I feel this article will be very useful for a lot of you all.
I know so many students and parents are stressing about getting into the “best school” but I feel more energy should be spent on assuring the right major is chosen.
I don’t necessarily agree with this article.
College choice doesn’t just have to mean obsessively chasing the most selective schools. It means finding the college that is the best choice for the student - in terms of learning environment, resources, and opportunities. A college is an ecosystem, and it can greatly shape a students’ outlook on life, careers, social relationships and many other things. The choice is important!
Major, on the other hand…may or may not be depending on what you want to do. Major is less of a determinant of future career than most young people think - experience and training in jobs after college allow people to zigzag between careers that they previously may not have imagined.
Treating salary as if it’s the most important factor in job/career success, IMO, is a much more dangerous course of action. There are a lot of other factors that contribute to one’s satisfaction in one’s career. It makes no sense, for example, for someone who hates math to major in engineering, most science majors, or economics. Yes, your lifetime earnings as an English teacher may be lower than that of an engineering director - but if you love teaching literature and you make enough money to meet your needs, the English teaching job may be more valuable to you than an opportunity to be an engineering director.
There’s also this:
“Earnings differences across majors are driven by many factors and do not necessarily reflect a wage premium for that particular major. The estimates cannot distinguish why graduates in certain majors earn more than those in others. For example, perhaps individuals who select into particularly difficult majors have skills that they would bring to the workforce even if they had chosen another major.” (https://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/major_decisions_what_graduates_earn_over_their_lifetimes - more details and delving into this at the site.)
Also, the differences may not be as large as people assume. For example, in the Hamilton Project report, median lifetime earnings for computer science majors are about $1.7 million, weheras lifetime earnings for English language and literature majors is about $1 million. The typical “working life” in these studies is about 50 years (usually measured from age 20 to age 69), so that’s a difference of about $14K per year (or the difference between making $50,000 a year and $64,000.) That difference shrinks to about $6K per year when you compare business majors to English majors.
There’s also lots of evidence that even if engineering and other science majors initially have higher salaries, social sciences and humanities majors catch up - and by mid-career there isn’t much of an earnings gap (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-stem-salaries.html).
There’s a survey that the MarketWatch article cites to provide evidence that people with social sciences and humanities majors regret their major more. But a ZipRecruiter survey by definition looks at people who are looking for jobs, who are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, or dissatisfied with their current role and are looking for things in their lives to blame on that dissatisfaction or lack of opportunity. Just because they believe that their major was the driving factor behind their inability to find the job they really want doesn’t mean that they are correct in that belief.
A better way to do this would be to survey college graduates 5+ years after graduation about their satisfaction in their roles and whether they regret their degree, with balanced numbers of employed and unemployed respondents.