Everyone and their cousin is getting pressured into studying computer science or business or going on pre-med track. Is this overwhelmingly growing trend going to saturate future job market?
Students at highly selective private colleges tend to choose fields associated with higher earnings. This isn’t a new trend, although the specific fields have changed in recent years, particularly with the increase in CS/tech popularity.
For example, just before dot com bust, 20 years ago, the most popular majors at Stanford were:
- CS
- Econ (typically → banking/finance)
- Bio (typically pre-med track)
- Hum Bio (typically pre-med track)
~4 years after the dot com bust (15 years ago), the most popular majors changed to the following. CS dropped from #1 to #8.
- Hum Bio (typically pre-med track)
- Econ (typically → banking/finance)
- Bio (typically pre-med track)
- Political Science ( probably → law school)
Today the most popular majors at Stanford are as follows. CS and tech have had a rapid increase in popularity, which likely relates to increased earnings in these fields, but the general idea of choosing higher earning fields is the same.
- CS (triple the size of #2)
- Econ (typically → banking/finance)
- Hum Bio (typically pre-med track)
- Engineering
However, students at highly selective private colleges only represent a small portion of the overall population. Students as a whole are far more likely to choose fields that are not associated with extremely high earnings than students at highly selective private colleges. For example, the most popular bachelor’s degree fields across the full US (NCES) were as follows. Across the full country, performing arts had more bachelor degree recipients than both CS and econ.
Most Common Bachelor’s Degree Fields in United States
- Nursing / Health
- Business
- Psychology
- Biology
- Education
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Business and healthcare can cover a wide variety of options. Even CS has many sub specialties. Not a quant and more the creative type? Try marketing or advertising. Like people? Look at Human Resources. Same for CS. Don’t enjoy programming? Look at security or architecture.
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Not a lot of people these days paying tuition to become sheep herders because there aren’t a lot of sheep to be herded or money to be made as a shepherd.
CS, business, and medical curriculums provide a variety of knowledge and skills that are applicable across a growing spectrum of lucrative careers. Supply meet demand.
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I’ve been on this site since 2014 and it’s always been this way here. Perhaps a few less people who want to go into engineering, but still it’s always the same. People (parents too) are primarily interested in professions where they think they will make the most money, and the colleges that will help them do that. Same old same old.
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D is a marketing manager (she has an MBA). Lots of data analysis in her job.
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Market signals (wages) tell is where there is unmet demand. People respond. If the fields are oversaturated, you will see that in wages and wage trends. Of course you can’t predict what will happen 20 years hence.
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You can’t even predict next June with any accuracy.
There have been some huge layoffs in the last month- any “disrupter” in the home mortgage space is losing market cap and shedding CS/programmers/customer experience talent like crazy. (Interest rates go up, fewer people qualify for a mortgage, these startups start bleeding immediately). A year ago these companies looked like sure bets.
There are five or six other sectors- again, lay-offs. Some in Health Tech- you can aggregate the data all you want for maximum efficiency, but at the end of the day, a surgeon can only perform one appendectomy at a time.
So all the young folks who ONLY wanted an entrepreneurial company, ONLY wanted a startup- they’ll be heading for the Fortune 50 soon enough!
You just cannot try to time the market.
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If you want to be more nuanced about it, if the wages are already low, after being high at some prior point in time, it means the industry is mature. There are low chances that it will see a resurgence. If you enter a hot industry, you are making bets on how long the hotness will last. You can be making these bets with open eyes. If you can last 5-10 years, and manage to grow well, then you will land better after the growth slows and you need to pivot. It is not irrational to pick high paying jobs up front. Of course you need to be mindful of startups. My kid tells me these are negative EV situations :-).
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3 of the most popular majors in the US lead to stable middle class jobs which are easily employable-nurses, teachers and business majors can usually find something, even in uncertain times.
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Nursing is the most promising of the lot, and more recently Physician Assistant jobs, because the places where you can get trained are capacity constrained. Therefore there is limited supply. And we are all getting old and needing help. All of us on this planet are getting old without exception.
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Excellent point- and in terms of capacity, the Nursing doctorate pool is shrinking (retirements and um… death). That was an unexpected consequence of the rise in nursing salaries 20 years ago due to the previous nursing shortage- fewer nurses went on for a doctorate because they made more money doing cardiac care or another high priced specialty. So now the professors of nursing are a limiting capacity to expanding nursing programs! Even if the hospitals open up more training slots for rotations (which in some parts of the country they are willing to do) the classroom component doesn’t have much flexibility at this point.
Chicken, meet the egg!
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It’s true that education majors have low unemployment rates, but they often do not have what is considered middle class earnings on this forum. By far the 2 most common major within the education grouping are “elementary education” and “early childhood education”. Both are consistently associated with some of the lowest earnings of all college majors. If you are thinking of high school teachers, high school teachers don’t typically get their bachelor’s degree in an “education” major.
Outcomes of business majors are often highly variable depending on field of work within “business.”
I agree with you about nursing. There is a significant variation by location, but typically high earnings soon after college and typically high demand with low unemployment rates.
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But nurses- like any other professional- need to be willing to relocate at certain points in their career. About a decade ago, three hospitals in my area merged, and then were bought buy a huge regional healthcare system. First they offered attractive early retirement packages- and then the layoffs began. The nurses were outraged-- who ever heard of an unemployed nurse?
There were hospitals hiring 30 miles away- but who wants a commute after standing on your feet for 12 hours? And there were- literally- tens of thousands of nursing jobs all over the country. But it took a bunch of years for supply and demand to equalize in my area… during which many nurses got real estate licenses, got random jobs in other fields.
Nobody likes to hear it from me- but mobility is sometimes the key to getting and maintaining a middle class lifestyle. The days when Dad walked home from the factory or store for a hot lunch and then back to work again (as his father- working at the same place) had done- those days are over.
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About 2mm Bachelor’s degrees are awarded each year. 22k start Med School. That is 1.1%. I don’t know how many actually go into IB, but it isn’t many. So the total for those two categories is really small.
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It is small businesses that make the most wealth in the US. I think the role of formal education is wealth creation is not that large.
https://www.therichest.com/salary/top-15-businesses-that-make-the-most-millionaires/
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Well, that is largely regional. Teachers in some areas are quite well-paid, or in other places may choose to live in low cost of living areas. It is possible to be middle class on a teaching salary if one chooses carefully.
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Your original post said education majors “lead to stable middle class jobs.” It is true that some early childhood education / elementary education majors lead to that outcome, but many do not. If you look at aggregate salary stats, the average earnings are far below average for bachelor’s degree recipients. Again I am talking about “education” majors, not high school teachers who typically do not major in education.
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No reason to debate it. Teaching jobs are remarkably stable. They are often held by those who prioritize schedules that accomodate childcare. In my town, single teachers can and do buy starter-homes in decent neighborhoods with acceptable public schools. Whether those teachers could make more doing other work is not relevant. Their jobs support a middle-class lifestyle here. Certainly not everywhere, but location matters for all jobs/lifestyle tradeoffs.
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I would love to be a sheep herder…especially in a beautiful locale…(ok, sorry)
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