I haven’t seen this article cited anywhere on CC yet:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/parents-fears-confirmed-liberal-arts-students-make-less-1446582592
“Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, called the government’s scorecard a ‘huge disservice’ to students because it puts too much emphasis on earnings while ignoring the intangible benefits of education, including a strong grounding in the arts and humanities.”
Your thoughts?
Another “invitation” to buy a subscription to the WSJ.
Strange. I was able to read the entire article before, but when I now click on the link I also get the “invitation.”
Delete cookies and the link will display the entire article.
This should be no surprise.
Everyone should major in Petroleum engineering (which a bunch of parents on CC were claiming just a few short years ago.) How easy it is to predict a multi trillion dollar economy in hindsight.
For the record, I know a bunch of underemployed STEM majors. And don’t get me started on the kids with accounting degrees who are working as seasonal tax preparers waiting for their actual careers to begin.
Reasonable parents want their children to be happy and well-adjusted. If your fears are that they are earning the median for Liberal Arts graduates vs the median for STEM graduates, you have a problem.
Ha! That and advising students to major in ChemE would have been horrid advice for incoming undergrads back in the '70s due to cyclical factors and a crappy state of the US economy back then.
Older relatives and colleagues recounted the same stories of ChemEs back then driving taxicabs, waiting tables, or becoming SAHP by default due to the crappy state of the market in those fields. Some lucky ones who were able to transition fields were the only ones who managed to find gainful employment. A few supervisors I’ve had were ChemE majors who transitioned into CS/computer technology during that period(70’s/early '80s).
I also had an uncle who was a CivE graduate from a school within the top 15 in the engineering field who ended up being a SAHP because the civE field was undergoing a cyclical downturn in that period and he was unable to find work for a few years despite having a PE license*.
** First part is taken right after graduating with an engineering degree. The second part is taken after working in the engineering field for several years.
I can’t read anything but the beginning sentence but it says:
“Students at elite liberal arts colleges don’t make as much early in their careers as those who attend highly selective research universities.”
Note if seems they are pitting the “ELITE” liberal arts colleges against the “HIGHLY” selective research universities…
Really I mean who cares about that. How about the 99% of the rest of the college kids?
Data and statistics are easy to manipulate to show what we want to see. As the article mentioned, many LAC graduates pursue jobs in counseling and social work which does not pay much. Moreover, we should remember this article is concerned with ‘median’ pay. It says nothing about the extreme right tail of the distribution. That would be data worth seeing. If we looked at the top 10% earners in the LAC vs. the large research university, I would be this gap would not be noticeable, and maybe even LACs would be better. There are in percentage terms many more well-off students in the elite LACs than in the large research universities - so income may not be the overriding concern for many top LAC graduates… Income is a data point, but its not the most important reason for a super achieving student to consider when choosing where to go to college imho…
I wish I could like this remark 1,000 times.
The article’s lead:
The operative phrase here is “early in their careers.” This could mean before going to grad school for an MBA. Or before going to medical school. Also, liberal arts grads who do not go to grad school need experience to build on their education before earning good salaries. So they can catch up in 5-10 years. I know plenty of liberal arts majors who work for tech companies (not on the engineering side) who are making lots of money 5-8 years out.
I see it the opposite. If THAT is your fear, then you are very fortunate, indeed, and probably don’t have much of a real problem.
The top 10% shows the same pattern as the other percentiles, with selective LACs generally being below selective research colleges, and Swarthmore & Oberlin doing especially poorly among selective LACs. I’ve listed the top 10% below, using the same college score card database that was used in the article.
Highly Selective “Research Colleges”
Harvard – $250k
MIT – $242k
Stanford – $233k
Princeton – $217k
Yale – $184k
Highly Selective LACs
Amherst – $172k
Williams – $168k
Middlebury – $165k
Bowdoin – $135k
Swarthmore – $114k
…
Oberlin – $77k
I expect this pattern primarily relates to career choices rather than college. For example, Swarthmore has a much higher rate of PhD production that any other college above except for Oberlin (only higher, not “much higher” than Oberlin). If PhDs generally don’t have high earnings 10-years out of undergrad, it’s going to hurt Swarthmore totals more than all other colleges above. Reed is one of the only LACs with a similar PhD rate to Swarthmore, and its 90th percentile was also low – only $83k. It would be more relevant to compare earnings of PhDs in similar fields who started at LACs vs research colleges; compare CS majors at Swarthmore to CS majors at Harvard; and similar. Instead of trying to compare completely a completely different mix of majors with completely different career goals.
If you google the posted excerpt, you’ll get a link to the article in the search results and it’s not behind the paywall like it is when you click it here directly.
Agree this is a key point. I think they catch up and often surpass.
This is basically 6 years after graduation.
Well, my liberal arts grad makes twice what I make (and she is only 26). She has so much room to grow in her career, too. (Oh, and she is very happy in her career choice.)
So much more to it than the field of study …
5-6 years after graduating college, anyone who’s in a PhD program, in med school, or in law school, is going to be earning very little. But making 20-25k as a grad student isn’t the same as making 20-25k at an unskilled retail job. And in my experience more LAC students go in to grad school than at research universities, especially for PhD s. So, for many top universities, these represent how much their students make as grad students, plus a smaller or larger number of people in the workforce. many of the salaries represented aren’t of an early career but of before a career starts. Those salary numbers will be more useful when they represent 15years after college entry ie., about 10 years after graduation, when the vast majority will be in the workforce, but it would have pushed graduation dates to too far in the past to start with this.
Given that it’s not a competition, it’s really immaterial to me that people who do things my kids aren’t interested in doing make more money. If my kid is happy with his $x a year career, what the heck difference does it make if his engineer roommate makes $x, $1.5x or $10x?
I have posted this before, but my liberal arts grad D loves her job. She makes OK money, not as much as an engineering grad would at this point, but she is very happy.
Averages are averages. In every sample there are going to be outliers. There are extremely successful people who went to LACs, Ivys and even to community college. If your goal in life is to make the most money possible, often its blind luck more than the school you attend, the job you take or the people you know. Ultimately I think the key benefit of higher education is to make young people lifelong learners who can adapt to change. The school you choose and the coursework you take are ingredients but its your personal drive and tenacity that determines individual success and happiness.
Okay… I love the LAC experience, and both my kids attend/attended LACs. But all LACs are not equal in the type of students they draw and how much preparation they give kids for the outside world. I will preface this by saying that I like all 3 schools below, and know some great grads from each. But…
When we visited Reed, my D2 really liked it. But it struck me as a wildly impractical place. Very intellectual, but I could not see the average student there performing well in a job interview or, frankly, sitting in an office all day. I told my kid that if it was her dearest wish to apply there and if she would be on an analyst’s couch someday complaining that her mom wouldn’t let her apply to her dream school, then she could apply. But that I saw it as a school that would exacerbate her absent-minded, impractical tendencies, and that it wouldn’t really move her toward skills she would need to succeed in the long run. I think that is one reason so many Reedies go to grad school – they are not equipped for anything else.
After my D2’s overnight at Swat, she said, “This would be a great place to go to school if you didn’t have to go out into the real world when you are done.” Even more intellectual than Reed, but deep focus on areas like social justice (which I consider important, but it doesn’t earn you a living). Just not any focus at all on any kind of career preparation.
Oberlin is its own little green oasis – again, practicality just isn’t in its DNA.
D1 attended Dickinson – and one reason she picked it was because it seemed to have a nice blend of LAC and more practical focus. My kid was able to get internships during the school year in Carlisle, and they offered certificates and minors in subjects that could go alongside a more pure humanities degree, for example. My kid came out well balanced – she was a humanities major who got a great job and is doing well in the workplace, but also had a sr thesis ranked in the top 60 in the country in her major, and is well positioned if she wants to go to grad school.
Not all LACs attract the same types of students and put the same focus on the balance of pure intellectual pursuit and getting students ready for life after college.