Numbers: Not Just for Math Majors Anymore
Katie Bardaro is the lead economist for PayScale.com, a salary data and software company.
UPDATED MARCH 24, 2013, 7:01 PM
In today’s oversaturated labor market, having a college degree no longer guarantees placement into a white-collar job. The underemployment epidemic is widespread and taking the hardest toll on people ages 19 to 30. However, the risk for underemployment is heavily dependent upon your chosen degree.
Fields that continue to see growth during these tough economic times are those that require analytical thinking and/or technological skills – essentially STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). Graduates in these majors are in demand.
The growing fields are in science, technology, engineering and math. You don't have to major in these; you could take a few classes and reap the benefits.
Furthermore, the typical pay for these fields is quite high relative to other bachelor’s degrees. When PayScale examined starting and mid-career median pay for 130 majors, we found STEM majors dominated the top of the list with an average mid-career pay of $112,000 across the top 10. For all majors combined, the average mid-career pay was only $72,000.
That being said, not all college students have the interest or ability to major in a STEM field. Another possibility is to major in a non-STEM field, but take some analytically focused courses like economics or statistics. Many jobs that previously didn't require analytic thought or data handling now do, and arming yourself with these skills is one way to get a leg up in the labor market.
Like majors, not all schools are created equal. The price you pay for a degree varies widely, and part of justifying higher tuition is the expectation of big financial return after graduation. If you plan to major in a low-paying field (like art, education or English), it is harder to justify the tuition of a high-priced private school.
PayScale annually releases a College Return on Investment study that factors in the cost paid to obtain a bachelor’s degree and the additional income graduates earn relative to a high school graduate. The findings of this study align with what we see in our major studies: schools with a large presence of STEM majors (like Cal Tech and M.I.T.) tend to have the highest financial return, while those with a large presence of non-STEM majors have a low and sometimes even negative return.
If money is a factor when making the all-important college choice, students should consider their interests and aptitudes: What are you likely to major in, and what income opportunities are likely to be available after graduation?
Join Room for Debate on Facebook and follow updates ontwitter.com/roomfordebate.
A Liberal Arts Foundation
The Reality of College Choice
91 Comments
Avoidance of mathematics and the natural sciences by those in the liberal arts and the social sciences means eventually that our reporters, politicians, businessmen, and lawyers will be flying blind. Look at Congress. Look at the media. Blind as bats.
The only entry level office jobs these days are receptionists, admin assistance, HR people, healthcare worker, along with jobs in retail, restaurants, healthclub and Starbucks. Most of which hire women. Where do the male libart majors go? Most go on to get a master's hoping to teach, or go into law or MBA, even lawyers and MBAs are now increasingly unemployed, and in even more debt.
I think it's irresponsible for colleges to continue to sell liberal arts majors claiming that a college degree makes a difference in their career, and pretend that all degrees are created equal. But ultimately people just need to wise up. Even English majors from Harvard are now unemployed, what hope is there for a Women's studies or Latino/Black studies major from a 2nd tier college?
Of course, as a humanities major, I've read the book (no mere spark notes cheating), and know something of the history of the expressions I used. It seems inherently useful to know where we've been, where our expressions come from, and how to place both within the proper context.
Maybe I don't earn quite as much as some, but scientists and Stem persons are not the richest amongst us; you have to be born a princeling. And you math people should know that higher income doesn't correlate well with happiness, eudaimonistic or otherwise.
That said, most people can't become engineers or actuaries and ultimately "Do what you love" remaims the best advise to give to young people.
Is it enough to repay the student loan and also support myself?
What are the chances that I will find a job?
What other fields can I find employment if I cannot find a job as an Art Historian?
The people who have gone to a 4 year college and gotten a degree in women's studies, art, liberal arts, history, philosophy, English, foreign language, economics, music, social worker, government, political science, humanities, anthropology, archaeology, or any of the other similar degree are still mostly unemployed, or at least not in a job where they were using their degree.
The USA must somehow set aside funds to finance the re-creation of a superior human technical STEM Database that will be required to win or at least compete in any world-wide technology war.
We need to reverse course of our educational system and re-emphasize science and engineering to create many more medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and educators as the US educational system did prior to the 1970's, instead of allowing the study of non-technical subjects in our higher education systems.
STEM is no safe haven. In fact its a pathway fraught with risk. The statistics in the article do not reflect the reality for most holding post-graduate degrees, even doctorates in these fields. In many areas, the situation is positively grim.
The trouble with the salaries is that they do not reflect the vast swaths of graduates with doctorates stuck in what I call the post-doctoral logjam. Ph.D.'s can be stuck in these positions for upwards of 10 years (following an 8 year Ph.D.). These people are grossing less than $40k a year working 70 hours a week - often into their 40s. Its not surprising that many throw in the towel.
3 problems plague these fields.
1. These fields are being commoditized. The skills mismatch that the moguls in Silicon Valley and investigators in biomedical labs moan about doesn't exist. They want cheap and compliant but highly skilled labor working hard for a song while they dangle the green card. Its that simple.
2. Demand in these fields is highly cyclic at best and the educational pipeline is long. It is difficult to determine "need" when entering an educational pipeline that's a decade long.
3. The skills set is a constantly moving target. Since employers seem to be allergic to on-the-job training, a worker who is in demand today is easily discarded tomorrow - like kleenex.
Right. Because you can learn English or education, and especially art, from just about anyone. Why would you want to be surrounded by bright kids from a variety of disciplines at an elite university? What's the difference between learning literature from a cereal box and learning it at, say, Princeton? Have we sunk so low that we think that universities are simply technical schools? Something tells me that this "economist" got her degree from one of those "high-priced private schools", though.
True you will spend 42 to 48 years on average, 2200+ hours each year going to the work you pick as a senior in high school. But if the perception of monetary return is a major factor, I hope someone will tell you to think again.
I'm surrounded by engineers and other professionals who are happy enough with the nature of the work, with a few who found a true calling, and unfortunately with far too many who just go through the motions, because they hate it. You can tell who they are because they never stay put very long, they are always the last to get promoted and the first to leave because there must be something better in that next job.
The only thing worse than an engineer working a job they hate is the life they lead away from the job. If you hate what you are doing 40+ hours a week you will be no fun to be around when away from the job.
And if you do decide to go into STEM because you believe you will enjoy it, take a few Liberal Arts classes in both high school and early in college. The scientists and engineers with the most potential for advancement and high pay are the ones who can write and speak well. And if you wish to manage or lead (they are not the same thing) you will need to learn how to understand and get along with people.
Advice like this might help if you have perfect breasts or a rare gift for salesmanship. But for an average smart person like me with above-average social skills, there's really not much out there but extremely difficult, boring, and often abusive jobs that will demand far more sycophantic loyalty than skill.
For smart people with below-average social skills like several of my friends and siblings, you'll be systematically excluded from most every position involving an interview, and will be limited to extremely specialized, difficult careers heavy in the type of technical work that your overpaid older superiors are too lazy to deal with.
That's the world today, and it will be that way until there's a significant economic upturn--or a revolution. I'm waiting for either. Until then, it's tax law for me.
I'm going to ignore your silly advice and tell you something that every one of us over-30's can tell you: your work will occupy most of your waking hours for the rest of your life.
Another thing we over-30's can tell you: there's a better than even chance that a student will end up in a different occupation than he expected.
Studies show that earning more than $75,000 a year doesn't increase happiness. But a good life does.
Choose something that you love.
We are also losing the technology race, and when we become a second rate technology nation, we will have no chance of creating any wealth by reversing the trade deficit.
We have recently de-emphasized science and anything technical at every level, and we need to re-emphasize science and engineering if we want to recreate the technological intelligence human database that we had a few decades ago.
China is using their hard earned and newly created wealth to accelerate their scientific capabilities, including their nuclear weapons and their rocket delivery systems.
As China increases their Nuclear Research,
China might soon surpass the USA in Nuclear and other advanced scientific technologies and also their nuclear weapons rocket delivery systems capabilities.
Chinese nuclear weapon technology and other capabilities will soon surpass the USA scientific technology.
As a result, we have both:
a ) dire shortages of applicants in positions requiring highly qualified and functionally literate individuals, and
b ) millions of individuals who hold four year college degrees but who are unable to obtain employment other than in positions in which their peers are high school graduates.
Our public policy in this country has created a generation of young people who have gone through the motions of attending high school and college without developing the skills needed in the middle income marketplace. The obsession with standardized tests has been a dismal failure in public policy.
This problem is best summarized in the white paper by the Director of Research of
The Hudson Institute, Edwin Rubinstein "The College Payoff Illusion"
http://rs.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2147
The USA has instead elected to produce large numbers of liberal arts graduates, history graduates, philosophy graduates, English graduates, foreign language graduates, economics graduates, musicians, artists, social workers, government graduates, political scientist, anthropologists, archaeologists, and/or other similarly educated US citizens that will not contribute very much to correcting the foreign trade deficit or generate any significant amount of new national wealth in the USA that is needed to save the US economy and save the US society.
The jobs for science and engineering graduates are being eliminated from the USA and relocated overseas or filled by H.1.b. immigrants who will work for an H.1.b. visa at just above minimum wages and the promise of a “Green Card” when US citizens of the same qualifications want more than McDonald hamburger flipping level compensation for that engineering work. This situation needs to change for the benefit of the US economy.
The average American student normally refuses to endure the hard work, critical thinking, and intense focus that is required to achieve technical and scientific STEM educations, when higher paying less strenuous fields of study are available, and the scientific and engineering jobs after graduation are so stressful and demanding compared to other jobs.
A grounding in science and math will help anyone have a better life and make better decisions, no matter what path is followed. And math is essential for virtually anyone who really wants to add value in the workplace rather than just attending meetings and moving stuff from in- to out-basket.
And balance the STEM stuff with a good foundation in the humanities and history so you can be a better person and citizen.
Asian countries are now are the technology leaders.
The best and brightest students in the USA have pursued the more financially rewarding non-scientific careers, instead of educations that might have created technically innovative products that people in foreign countries might have purchased.
The Asian countries produce many times the total number of science and engineering graduates that the US undergraduate programs produce, while the USA produces multitudes (a surplus) of non-stem college graduates.
Asia is now the primary source of the most advanced engineering and scientific talent because their public education process starts early and continues to produce a stream of highly qualified young science and engineering graduates that is quite large compared to what is produced by the US undergraduate college programs.
American students will generally not endure the hard work, hard studying, concentrated critical thinking, and the intense focus that is required for science and engineering degrees, especially since today there is such limited financial rewards and respect for that STEM related effort after graduation.
The post WWII GI Bill created the post WWII economic industrial expansion that gave the US citizens a wonderful lifestyle for a few decades, until the US government created the Free Trade Agreements, the EPA and other anti-business government laws that destroyed the US economy and exported those jobs that employed US citizens.
The US congress and the three most recent presidents have eliminated almost all foreign trade tariffs and other barriers with their creation of “Free Trade Agreements,” so now the US workers must now economically compete worldwide based upon producing each product using the lowest total cost labor, environmental compliance, and other costs in order to obtain the lowest price for each product.
Many of the STEM manufacturing and STEM product design jobs went to foreign nations with the manufacturing jobs.
Many universities have a quota on CS/engineering majors per year, and most are reserved for foreign students who pay higher tuition. US students shy away from classes overrun with foreign students, mostly those STEM classes, just like our workforce now shun restaurant kitchen work because it's overrun by people who don't speak English, same with construction, farm work, and increasingly, trucking. Overtime this "shortage" sham becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In IT, anyone over 45 who loses his job can forget about getting another full time job. Employers would rather hire cheap Indian imports or recent grads who has the latest technical skills, than retraining an older worker. Plus the foreigners are obedient for fear of losing their visa.
We need to force employers to think long term on how to grow our own workforce. For every H1b hired, we should make the employer pay for a full scholarship to sponsor a US citizen for the same degree. Once the citizen graduates, he/she takes over the job from the H1b and the foreigner goes home. These foreigners are needed much more in their native country than the US.
My father used to say, "Leonard, a person has two chances to get rich. One is at birth. You messed that up. The second is when you marry. Don't mess that up." Unfortunately I did.
BTW I am a mathematician with degrees from MIT (BS) and Columbia (PhD). I didn't do nearly as well as my friends who went into business.
clip - we have too many high-tech workers: more than nine million people have degrees in a science, technology, engineering or math field, but only about three million have a job in one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/opinion/americas-genius-glut.html?hp
Now we are asked what college majors are a good return on investment? But look at the assumption here. We are supposed to accept the view that education is a personal financial investment, like investing in Coca Cola, or Microsoft. Why should we accept that? What ever happened to looking at education as a human good, valuable in itself?
And notice how well this outlook fits with the needs of the business community. What they want is a bunch of number crunchers - not people who are any good at thinking about morality or politics.
Education used to and should be looked upon as a public good, and therefore supported by the public, just like the police and the military. And it is well known that good number crunchers are not necessarily good at thinking about morality or politics.
However, the old model of studying liberal arts no longer guarantees a job upon graduation. And the jobs that have the best pay scale and future outlook are those in the hard sciences. This is not a conspiracy by big business- this is the reality that (non-rich) students face today. I'm guessing you're under 25...
Your misreading and mischaracterization of my comment does not bode well for your argument. Notice that I never said STEM people "aren't any good at thinking about morality or politics". I said that the business community does not value advanced learning in morality and politics.
Of course STEM people can be good at philosophy; my only point was that being good at math an science does not automatically imply that one is good in philosophy. So, we know of people who are very good at science, and who still believe in medieval superstitions (religions).
You also missed my point about ROI. There is no reason in the world why higher education couldn't be virtually free, as it is in many other countries. If it is treated as a public good, then it can be paid for by the tax payers, just as the police and military are.
Yes and no: as a STEM graduate from a liberal arts school, I found that the number-crunching and logical deduction emphasized in STEM programs were often valuable tools for looking at moral and political debates.
For example, being able to translate a "10% cut in TANF funding" into "X million people thrown out onto the street" is important: You may be able to take that 10% cut and save the lives of 2*X million people and thus have a net benefit to society. And being able to double-check the number-crunching that others have done is also critical, since think tanks and politicians and the like can easily put forward a version of "facts" that fail to add up.
The rest of the thrust of your argument is quite astute though: There is a serious question to be asked about why we see education as not a good in and of itself.
The sharper attack on education as primarily a work qualification is this: The fallacy of composition. One person's earnings can go up if they have a PhD and others in their field don't. But if everyone else goes out and gets a PhD, then all you get is PhDs mopping floors and flipping burgers to make ends meet.
One: An education lasts a lifetime, the bills for such will eventually go away.
Two: Most of us change careers, not just jobs, several times in our life.
Three: Virtually all college programs prepare their students to become viable employees – since myself and my sons mother are both business owners – take every course possible that will assist you in becoming a business owner first as these will also apply from an employee perspective.
This debate has the a "deck chairs on the Titanic" feel to it. As more and more wealth flows to the top, middle class America shrinks, and we race to the bottom. We should be talking about how to reform our economic system to make it possible to live a decent life as a high school teacher, rather than how to crawl over the bodies to the top.
I wrote a blog post about this very topic during my last semester of college:http://tinyurl.com/d5psslv
rachelkspurrier.com
"We need smart, motivated, adaptable, and creative workers who can leverage their skills in multiple markets."
Implying that STEM majors are not capable of that?
Classical degrees are not the pinnacle of mental acuity, nor do they stand alone in creativity and problem-solving skills.
The skills required for leadership are diverse, whether you are a scientist, administrator or minister. Think about strategic planning, financial management, capital decisions, human development, supply chains, marketing, sales, operations, productivity, etc.
The kind of organizations you want to work for don't want to hire someone who can only do the first job, (except those who burn and churn a lot of entry levels, lots of these), because they will become frustrated about a lack of advancement. They want to invest in developing those with the education, skills and potential to grow with the organization.
You are right, a lot of people in organizations can be replaced, but good leadership is very hard to replace with a contract worker form another country.
Years ago, a high school degree was the standard and was relatively inexpensive insuring maybe that you could communicate, read, write and do arithmetic. Now it is a college degree that has taken its place at astronomical costs. Now we are told like the village idiot that if you don't have college, you can't compete and are doomed. We are like lemmings moving toward degrees whose ROI is now questionable at best.
With law school grads working in starbucks (and suing their law schools because they are in debt to $300K with limited prospects), you have ask yourself the question, "is it worth it?". The same is true of the new "lost generation" of undergrads that are equally underemployed.
Yes today you need to carefully select the degree(s) based on the market and it's demands. Novel idea for too many...you also need to think like an entrepreneur and innovator as well.
This is not easily done in our fast growing "government dependent" society.
Maybe you need to take the money and buy your son or daughter a franchise...
Try it and maybe you won't have to sue your college or law school someday!
The Obama Administration has done more in cooperation with the states than any in recent memory to lead the turnaround around the leaking, creaking ship that is our current education system.
Teacher Accountability. The Race to the Top and other efforts have started shifting from "job for life" to comprehensive teacher evaluation and development, to build the best educators and reward them appropriately, so that students are ready for higher education.
Higher Education Accountability. The Education Dept is helping students judge the full cost and benefit of individual colleges, with a college scorecard on total costs, graduation rates, available financial aid, career placement and student loan payments after graduation. This identifies the bad actors, especially for-profit schools that load students up with debt and have low graduation rates. It also puts pressure on all schools to provide better value, a new concept for many of them.
Student Accountability. The US student loan program has been moved out of the private sector and modified to reduce the odds of default, while providing flexible payment schedules based in income. The FAFSA has been greatly simplified, increasing the chances of financial aid for many.
I am encouraged about US education for the first time in many years.
My "typical" math class was a Chinese professor teaching a Chinese class with a few South Asian Indians and Americans, in English. I owe my math education at an elite public institution to the propensity of foreign nationals to encourage their children to study the STEM fields, as this largely provided both the teachers and the students in the US university I attended. At some point they might all be in a position to just "stay home".
Which will become a "global economic strategic problem in the future", as you say (for the US), but not because of the mechanism you put forward.
While I'm a huge booster of the many beautiful and oftentimes intangible values of a liberal arts education, it's done nothing for us career-wise.
I've been at a particular disadvantage, a recipient of the "girls can't be smart at math and science" short end of the stick during my childhood.
Our daughter similarly cannot afford the luxury of a BA in English and while her reading and writing skills are excellent, fortunately she is far more interested in the STEM area than I was. Her passions are computers, math and physics and her dream is to attend MIT.
Even though her grades are perfect, she may end up attending a local SUNY school because my largest passion right now is for her to NOT be saddled with huge student loan payments upon graduation. I'm being practical about this and so far she sees the wisdom in our plan.
Here's the link--
http://projectonstudentdebt.org/pc_institution.php
Immigration may be an issue for other fields.. but not mine. There are plenty of immigrants in my field but there are also plenty of jobs to go around.
students shun English, Philosophy, History,etc. Can you
imagine being educated and never read Shakespeare, Aristotle
or history of Roman Empire, Mesopotamia, Egypt,etc.
As far as career and big earnings are concerned, these
fluctuate from time to time. A few years back it was Economics
and MBA. Princeton graduates were quoted in the newspaper
if they take two courses in economics they can find jobs
in investment banking earning $100,000 at the age
of 22 or 23. That is gone with the financial fiasco.
Today it is STEM. Study what interest you and enjoy other
things besides money and big title. Reading a poem by
shelley or Keats will provide greater pleasure than being
promoted to Associate Director in an Insurance company.
If you want your kids to earn big money push them into
sports-football and tennis players are making good
money these days. You don't have to be smart.
I do not believe that any business anywhere in the world has a philosophy department with a room full of philosophers sitting around talking philosophy at each other.
Most of these type of US graduates are probably employed in the "Fast Food" industry” unless their parents are wealthy.
The future global economy may be staffed by robotic people, but what kind of future will it be? The South Koreans you so laud may create a new global reality. But your argument raises the question of what sort of reality it will be and what "realistic" itself means. It seems a bit of a generalization to accuse our kids of being "neither hard-working nor realistic."
Richard Arum and Josiah Roksa, authors of "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (2011), report on their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at 24 institutions. 45% percent of these students demonstrated no significant improvement in a range of skills -- including critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing. The number of Americans going to college exceeds the number capable of mastering higher levels of intellectual inquiry. This leads colleges to alter their mission, watering down the intellectual content and dumber down courses so that the students they admit can pass them. Let's face it; only a modest proportion of our population has the cognitive skills, maturity and intellectual curiosity to master truly higher education.
It's completely mad and surreal. College classes are all taught by people like me, for $2000 a pop, no benefits or extras. If we fail a student for anything less than "never once showed up to class" we lose our jobs for the crime of imperiling the flow of Stafford and Pell per-head bounty money. The students will be very, very lucky if they get jobs that let them pay off their debt. The only people getting rich are the college presidents and their cronies. (Who are very, very rich at the school I mention.)
Something has to give.
I'm very wary though about advertising it to people simply on the basis of money. I've had a good life, but hardly rich from it. And I think that life is getting harder in this generation than it has in the past.
If I could give three pieces of advice, they are simple:
1. Do what you care about. Don't go into this if you don't find that it's something you really want to do, because it's hard ... even for very bright people. Nobody can make themselves work hard at something they don't enjoy in some way.
2. To the greatest extent possible -- don't take on debt. The reality in the STEM fields is that you'll need an MS to make any kind of career of it at all, and in many a PhD is basically required to be competitive. You'll be many years in school, don't take on debt early ... and try not to take it on in grad-school.
3. Really good people often come from non-prestigious universities, often state universities. This isn't politics or law, or Bschool. Nobody really cares where you got your undergrad degree, and in fact not very many care where you got your graduate degree(s) either. It's what you know, what you can do.
I encouraged both my children to look at private schools since often their endowments allowed them to offer financial aid that brought the cost of tuition down to the level of our state university. At smaller schools, (10,000 and 5,000 students respectively), I feel they received much better educations and made better contacts than they would have at the 40,000+ student state u. And this strategy proved me right.
Our MD son may not ever make buckets of money, but he will live comfortably and has a manageable debt from medical school which we framed as a business investment (since he is investing in himself).
The key to college planning and beyond is just that...plan. Have goals. And I agree, as a former high school educator, that we do a huge disservice to our children to expect them all to obtain college degrees. This is the line that our taxpayer-supported community colleges have fed the public when in fact, unless one is obtaining a certification for a specific field, students are wasting their time taking remedial English and math courses that they should have mastered in high school.
America doesn't care about the STEM people when their middle age. Look at high-tech in sillycon valley and all the programmers who are out of work. Those people who are 50+ are done and won't find work in these new fangled start-ups. Too old are u? What does the head of Goggle et. al. want to do.
He wants the Republicans to pass legislation so he can hire cheap labor offshore rather than American citizens who can do the job.
Want U.S. kids to invest in STEM, give them free tuition at the state universities. Give every kid in the Ghetto a free ride to STEM jobs and you'll see these kids kick the butt of the foreign imports.