Majors and Money--NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/choosing-a-college-major.html

Interesting.

Maybe it’s what you do with your major, more than what you choose as a major, that matters. Do you have useful job skills? Do you pursue internships in school? Etc.

Basically what I said above. Major in History or whatever but get some immediately useful tech-ish skills along with that.

I wonder if that will become a trend. There are institutional reasons some Us have for wanting kids to declare majors before they even apply.

Intriguing…no major at all!

Re: no major at all

Evergreen State has no majors and no general education requirements for the BA degree there.

An undergraduate majoring in the humanities or social sciences may go on to medical, dental or law school or may get an MBA. This would increase their career earnings potential. That was not factored into this study.

It’s not clear to me which of Webber’s lists and methodologies the article is using, but Webber does separate earnings for Bachelor’s only from all degrees elsewhere, such as the links below:

Earnings With Bachelor’s Degree Only – http://www.doug-webber.com/expected_bachelors.pdf

Earnings With All Post Grad Degrees – http://www.doug-webber.com/expected_all.pdf

There are some big differences between the two lists. For example, Biology is one of the 3 highest career earnings majors when including post-grad, but roughly the same as Ethnic Studies if only Bachelor’s.

The actual paper is far more interesting and complex and does things like try to normalize ability and self-selection, which is a huge factor in relative earnings – https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/sites/ilr.cornell.edu/files/WP152.pdf .

However, better outcomes for graduates of more selective colleges may also reflect the selection effect (in both personal academic strength/merit and family income/wealth advantages that tend to be greater for students at more selective colleges) rather than the treatment effect (the professional network opportunities and the like). Indeed, the article does mention that students at more selective colleges “are also more likely to have two majors than students at second-tier colleges, who tend to be more financially needy and have to work, affording less time to double major” (where the article suggests that double majoring is a signal of increased intellectual curiousity).

On the other hand, the few career surveys results stratified by major made public by universities do indicate that choice of major matters significantly in post-graduation job prospects. Of course, one should be careful that the major-specific job demand for a given major will be the same four years into the future compared to now (just ask any recent petroleum engineering graduate).

My major was one of the highest at my college for starting salary. It was relatively small and sent 1 or 2 people to the NFL or NHL every year.

A huge issue with any kind of lifetime earnings study is dealing with the implied assumption that the flight path from 20 to 40 to 60 or the English majors and Engineering majors of our generation provides a useful indication of the flight path for the English majors and Engineering majors of today. That’s an enormous leap of faith, and almost guaranteed to be wrong.

Also, I know they try to determine return based solely on a BA, but – at least in the high-performance university world that I inhabit – English majors and the like without some sort of graduate degree are rare, outliers. My daughter is a 2009 English BA, and she has picked up two professional masters degrees mostly paid by her employers in the past 8 years. She’s still 100% an English major and has had an English major’s career to date – it’s not like she went to law school or became an accountant – but she would be out of any of these studies because of her additional degrees. And it’s similar for my son, a 2011 Sociology major. He paid out of pocket the (discounted) costs of a master’s degree, and was able to repay the loans he took out for that in three years out of the additional earnings he got, but what he is, is a working sociologist. And he’s excluded from the data, too. Same with practically everyone I know.

Most dont attend HP university and are not in that world.

The author seems to dance around some pretty important issues though.

The author conveniently compares lifetime earnings at the 60th percentile for English, psychology and history against the median for the business graduate. That lessens the gap, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that a bright, motivated, hard-working person with the aptitude for their major would be expected to fall in the same percentile regardless of their major.

Even worse, the study doesn’t seem to take into account the time value of money and probably doesn’t consider career benefits. The $300k gap between the 60th percentile psych major and the median business major could really mean more than $1M in net worth when you consider investments, 401K matching, etc.

The author doesn’t provide any numbers to back this up, which I find problematic given the fact that he provides very specific numbers when comparing lifetime earnings for different majors. It makes me think that the differences are much less dramatic, possibly because after you’ve landed that first job your school’s reputation tends to have less impact with future jobs.

@shortnuke -

Here is a quote from the original study linked by @Data10.

This paints a better picture of the prospects of Arts and Humanities majors.

“STEM” should really be avoided as a category here, since various STEM majors have very different job and career prospects. Compare, for example, a computer science major, a mechanical engineering major, a petroleum engineering major, a biology major who goes to a health profession school (e.g. medical or dental), and a biology major who does not go to a health profession school.

@ucbalumnus that point is made in the article.

The first big graphic does too. Our favorite STEM punching bags salary-wise, Bio and Chem, are below PoliSci and business and not very different from English, Psych and “Liberal Arts”.

The logic underlying much of this discussion of the effects of college majors on earnings is flawed for many reasons. A key one is that there are powerful selection effects. I’ve got two very smart kids. But one is mathy, the other is artsy. They didn’t have the same effective choice of majors or careers, if they wanted to maximize the returns to their talents. There wasn’t even one college that they BOTH applied to.

It’s also important to think about how careers develop. A career is not a first job, or even defined by one. By the time a typical college graduate reaches the age of 30, chances are pretty good they’ve had multiple employers, possibly obtained an advanced degree, accumulated a lot of experience and contacts that affect their marketability. They may have children of their own. They may have skipped a rung or two climbing the career ladder. Or they may have fallen or moved down on the ladder or made a lateral move to a different occupational path. They may have moved to a different part of the country.

I like this NYT article for several reasons, not least because it emphasizes the variance in career earnings within and across different college specializations. Many intangible factors affect these outcomes, including luck, connections, health, ambition and attitude, creativity, willingness to work long hours, and other factors.

It seems unlikely that many of the graduates in the bottom half would continue on to graduate school, while a very large percentage of those in the 90th percentile would continue on with graduate or professional degrees. In addition, a percentage of chemical engineers continue on to medical school, further skewing the data. Did the NYT article adjust for graduate education?

I sort of fall in the middle here. I’m certainly a large proponent of a healthy amount of classes in the liberal arts. At the same time, your undergraduate major is going to matter less if (a) you’re committed to going to graduate school and/or (b) you’re attending an elite Ivy/Ivy-level institution where the name brand of your school can get you past a lot of HR filters.

On the other hand, I’m always disappointed when I see these types of articles only quote college administrators (who have a self-interest in effectively saying, “You can major in anything that you want!”) and have zero input from actual employers of large numbers of college graduates. As someone that has spent a lot time hiring college grads in a variety of different positions over the past 15 years, the blunt reality is that the undergraduate major is VERY important once you get past the Ivy/Ivy-level schools. I’m not talking about mediocre schools, either - basically, any school at or under, say, the Berkeley/Michigan-level of the undergrad rankings is going to have a very wide variance of outcomes depending upon majors. Once you control for professional/graduate-level schooling beyond undergrad, I personally see a strong correlation between major choice and professional outcomes. What might have been true for prior generations in terms of undergrad major flexibility is very different than today with so many companies wanting new hires to hit the ground running immediately as opposed to having them go through corporate training programs (which, for better or worse, have been cut drastically).

As a result, the reality is that the quantitative skills that favor engineering, math and the tougher business majors (e.g. accounting) are simply (a) much harder to find in the marketplace and (b) industries need a whole lot more of them to fulfill their various project needs. “Soft skills” that favor liberal arts majors are certainly desired, but the fact is that such soft skills alone really don’t mean much because there are more people out there with just those skills and many firms generally only need 1 or 2 of those people for every 10 or 20 computer programmers or accountants. Plus, there’s a fallacy that having quantitative skills precludes having qualitative skills and that often isn’t the case. Firms always see soft skills as a plus, but there are enough people in the marketplace with both “hard skills” and soft skills that they can ask for it all for top positions.

Let’s put it this way: the sky is the limit if you have both quantitative and qualitative skills and you can still find gainful employment if you have only quantitative skills based on current market demand, but it’s extremely difficult and competitive out there if you’re purely bringing qualitative factors (with the caveat that Ivy/Ivy-level grads may get more of a pass).

The author asserts that major matters less than school. He points out that career focused students from directionals don’t do as well as humanities majors from Ivies as evidence.

That makes no sense. The Ivy students are much strong, on average, from day 1. Many of them are going to do better no matter what they major in.

In reality, for the same student, their choice of major is more important to future earnings in most cases, within a reasonable range of schools. If the average student put as much effort into evaluating majors as they put into visiting schools, they would be better off.

Which sorts of majors are most likely lead to jobs that will become automated in the next couple of decades? I mean, it’s already happening somewhat with Accounting, for example.

This. As far as i know, every college has significant liberal arts requirements even for quantitative majors. Engineers take humanities courses, do public speaking projects, write, etc.

I really can’t get past the opening graph. To take just one problem, the “liberal arts” line—does it include, say, English and philosophy (or, for that matter, chemistry)? If so, then there are some things that are counted more than once, and comparisons become really problematic.

Well, and a second one: The selection of fields is…odd. Nothing in the fine arts? Why just chemical and electrical engineering and none of the rest of the engineering fields (particularly mechanical engineering, since it’s the most widely-taken engineering field)? Also, the only social science is psychology—and yes, that’s incredibly widely-taken, but no anthropology?

I haven’t read the underlying data yet (but have downloaded it from the links upthread), but I’m hoping it’s better—this summary article is pretty well useless.