“A college grad in my family got laid off from his job, and is now working on an auto company assembly line. I am pretty sure that is not what he had in mind when he chose his major.”
This could happen to anybody. There’s no magical major or university that prevents life from happening to people. But again, who hasn’t figured out that on average, people at Harvard make more than people at East Bumble State U, and who hasn’t figured out that on average, neurosurgeons make more than nursery school teachers? It’s all so trivial and unhelpful. I believe you have to do what you love, or at least like, and then go from there.
“Just as important as salaries are employment rates and underemployment rates. There needs to be more transparency so students can make more informed decisions about education.”
The biggest factor in employment, however, is one’s personality / ability to interview / make connections. Who cares if you graduated Harvard with a STEM degree and a 4.0, if you have the personality of a limp dishrag?
If you think that the primary purpose of college is white-collar trade school, then many disciplines/majors at any college or university, no matter how highly ranked, will not be of interest to you. Fair enough. The key is in the descriptor, “liberal arts colleges.” I don’t know any graduates of top liberal arts colleges who are living a life of penury and indignity because they went to, say, Swarthmore instead of Penn. They aren’t staying awake at night because they aren’t earning what engineering grads or Wharton grads make.
At top-ranked liberal arts colleges, about half the student body is full pay, so they wouldn’t show up in these statistics. These students come from families where college is not primarily an ROI proposition but a basic feature of life. They don’t think, “Oh, is it worth it?” Of course it is worth it, whatever “it” is.
Well, I, for one, will readily agree that Harvard grads on average make more than graduates of other colleges (though I decline to use the snarky, elitist put-down in the original quote). But I would also continue to insist that the choice of college just doesn’t matter that much for earnings purposes. The data, and serious studies of the data, suggest that Harvard grads earn more mainly because of the types of students Harvard selects, not because of value-added that Harvard gives them. Harvard “types” who attend other schools tend to do about as well financially as actual Harvard grads. Harvard gets you a fancy nameplate to attach to your resume, but frankly over the course of a career no one’s going to give a hoot that you went to Harvard, other than perhaps some other Harvard grads. Certainly there are some Harvard grads in influential positions, so at the margins that might matter. But there aren’t that many of them, so you can’t count on old school ties to bail you out at critical junctures in your career. And however loyal they may feel toward their alma mater, most Harvard grads (but not all) are smart and savvy enough to recognize that talent, skills, work ethic, people skills, creativity, integrity, common sense, life and career accomplishments, etc. are far more important than where you got your undergraduate degree. So in the end, I think the name attached to your undergraduate degree is pretty much a wash. You need to prove yourself as an individual; you don’t get a free pass in life because you went to Harvard.
I am also firmly of the belief that college is not trade school, and it’s not all about maximizing your earning potential. I understand that some view it differently, and I respect their right to make the choices they make. But to shamelessly appropriate a motto from an organization that supports historically black colleges and universities, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Your undergraduate years are probably the best opportunity you will ever have in life to expand your intellectual horizons, question long-held (but often not deeply thought-through) assumptions, and expose yourself to the peaks of human knowledge and insight across a broad array of disciplines. To shelve all that in narrow pursuit of a career is, in my view, a waste of human potential. Especially since it’s been proven down through the ages, and it remains true today, that it’s possible both to have a rich and challenging intellectual life as an undergraduate–something you can draw on until your last days on earth–and also to have a successful career. It’s not a zero-sum choice, and those who insist it is are impoverishing those they profess to help.
Is the point of sending your kids to college really to have them make more than other grads?
I remember filling out a kindergarten app question, something about our goals for their education. And my answer had zip to do with future incomes- and everything to do with, well, education.
Neither of mine is “using” the info gained in their majors. But they certainly are using their sharpened wits, ability to take on a challenge and their resilience. What strikes me is that, on one hand, we jump at the unfairness when we learn some parents do push or force their kids into certain paths. But here we sit, fussing over which jobs make more. And some assuming those who make less are lesser.
It is likely that most students and parents assume that going to college or other post-high-school education makes it highly likely that one will earn more later than one would with just a high school diploma. It is also likely that if this were not true, many students and parents would believe that the cost of attending college to be too high for the benefits relating to intellectual development, when the financial pressures that affect a large percentage of people are more immediate concerns.
That many people’s decisions to attend college (and choices of which college and which major) are at least partially motivated by job and career considerations may not sit well with many posters here, but it is likely reality outside of the forum demographic of the “middle class that will not receive college financial aid”.
Ucb: but that’s “going to college,” and presumably graduating, versus stopping with the hs degree. We believed our kids would get farther with the degree than without. But we did not wince at their choices of majors. We never said, as these articles imply, that their humanities degrees or the choice of an LAC would doom them, based on salary. Instead, we focused on the world of opportunities for savvy, bright thinking, hard working folks.
Frankly, we had done too much living of our own to think only certain majors guaranteed entree, success and stability.
I don’t believe that any posters on this thread have related this subject to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement which included (but, of course, was not exclusively composed of) millennials camped out at Zuccotti Park. Although OWS’s goals seemed amorphous to the general public (or at least to me), and do not appear to have resulted in any substantive legislative reform, I believe that the major complaints were wealth inequality (i.e., anger at the “1%”) and, for the millennials at least, student debt.
Presumably, the student debt issue exists because of the disconnect between the cost of education and the difficulty, or inability, of some graduates to pay off loans when subsequently employed (or not). Similarly, the wealth inequality issue is inherently related to the effects of disparities in income when comparing different career paths. (Wealth inequality would not be worth protesting if all careers paid fabulously well, but in uneven measures.) The “parents’ fears” in the title of the WSJ article may include dread that their kids will end up with complaints like those of the OWS millennials.
The problem is that having issues paying off college debt or being unemployed/underemployed isn’t limited to “liberal arts majors” contrary to popular stereotypes bandied about here and elsewhere.
One good case in point, is what happened to many ChemE majors during the 1970’s and early ‘80s. The job market for that major was so bad older relatives and former supervisors recounted knowing many who drove taxis, waited tables, became SAHP by default, and/or changed careers as the former supervisors did from ChemE to computer programming/tech. Also, the state of the ChemE major job market was so well known by the middle to end of that period that parents back then were actually telling each other and their kids/neighbors’ kids to avoid majoring in that field to avoid bleak job prospects upon graduation.
Another case is an uncle who ended up being a SAHP for several years during that same period because his industry happened to go through a cyclical downturn which meant even CivE graduates with a PE license were not in high demand for a period
One more recent case is the scores of CS/Computer engineering/IT graduates who were laid off/graduated to massive unemployment in the wake of the dotcom crash in 2001. Plenty of such graduates who assumed they’d be gainfully employed in their industry while doing the “good major” ended up being laid off en masse or graduated to unemployment/underemployment. Several CS major friends/colleagues had to work in retail, wait tables, etc to make ends meet when jobs in their field were scarce.
One close friend considered himself lucky to work retail at Best Buy despite the fact he had an MS and a BS in CS from a university with a respectable CS department.
Another example of a CS major who had issues finding employment in his field upon graduation ended up switching out of the field to being a customer service representative for a major car rental company. He was the individual who guided us to renting a vehicle to fit our requirements. In the course of chatting him up, I found he was a CS major who graduated into the dotcom crash and after a year and a half of un/underemployment in various retail/restaurant gigs, decided to switch into customer service and had been out of the CS field for 10 years. And he also mentioned worrying about outstanding college debt.
We drew a clear line for our girls between what was then and what is now. And while some lessons from DH’s and my past (even recent past) were relevant, many were the equivalent of the proverbial granddad tale of walking X miles to school.
When one examines the latest article or hoo-hah, it helps to look beyond the surface. And past some anecdotes.
Not all people want to (my expression) “drive the Mercedes.” That is entirely different than making enough to support yourself, continue to grow, be a nice citizen and ultimately do well for your own kids. Imo, we;ve got to stop measuring people by their salaries.
And debt should be taken on wisely, whether it’s the college loans or the 30k car. Wisdom is a life skill.
I still think it’s the mark of a loser to be comparing oneself to what others do or make. The question is - will you be able to be happy and self supporting with your choices - not - will you make more than others. Again, what difference does it make to my politics and government loving son that his engineering roommate might make more off the bat? For that matter, his year-older, Princeton econ major cousin in investment banking probably makes 3x as much. Again so what? Why is this of any relevance whatsoever?
What, I should be the kind of loser parent you bump into on CC who would then force his kid to become an engineer or pressure him to be an I banker when he doesn’t want to be?
I suspect a Quaker college’s definition of “best foot” may very well be the grads who are engaged in bettering the world in some altruistic way, and not on the finance/consulting grads, though both types of alumni certainly exist.
Sorry… not to pick on these students, but they were “haring off” on tangents where they probably aren’t going to do anyone any good. I have no objection to students working for reputable NGOs or non-profits, or starting ones that seem like sound ideas. These were not. They were half baked. I’d have been fine with some students in grad school, working in labs, working in staff positions in DC, etc. There really was an off-the-rails-we-don’t-give-a-crap-about-the-outside-world vibe that was kind of amazing. Parents visiting were chatting about it in some amazement, and my student (who I hadn’t seen in about 16 hours while she did student activities) immediately commented on it when we met up.
There are kids at all sorts of colleges with “we don’t give a crap about the outside world” kinds of kids. My neighbors son is a C student at a directional state college majoring in communications. He thinks he’s getting a job developing strategy for ESPN (his “dream”). The fact that his delusions are vocationally oriented, and the fact that he’s got a “practical” major, doesn’t make him any less delusional and in fact- demonstrates his lack of knowledge or understanding about the outside world. Nobody from his college has ever been hired by ESPN by the way- at least for as long as they’ve been keeping track.
To me this is a sign that he’s a teenager (he’s 20 but you know what I mean). I wouldn’t read too much into it vis-a-vis the school he attends, nor would I knock a Quaker school off the list for having students with a heightened (albeit unrealistic) sense of social justice.
For some reason, that reminded me of 30 Rock. Liz Lemon said once that they had a running bet about how long it takes “Twofer” to tell a new acquaintance he went to Harvard. Or when she would reference “Twofer” to a new colleague, she would dryly state, “In case you didn’t already know, he went to Harvard.” The Harvard thing was a frequent source of lines on that show.
All true. In circles I travel in, it’s known as “dropping the H-bomb,” as in “How long do you think it will take X to drop the H-bomb?”
Usually not very long. But some Harvard grads project more humility, though for a certain percentage of those, humility seems more like a calculated posture than a genuine sentiment. On the other hand, some of the best, most genuine, most inclusive people I know are Harvard grads. So there you have it.