My question was not about whether the field that may be chosen is elite, but whether the person is or can be elite in any field of their interest. For example, consider someone whose best career path (i.e. where the person’s strongest talent and passion is in) is police officer, but is a merely good police officer, not the best police officer.
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No. It is their life and their choice what to major in and what career is chosen. But we did have a say in which colleges we would pay for, so we could eliminate any with less desirable hiring data or weaker career centers (compared to others offering admission).
There are a lot of people in jobs for which they have little or no talent or passion. If you have both it isn’t difficult to excel.
For those of you whose children have majored in specialized pragmatic fields (especially CS and engineering), do you ever have concerns about a possible glut of employees or about a major change in the economy (such as outsourcing the positions to countries with less expensive labor)? I recall a time when the tech sector tanked and CS grads were thrilled to get a job at Best Buy. Do you think that the specialized pragmatic degrees build the same types of transferable skills that liberal arts majors have a reputation for (reading, synthesizing, analyzing, writing)? Or do you think they would need to have a vocational reset with potential additional education?
I have family members with various applied STEM degrees and family members with degrees in social sciences & pure sciences (and my own tended toward the humanities), so this is not intended as a loaded question; it is simply something that I wonder about.
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Your musician daughter is extraordinarily talented, but I know she has also worked very hard to get there. It would have been a shame to make her go into a safer profession.
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One of my relatives was a star student at Julliard. The reality is that very few symphony positions are available and even the best musicians can struggle. After several such years, she got a computer masters degree as well.
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My older son glommed onto computer programming in grade school. We never encouraged him because it was lucrative, only because it was clearly his passion.
Younger son loved history and has always been interested in military strategy. He ended up majoring in International relations. (Although he says in retrospect he should have majored in history as he didn’t like a lot of the courses he was forced to take in IR.) He got disillusioned by NGO internships and ended up going to officer candidate school. He’s now in the Navy. He lived with us for a year and half after graduating from college and was a joy to have around. He’s been self-sufficient for almost six years now.
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My kid is a chem e. She has critical thinking skills that can translate to many industries. The keys is being willing to adapt, be willing to move, and to keep learning. She will do an MBA down the road. I’m not concerned.
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We do worry about a possible upcoming recession. I have potentially two kids going into CS. It is not a CS or a liberal arts degree choice. It is CS and a fairly large number of non CS/STEM courses in the humanities etc.
I worry less about the one that I think is stronger and more about the one that I think is weaker between the two of them. Stronger ones are always more versatile.
The CS bit doesn’t worry me because a lot of the other industries are going to be transformed by computing and data science. If you are the change maker, then you have a 10-20 year runway for a good career, and the high end of these jobs are not getting outsourced. We have visibility into both ends of the outsourcing funnel. And we (as in we the parents and the kids) have a good sense of what skills you need in the US in this space to stay competitive.
Since I feel a large amount of economic uncertainty (maybe it is just circumstance and path through life), I would prefer for them to front-load their earning, and not develop expensive tastes.
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I look at it the opposite way round, I’d prefer them to explore their passions, and figure out where that aligns with their talents, in their early 20s while they don’t have expensive tastes (or other commitments).
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It depends on the kid. If the kid already has some clarity on what s/he wants, then the 20s could be one of the most productive parts of their career. It is often a young person’s game these days. Energy goes down with age. Ideally this exploration of interests happens in high school and college. In their 30s they will acquire a family and responsibilities, and slow down.
S was strong in and enjoyed math and science. He decided to get an EE degree and worked in EE for about a decade, including getting his PE certification as well as a certification in project management. He recently quit his fed EE job and opted to devote more time and resources to his part time gig that was bringing in 2-3x as much as his salaried position. He enjoys being an entrepreneur. He’s been paying all his own bills since he graduated from college and is happy.
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I don’t worry about my kid who’s in CS, I told them to eat right and exercise, everything else will follow. We have this forever debate on CC about liberal arts kids have more critical thinking skills than engineering/science kids, a load of baloney is all I can say.
But I’m done worrying them, now I just have to take care of myself and my husband before they start worrying about us.
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Interesting thread. I’m not a parent, but my parents didn’t try to sway me one way or another when I chose a major. Nor did they to my sister. We also have other family members that lived in our house and they didn’t try to sway them either, though they would give advice if asked.
I paid close attention to costs and loans when I applied for college. I believe I graduated with about 20k debt for my 4 years total, or something like that. I was in no rush to pay this back. Interest rates were super low. My work is paying for 95% of my masters degree. The rest I’m paying cash.
My sister didn’t look so much into the costs and loans. She got her associates degree and decided she was done and had about the same 20k debt that I had, for her 2 years. She makes less than I did at her age, and probably will overall total, due to the fact that we both work in different fields. She is very frugal and paid off her 20k before I paid off my 20k, and I’m 6 years older.
My other 2 family members that grew up in our house decided not to go to college (they went to tech during high school, though). One owns his own business and the other is a manager at a greenhouse/florist.
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How do you know what the high-paying jobs will be in five, then, 15 years from now? And how do you know what degrees will lead to them?
I think it’s a terrible idea. Call me old-fashioned or high-minded, but I still believe that the purpose of college is for higher education. It’s not vocational school. It’s to prepare young minds for participation in and contribution to civil society and democracy. With such a mind, many careers are open, some with graduate education, some without.
My two nephews who are in their late 30s are both in very high-paying careers that did not exist when they were in high school. There’s no possible way their parents could have steered them to where they are now. If their parents had insisted that my nephews major in business or engineering or computer science, or nursing, or whatever the bright shiny objects are now, they’d both be miserable.
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Curious what profession your nephews are in, and what they studied in undergrad. Just so I can understand what educational choices expand career choices for kids after graduation.
My nephews did not have undergrad majors that gave them tactical job skills. The only educational choices they made were to become highly educated, broad-minded humans. To learn how to think, to learn how to learn. They each majored in a liberal arts discipline, ones that many people on this board would say is a waste of money.
One of them works in the strategy area for a household name technology company that barely existed when he was HS age. The company just wanted to hire smart people. College major irrelevant. The other one, also with an undergrad liberal arts degree, went on the get a doctorate in AI and is working in the field.
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That is cool. Good for them.
So once again this requires that every person has a talent for something. I’m not sure that it is really the case. A lot of people say it. But it is an interesting and extremely hard question to answer.
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@brantly
I’m with you. I think of college as an opportunity to become well educated. For some fields, the major must dovetail (ie., engineering). But otherwise, the major doesn’t matter so much. Look at all the financial institutions that recruit at Ivies, etc. that do not have undergrad business or finance majors. They just want well educated people. A major doesn’t dictate the only thing you can do in your career.
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