<p>Journalist Ben Casselman (formerly of Wall Street Journal, now of FiveThirtyEight.com) has analyzed economic outcomes of the choice of majors: <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major/">http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major/</a></p>
<p>He provides a tool in which you can input a major (say political science), and learn the median, 25th and 75th percentile earnings.</p>
<p>From the introduction:</p>
<p>"The link between education and earnings is notoriously fraught, with cause and effect often difficult to disentangle. But a look at detailed data on college graduates by major reveals some clear messages: Don’t be pre-med if you aren’t planning to go to medical school; don’t assume that all “STEM” — science, technology, engineering and math — majors are the same; and if you study drama, be prepared to wait tables.</p>
<p>Those lessons might seem obvious, but there’s evidence that many students aren’t learning them. By far the most popular major in recent years, psychology, is also one of the lowest-paying and leaves more than half its graduates working in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Many of those students no doubt would have chosen to study psychology even if they had known about their uncertain career prospects. But research has consistently shown that many colleges and universities do little to push their students to make informed choices about what to study.</p>
<p>For all the recent skepticism about the value of a college education, a bachelor’s degree is still “worth it” on average. In fact, according to a recent analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average value of a college degree is near an all-time high, even factoring in rising tuitions.</p>
<p>But the key word there is “average.” The same Fed researchers also found that the lowest-earning 25 percent of college graduates earn less than about half of high school graduates — and the high school grads also had four years to make money while the college students were taking on debt. And those figures don’t include the shockingly high percentage of college students who don’t graduate, many of whom end up with the worst of both worlds: saddled with debt, but with no degree to help their job prospects...."</p>
<p>Probably the most common misconception is that all STEM majors have good job prospects, even though that is not true of the most popular STEM major (biology). Casselman’s article does address this by pointing out the relatively low pay that biology graduates find.</p>
<p>Of course, job and pay prospects should not be the only reason to choose a major. But awareness of such factors can be considered in the context of the student’s spending habits when determining whether the student will be able to become financially self-sufficient in the career path associated with the major.</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear that the author doesn’t know too much. He thinks that actuarial science is close to accounting and recommends it for lib arts majors even though actuarial science is a math-heavy quantitative major that isn’t very related to accounting.</p>
<p>While he does apparently underestimate the math involved in actuarial science, he does get the non-uniformity of STEM correct, as well as noting that women tend to major in the lower paying STEM majors.</p>
<p>Well not all engineering majors will do well in the job market either. For example, pick Electrical Engineering, within this major there are subfields. If you concentrate in one of these subfields that are not in demand, you will not be able to find work. I used to have to take a whole year of Analog, I just checked EECS from UCB and quickly I didn’t see it was offered, just digital electronics. In real life, I bet there are fewer people even know this subfield to teach, one of mine died a few years ago.</p>
<p>Oh here we go again…yet another thread on the economic worth of college majors. </p>
<p>Skills do have differing economic worth (as does the level of your skills).</p>
<p>Some majors do correspond to skills.</p>
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</p>
<p>EE 105: <a href=“UC Berkeley EE105, Fall 2014”>http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee105/fa14/</a>
EE 140: <a href=“EE140/EE240A, Fall 2014”>http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee140/fa14/</a></p>
<p><a href=“Electrical Engineering (EL ENG) < University of California, Berkeley”>http://bulletin.berkeley.edu/courses/el_eng/</a></p>
<p>Enrollment in EE 140 is only 10 this semester, though, with an additional 17 in EE 240A (the exact same course for graduate students). EECS enrollment is mostly in CS courses these days.</p>
<p>It is true, however, that some majors that used to exist at Berkeley no longer exist. For example, there used to be departments and majors in mining / mineral engineering and naval architecture and offshore engineering. Their former existence is hinted at by buildings whose names refer to those departments.</p>
<p>ucb, are those advance level courses, I took mine in sophomore/junior-ish year. I’ve heard people can’t find RF engineers anymore.</p>
<p>Based on listed prerequisites, they are typically available to juniors who have taken the prerequisite course EE 40 (introduction to microelectronic circuits), which is typically taken as a sophomore.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus : Though Cal must have gotten out of mining engineering and naval architecture for reasons other than obsolescence, however, as those majors are offered by other schools and grads from those programs can generally find fairly lucrative jobs.</p>
<p>Likely reason is loss of student and faculty interest. For example, there used to be a lot more ship building in the area than there is now.</p>