continued slight advantage to female STEM majors in mid-career salary levels - but youâd probably have to dig down deeper to tie income to number of hours worked to get better sense of the source of those differences. It could also be tied into other factors related to gender discrimination.
While I agree with the sentiment, please note that the study is of course based on historical data, and as our finance friends point out, past performance may not be predictive of future results. The now 40 year olds at mid career cited in the survey graduated college long before iphones were even invented.
Of course, those who had a pay advantage between ages 23 and 40 had that extra money to save and continue to build through compound interest / capital gains to fund their kidsâ college and their own retirement. That is, if they did not lock themselves into expensive spending habits that consume all of the extra pay.
Also, those who increased their pay after going through professional school (JD, MBA, etc.) have to use some of that increased pay to pay off their professional school debt.
I will have to partially recant, @blossom, as you make a good point. When I made that comment, I was thinking about things like gender studies or gay and lesbian studies or other politically current studies programs. I believe that learning how to think systematically in at least one discipline (and preferably more than one) is going to bode people well over the course of their careers. Many jobs are going to vanish â my understanding is that one of the Big 4 accounting firms in the UK is expecting a reduction in headcount from 300K to 100K in a relatively short period of time due to AI. People who just know accounting will have difficulty finding good career paths. In contrast, having tools to reason and problem-solve by drawing on a variety of ways of thinking will often dominate specific substantive expertise.
I suspect that one can get such intellectual training in an Asian studies curriculum, for example, but that it is not guaranteed. From what I can see, it is hard to do in some of the more politically current âstudiesâ programs; again not impossible, but there is a need for conformity in conclusions that may frustrate genuine learning about how to reason well.
I have often advised decidedly non-quantitative English majors to consider studying Arabic as there is likely to be significant demand for non-Middle Eastern Arabic speakers for a significant time to come. No doubt, the same is true for Mandarin and Korean speakers. But, in my small sample of kids are a couple of Asian studies majors who were truly bilingual both in terms of language and culture who thought that would be helpful in getting jobs and discovered that the companies they interviewed with were looking for something else. Both are now in US sales for big tech companies, doing very well but not using the language or cultural part of their education or background directly. Perhaps some other companies view things differently than yours.
Probably for many majors (which may or may not have âstudiesâ in the name), there is variation between different departments in how much they emphasize and require thinking systematically. And there is likely considerable variation between students in the same major at the same school in terms of how much they want to learn how to think systematically.
I see this often posted on the forum, but Iâve never seen a reference that shows a plateau after 6 years or similar. The rate of increase may not be as high as certain other fields, but relevant experience is valued in engineering, and as such salaries tend to increase with experience. Itâs common to have annual salary increases with rate of increase dependent on both individual and company/group/team performance. If salary does not increase on a regular basis, many engineers choose to switch companies. For example, Glassdoor reports the following average salaries by years experience for general engineers (employees whose job title stays as âengineerâ):
<1 Year â $65k
1-3 Years â $68k
4-6 Years â $78k
7-9 Years â $83k
10-14 Years â $92k
15+ Years â $102k
At larger companies, engineers generally do not keep the same job title throughout their career. Job title tends to change as they get related promotions and gain experience, often going through a ladder of levels. Responsibilities and salaries often have corresponding changes. For example a list of Google software engineer type job titles and reported average salaries + compensation at Glassdoor is below:
Software Engineer II â $140k (some new grads)
Software Engineer III â $170k (some new grads, some with a few years experience)
Senior Software Engineer â $208k (most have 5+ years experience)
Staff Software Engineer â $268k (most have 10+ years experience)
Senior Staff Software Engineer â $333k (most have 10+ years experience)
There are ~4 higher non-management track engineer levels, but promotions to those levels are rare.
I wasnât able to find the source for these numbers, but other sources that are available suggest a completely different trend and often different salary range. For example, Payscaleâs median mid-career salary by major is at https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/majors-that-pay-you-back/bachelors . All the highest mid-career earnings majors are applied quant or pre-professional majors such as engineering, applied mathematics, and pharmacy. All the social science, history, and similar less applied, less quantitative majors have far lower mid career salaries; just as they have far lower staring salaries. Maybe the difference is that history and similar majors have a far higher rate of JD/MD/⊠professional or grad degrees? But even then, that wouldnât fully explain the difference.
Itâs not just about salaries, itâs also about the availability of jobs. There are some jobs that pay really well but are very niche. My uncle had a job like that, and when his company got bought, the purchasing company already had someone doing his job, so he was let go. He had a really hard time finding a new position because there werenât many companies that had a need for his skills.
And itâs also about learning what the jobs are actually like. The subject matter might really interest you, but the jobs might not. I think high schools should much more to help expose students to the actual working world to help them learn about jobs and careers, not just subjects to major in.
There are several similar public sources for earnings by major. There is an interactive tool in which you can select earnings at different points in career by major at https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/career_earnings_by_college_major/ . For example, after 20 years since start of career, some of the listed medians earnings are below. Also note that sample groups started their career decades ago, when job market differed. If you include post grad degrees, there appears to be a more notable divide between STEM and non-STEM. The trend including post-grad appears to be median >$80k ~= STEM, median <$80k ~= not STEM (including economics as STEM, which many colleges do). When only looking at bachelorâs, there are more exceptions, particularly with a good portion of life sciences majors later pursuing what I expect are MDs.
Median Earnings 20 Years after Starting Career
Chem Eng â $109k with BS, $111k with any
Aerospace Eng â $100k with BS, $112k with any
Electrical Eng â $97k with BS, $109k with any
Mechanical Eng â $96k with BS, $106 with any
Computer Science â $86k with BS, $91k with any
Physics â $88k with BS, $109k with any
Economics â $84k with BA, $98k with any
Mathematics â $73k with BA, $87k with any
Business â $64k with BA, $69k with any
Chemistry â $62k with BS, $101k with any
Nursing â $62k with BS, $66k with any
History â $61k with BA, $72k with any
Biology â $57k with BS, $90k with any
English â $50k with BA, $57k with any
Liberal Arts â $50k with BA, $56 with BS
Psychology - $46k with BA, $55k with any
Fine Arts â $41k with BA, $44k with any
Music â $40k with BA, $49k with any
Social Work â $40k with BA, $44k with any
Did Not Finish BS/BA â $37k
Early Child Education â $31k with BA, $39k with any
No College (HS grad) â $30k
Did not Finish HS â $21k
Yes, there may be jobs for every major⊠but how many are there and what do they pay?
We recently relocated to a Boston suburb from the great state of Texas. Now that we are in a new place, we are schleepping all of our friends and family to the Boston museums when they come to visit.
On our last trip we visited a very well know Boston museum and I was making small talk with a lovely girl that was the gift shop cashier. She was telling me she had (and I may not have the exact degree) but an art and architecture/museum studies MASTERS from BU and this gal was working in a gift shop making the same 12 bucks an hour that my 15 year old makes bagging groceries at Roche Brothers.
Iâm sorry. I would never let my kid major in something where the job prospects are minimum wage. I know many on cc are haters on the â pre-professionalâ majors but at least they pay the bills.