I’m surprised to see nursing included. Nursing is a vocational field that tends to be well compensated, particularly soon after college. As an example, CollegeScorecard earnings (mostly FA and Pell recipients) by major for NYU are below. Nursing was 2nd only to CS for bachelor’s degrees, and nursing was the highest earning field for master’s degrees. These stats were capture pre-COVID.
Nursing earnings vary by location, and I chose NYU as an example because NYC is at the high end for earnings. Averaged across all locations, nursing early career earnings are similar to engineering. Earnings may be limited later in career, if the nurse does not pursue additional education/skills/… Nursing can also have other unique benefits beyond just salary and “passion”. For example, I’ve known nurses who like that they can choose to have a 3-day work schedule, with 4 days of the week off.
College Scorecard Early Career Earnings by Major: NYU
Yes. Yesterday’s “passion career” can become tomororrow’s money making profession. Nursing shortages drive the market and salaries continue to . I’d love to see this happen next for teachers!
Teachers in some states can make a decent salary, plus they can supplement by tutoring. My SIL is a nurse and she makes a great salary. At this point she is the director of her unit and she is in high demand and is offered high bonuses for retention.
Can’t forget the need for childcare, even if kids are in school. If one parent is a teacher, that can save a lot of money. Ditto nursing if one can take the weekend shifts.
Just to clarify, the reason why I spoke of nursing (and perhaps janemommy49 as well) is that the article summarizing Work Won’t Love You Back discussed nursing quite a bit. One of the key quotes is here:
A lot of that, she argued, was because of that unchallenged assumption that we should never place any value on the “emotional content” of a job, on stuff that can’t be counted. “A few years ago, I did a lot of reporting on the nurses’ union here in New York,” she says. “And they would tell me that they were getting told, in these exact words, ‘to not waste time on things that were non-productive’, by which the hospital bosses meant caring, getting to know patients.” One of the things that the pandemic has shown, if we didn’t know it already, is that, in fact, a great deal of the value of nursing lies right there, in that “non-productive” effort.
The article also seemed to be implying that many nurses are underpaid given the intensity and importance of their jobs. I don’t know how true that is overall compared to other professions. Even before the pandemic, I occasionally ran across articles discussing burnout among nurses as well as difficult working conditions. At the same time, the nurses that I know well are actually paid fairly well, but their jobs definitely demand a lot of physical and “emotional” labor. My impression is that the book is saying nurses are told that such emotional labor should be its own reward and that they should not mind any unreasonable or lopsided working conditions because they should just love to serve. I’ve heard teachers say something similar “no one goes into teaching for the money… they go into it because they love children and want to nurture young mind…” It seems that Jaffe’s book is pushing against those sentiments and according to the subtitle, those sentiments leave lots of workers “exploited, exhausted, and alone.” I don’t fully agree because I think one can genuinely love their work, but reading the guardian book review, I think that I understand the gist of her argument. I don’t think one should love a job that exploits them or that employers should demand devotion to work while compensating unfairly.
This is a tricky situation. Reminds me of that adage - can’t pay the best teachers enough and yet the best teachers aren’t in it for the pay. I suspect that applies to any high touch job.
Be careful of survivorship bias in personal observations and anecdotes. You may know highly successful artists, but they are the elite, not the ones who were not elite enough at arts to make a living out of arts, so they had to do something else, and therefore not known to you as professional artists.
Indeed, job dissatisfaction among nurses appears to be high (many nurses are in unions, which exist because of job dissatisfaction, and the unions are frequently threatening to go on strike), but it is likely due to working conditions rather than just pay levels, which have a relatively high floor (although they have a relatively low ceiling at the top end).
Many people I’ve met over the year who came from low income families or families where they struggled financially in many ways, decided early on that they wanted highly paid jobs and sought them out. They still give back but mainly in the form of a check. Many of the people I know who went into low pay high reward jobs came from families with money. They knew that they could fall back on their parents for rent etc. Don’t know if that’s still the case, but I haven’t met many kids at all who plan a non-profit career.
There seems to be a group of people ( nurses, teachers and many others) who went into their respective field for a sense of giving back to the community. This often doesn’t have an associated payback. Some are well paid (like nurses and teachers in some communities, others are not).
I’ll throw this out there: nursing, teaching, social work , etc. are very important professions, but they traditionally (and continue to be ) dominated by females. And professions dominated by women traditionally pay less.
I know many people from low income families who don’t go to college at all, or go to community college for fire science or medical assistant etc. Or go to the local state u, live at home, and join the DPW or police force. Plenty, with or without education after high school, end up in restaurant or retail work. Not everyone can shoot for high pay. So many are trapped, and the recent inflation and housing surge doesn’t help. Sorry to go off topic.
Very good point. At the same time, several of the anecdotes here have helped illustrate the many different ways an artist, musician, etc can make a living. Not disputing that arts is a very tough field, but it’s not entirely a case of elite enough to be well known vs do something else. There are varying levels of success in the middle. And unless you personally know them, or patronize the sorts of local or community level organizations where they work (as opposed to say the NY Phil) you may not be aware of this.
Not disputing that arts is a very tough field, but it’s not entirely a case of elite enough to be well known vs do something else. There are varying levels of success in the middle.
Wow, I am pretty surprised to hear that BS in Chem or Bio is getting $70-$100K for entry-level jobs. I have a bio PhD and spouse has chem PhD. We are professors and don’t make that much money. In our experience, new BS graduates are not regularly getting jobs with those salaries right after graduation. A small number of the chem majors do, but it’s rare for bio majors. For every student that gets a high-paying job, there are at least as many who come back to their profs for help because they are having trouble finding a decent job in their field. Could be region-specific. We are in an area with low cost of living, but many jobs (great lakes region).
I did point out the small sample size and HCOL so yes, bias. I think it’s hard to come up with succinct accurate advice for kids when it comes to picking majors.
Most kids who have college educated parents already have some leaning towards one major or another.
I think artistic or STEM kids are the easiest to guide. The artists are driven by art, so the only thing to say would be to graduate debt free and learn to market themselves.
STEM kids the same.
What do you say to the kids who are not one way or the other than to graduate with as few loans as possible and to get at least a basic understanding of personal finance?
Same reason why most of the teachers I know today highly discourage their kids and students from becoming teachers themselves — the “feel-good” nature of “giving back to the community” in jobs like teaching or NPO work (nursing is debatable here, but I’d argue that nurses are underpaid compared to the intense stress they go through) will not compensate for the inadequate pay and poor working conditions of many of these jobs.
Of course, I have and always will support teachers/ nurses unions as well as better pay and working conditions for everyone (especially given the housing market today and the dwindling of social security). However, there is a big difference between supporting teachers/those in “passion jobs and wanting your own kid to become a teacher themselves.
I went to Indeed. I plugged in “entry level,” biology degree, full time and my locale, which is in Silicon Valley, obviously a HCOL area. The results were jobs available from 55,000+ (270) to 90,000+ (24).
A surprising fact is that A&P isn’t required for med school. General biology and biochem are usually required, and psych/soc is recommended. Maybe she in fact had all of them except psych/soc? I majored in bio with a lot of ancillary science, and I also agree that bio and chem classes are mostly “easier” than the math and physics classes for MOST students. I think it’s roughly proportional to the amount of quantitative content. I also think A&P is just about the easiest bio class because it’s heavier on straight memorization than the others are.
My SIL has a visual arts degree. Worked in banking for many years to pay the bills until she was laid off due to downsizing. She got severance package and decided to use it to take the time to see if she could make it as an artist. She started her own business mainly doing photography but also some portraiture. To be honest I’m not sure if she’s making any money doing this and if she would be able to continue to do so if not for my brother’s income.
Read a lot about this over the years. And there is a lot of debate about which came first: lower pay or being dominated by women. Something of a chicken and egg issue. Is the pay less because the jobs have been dominated by women or are there things about the job that attract more women than men. Ultimately, I think its a mix and depending on the job, the mix skews more in favor of one over the other. Just not as simple as saying women work there so they get paid less.
. I’d love to see this happen next for teachers!