Tell him to somewhere cheap and allow him to study whatever he wants.
It’s his life to live, ultimately.
But I, for one, am not willing to invest much in low-return ventures.
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Oh yes, yes, yes. I come from a family with a history of teachers or engineers. Anything outside of that, I know nothing. I feel like I would have been better suited for something other than engineering, so I didn’t want to pressure mine to be engineers.
Older kid was easier. He was obviously strong in math and loves money. But the overlap between business, finance, economics, entrepreneurship is lost on me. We purposely looked for schools that could help guide him. He wound up an LAC with econ/math degrees and is doing very well now.
Younger kid was harder. Generic smart kid. He loves several things, but it was harder to see it as a career. I had him read upper level course descriptions of several majors and found one that fit him perfectly (intelligence analysis). He still has to graduate and find a job though.
Both kids have had coding classes in college, the younger one moreso. Their consensus is that they can do it, but they would absolutely hate it as a career.
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Well to be clear, I don’t see it as an investment, just another education expense. Tuition at a UC is less than some parents pay for their kids’ preschool (yes, there are other expenses). I can afford it, and never offered to foot the bill for anything else. He does not need to have a wildly successful career. He does need to become independent though.
I admit I don’t want him to be shiftless and living at home into his 30s either. I am just trying to navigate what kind of advice I can offer him. Even in tech, there are a lot of non-engineering jobs such as a product manager or marketing. He is certainly comfortable around technology, but isn’t excited the way I was. I just feel that it is a lot harder to leverage “soft skills” like writing and communication. I work with many successful people who have done it, but I would have been overwhelmed if I had to.
Which means you do see it as an investment. You have a goal (getting him to be independent) and you see a path (college) as a potential way to achieve that goal that you are willing to pay for.
In the end, though, he has to do the worrying about his life and control his life himself. He has to try to make a go of it his own way. Stuff like the quantitative social sciences (or business or philosophy) may or may not be terribly remunerative straight out of undergrad though they still tend to sharpen analytical skills. I think he should try to shadow, ask for informational interviews, basically try to figure out what jobs people do and what he would like to do, then work backwards from there.
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Sometimes the “cheapest college” route isn’t the best one outside of STEM.
The career services’ ability to work with Humanities/Social Science majors, to help them find internships, etc., is crucial. If the career service’s resources are stretched thin, they may not be able to help much.
Check also whether the career fairs are open to all majors, or just some majors.
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The “cheapest college” isn’t a UC, though you’re probably right about career services being stretched thin. If my son had shown a lot of interest in some more expensive option, we could have had that discussion. He seems content with his choice. I think he needs a few years to figure out for himself what he wants to do. He’s actually very serious about his school work and I think the fact that he doesn’t need parents pushing all the time is going to work out for him in the long run.
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I’m sorry if I missed it, but is he in college already or still trying to decide a major?
One other idea I had was when I just helped my sons’s graduating GF find a job in S’ area. Her major was Strategic Marketing. I would not have known such a thing existed. I started trying to look on the career websites, but what I found helpful was googling (major) companies in (name of city)Then open the the map and it had dozens of companies listed. If I zoomed around or panned more, more showed up. I’d click on each company and open the website and read about them. At least 50-75% of the websites had a career or job openings link. I found easily two dozen to apply to, but more importantly I learned so much about what kinds of careers were out there. It was a lot of fun for me since I didn’t have the stress of trying to get a job lol. And I could see her working at that type of job. Ultimately though, she landed a job through her own school’s network, but it would be a great way to learn about what certain kinds of majors can do.
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I didn’t realize your son was going to a UC – I was speaking in general terms. 
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He’s an incoming freshman. He sent his SIR to one UC and is waitlisted at a preferred one. Both are undeclared but in whichever college includes social sciences. I think he could get some benefit out of the fact that his aptitudes are pretty well balanced between math and writing, but he doesn’t really like some of my suggestions, like economics. I wonder if once he feels some pressure to get a job that he might go for certifications later on.
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No worries. I think if budgeting had been a real consideration I might have suggested he accept at a CSU. One option people discuss a lot is going to community college and transferring later. That’s one that I don’t think is appropriate for him. He’d probably just feel very stuck and depressed and would not look any better as a transfer student than he does now.
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He shouldn’t live his life for others, but that also means he shouldn’t live his life in rebellion to others (a trap adolescents may fall in to). Anyway, jobs don’t have to tie to majors, but it’s helpful for anyone to work out what goals they have in life and what they have to do to achieve them.
Agreed. I don’t think he’s really rebelling, though I think I may have pushed a little too hard when he was very young on things that I like, like math puzzles and programming. It brought him frustration and not even a feeling of accomplishment when he succeeded. So I hope to give him the space to figure out his goals.
STEM degree doesn’t equal good career prospects or a high salary. Instead it depends on the specific field. For example, biology is the most popular STEM major. A student with a bachelor’s in biology and no further degrees is likely to struggle to find high salary employment.
I also work in tech. I know some persons who work in tech and love their job. I know others who were miserable enough to quit and do something completely unrelated to their degree. You shouldn’t force a particular kid to be in a field he doesn’t like, but he should consider salary and career prospects when deciding on what field to pursue, regardless of whether STEM or non-STEM. Software engineering is no doubt a high salary field. However, there is no shortage of other alternative fields that are also associated with a high salary.
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Though it’s probably one of the “easiest” path to a high salary if you have the aptitude and interest for it. Nearly all the other paths entail some combination of long hours/stress/career uncertainty.
Not that that is necessarily always missing in software, but in general, for a high comp, the only roles that are 40 hours are ones that require coding or quantitative or some other (fairly unique) expertise.
Actually, it’s up to him if he needs a “high” salary, though I guess it depends on what you mean by that. If at age 30, he is driving a used car and needs to split rent on an apartment, that’s fine with me (and expected, e.g. if he goes to grad school). If he decides that he has no options but coming back home indefinitely, that’s a problem.
I think what set me into a little bit of a panic was seeing “starting salaries” for some majors that are less than what my son was making as a teen lifeguard. That said, I had college friends as far back as the 80s who worked in fast food jobs long enough to move up into management and turned it into steady employment with or without college degrees. I’m really not particular. I would like him to be able to take care of himself though.
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I think that tends to come with interest in the opposite gender.
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One of the bigger problems in CA is that outside tech it is hard to make a high enough salary to afford to live in places like SF.
We are resigned to the kids moving away
after college to states with a lower cost of living.
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That’s true. I live in the SF Bay Area and take it as a given that both my kids will be living somewhere else. I am not sure I’ll stick around through retirement, but that’s a whole other discussion. It’s certainly tempting to cash out on the crazy-valued home.
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What does he want to study?
Some colleges’ career surveys do list employers and job titles that can give an idea of where graduates in each major go. For example: https://career.berkeley.edu/survey/survey
Note also that “STEM” majors vary considerably in career prospects. For example, biological sciences are among the most popular “STEM” majors, but their graduates typically show up as among the lower paid majors in college career surveys and College Scorecard.
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Maybe instead of “STEM” I should have said “easily applicable to tech careers.” Actually I have worked in biotech as a software engineer and I did work with people with biology backgrounds. They tended to be lab techs and weren’t super-happy about their jobs (which apparently involves a lot of pipetting that a robot can probably do cheaper today, about 20 years later). I always found biotech really exciting, though I don’t know the biology. A few of these employees went to med school eventually.
But my thinking is more along the lines of, let’s say you want to work in data science. You need some statistics, but that can probably be learned in the context of social sciences. I don’t think it’s incredibly lucrative, but I have seen people who do it for a living. Alternatively, I have worked with numerous people doing product management, marketing, or business development, and they don’t seem to need to know any engineering. The mystery for me is how they get to those positions.
I’m not concerned about my son getting a “high” salary as much as being employable. Like you get this degree and ask yourself what exactly does it qualify you to do? Trick question, because the CS degree doesn’t “qualify” you for much either without some practical experience. It simply appears a lot easier to make the case that you can do something useful. I had enough trouble getting started with a PhD in computer science and no experience. If I had to make a case for myself with something really nebulous I’m not sure how I’d do it.