Would you pay for ANY major?

Parent Cafe
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<p>I know a “tiger mom” who bragged all of the time of how well her tactics worked with her two kids that did get through top schools with marketable majors, and life was good. It always is when ones plans work out.</p>

<p>Not bragging about the youngest two. They are not HPY material. They are not going to be premeds or STEM majors. Just arent’. Getting through college and not to jail (on dumb things) is going to be a challenge, it already is clear. And the 6 year plan is probably likely for college, if they are lucky. Maybe another 10 years at trying to find a decent job. Those timelines and that situation is real life for a lot of people, some of them OUR children.</p>

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<p>Yes, all students and parents should be aware of the job prospects, even if they are not the main criterion for selecting a major (and they should not override the student’s actual ability and interest in the various subjects, since a student with poor ability and/or low interest is unlikely to do well in school or on the job in that area). Being aware can avoid unpleasant surprises at graduation; knowing beforehand may influence some decisions such as being more debt averse if the student is interested in an area with lower paid job prospects.</p>

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<p>Much of it is reaction against the constant refrain that majoring in anything except engineering, nursing or accounting is “useless,” “a waste,” etc. Liberal arts defenders are an embattled minority. I make no apologies for it. College is not trade school.</p>

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<h1>144 This ties into ‘is an elite college worth the cost’…</h1>

<p>IF you are going to major in a ‘soft’ subject…philosophy, English, European art history…THEN it behooves you to go to an elite institution. Notice, none of the examples given received their LA degree from a low ranked or unknown school. HOWEVER, if you are pursuing a more ‘hard’ subject, engineering, accounting/CPA, teaching credential etc. then the pressure to attend an ‘elite’ with the associated high cost.</p>

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<p>IF your graduate can not live on their own, pay off their own loans and support themselves in a reasonable life, then are you willing to continue to supplement them as adults? If your graduate can not make it on their own are you willing to let them just deal with the consequences of their college choices or would you feel a strong parental pull to assist them?</p>

<p>Also, depending on the lifestyle your graduate was used too while living on your dime, they may have absolutely NO IDEA what it means to live well below those means. It’s probably romantic to think you can be happy living a very bare bones financial existence, but I’d bet the actuality is quite less fairytale.</p>

<p>Then the question becomes, is any UG degree worth 250K.</p>

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<p>“If you want to be guaranteed a leadership position, try serving as a combat arms officer in a branch of the military (if you’re a male). It’s trial by fire.”</p>

<p>This Memorial Day, as an Army Brat, and the daughter and sister of veterans, i lit my candles for all those loved ones who served in that capacity, a number of them no longer with us as they did sink, not by their own faults. So as much as I support , with my family life blood, the Armed Forces, i’m not big on recommending that route, unless it is truly the choice of the one wanting to go that way. My cousin’s son is in NROTC, as a marine. Her only son. Truly the light of her rough life, and she want so much for him. Hopefully, the wars are over when he has to do his time, because we all know where he will be sent. My niece is married to a Green Beret who is in Afghanistan now. So, I’m on my knees praying for them too. There is no second chance for them, if things go wrong and statistically their lives are more on the line than their peers who got their degrees in the Lib Arts and may flounder some years at little over min wage. Many of them, and I say this with experience, will find a groove to make the money and raise their families, though it will likely take a lot more time than the STEM majors.</p>

<p>My DH was a Lib Arts major, and yes, the Engineering grads were making a lot more than he was right out of college. He had long blown by them 10 years later with his MBA. The incomes plateaued and number of those we knew left the engineering fields for business as a result. Some of our closest friends were in that situation, classmates from the days of yore. From our college, by this time most all, and we do know most of them from our class, have found their grooves and tend to be doing all right, even the humanities majors.</p>

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<p>Far fewer students would pay to go to college if doing so did not upgrade one’s job prospects. This includes students whose majors are not aimed at any particular job, since having a bachelor’s degree in any major from a reputable school is generally considered more desirable than having just a high school diploma for a large set of jobs.</p>

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<p>And I am absolutely not sneering at STEM and the other such majors. I have stated above, very clearly, that I would have been and would be ecstatic had any of mine taken or do take that route. I love, love, love the idea that they could be self sufficient financially within the year after they graduate from college. What parent would not? So no sneers here. Lots of envy, in fact.</p>

<p>But I’m not about to push a kid of mine who want to be a Musical theater major into the STEM curriculums There are square pegs out there, you know. And it’s not a very useful or healthy thing to do, when it comes to trying to push your kids into some field of study when they despise and do not do so well on the very core of those fields.</p>

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<h1>167 UCBalumnus: I don’t see how my comment and yours are mutually exclusive. Education is a useful signal for employers, yes. I still find the constant slamming by some posters (usually high school students or college students majoring in STEM) of the liberal arts as “useless” not only irritating but frankly stupid.</h1>

<p>As many people’s comments on this thread have indicated, life is long and outcomes are uncertain. People succeed because of a combination of ability, qualifications, personal traits, and opportunity. Majoring in a certain subject guarantees nothing, either good or bad.</p>

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<p>English is in demand. No one can write, and if you can, someone will always hire us. I have never been unemployed and have written for STEM folk. Imagine that.</p>

<p>There is a political agenda buried in the celebration of only what can be quantified. It’s the job of the humanities everywhere to remind us that there is more to us.</p>

<p>Cpt: I feel your pain. I’d love to chat sometime.</p>

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<p>I have directed a number of kids who have graduated from Ivy, yes, Ivy league schools as well as any number of highly selective schools, to community college programs when they could not find a job for a while. A certificate in nuclear medicine technology, or medical billing can get them jobs that are a bit more than min wage, and get their foot in the door with companies that may have future openings where that BA from the college comes into heavy play. Every single one of them are now gainfully employed and making good salaries, and not doing the tech jobs any more. They just needed a bit of a stepping stone.</p>

<p>My optometrist was an anthro major at UPenn. Loved her years there, did well there, found some interesting but low pay jobs for some years, decided to go back for optometry. She’s now doing very well in that field. Took a bit longer, but she would not trade those years of study at Penn for a direct entry into her current line of work, Absolutely not. NOt for a million dollars or anything. Those years were wonderful to her, and what she will always cherish, and so she wants to provide for her kids as well. It took her longer to get on her feet, but something tells me that she wouldn’t have wanted to spend those years as a STEM major either. There is a balance of sorts in all of this.</p>

<p>But, yes, as a mom, I’d so embrace a kid who wanted to be an engineer.</p>

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<p>This is obviously a very interesting question by the evidence of the many views and posts, if nothing else.</p>

<p>And, I think, I would have to side with answering “yes.” I can’t think of a major that I would completely object to (short of underwater basket weaving). ;)</p>

<p>As others have posted, there are BFA majors who are gainfully employed and there are science majors who are back living with their parents. There are no guarantees as far as job prospects go.</p>

<p>However, I do feel a discussion with my child is certainly warranted. Right now I’m not crazy about her declared intentions for a career (nothing to do with income level or employment chances). I think it is part of my responsibility as a parent to at least help “guide” my daughter and at least discuss possible most likely ramifications and to make educated decisions.</p>

<p>Buy, by all means, it is her life. Not mine.</p>

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<p>That does make college a “trade school” at some level, even if you find that distasteful.</p>

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<p>But then so is the disdain for more pre-professional majors (other than visual and performing arts), or the apparent denial that many liberal arts students choose those majors for pre-professional reasons. Also, there appears to be a common misconception that STEM and liberal arts are mutually exclusive, even though the sets intersect at science and math (non-STEM liberal arts majors would be humanities and social studies).</p>

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<p>I think it is easy being the parent of a kid majoring in Sports Management to answer questions in the line at the grocery store about what the kid is doing and what he plans to do. I think it is harder being the parent of the Renaissance Studies major-- we live in a consumerist society where everything has a price tag on it, everything needs to be monetized, and anything even vaguely intellectual is looked down on as both elitist and irrelevant.</p>

<p>I promise to stop criticizing the people who go into debt for degrees in Sports Management or Leisure Studies once they stop criticizing Linguistics, Comparative Literature, et al.</p>

<p>Back to our regularly scheduled bashing of the humanities, to be followed by “Anyone who pays full freight an at Ivy is an idiot”, followed by an oldie but goodie rerun of “I know a kid who studied computers at Western Connecticut State College and he got a job at Microsoft so clearly MIT and Carnegie Mellon are for losers”.</p>

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<p>Sometimes people are gifted in areas that aren’t lucrative – poetry, painting, dance, teaching, social work. And maybe they despise/are terrible at math, the corporate culture, sales, technology. So isn’t it better they pursue what they are good at and what they love? Some kind of career will evolve – (maybe) just not a high-paying one. I guess my husband and I are lucky to be able to have our kids do what they love and are good at, while qualifying for no need-based aid-- we, with our English and sociology degrees,and no extended family wealth.</p>

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<p>True, but then majors like sports management or game design bring up the question of why one would want to major in a pre-professional major that is that narrowly aimed at a specific job which likely recruits and hires people from other backgrounds (e.g. general business for sports management, computer science or art for game design – meaning that lots of people can compete for your job, but you are less able to compete for other jobs in those other areas).</p>

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<p>My young D is currently fascinated with architecture which I think is a stimulating and difficult major. The fact that I know more than one architect who got hit HARD in the recession makes me hold my breath a bit…one even went to work in a warehouse to feed his family for a few months. But that is a long time off …markets and her interests may change.</p>

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<p>I believe this is what is known as a false dichotomy. I’d respond further but my eyes have rolled so far back into my head that the computer screen is blurry.</p>

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<p>Believe me, having seven very different children robbed me of any smugness years ago.</p>

<p>Out of those seven, do you know how many seem headed towards a STEM degree? One. We will undoubtedly have a mix of degree fields… and possibly no college at all.</p>

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<p>This is basically where I’m coming from. I’ve seen it up close among my younger set of friends. They were exhorted that “College is not trade school”. They pursued obscure degrees from expensive schools and surely received a top notch education.</p>

<p>But now they are underemployed and struggling in many ways. Their stress level is very high, with not much hope of any lessening. Money does not buy happiness (if I had wanted money, I wouldn’t have had all these children!) but it goes a long way to making life a little less hard.</p>

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<p>But Village Mom- there is very little evidence that the cause of these young people’s underemployment is the obscurity of their majors. My large corporation hires new grads all the time who majored in Classics, Medieval History, Philosophy, and a recent Ethno-musicologist (we had to look that one up.) We have a variety of roles which require the ability to do research, write well, analyze information, write well, and oh by the way- write well. </p>

<p>I have colleagues who run recruiting for global ad agencies, banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, consumer products companies, etc. and although we all hire for different industries, the core skills don’t vary tremendously in many business functions. </p>

<p>I am asked for career advice all the time (mostly by the frustrated parents of the newly underemployed college graduates) but most of the time, nobody wants to hear the advice. There are newly minted grads with degrees in history and political science and comp lit and yes, ethno-musicology, getting jobs TODAY at magazines and think tanks and ad agencies and insurance companies and security technology companies and on Capitol Hill. </p>

<p>Of course the young folks you describe are struggling, but they don’t want to hear what the solution is. Move to where the jobs are. Realign your expectations- there’s a reason it’s called entry level. Do some research- if you can’t get hired at ESPN without television experience (and you don’t have any) get hired at your local PBS station and work your tail off doing all the awful tasks nobody else wants to do. Then re-apply to ESPN in two years. etc.</p>

<p>Virtually everyone I know (myself included) who have jobs where they manage big budgets and lots of people had to start in either industries they weren’t particularly interested in or a department/function they knew they’d hate. That was life “back in the day”. We were all so grateful to have a job after graduating during a horrible recession, the fact that we’d moved to Dayton Ohio or Worcester MA or Fort Worth Texas was secondary. Now everyone wants NYC or SF or Seattle-- and nothing else will do.</p>

<p>I’d love to see the correlation between obscurity of the degree and the level of unemployment. Based on the last 50 humanities undergrads I hired- I don’t buy that argument.</p>

<p>What I do buy- you can’t sit on the couch tweeting your similarly unemployed friends and expect to land a job. You can’t tell everyone who tries to help you find a job “I want to do policy or strategy”. You can’t insist that if you studied Art History and want a career in the art world, that applying for a job in the marketing department or merchandising department of a museum is somehow beneath you.</p>

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<p>Oh, man, I love this. I find it hard to answer that question about d14’s intended field of study. What does one do with a pure math major (not engineering, not math ed, just math). I have to stare back blankly because I have no idea. It is SO much easier with d’11. She’s in a BSN program. Once I say that, the questioning stops!</p>

<p>There’s only one major I’d have reservations about, and that’s psychology. There’s just so darn many people with that major. However, I’d still pay the bills if that’s what the kid decided to pursue.</p>

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<p>I’d pay the bills for the major no matter what. Probably without a whole lot of reservations.</p>