The reality of finding a job with a major in Social Science.

Well…nobody on this site knows you :slight_smile: It’s the nature of going into an online forum. I can’t tell you what the best choice is for you. I can only give you my opinion, which is colored by my own experiences and preferences, just like everyone else’s.

Secondly, let’s address something: Financial aid does not last forever.

No college is just going to keep giving you financial aid until you decide you want to graduate. Most colleges cap the number of semesters you can draw financial aid from them. Federal student aid has lifetime limits and credit hour limits. You can’t receive the Pell Grant for more than 12 semesters (six years), and you can only borrow up to $31,000 in undergraduate federal student loans as a dependent student (which is just about four and a half years’ worth). Obviously if you take time off in between, the financial aid clock stops while you figure out what you want to do, so that’s a different story. But you can’t just keep attending and taking classes and trying to find your passion without financial aid running out on you. (I do agree, though, that taking time off to figure out what you want rather than spending a lot of money and running up loans is a good idea.)

Also, this

You still have the option of loans, but if you’re almost maxed out (like I am), it makes working toward another degree that much more difficult if you eventually settle on a field that requires higher education (and after age 25, you’re considered independent – if you’re working a low paying job at that time, or not at all, you’re pretty much looking at a free-ride to college).

is inaccurate. First of all, your undergraduate loan limit doesn’t count towards your graduate loan limit. Graduate PLUS loans are a different beast - even if you max out the $31,000 limit you can still borrow up to the cost of attendance of your grad program (not that it’s a great idea, but you can). Second of all, yes, after age 24 you are considered independent, but that doesn’t mean a free ride. That just means that your EFC is low. But if you are a transfer student, your chances of aid are lower than a first-year freshman. And most colleges do not have the resources to meet 100% of your financial need, so being low-income and 25 doesn’t magically conjure up free money for college.

Well, first of all, staying in school longer costs money. Financial aid sometimes (often) runs out after eight semesters, so a student who stays for an extra year to complete another major may be costing themselves a lot of money. Also, in the particular thread you linked, the student had no idea what she would want to change her major to. I personally think it’s a better idea for a student to spend four more months taking some classes they don’t like than it is for them to flounder around for a year or more trying to figure out “what they want to do with their lives,” which isn’t the point of a major to begin with.

A lot of the people commenting in that thread are adults with careers who realize that college major is not as deterministic as people seem to think it is.

And that’s really the tl;dr: A college major is not as deterministic as people seem to think it is.

You can major in social services and go and work in HR, or management, or market research, or finance, or any other variety of backgrounds. You also don’t have to go back to school to change fields, depending on what you want to change to - you certainly don’t have to go back to change to business. In fact, I daresay at many companies, you’d be much better off trying to get those jobs with a social sciences BA from (say) Indiana University than a business degree from the University of Phoenix. And after your first job, your work experience matters FAR more than your major in college. Some of my current friends, I don’t even know what they majored in in college.

I’d also like to point out that math, computer science, and economics are liberal arts majors.