I didn’t read it that way since those are all on the chart on their own line.
I didn’t know what a “liberal arts” degree was but my D recently told me that’s what her degree would say if she didn’t pass her major department’s comprehensive exam by graduation.
I think a handful of schools grant that actual degree anyway, like Soka, maybe Evergreen?
So I gave a quick scan the article connected to that chart, and the sample is limited to men.
Well, this is going to be, um, interesting when I get a chance to give it a proper read.
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).
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).
So I’ve read the article. The statistics look solid, though the data that late-career earnings are based on is so sparse that I feel that it calls the entire lifetime earnings estimates into question.
The article does ameliorate one of my concerns about the NYT article, though—it’s a pretty broad selection of majors, and the person who put together the NYT graph simply did a bizarre job of deciding which fields to include.
“Liberal arts”, BTW, is for the author the humanities (and so does include stuff that is pulled out separately in the graph). The paper does a nice job of pointing out the problem in talking about the earnings potential of large categories like “liberal arts” or “social sciences”, with a mini-case study of psychology vs. economics.
The biggest problem, though: It’s unclear whether the actual data is reliable. It’s based on a good, well-drawn sample (with longitudinal tracking, even!), but then that sample gets trimmed in ways that are problematic. To take the clearest one, which I mentioned upthread, data from only men is used (on intensely tenuous grounds, I might add); therefore, not only are differences in the gender pay gap completely out of the picture, the data for some historically highly feminized fields (e.g., nursing, education) is questionable—or at least it would be if there was a way to know the size of the sample within fields of study, which highlights another big problem, namely what seems to be a refusal to report Ns for groups within the sample. In addition, there are some fairly arbitrary choices made about other individuals to exclude from the calculations, though this is—I think, it’s impossible to be certain without a breakdown of the Ns—a smaller issue.
TL;DR: This is better data than what you often see from Glassdoor and Payscale. It’s still pretty questionable, though.
I believe a student should choose a major based on their passion. That said several states have set up databases to track college graduate earnings. The low earnings of liberal arts graduates is consistent across all the states for which there is reported data. See the report “Why Your Major Matters - College Degrees and Long-Term Payoffs” by Mark Schneider.
@foobar1 I agree. A kid needs to have passion in college. It keeps him there. It makes him enjoy learning - and he’ll continue to enjoy learning new things throughout his life. That makes him employable.
These studies are flawed. People from families with money earn far more money on average than people from poor families. I remember reading that Art History majors do quite well. Who majors in Art History? - rich kids
I’m not putting much faith into this study
Agree that students should choose based on their interests. However, being aware of job and career implications allows the choice to be more informed. For example, if the student is undecided between statistics and biology, or between chemistry and chemical engineering, the job and career prospects of each major may allow him/her to choose a major of interest that will not become a major of regret or frustration when looking for jobs.
As a quantitative social scientist who is normally a very strong advocate for including women in studies - I don’t think the grounds for excluding women are tenuous at all.
“First, only men are included in the analysis sample, consistent with many labor market studies. This is a particularly important restriction for this study given the relatively weaker labor force attachment of women in the 1979 cohort of the NLSY and the drastic differences in major choice among women (e.g. STEM fields) relative to today.”
In 1979, lots of universities were still men’s only or only very newly co-ed, and women could still be legally paid less than men or effectively barred from entire enterprises. It makes sense that there’d be some screwy effects on women’s major choices and salary data that would confound the results. It would probably have been better if he had still used the women’s data and simply reported it separately, but this isn’t a tenuous reason - it actually makes sense. Any data on the gender pay gap from a cohort who started in 1979 would be relatively meaningless for kids making major decisions today.
More concerning to me is that all of these studies tend to drop participants with a graduate degree, rather than analyzing them separately and presenting their data along with the bachelor’s only sample.
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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.
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The idea that humanities and arts majors only impart “soft skills” needs to die, as does the notion of “soft skills” altogether. Only some jobs require advanced quantitative skills - actually, really only a small minority of jobs require advanced quantitative skills. Every job on the planet requires some level of communication and critical thinking skills. I work in a highly technical job that requires a high-level of training - master’s with several years of experience at least, but we tend to hire PhDs who generally have 5-7+ years of experience doing what we do. And yet communication, research creativity, flexibility, and relationship-building are actually more important than the research methods and quantitative skills necessary to do the job. While we do have baseline requirements, we’ll hire a researcher who is better at the relational part over a researcher who is a really good methodologist but is terrible at the relational part any day of the week.
And it’s not that engineering, math, chemistry or physics don’t teach those skills - they can, depending on how the classes are taught and such. But those skills aren’t any softer or less important than the more technical or quantitative skills and they are much more widely demanded and more difficult to learn. Teaching statistics is way harder than teaching someone to write well (and I know, because I’ve taught both.) So I don’t understand why we call them “soft.”
Again, I’m not sure where this idea comes from, because only a small minority of jobs out there require any advanced or even intermediate quantitative skills beyond what you learn in high school or maybe what’s required for all college students. Those jobs pay well, but they don’t make up the majority of the American workforce.
Also, smaller issue, but qualitative =/= “soft skills.” Qualitative skills can be just as technical and specific as quantitative analysis (for example, ethnographic research is qualitative and also a specific technical skill that one has to be trained to conduct. It’s super useful in tech, where we often follow people home to understand their home and work environments so we know what tech they’re gonna want to buy).
I’m going to push back further on the exclusion of women from the analysis. Yes, female labor force attachment was weak in 1979. However, the NLSY79 (which sometimes gets used by researchers in my own non-econ field) includes people who were 14–22 years old in 1979—the exact. same. cohort. that ended up with strong female attachment to the labor force.
I don’t care if other researchers have found it convenient to leave the women out of their analysis, that doesn’t provide an excuse on this one. Yes, it makes it more complicated that the world changed during a longitudinal study. But you know what? That’s what happens when one does longitudinal work. As someone who does longitudinal work myself (though not nearly at this level), I can’t just ignore things that are difficult because they’re difficult, I have to figure out how to deal with the fact that change is communal as well as individual, and that the communal and the individual affect each other.
I just had to laugh reading this article because the day before I read it my kid told me they were thinking of chemical engineering. You go girl!
The data in this study should also be broken out by terminal degree. Terminal degree (JD, PhD, MD, MBA) will overwhelm the effect of choice of undergraduate major. According to the data, history majors will make over $500,000 more in a lifetime if they earn a graduate degree. History majors that hold high-paying advanced degrees will make more money on average than history majors earning a generic graduate degree.