@Mwfan1921 Maybe they don’t want to live there.
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Here are the top paid city employees in San Jose. What’s the ROI for police officers and fire fighters?
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It depends upon the number of stars in their reviews. I’ve seen many succeed, and fail.
Trades, like pretty much any other job, require a certain amount of natural talent to be good at the job. Those who don’t have it rarely stay employed long, at least in one location.
Yes, anyone regardless of their field, needs to actually be good at it in order to succeed. You can be an incompetent lawyer and make 60K a year probating small estates, or be a superstar lawyer and make 7 figures. Trades, professions- nobody can expect to be at the top of their field without being good at it…
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Which is why it’s pointless to look at various ROIs (colleges, majors, trades) and point Jr in that direction. What is Jr good at? Finding one’s niche is priceless and often sustaining with good mental aspects too. It might mean being a lawyer, plumber, tattoo artist, or ?
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Agree 100%. And then there are the professions/industries/functions which don’t exist today- how do you predict those skillsets?
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Although you hope the Jr is good at something where being good does well, rather than being merely good at something that is elite-or-bust.
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STEM is a broad area. I think there are broadly 4 buckets of skillsets – analytical, creative, life sciences, and stuff such as sociology/gender studies etc that cannot be bucketed into the other three. If you take the non life-science STEM, those areas should be seen as two things – broad analytical skills plus some additional narrow area skillset. So the STEM kids (minus life sciences) that I know of, look at or comfortably place into engineering, the business side of tech, law, IB, private equity, management consulting, hedge funds, venture capital, academia, tech policy, broad business areas like marketing, operations etc. My kid who is a CS major has considered most of the above, and can get any of the above that he is seriously interested in. Clearly this is a broader list that you can access from being just a business major, or a psychology major, or even an economics major. So I don’t know what is being lost by being a STEM major.
I remember my son telling me that what you study, within reason the degree you get, and the job you get after that, are completely independent of each other.
If my kid is not interested in doing Chemical Engg or CS (as you asked), I would encourage him to pick majors that a) he is interested in, and b) that leave him with the most optionality 4 years from now in terms of what he wants to do.
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This seems very wise. Optionality is the operative term.
My kid knows he’s good at math and loves it, but is not sure beyond that. So he will start with an engineering field. If he likes it, great; if not, he will shift to some applied math field like statistics or actuarial science. If he doesn’t like that, he will shift to accounting or business. College will be about self-discovery in the truest sense of the word.
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There’s no broiler plate solution to selecting the best fit or to receiving the best return. It may sound cliche but the student needs to really find the school, the program, the environment and the atmosphere that they can thrive in - be passionate about. Once they find that passion, a work will never feel like a work and studying will never feel like studying.
A good college should be one that inspires, motivates and boosts not only knowledge but also self confidence so that the young people can take on the world. I found one a little too late when I decided to get my master’s degree at a different university than where I got my undergraduate degree. The professors made all the difference for me. The joy of learning and the fact that they even knew my name after few weeks were a welcome change and even a shock! What caused the postponement was the dreaded, dragging-my-feet kind of experience I felt at the undergraduate university which was simply too large for any personalization. In this regard, my ROI could have been greater from my undergrad degree had I pursued my master’s immediately rather than delaying for years and years. So, the ROI is personal not merely based on any datasets.
At the same token, some majors really should not be majors. Research after research shows that things like Gender Studies leave many grads unemployed. It can be a minor but a major? If anyone tries to debate this one, all they need to do is a simple research.
As for the # of colleges out there, well — demographically, there is supposed to be a big dip in entering freshmen population as early as 2025 or 2026 so maybe some should consolidate and/or think about closing if it’s not competitive instead of relying upon foreign students to pick up the gap. Otherwise, what will happen is that the US students (citizens or resident status) would constantly have to compete with foreign students who may get more and more of the coveted spots at the Top 100 colleges leaving many qualified US students by the wayside. That would be totally UNFAIR, as we have already been witnessing this for the past 2 decades especially within the Top 25 college pool. There has to be a way to protect qualified, motivated US students who have done everything they can do in high school to make the cuts and not take away their seats so that the prospering colleges can make even more $$ through the extra tuition they charge for foreign students. These same foreign students with Student Visa then stay in USA permanently and often nab the coveted spots at Fortune 500s.
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I know you believe that your kid (at Princeton if I’m not mistaken) is representative of the entire global economy, but I assure you that’s not the case.
What is lost is that a low performing STEM major (perhaps not from Princeton, but from somewhere else) is not going to do as well professionally as a top performing something else.
Try an experiment some day when you are bored. Head to your local Apple Store and talk to the Geniuses who work there. You will meet a LOT of low-performing CS majors, whose parents get to tell their friends that Jonny majored in CS and got a job at Apple. They could be folding towels at Macy’s (low status) but are helping Boomers retrieve their photos at an Apple Store (high status? go figure).
Head to your Verizon store. There you will meet the low performing Engineering majors (who couldn’t hack engineering so switched into Business) and now their parents can brag that they are working in telecom.) One of these is my cousin, so this is not hyperbole.
That’s what’s missing. Society misses out when a kid who could have been an outstanding speech therapist or expert in voting fraud or investigative journalist or innovative architect or outstanding graphic designer or hilarious advertising copy writer becomes a low performing STEM major.
Your kid lives, eats, breathes CS? Fantastic. But if not, what then? And are you smart enough to predict with any accuracy “optionality” four years from now? If so- get off CC and go make your first billion $. Remember when Petroleum Engineering was the hot major for “guaranteed” high wages forever and ever? And then oil prices plummeted… and energy companies laid off experienced engineers and cancelled their interview schedules for new hires? I remember. And even though I’ve been hiring for decades, I’m humble enough to admit that I cannot predict the labor market four years from now.
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Our world is better when more of the population is educated, not less. How does closing/consolidating colleges instead of inviting some of the best minds on this planet help? It hurts.
Yes, some of the best/brightest are in the US as well and shouldn’t be shut out - no doubt there - but closing/consolidating certainly doesn’t help with that either.
We’re all citizens of the planet first, then our country/region/state/etc afterward. Helping the planet helps us all.
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Reality check- these foreign students are able to get companies to sponsor them (which is now neither easy, fast nor cheap) because companies cannot find the talent to take those jobs among those who are US born. You can’t legally work here without the right visa (or marry an American) and the only reason you’ll get the right visa is if your skills are so in demand that a company is willing to jump through the hoops to get you.
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I always wonder why Gender Studies as a major gets cited so frequently- must be very triggering to some.
There have been numerous analyses done (on the student loan crisis, for example) which show that the actual culprits in higher ed are For-Profit colleges and majors such as Tourism and Travel, Recreation Management, Court Reporting, Sports Management, etc.
None of these majors deal with gender, and also, none of these majors are particularly analytical, theoretical, or involve a high degree of intellectual engagement. And the level of under-employment of those students is extremely high.
For every Sports Management major who is selling memberships to your local LA Fitness and wondering why he’s not running the NFL, you could likely find a Gender Studies major who is at law school preparing for a career as a litigator in employment law. At least the Gender Studies major knew he or she needed grad school to achieve those lofty professional goals!
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It is the kids that are less academically strong that should consider a STEM major because those are employable skills with a defined / structured outcome. Of course as long as he/she finds the STEM major interesting. The kid that is strong academically could do a wider set of majors and still become gainfully employed. Of course if you are talking about careers that involve self-employment, because you are going into business for yourself, all this discussion is moot. You don’t even need a degree.
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Which part of STEM offers great career outcomes for weak students?
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The college majors with the stronger major-related job and career outcomes (regardless of “STEM” or not) tend to be the ones that are either more difficult academically, more difficult to gain admission to the major, or both. Academically weaker students are less likely to complete a major that is more difficult, and may be weeded out if the major is more difficult to gain admission to.
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Biology is the most common STEM major, which was also the lowest salary major listed in my post above for SJSU 2019 medians. CS is also a STEM major, which had the highest median salary. STEM encompasses a wide variety of majors with varying degrees of associated career outcomes. STEM does not universally mean “employable skills with a defined / structured outcome.” Specific numbers are repeated below.
Computer Science – $111k (39% still looking)
Electrical Engineering – $67k (59% still looking)
Chemistry – $34k (20% still looking)
Biology / Physiology – $31k (33% still looking)
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Weak is a relative term. I am not saying you can be highly disinterested and have great career outcomes. But if you are hard working, and not necessarily “brilliant” whatever that means, you will do very well if you are simply trainable. Currently there is a wide gap between CS and other Engg majors. And CS happens to outperform the non -specific majors such as Math and Physics also unless you are Math/Physics from a top school. . Kids that go to a three month CS boot camp (nowhere close to a degree) are starting at 70-80k in NJ. Higher on the west coast. Broadly speaking there are two parts to the CS job market – core engineering (like Uber, Lyft, Google etc) and building business applications such as working for a Loreal implementing some database tools etc. The first variety of jobs demand a harder skill set than the second variety, and the pay for the first variety is more than for the second as a consequence.
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