<p>That’s an average. Performers, by the nature of the business, work sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it takes a while to find a break. Some don’t ever really find a break. There are plenty of people in music that do just fine. There are plenty that had to find other entry level positions just to get by. As I said, starting pay for a teacher is, on average, $43,000.</p>
<p>Plus, a lot of the things they’re calling “high school diploma jobs” actually require other certifications in many cases…so they’re not talking about someone out of high school with no training.</p>
<p>muaythaiguy18-why are you so focused on how much music or other arts majors earn vs. high school grads? If they can support themselves, it’s enough. Maybe they don’t WANT to have a big house and nice cars right away. Maybe they understand they need to “pay their dues” to become financially secure.</p>
<p>My BIL is an actor. You’ve probably seen him in movies or TV. He knew he would not come out of college making big bucks, but acting was the only thing he ever wanted to do with his life, and his parents supported that. He is primarily a stage actor (has won the Canadian version of the Tony), and no, that doesn’t pay the big bucks. So he takes bit parts in movies, TV and commercials, along with many, many voice roles, and makes better money that those of us with “real” degrees. That money also finances his stage work. But he started out after college waiting tables-probably making less than some HS grads. Go figure.</p>
<p>juillet, my D said that is she had chosen a minor it would have been Spanish or English because she already had so many of those credits going in. I don’t think she’ll do it though. Her plate is full enough.</p>
<p>Sseamom, that was addressing the point that music degrees impart special employable skills. </p>
<p>As I stated, I encourage people to pursue what they enjoy. I also stated that my concern is that people who get degrees like this may not end up with a job in the field. If my kid wanted to be a music major, I would push for music teacher or grad school in music.</p>
<p>For instance, does anyone have numbers on what percentage of music majors end up in a music-related career?</p>
<p>I have a two kids with these goals: professional musician (music performance major), and potential surgeon (biochemistry major). Both take exceedingly difficult courses (IMO) and are at the top of their game in these areas (as another poster mentioned, that really is the goal). Don’t underestimate the depth and strength of serious music curricula; it’s hard! There are many other avenues within the music industry and biochemisty fields that each of them may consider if performance/med school don’t work out. Both will attend graduate school one way or another (their choices).</p>
<p>My dad told me long ago: there is a reason they call it work. It’s a long life (hopefully); find something you love to do and about which you are passionate and you will be successful in life (and it won’t seem like work). I want my kids to be happy, not miserable in a profession they hate. They both have been passionate about their chosen areas of study for a long time. They may never be rich, but hopefully my influence will result in happy adults.</p>
<p>So yes, we will (and have) pay/paid for any major. (Scholarships helped).</p>
<p>There are unemployed and under-employed PhD’s in economics too. I know a couple- and just interviewed one for a position at my company. If only he’d taken a class or two in performance-- the role requires a lot of interface with teams, customers, etc. and this guy (as brilliant as he is) cannot communicate without putting people to sleep.</p>
<p>Muaythaiguy- there is no magic bullet. There are successful people out there who majored in basket weaving, and unemployed economists and engineers and nurses. We live in a dynamic economy which is changing very quickly and in unpredictable ways. Remember everyone claiming that medicine was the only sure field because it couldn’t be outsourced? Well, my radiologist lives in Mumbai. So much for that theory.</p>
<p>If you are happy with what you are doing- terrific. But even getting a PhD in econ isn’t a sure thing- so you might be a little less condescending about other people’s choices.</p>
<p>muaythaiguy: You are obviously a numbers driven person. Not everyone is. Some of us operate by instinct and intuition. I excelled in math and science, but I didn’t go that route. I live by intuition and work in the humanities. Yes, I do make six figures. More important to me was that I was able to maintain a career and raise children without nannies. Nothing wrong with nannies, just not what I wanted.</p>
<p>After 32 years years my heart still sings when I teach a Donne poem, help someone understand how to write or introduce the Iliad. How could anyone quantify that.</p>
<p>And I do some of my own work too. I think I have earned under $60K for my own work in my entire life, but I do see it published sometimes and I love the actual writing.</p>
<p>I have the brains but not the values or temperament for careers that are going to leap off the page as top earners.</p>
<p>I think it a very wise decision to have picked a field I didn’t burn out off and that I could maintain while raising a family.</p>
<p>There are other things to consider besides percentages on a page or lists of earning capacities.</p>
<p>Both my kids are getting PhD’s. They knew they needed to be in fully funded programs that paid their tuition and a living stipend. Well has found such a position; the other is finishing a masters and applying. They know they may never find an academic job, but each has a very feasible back-up plan. Why should I discourage them when they may achieve their heart’s desire? Since they won’t be incurring debt, nothing is lost by trying and many valuable skills will be gained along the way.</p>
<p>How many people would pay to go to college if they did not see it as an upgrade to their employability (even if that is not their only motivation to go to college)?</p>
<p>There are more people who are in jobs unrelated to their majors than those who are. Most jobs are not that inflexible in what one studies or majored in at school. You can’t get a job that has some specific requirements without getting the knowledge, and also oftnen the certification needed that you have that expertise at a certain level, but those jobs are rare. My DH works for a major company, and other than some technical departments it doesn’t matter if you were a French major or an engineering major or a history major, or even, gasp, a music major. I know folks high up there with all of such majors, working way outside of those fields of study.</p>
<p>The OP’s question is a great one. One that we are beginning to work through. Return on investment is discussed in my house quite a bit. I think we would pay for any major but, where we would pay for our children to get it is the question.</p>
<p>I don’t think parents should worry as much about what their kids are majoring in as whether or not they have a couple of reasonable career ideas that would be achievable given their chosen area of focus. </p>
<p>The obvious “practical” fall-back for the music major is teaching, but it isn’t the only one. Law schools don’t care what you majored in as long as you have the GPA/LSAT. I know people who majored in English or Classics but also took the pre-reqs to get into med school. I know a lot of people who have jobs with non-profits that they got through extracurricular leadership and programming experience combined with general academic achievement rather than through any specific skill set they picked up through a college major. They may not be making a lot of money, but if they stayed in the field, they’d certainly wind up earning a reasonable living. </p>
<p>There are also jobs a lot better than burger flipping that may be accessible to someone with an “impractical” BA. True, the situation is grimmer than it was in 2005, when the word was if you went to a good school, even humanities majors could be recruited by big Wall Street firms. But if you aren’t expecting a six figure salary, there are still jobs to be had. A lot of administrative and non-high powered business jobs that 30 years ago wouldn’t have required a BA at all now use the college degree as a weeding out mechanism, but don’t necessarily care too much about the major. As with the non-profit path, you’re probably not going make big bucks in these jobs, but you can wind up with a solidly middle-class life. </p>
<p>Even supposing, horror of horrors, that your philosophy major has decided she doesn’t want to go to law or grad school, isn’t cut out for teaching, and would rather tear her hair out than work in an office, all is not lost. One of my close friends from college majored in psychology intending to go into the field, but then changed her mind. She worked in the public service sector for a couple of years while taking something like 6-8 courses she needed to apply for an MA in speech language pathology, and is now preparing to begin a program. For students who want to go to med school, there are even specialized 1-year post Bac programs designed so that people who majored in non-science fields to complete the pre-reqs. If a parent doesn’t want to fund these programs, which essentially amount to a 5th year in college (although generally just the tuition part, not room and board and all the other bells and whistles you’re paying for), that’s fine, but the fact that your kid’s major MIGHT mean that he needs an extra year of undergrad level courses on his own dime depending on the path he chooses after graduating is no reason not to pay for a 4 year humanities or arts degrees.</p>
<p>As for me, if I manage to have kids who will have in-province status for Quebec by the time they reach college age, and assuming in-province tuition for Quebec us will still remain affordable, yes.</p>
<p>If I end up having a job - and kids! - away from my homeland, everything will depend on the cost of each option my kids may contemplate.</p>
<p>I was a psychology major but ended up beginning my career as a computer programmer. From there I discovered management consulting - and the rest is history. I made sure my kids did not spend too much time agonizing over their intended majors and used my experience of an example of the flexibility available to them.</p>
<p>S had no idea what to major in because he couldn’t envision anything he would want to spend the next 50 years doing. For S - this was the wrong way to look at it - so I just asked him to pick a major - any major. He decided to major in business and selected his college because it has the #1 undergrad business program. </p>
<p>Freshman year he took a variety of business intro classes for marketing, accounting, finance, management, etc. and did not really like any of it very much. He had to declare a concentration Soph year and against my better judgement - because I know my S - he chose Accounting simply because of the stability and assurance of doing well in the job market.</p>
<p>After interning for an acccounting firm the summer after Soph - he knew for a fact that he wasn’t cut out for the lifestyle of an accountant. So… he decided to double major in Film with a concentration in production - and has no intention of working as an accountant. Now that is more like it! He is no longer the brooding, anxious kid worried about making a life doing something that he doesn’t like. He is joyous, ambitious and taking risks. I am thrilled for him.</p>
<p>A few months ago he told me that the best place to begin a career in Film is in the mail room. Wait…what? I was doing the math in my head calculating how much we would have sunk into the opportunity for him to work in a mail room. Luckily, instead he landed an intership this summer, and an offer of full-time employment upon graduation, with a major TV station/film production company - and NOT in the mail room.</p>
<p>Kennedy - your experience exactly illustrates my points (a few pages ago). </p>
<p>One can force themselves to go for a “marketable” major - and perhaps even do reasonably well - but it will seldom be enjoyable for the long term and one runs the risk of being in the percentages who aren’t employed in that field as the passion is just not there (and you are competing for jobs with those who do have it).</p>
<p>But, if you go for what you do like and are good at, you not only enjoy life more, you have a passion and are more likely to get jobs within the field. It may - or may not - come with high pay, but for most, high pay is not equivalent to success.</p>
<p>If Plan A doesn’t work, as others have mentioned, there are far more jobs out there than just deli jobs or flipping burgers. It’s worth it to consider ones personality (adjust it if needed to get better people skills) and market yourself to these other jobs. The unemployment rate for college grads is far lower than high school grads - but either can be unemployed if the people skills aren’t there no matter what academic knowledge is there.</p>
<p>Go for the passion and try to be the best. It sure beats working in a field one is not passionate about IMO.</p>
<p>I am not a parent (actually a senior going into college), but I feel obliged to comment on this article. I sometimes think that the so called “childlike” mentality of “what do you want to be when you grow up” is the best route when picking a college degree. Not to say that liberal arts degrees are useless (they certainly are NOT), but I think a person should try to get a general idea of what area they would like to work in when they are out of college, and THEN pick a degree that will take them there. To be fair, many people switch out of their degree or change career directions, but that is usually because their first was wasn’t a good fit. This should be worked out by both the student and their parents. For example when I was a freshman in HS, my parents asked me what I was considering for a career, because I had bounced through so many career ideas before (Law, architecture, anthropology LOL ), and we discussed what my favorite subjects and strengths were. I did a bit of research and found that engineering / computers interested me. I took a few classes and software development and decided that is what I want to do for a career. I am now going to major in computer science at a university, but who knows where I might end up? Maybe anthropology :)</p>
<p>Of all the very educated people I know, only one is still in his chosen educational/professional path at age 50. My friend who has a phd in a science she loved got burned out and has given up research and proff’ing to run a language school. I have a BS in industrial pysch and a law degree but I’ve taught english abroad and want to do something else when I grow up/retire.<br>
I would like to think if a kid was hard working and education-driven I would help with any major because I am confident they could “make it work.” The problem becomes the kid(s) in the family who aren’t. The ones who will likely bob along fairly directionless. What about them?</p>
<p>That’s why I said that it’s really subjective. Parents have to know their kids. My D2’s PASSION is music and I know it, therefore I would NEVER have objected to a music degree. I’m relieved she chose music education rather than performance, but I would have supported her no matter what.</p>
<p>D3…I’m not sure what she’s passionate about, if anything. But she’s extremely bright and very capable. She could do most anything. She’s chosen Mechanical Engineering. So the first year she’ll get a lot of math, physics, some basic engineering, technical writing and PE. Nothing to complain about there. I figure she’ll PROBABLY wind up in a STEM vein - but we’ll see. She could switch it up completely.</p>
<p>Good question by the OP and one I’ve recently had to think about. My older D is a junior in college and she has changed majors about five times so far. She came home at Christmas and informed us that she was switching from a Human Resources concentration in business to public relations. At first I was angry that she switched majors again and I wondered what kind of jobs she could possibly get and then I decided that I didn’t care what her major is as long as she gets a degree in four years. </p>
<p>A few years ago though my younger daughter (currently a HS senior) said she wanted to be an archeologist. I told her she’d have to get a full-ride scholarship for that because at the time I knew an unemployed archeologist. She decided she likes math, history and business and is currently planning to major in computer science or systems engineering and minor in at least one other area that interests her. She told me last week that there are just too many areas she’s interested in. We’ll see what she ends up majoring in but I’m not as hung up on what it will be anymore. </p>
<p>I’m keeping my fingers crossed that both kids will be able to support themselves after college.</p>
<p>My neighbor majored in dance. She now dances at Disney World. She does what she loves, and she makes a living doing it. A young man from my church majored in vocal performance, and he is making a living in NYC as a musician. He is not famous, but does what he loves and makes a living doing it. My biology-major son will most likely try to take his band on tour once he graduates. I didn’t pay for a music major, but he will probably end up trying to earn a living in music, anyway (and no, he never wanted to major in music, so I never said no).</p>
<p>I work at a graduate school of art. Our grads are able to support themselves just fine, doing what they love to do … and there are many who earn more than I can even dream of earning.</p>