“Kids these days have no idea how to work hard. In my day ……”
— Quote from every older generation about every new generation.
The Greatest Generation said it about you Boomers, remember? I dunno, the kids I see are panicked about their future in every possible way. Politically, socially, economically, environmentally, etc etc. with good reason.
Exactly. Calling us lazy or unwilling to relocate doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — especially because lots of jobs (even those in Nebraska) are remote post-COVID.
Then they should look to change careers. There are long list of careers which have high job satisfaction, many which are not all that high paying.
Actually, though, the job market has been brutal for STEM majors as well. Look at the hoops that tech companies often require from STEM majors, and you’ll see that the problem of highly qualified applicants trying to find jobs and most companies not willing to pay appropriate pay is endemic. Tech people are complaining that companies require 5 years minimum of experience in software that has been barely out for 2 years, 5 or 6 interviews, etc.
There is, indeed, a bigger problem of underemployment than there is unemployment, or working at a job which doesn’t require a college degree. When you look at that, the fields that have it the worse are Criminal Justice (73%), and while “liberal arts” is at 59.5%, Business management is at 58.8%, Misc Tech is 55.3%, Biology is 46%, Engineering technologies is 40.4%, information systems at 37.1% is only slightly better than art and design which is at 35.8%.
While Computer Science has “only” 21.3% underemployed, they have a whopping 5.2% unemployed, compared to 3.1% for History majors, and 3.1% for Art History.
Physics, the most STEM-iest of all STEM fields, has underemployment of 34.3%, but an insane 7.7% unemployment.
Having actual data is very good, as opposed to all of the “I know unhappy humanities majors who are employed in bad jobs” sort of stuff.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market/college-labor-market_compare-majors.html
That’s an interesting table. I believe the most recent published version of the table is at FEDERAL RESERVE BANK of NEW YORK .
A summary of some of the majors that have been mentioned in this thread is below. The table below is ordered by earlier career salary, which is notably different from the order for lowest unemployment. For example, elementary education has an extremely low unemployment/underemployment rate, but does not have a high median salary.
Unemployment seems to bare little correlation between STEM major vs humanities major. Most majors in both categories seem to have ~4% unemployment, like the overall average. Physics is something of an outlier with 8% unemployment, which is among the highest of all majors in the table. Underemployment does show more of a correlation, with >50% of most humanities majors being underemployed (defined as job that survey respondents believe does not require college degree), while most tech majors are closer to 20%. Salary showed a similar type of division between tech and humanities. However, salary was more correlated with tech + specific majors like economics rather than STEM vs non-STEM. For example, biology is the most common STEM major, which has similar stats to English majors, with only a bachelor’s. As noted earlier in the thread, more lucrative biology-specific positions often require higher than a bachelor’s.
American Community Survey 2018-19: Recent College Graduates
Thank.you for the summary. I know many are entrenched one way or the other about what is good regarding a degree and job outcome. It’s nice to have the actual data displayed this way. I’m sure there are outliers everywhere but on average the results are pretty clear. There are certainly better odds in both areas depending upon the field of study. Not every field is going to be equal even within STEM and humanities. Individual students can swing widely in their outcomes too based on their effort, personality and perhaps even luck. In the end we all make choices in life and those choices have consequences. Some paths may work out better for some. Some may prove dead ends for others. It’s best to take a good long look at potential majors and their potential outcomes and prospects. This has been an interesting thread to watch. In the end everyone makes their own choices and has to deal with the results.
I know a lot of young adults (many are not so young any more) and they are all gainfully employed. Most of them had an idea of what they wanted to do and were very aggressive in pursuing their interests. I don’t know anyone who stayed unemployed because they were too picky.
My niece got her first job in Atlanta even though she wanted to be in Charlotte. She took the job, but was able to transfer to Charlotte later on. Both of my nephews would rather to be in ÇA, but they are working in NYC now.
When D2 was applying to law schools, her preference was nyc, but she would have gone to DC or ÇA if she had to.
D1’s best friend would have preferred to work at a Seattle law firm after graduating from Stanford, but she settled on one in ÇA. Three years later she is in Seattle.
I do not think young people are as much of “prince and princess” the posters are making them out to be.
I certainly wouldn’t say all Gen Z’ers don’t care about their jobs. Most of them do. However, there appear to be a larger number of them (still a minority, of course) don’t feel the same way about their jobs as previous generations. A friend’s daughter, who just graduated and started to work at an aerospace company this year, told her parents that she was comtemplating quitting her job and perhaps doing something else. Another friend has a daughter who’s been changing jobs so frequently that her parents can’t even keep track of. She does well and frequent job changes didn’t appear to deter employers as they used to.
Frequent job changes can be due to employers going out of business or having layoffs, or the threat of such.
Those who have both strong in-demand job skills and strong sales skills sometimes prefer contract work that results (for them) a higher income than regular employment and a long resume of short term jobs.
Or, you can be like one of my siblings with a great education, multiple degrees, a great skill set but has few soft/people skills. Made for a rough career and a forced early retirement.
In her case, those job changes were the result of her initiatives. She also wasn’t a contractor but her skills certainly appear to be in demand.
Thanks @blossom for the great advice to new grads. I would have loved to have advice like that when I graduated. I’m a boomer too and it does seem like new grads are waiting for the “perfect” job rather than taking any “career seeming” job like the boomers did to get their careers started.
However, companies might have less of these entry-level training or rotational opportunities than they did back in the day. Companies demand skills nowadays and for their employees to hit the ground running. That might explain some of the bias toward “hard” majors like engineering or finance.
Finance a “hard” major? Yes, hard at some colleges, and there is a “hard track” at other colleges. But there are kids who graduate with degrees in finance with 12th grade math skills (algebra plus trig) and use nothing more esoteric than multiplication AND learning how to input numbers on an excel spreadsheet. Fractions? Very important in finance. Calculus? Only at some colleges, or at the quantitative finance track at others.
My niece’s husband has a law degree and was working at what he called “soul sucking legal job.” He said he always wanted to be an athletic director (not a coach) at a college. He decided to work few years at a law firm, saved his money and applied to a school specializing in running an athletic department. As it turned out, the program preferred people with law degrees. He is graduating next year. It will be interesting to see where he lands.
In my opinion remote work is not for new hires. They don’t know the company, they don’t know the job (frankly for many this may be their first job), they don’t know how their work will affect he work of others, etc. An experienced employee may find they can be very successful working remotely but most students didn’t like remote learning and I don’t think those same students will find themselves very successful in a new job with a new company working successfully.
Another thought I have is that the current entering graduates may have an opportunity to work with a group of people that has extensive experience in the fields they are aspiring to. In 5 to 10 years those people will be out of the work force and the opportunities to learn from and improve upon their experience will be gone. Denying yourself that opportunity because of where you wish to work or some perception of what you think you should be doing in my opinion is folly.
Both of my kids are in fields where they have done coops or clinicals and had an opportunity to learn from others. When my engineer interviewed they were far more interested in her work experience than her degree. It’s far less likely a humanities major is going to have those opportunities before they interview so I think it imperative that they be able to sell themselves and understand that any opportunity is an opportunity to gain experience and direction. Once your worth is established then you can be choosier about where you work, your working conditions and who you work for.
A lot of positions in the workforce have become much more quantitative with the advances in tech, especially data collection and the ability parse and analyze data. While I think that critical thinking, reading and communication skills that humanities majors can excel in are still important over the long run, I would advise any humanities types who want to go into the private sector to take a good does of quantitative courses to broaden and enhance their opportunities.
What may be interesting a few years out is that AI may become so advanced that the pendulum may swing back the other way. Rather than needing to crunch numbers, maybe the value added skill is asking/forming the right questions, interpreting the results and then mapping an execution or strategic path.
Pendulum always swings too far one way or the other. Just as students in humanities need to equip themselves with quantitative skills, students in STEM also need to be versed in humanities. There’s a reason a couple of the STEMiest schools have heavy requirements in humanities.
Really? Wouldn’t the most valued skill be being able to manipulate the AI? And wouldn’t one still need a good understanding of Data Science/CS/AI/ML to “ask or form the right questions, interpret the results, and map out an execution?”
Completely agree. So much of the culture of a company is something you only see in person. And if you want to stand out and progress rapidly that is much easier when you build personal relationships with potential mentors. A very few people are capable of doing that on Zoom (mostly those who are natiral networkers who would likely have even more success in person), but many aren’t.
That is an argument for students in any major choosing general education, regardless of what the college requires in this respect.
Or the AI pendulum may, as some predict, knock many people in all fields out of job opportunities, leaving jobs only for a small number of elite people in various fields who are needed to ask the right questions and interpret the results.
The number of people to write/modify the AI would still be a critical skill, but the number of people required for that skill is a tiny fraction of the people who are working with the data in industry. Yes, you still need to be familiar with what the data implies, but the AI might replace a lot of the current grunt work in data collection, sorting and first level analysis. IMO, it is always good to be familiar/comfortable with numbers.