This is an timeless question asked by millions of college students every year. Let me try to answer it.
It’s true that the average engineering major will earn more than the average “liberal arts” major. However, before submitting to the whims of your authoritarian parents or social judgments on the relative worth of “hard” and “soft” subjects, note that: a) the 90th percentile of historians will still have far more successful and enjoyable careers than the 75th percentile of engineers, b) if you hate a subject, you can’t do well in it, and c) in any case, at least in the US, the top echelons of the “hard sciences” are crowded out by foreigners with no life. They are the office slaves of the future, the American business majors – no matter how repellent they are – will be the ones who end up on the top of the corporate pyramid. So don’t let your parents or social expectations dictate your life. Don’t be repelled by doing English or Political Science if that is what you really enjoy and if you are good at. Of course, if your preferences tilt towards the “hard” sciences or Medicine, ignore this and steam full speed ahead.
On the other hand, unless you feel it is really necessary don’t bother with subjects like Film Studies or Women’s Studies. Not to disparage them, but as long as you’re not one of the people looking for a doss subject to fill in your requirements in compulsory education (if that’s the case, why don’t you just quit?), you’be be far better of doing something semi-respectable like Sociology or Political Science. If feminism is your thing, concentrate on that during your work. Ironically, all the Gender and Women’s Studies majors who replied to a UC Berkeley survey ended up working in the (invariably low-paying) education sector, ironically one of the most traditional occupations of the fairer sex.
Anyhow, just for fun – and to try out the newest version of Excel after my Linux-induced Windows drought – I compiled a few charts of how different UC Berkeley majors did one year after graduation in 2007. Perhaps this will be of use to people agonizing over which major to pick for their academic careers…
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Employment-wise, if you want a guaranteed job soon after graduation without the hassle of graduate school, it’s best to do business-oriented majors like Business Admin, Computer Science, Engineering, and languages. In particular, languages and computer science will be highly useful as second majors, force multipliers if you will.
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If you’re looking for a more or less guaranteed high salary on graduation, focus on the mathematical sciences, Engineering, Computer Science, and Economics and Business Admin. That said, even some unusual choices like Linguistics, Political Economy and foreign languages (with the exception of Spanish!) have good prospects.
Though subjects like Philosophy, Political Science and Molecular & Cell Biology are quite respectable, you need to do more with them to get a good job, generally speaking. For the former two, you will generally need to do a doctorate and go into relatively well-paying academia. For the latter, this a standard premed route into a high-paying job as a member of America’s healthcare mafia. Similarly, History, Rhetoric and Political Science are frequently exploited as stepping stones to law school and the perks and privileges of being a lawyer in a litigation society.
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If you’re going to be doing a pure science like Physics, make sure to go into graduate school, because the normal economy has little need of physicists (mathematicians are more useful for investment banks). In other words, a low GPA is not an option here. Similarly, many historians, philosophers and political scientists can expect to go into law school, just as those many of those specializing in Public Health or MCB with okay GPA’s can expect to go into med school.
Finally, don’t stress it. The real purpose of college is to network and make lots of connections, because these will ultimately determine your “success” in life. A hundred friends are better than a hundred dollars. If you’re of a nerdy disposition, imagine its a video game – if you fail, then you have endless other lives to practice and perfect your social skills. Having a visible circle of friends also gives you “social proof”, which makes getting to know new people ever easier. The road to millionaire-dom does not go through GPA station.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Andrew Abbott’s excellent welcoming address to new Chicago students in 2006:
Now many of you, of course, don’t give a damn about those other students — young people and adults struggling to move up a few notches in the middle class. You’re interested in living in Winnetka rather than Downers Grove. You may want to summer in the Hamptons rather than on Fire Island. Your idea of a good vacation may be a hotel in Paris and visits to the MusŽe d’Orsay instead of a resort in Orlando and visits to Disney World. “Surely,” you tell me, “my studies at the University of Chicago will have a big impact on those kinds of things. Surely they will determine whether I’m in the ninety-fourth or the ninety-ninth percentile of income. Getting a fine higher education may not affect my gross chances of worldly success, but surely they affect my detailed ones.”
On the contrary. I have to tell you that there’s no real evidence in favor of this second reason to get an education, and there’s a good deal of evidence against it. In the first place, all serious studies show that while college-level factors like prestige and selectivity have some independent effect on people’s later incomes, most variation in income happens within colleges — that is, between the graduates of a given college. That internal variation is produced by individual factors like talent, resources, performance, and major rather than by college-level factors like prestige and selectivity. But even those individual factors do not in fact determinemuch about your future income. For example, the best nationwide figures I have seen suggest that a one-full-point increment in college GPA — from 2.8 to 3.8, for example — is worth about an additional 9 percent in income four years after college. Now that’s not much result for a huge amount of work.
I’m sorry to bore you with this income story but I want to kill the idea that hard work in higher education produces worldly success. The one college experience variable that actually does have some connection with later worldly success is major. But in the big nationwide studies, most of that effect comes through the connection between major and occupation. For the real variable driving worldly success, as all of you know perfectly well, the one that shapes income more than anything else, is occupation. Occupation and major are fairly strongly associated within the broad categories of nationwide data. But within the narrow range of occupation and achievement that we have at the University of Chicago, there is really no strong relation between what you study and your occupation in later life.
… As far as performance in college is concerned, there is not, as I said, any national evidence that level of performance in college has more than a minor effect on later things like income. And in my alumni data, there is absolutely no correlation whatever between GPA at the University of Chicago and current income. Get it straight. Whether you end up on Fire Island or in the Hamptons depends largely on things that are unrelated to what you do as an undergraduate at Chicago.
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Anatoly,
Great article, but could you make the graphs a bit larger? Or have a link to a larger version of them to click on? They looked interesting but I couldn’t really read them!
Sorry about that, Natalie – now fixed. Click images to go to a page where they’re large.
Thanks!
Studying for future income and prestige is not a happy choice. I know people who went through college just to be graduates (social prestige) but in reality do not need the education because they already make millions doing business on their own.
I personally study what I like and don’t give much thought to what my future employment or salary may look like.
If you ask me Anatoly, there is a pressing need for more eccentric historians.
Maybe it is just my erratic reading, but it seems that it is still the old guard that are most prominent: the ones who reinforce the neo-liberal/ far left wisdom (Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, Edward Hermann).
Best of luck with your book. Good date for starting: near the Autumnal equinox.
What did Hitler and Stalin major in?
Nothing – neither got a university education.
Which I suppose goes to show that you don’t need one for success.
Priceless.
Without meaning to wreck the great intentions at this thread, there seems to be a good share of cabbies and hotel and restaurant personnel, with impressive liberal arts academic credentials (at least this seems true in NYC and some other major cities).
On the other hand, there’re some not so great paper credential folks who strike gold in liberal arts related work.
There’s no definite pattern. Much of the success is luck of the draw and/or being of the preferred slant.
If pressed, formally educated liberal arts folks can find decent paying work outside their main love, in a way that allows them to continue their passion.
Perhaps one should also be mindful of the notion that few if any survive many years in the institutional brainwashing machine (of advanced formal ‘education’) with their mental functions intact. So perhaps one should also ask which aspect of one’s intellect would you prefer to have trashed by an input of junk dogmas. I would say one thing for math(s) which is that it is about the only subject that trains in accurate thinking skills.
I don’t really agree (and not only because I highly disliked the theory-based math classes). One of the good things about the US is that there is a somewhat greater freedom to approach non-scientific subjects from outside the established dogmas than is the case in many authoritarian societies.
Re-math, even from a “philistine” perspective computer science and engineering are far more useful nowadays. (And in the case of the former, far more enjoyable than math IMO).
Not clear what you mean by “theory-based math” (or why you would dislike it). Ultimately everything is theory! We did “theoretical mechanics” at grammar school Alevels and it seemed to have an exceedingly low speculativeness coefficient, grounded firmly in observations. And I just tended to get the right answers in a flash anyway.
“computer science and engineering are far more useful nowadays.”
I wonder if here your peak energy awareness is a bit shallow (or of course we all struggle to live up to the paradigm shift inplications)–maths came before corporatisation/oilisation and will long outlive it, unlike comp sci.
US not an authoritarian society? So you have got a sense of humo(u)r after all!
“somewhat greater freedom to approach non-scientific subjects from outside the established dogmas”
A somewhat big word at the beginning of that quote (albeit makes a nice change from the excellent fabulous etc norm of what usually comes from between Altantic and Pacific).
I’m reminded of the last email I got from Noam Chomsky in which he referred to the myth of political correctness. At which it was clear he was either a liar or an utter incompetent. Let’s just guess how many professors of Islamic studies there are who are critical of Islam, ooh, like say “Professor Robert Spencer”, now which college is he based at….
My reckoning is that the main difference between west and east is that the former are much better at believing their own propaganda, due to the capitalist natural selection process having strongly selected for successful (profitable) deceits and discarding the duds into bankruptcy. Meanwhile a small handful of us fall between the cracks in the machine and get our CVs mangled…
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Spencer
“Spencer has criticized academics at his Web site writing that he opted not to enter any PhD program because he “could see [in 1986] that Middle East Studies and other departments were becoming highly politicized and retreating from genuine academic work”.[1][39]“
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Well do some university-level pure math and then comment again. School math (e.g. A-Levels) mean jack-all in higher education.
Re-CS and peak oil. First, I don’t see peak oil leading to the immediate collapse of civilization – the period of greatest risk is after peak useful energy (“emergy”) and critical buildup of pollution levels.
But even if I’m wrong and we’re already on a steep downslope, then believe it or not math is every bit as useless as CS. Just who’s going to feed you for your knowledge of groups, number theory or the Black-Scholes model?
Seems that the school math you’re indicating a despising of is also the math that you are not so hostile to! Ability to do “school math” trig and theoretical mechanics will indeed be valuable in a post industrial world, and may even help in surviving breakdown emergency conditions. E.g your makeshift housing, defence, or bridge doesn’t collapse.
You don’t see peak oil leading to immediate collapse of civilisation. That’s interesting coming from a poster to tod, where big names such as Gail and Nate are very much moving to that direction (eg latest thing about the two denialist articles http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5811). I’d be interested to know what you say in response to http://energyark.blogspot.com/2009/07/will-there-be-abrupt-collapse.html
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Spencer
“Spencer has criticized academics at his Web site writing that he opted not to enter any PhD program because he “could see [in 1986] that Middle East Studies and other departments were becoming highly politicized and retreating from genuine academic work”.[1][39]“
Interesting essay. I sent it to my Mom, who is an educational counselor, since I thought she would find it useful.
I am glad you made these points:
1. That if you hate a subject you probably won’t do well in it. I would expand that to say that, even if you do well in it, why would you want a job based on that subject? You’ll just wind up hating your work. IMHO, better to make less money and enjoy what you do.
2. Having only an undergraduate degree in a hard science doesn’t give you much of an advantage.
Anatoly, I think you might be interested in Paul Graham’s graduation speech.
Here is the money quote, I think: