Will we see a decrease in the # of CS majors?

Parents Forum
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That choice is going to depend on how big the differences are. The choice may differ between the following situations:

  • Choice #1 between:
    • A job you love whose pay is too low to live on if you want to be able eventually to move out of your parent’s place.
    • A job you merely like whose pay is high enough to let you live on your own comfortably and save for long term goals like retirement, your kids’ college, etc…
  • Choice #2 between:
    • A job that you love whose pay is high enough to let you live on your own comfortably and save for long term goals like retirement, your kids’ college, etc…
    • A job that you hate whose pay is 5% higher than the job that you love.

It would not be surprising if there were many people who would choose the money in choice #1 but the job that they love in choice #2.

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https://www.luminafoundation.org/files/resources/deciding-to-go-to-college.pdf page 4 lists many employment and pay / financial reasons as being highly important among surveyed people.

https://news.gallup.com/reports/226457/why-higher-ed.aspx says that “Results confirm that work outcomes are the main reason most people chose higher education, with 58% reporting job and career outcomes as their primary motivation. This is true across all higher education pathways and demographic subgroups. Work outcomes are also more than double the next-most prevalent reason, with 23% reporting a general motivation to learn more and gain knowledge without linking it to work or career aspirations.”

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You may not have read it this way, but I was supporting your post, which, again, I didn’t take as a statement of absolutism about the American worker: “Thrilled and fulfilled vs. Chained.”

I can’t really substantiate why I suspect a lot of people are in the middle beyond the explanation of my own situation: I wanted a certain level of material wealth and concomitant “life” flexibility, and the things I naturally love to do and in which I am truly interested weren’t connected in any obvious (to me) way to the level of pay I needed to reach that goal. So, I went to law school!

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This is an interesting discussion about career satisfaction. But I just want to throw in a couple thoughts. First, there are certainly people who get B’s and C’s in college classes and then succeed and thrive in those fields once they have a hands on job. (And the reverse may also be true.)

Second, you benefit from what you learn getting your bachelor’s even if you end up in another field. My youngest is about to graduate with a double major in computer science and classics. Was the classics major a waste of time because it’s not directly relevant to the job my kid is starting this summer? Of course not.

Isn’t it true that a lot of the skills and knowledge gained getting a CS degree will be useful in a wide range of careers?

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Since most desired jobs attract hundreds of applicants, they can be considered “reaches” for job seekers. So it would not be surprising if many job seekers have to settle for jobs that are just ok and which pay just ok, rather than getting their dream job and/or dream pay. Looking for a new job is also substantial work in addition to the job one already has, and if one is unemployed (or a soon-to-graduate college student looking at student loan repayment), there may be more financial or other pressure to take the first job offer that comes.

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Here was the question:

58% is actually a lot lower than I expected. That leaves A LOT of people open to other #1 reasons.

None of my kids went off to college with their life-careers on their minds, though it’s fair to say that they saw it as the next thing one does in getting on with life. That is how I intended it. To be blunt, they have a safety net (me), and, yes, I’m keenly aware of the obvious point there.

Two of them are making very good money relative to their age and one of them is in a job to help her gain admission to a PhD program in Psychology. I assume, I think safely, that if she achieves her goal she’ll be able to take care of herself financially. And really, she’s taking care of herself financially right now. We haven’t sent the monthly “help money” in almost a year.

In the context of yet another “college is to make more money vs. self-actualize” debate of extremes, which cannot be reconciled, absolute statements about everybody’s intent for going to college amounts to question begging.

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Of course. That seems consistent with the expressed idea that there are a lot of people in the middle between “hate” and “love”.

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Perhaps if they started work with unrealistic expectations at the tail end of a long boom, then they are doomed to feel the job (and perhaps soon the pay) is a bit of a letdown. That’s my takeaway from this sort of article:

“What may seem like entitled behaviour – quitting and demanding changes at work – is actually employers failing to meet the demands of modern life. Gen Zers just “want decent pay for doing work they enjoy, and the respect that allows them to have a life outside of their jobs”…”

One of S’s friends (3 months into her first job after graduation) is already saying “I can’t imagine working 40 hours a week for the rest of my life” (she mostly doesn’t actually work 40 hours despite being paid for it). Meanwhile S is working 50 hours a week, doing a job he loves for bosses who think he’s great, and his friends think he’s crazy for working that hard. Adulting definitely requires an adjustment from college life.

But I’m sure that baby boomers had the same opinion about Gen X: for example I recall the movie St Elmo’s Fire from my college days.

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For some people (even college educated young people) that’s enough. They don’t see it as “doomed”. They work to live, not live to work, and get their primary satisfaction from non-work areas of their life. Career optimization simply may not be a priority, however much ingrained in our workaholic American culture it is. “Just okay” may truly be okay for them.

Then there are people like me, who found myself in a bad fit career and tried hard to find something I’d like better and could realistically pivot to, but never quite found it (and yes, I read all those books on your shelf!). Maybe that speaks more to my own incompetence than anything else, but in the meantime life gets in the way and career satisfaction takes a back seat. And so here I still am.

The demographic on this site, both parents and students/young career folks, skews highly educated and ambitious. And these are the folks that will be striving for the best in their careers, and attempt to re-pivot if things are less than satisfactory. But that doesn’t mean everyone else has, or should have, the same ambitions.

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Or has the opportunity to earn the achievements needed to reach such ambitions (e.g. talented performing artist from a poor family who cannot subsidize the performing artist’s living expenses though unpaid internships or very low pay jobs needed to try to enter the profession, so chooses something else as a day job to pay the bill and does community performing arts as an “extracurricular”).

Or knows of the existence of some ambitious goals (how many jobs out there exist that a typical high school or college student does not even know exists?).

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But here’s a problem with this line of thinking- Many, many interesting jobs are the by-product of putting up with the less interesting jobs as you work your way from entry level to decision-maker. That’s just how the work world works in a lot of fields.

It would be like asking a woman, immediately post-partum, “how satisfying is motherhood?” Not so satisfying, most likely. But a year into it, most parents are totally and completely in love with their children. (Sorry for the bad metaphor, I’m running on fumes today).

So of course new grads don’t find their work especially satisfying. But the ethos of “oh well, find something only modestly hideous and get your gratification elsewhere”-- realistic as that may seem in the short term, ignores the fact that sticking with stuff (the grit mentioned upthread) actually gets you to the good stuff.

My early corporate roles were kinda/sorta dismal. They paid fine, not great; they weren’t terribly interesting to me; the people were ok. I lived somewhere I hated, but had to be patient to get to move somewhere better.

But 35 years later? I work with phenomenally smart and kind and curious people, I’ve learned from some of the best leaders in the corporate world; the work gets more interesting every year, and I won’t be retiring until they kick me to the curb (which of course could happen- I’m old!)

So yeah- quiet quitting, actual quitting, the current generation thinking they want to “phone it in” for 40 years while they climb rocks and make kombucha in the bathtub and participate in Iron Man or Burning Man… absolutely. But the quiet quitting folks aren’t in line for the more interesting jobs down the road.

And the more interesting jobs usually pay better than the entry level jobs. So that’s where the Venn diagram starts to become real. A job which was initially boring/OK, which progresses to the more interesting jobs, which progresses from “pay is fine” to “I’m making more money than I thought possible doing something I really enjoy”.

I’m not sure this generation understands this dynamic. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. The hustlers gonna hustle. And everyone else gets to enjoy home brewed kombucha and walk their dog during lunch.

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However, there are fewer upper level corporate (or other organizational) roles than there are lower level ones. Did most of your peers in similar early corporate roles get to high level jobs working with phenomenally smart and kind and curious people and the best leaders in the corporate world?

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Many of the women in my cohort took maternity leaves and never came back. 15 years later when they tried to re-establish themselves professionally, they discovered that the world had moved on. One is working as a yoga instructor, one teaches knitting at a high end yarn store, a few have opened service type businesses (closet organizing is big). They don’t make much money, and they are (almost all) bitter about “what happened to me”.

The ones who stayed in the corporate world have all done well. Not all climbing the corporate ladder, but opening their own ad agency, package design firm, PR firm (so leveraging their former co-workers and professional network to become their clients). One cashed out after a successful start up and is now on boards, podcasts on leadership, speaks at conferences.

So much of Sheryl Sandberg’s advice has been tainted by the whole Facebook/Meta association, but I wish I could tell young women that there is a significant kernel of truth in “Lean in”. It’s not too hard to get some key promotions early in your career if your colleagues are leaving in droves.

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And the time to put in the extra work to get ahead of the game is immediately after college, when you likely don’t have the same level of responsibilities (house, spouse, children, etc) that might constrain you in your 30s.

We talk about the pressure high school kids are under to get into a good college, but I wonder how many kids get to the end of college feeling burnt out (by pressure to get good grades, internships etc) so they want to take time for themselves, as opposed to feeling “I’ve had four years to enjoy myself, now it’s time for the real world”? 30 years ago, I imagine most people in my cohort thought the latter, but I’m not sure if that’s still the case.

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If your goal is to maximize the amount of financial reward while minimizing the amount of work/effort, and you derive your satisfaction purely from that ratio, you’re highly unlikely to be happy with your job.

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This is becoming much less common, in large part because the rising CoL in many urban metros is so high that two incomes are needed to keep finances in order (especially during the daycare years).

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Do most college students really “enjoy themselves” for their four years of college? Depression and anxiety among college students these days is at an all-time high, and the pressure for good grades and high-paying internships is intense – in large part because of the larger student loan amounts that people are taking out.

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This interesting thread is veering into a few different directions, so I just want to make a distinction between career starters who seem unwilling to “pay their dues” at the unglamorous starter jobs and those who make conscious decisions that they know will impact their future prospects.

I’ve definitely encountered the former, but when I’ve posted here about those happy with “just okay” jobs, I’ve had in mind the latter. I’m thinking of several I know who decided something like “I know my career prospects are better if I stay here in Expensive Area A, but I am going to move to Less Expensive Area B. I won’t have a great choice of jobs or have as much future potential, but I’ll be able to buy a house and spend more time with my family, which are important to me. This job and this income are ‘good enough’.”

Of course, this depends on the particular career. As @blossom described, some require starting in the less desirable locations in order to progress to the more lucrative interesting jobs. But some industries/careers are concentrated in particular areas, and outside of those you settle for less, career and income wise. It comes down to personal priorities.

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Just wanted to respond to this- I’d push back on “in large part”. Anxiety, suicidal ideation, depression AND successful suicide is up across the board for young people, including those in the military (who have zero student loans), those who do not attend college at all (zero student loans) and in countries overseas where university is inexpensive because the government pays for the top academic kids (and the others don’t go to U at all).

So the cause and effect of student loans and depression and anxiety? I’d love to see a source, I don’t think this is the case.

Agree that personal priorities need to align with the professional decisions. I’d hope these are conscious decisions and not just folks looking back at age 70 thinking “Wow, I’m glad I decided to stay in Des Moines, but maybe I’d have had a more fulfilling life if I’d taken that transfer to Chicago”.

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But wouldn’t student debt push you in the direction of putting more effort into career development? D was in a cohort of kids with a full ride scholarship. I felt that the lack of financial concerns made some of them less career oriented (eg more interested in summer jobs like leading outdoor activities) than my S’s classmates. Her friend group behaved similarly to my classmates 30 years ago (when a summer job was just a way to pay for your vacation, not a resume building activity).

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