College is Overrated

[Tyler]

Here's all the data you could ever want for trying to decide on the payoff of a certain degree.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/u ... Report.pdf

[Mark Leavy]

Here's all the data you could ever want for trying to decide on the payoff of a certain degree.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/u ... Report.pdf

Outstanding.
Much appreciated,

Mark

[MachineGhost]

https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/u ... Report.pdf

So, looks like Electrical Engineering is the highest paying job for a recent college graduate ($62K) and Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Sciences & Administration for an experienced college graduate ($114K).

Excluding engineering, the high paying jobs for an experienced college graduate are:

Business Economics
Finance
Management, Info Systems & Statistics (MBA?)
Computer Science
Information Sciences
Physics
Pharmacy, etc.
Economics

How would one maximize as many of these fields as possible in a degree?

[WiseOne]

Seriously, I wouldn't pick a career based solely on expected remuneration.  However long you spend at a career, it's way too much time to be unhappy.  I've got plenty of gripes about mine, but at the end of the day my job is amazingly rewarding and it more than makes up for the fact that my buddies in private practice earn twice my salary.  They don't have dilemmas like this:  I got invited to give two talks overseas, and have travel funding only for one...do I go to Prague in July or Australia (Melbourne) in August?  (I'm leaning toward Prague.)

I think this thread is arguing only that diving into a vat of student loans should be reserved for careers that can be counted on to pay those loans off.  And that very rewarding careers can be shaped without a college degree.  Further, taking on massive student loan debt means you're now locked into that high paying career and can't change your mind without seriously compromising your future.  Scary risky.

[Tyler]

Further, taking on massive student loan debt means you're now locked into that high paying career and can't change your mind without seriously compromising your future.  Scary risky.

Good point.  Red-plated debt handcuffs can be pretty brutal when they chain you to a career that causes you distress.  The tricky thing is that it's hard to know that ahead of time for a naive 18-year-old picking a major. 

I'd recommend:
1) Make a list of careers you're pretty sure you may find intrinsically rewarding in some way other than the pay
2) Establish an income/debt baseline to eliminate options that very likely make no financial sense.  Feel free to pursue them as hobbies.
3) With the rest of the list, make a final decision only after interviewing people in those careers right now.  Ask about both the good and the bad.
4) Look for inexpensive alternatives to achieve your goal that preserve your future flexibility.

[MachineGhost]

1) Make a list of careers you're pretty sure you may find intrinsically rewarding in some way other than the pay

But isn't the built-in implication here that you will find at least one career from the list that is intrinsically rewarding.  What if you don't?  That never goes answered because the factory line system and higher education industrial complex would both screech to a halt.

I'm long past 17 or 18 but when I look at that list of high-paying jobs, I don't want to turn any of them into a career kowtowing to some boss or evil corporation doing stupid, boring work I rather not being doing, instead of keeping them a profitable hobby.  So, what's the answer?

i should mention it here because it is tremendously useful even if I can't be bothered to actually do the work, but What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles is now in its (firing up Windows calculator)...  45th yearly printing.  If you can manage to get through it, you surely will know what your excellency is job or career-wise.  I think any 17 or 18 year old deserves a gift copy at a bare minimum (yeah, I didn't do it back then either!).

[l82start]

  Some kids get a lot of career guidance (and even management) from parents and friends, but I think that circle is still probably too small to rely on for such an important decision.

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

[I Shrugged]

Many if not most college grads don't stay in the field of their degree.  On the one hand, that allows for someone to get an art degree.  On the other, I still say get something that will at least shuttle you into a career start.

[Tyler]

But isn't the built-in implication here that you will find at least one career from the list that is intrinsically rewarding.  What if you don't?  (yeah, I didn't do it back then either!).

Many if not most college grads don't stay in the field of their degree.  On the one hand, that allows for someone to get an art degree.  On the other, I still say get something that will at least shuttle you into a career start.

I see these as related.  My DW has never really had a particular career calling, but she picked a major she knew would open lots of doors (mechanical engineering) and graduated with no debt.  She found over time that people skills & management was more her thing than heavy technical stuff, and had the foundation and flexibility to make things happen. 

[Libertarian666]

Having a daughter who is a junior in high school, I am finding this thread very sobering. I myself didn't learn well in a school environment and am also of the autodidact bent, though not so accomplished as some on here.

Our daughter seems to learn a lot when she has a teacher who is skilled at putting stuff across in an interesting way. She learns virtually nothing from books on her own. I think that is probably normal but what to do about college and the shrinking pool of decent jobs? Anyone else on here have kids that are close in age to ours? Though we have some savings for her education, I am really at a loss as to how to advise her beyond the terribly generic "work hard." When I look toward the future I don't see a land of possibilities. Argh!

...
Then there's option 4, which is politically incorrect and possibly offensive so I hesitate to mention it, but it's the truth: option 4 is to go to the highest powered school possible with the hope of snagging a mate with good career possibilities. An attractive, intelligent asian-american young woman is bound to be borderline irresistible to hormonal young men in a mostly unsupervised, highly sexualized, alcohol-rich environment (what, you didn't think that's what college was? ). If placed in a situation where the young men are more likely than not to have successful lives, she could have a real possibility of hitching her wagon to a winner. This was after all traditionally why young women were sent to college in the first place--to hobnob with go-getter men who would make good husband material. For all the feminism being thrown around on campus, I can personally attest that this phenomenon is alive and well.

I did say it was politically incorrect, no?

Perhaps, but not politically incorrect enough to stop a woman from writing essentially the same thing as a letter to the editor of the "Daily Princetonian":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-pat ... 88154.html

[Libertarian666]

Anyway, for HS students these days, I agree with previous posters that college makes the most sense for those pursuing a defined, decent-paying career path.  Just off the top of my head, those paths include:  Medicine, Engineering, Accounting, and Sales.  There are no salespeople on this forum, so we can cross that one off the list.  Accounting is a really good field, in my opinion.  It's pretty challenging, but not as difficult as Engineering or Medicine.  The only MBA that's worth much is one from a top 5 program.  You need to be an extrovert to do well in those programs, so again we can probably cross that off the list for most forum posters and their children.

Finance in general, I would say. My sister was recently dating a fellow who's good at math and decided he wanted to be rich, so he's currently studying to be an actuary. He attended an in-state school and is brilliant, so he got a free ride. He has already gotten a paid internship at a major financial firm where on a monthly basis he made almost as much money as I do. Actuary Science is probably better for your mental health too than most of the prospects in that industry, since you'd be doing more of the "calculating when old men will die" than the "scamming old men out of their life savings."

That's how I started out right after college, lo these many years ago. Unfortunately it was fairly boring; I found the programming part much more interesting than the actuarial science part, so I switched careers.

Wait a minute: he wants to be rich so he is studying to be an actuary? Hmm, somehow I don't think that adds up. How much do actuaries make these days? It's hard to believe they get "rich". Reasonably well-paid, sure, but "rich" seems a bit much.

[Libertarian666]

Option 3 is the path we have been planning on more or less, positioning assets and jumping through other hoops... just playing the damn game the way it is set up. But the kid still needs to be employable when she graduates, right?

Right. Even if she gets a free ride at a good school, if she doesn't learn anything that makes her employable in the elite world she'll have become accustomed to in a selective school, she'll be disappointed and embittered, even if she's not crushed by debt. Nobody ever mentions this; once you've experienced 4 years surrounded by intellectually stimulating potential future elites, you're not going to want move back to a small town, so to speak.

I can say I've never been surrounded by so many smart people as I was at college. But it hasn't made me bitter; rather, I'm grateful that I had that experience at least once in my life.

[Libertarian666]

On a slightly related note, I think it'd be interesting if college tuition rates were largely dependent on what society needed. So if we needed more Nurses in the U.S. or a particular geographic area of the school, then the tuition rate would lower to entice more people to go into nursing. Same would go for those that wanted a major that wasn't needed as much by society (or not a lot of jobs currently for them), so tuition would be higher.

Granted this is then a double-whammy for those desiring to pursue a degree that doesn't have as much job prospects (less jobs available after graduating plus high tuition for that degree), but it would help out those trying to get degrees in stuff society needs.

This however is social engineering and not sure if this could take off or not.

That would happen automatically if the government wasn't subsidizing, penalizing, and generally interfering in the labor and education markets. That's because "What society needs", if it means anything, means "What individuals are willing to pay for out of their own resources".

[Libertarian666]

Thanks for your input, PS & WiseOne!

WiseOne, I like the idea of internships and am trying to push our daughter in that direction for this summer (the one between her junior and senior years of high school).

PS, I'll go with options 1,3 & 4! I love the idea of gap years and think they can also be beneficial just in terms of a kid getting a break in their studies. And getting real world experience can only be a plus.

Option 3 is the path we have been planning on more or less, positioning assets and jumping through other hoops... just playing the damn game the way it is set up. But the kid still needs to be employable when she graduates, right?

Being Chinese my wife talks openly about all kinds of things that are not necessarily PC, and option 4 is one that she has put out there many times. Whether male or female, a person has better odds of meeting a future high earner at a high-powered school. Of course high-earning women don't tend to latch onto low-earning men, but we are not worried here about how the world maybe should work!

Men don't find high-earning women more desirable as mates. Women do find high-earning men more desirable as mates.
This is due to basic biology and will never change, although of course the details depend on societal organization.

[Libertarian666]

Isn't there some happy medium between not blundering into becoming debt ridden and unemployable, and yet at the same time not having your life course dictated by scurrying around seeking money? It sort of saddens me to think of an 18 year old choosing a career path based on the hope that it pays well. If someone finds finance fun then great and then the great pay is a bonus. But otherwise why spend a massive chunk of your life on something just because the pay is good? Surely all that matters is to do what you love and to be able to live OK from it? What's so special about being rich?

The concept may be increasingly coming under technological assault, but high pay is still a marker for high utility to others, and money is still required to enjoy the luxuries of modernity, that's why. Nearly all the people I know who are wealthy work exceptionally hard and provide a lot of positive value to others. And by contrast, of the people I know who are very poor, almost none of them provide a great deal of much of economic value to others. For example I am friends with some artists who create art that nobody likes, or that people might like if they would bother to try and sell it, and they make most of their spending money working menial jobs that do not require college degrees. Because these people produce very little value to others, they suffer the ill effects of poverty, and are unable to dig themselves out from the mountain of student loan debt they have accumulated.

I agree with you for the most part (no surprise there) but I know of a few exceptions, where people who perform services with a significant value to the potential recipients but are paid almost nothing.

I'm thinking in particular of two science fiction writers who have been hamstrung in the past by an archaic, hideously inefficient publishing system. The result is that they have readers clamoring for new books (or even reprints of old works) and no way of fulfilling those demands. Of course we now have Kindle self-publishing, so this shouldn't be a problem in the future to nearly the same extent.

I've tried to do something about this in the past with one of the victims of this system, but unfortunately he was so embittered by his previous experience that he wanted nothing to remind him of it.

Anyway, the point is that it is possible for people to be able to do something of value but be thwarted by technical details of business organization, e.g., the makeup and behavior of the publishing industry.

[Pointedstick]

Perhaps, but not politically incorrect enough to stop a woman from writing essentially the same thing as a letter to the editor of the "Daily Princetonian":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-pat ... 88154.html

Oh my god I can't even handle the idiocy of the responses to her article. I don't know which explanation makes me feel better: that those people could miss the point so badly, or that they could be so cynically exploitative of the modern progressive umbrage machine.

[Pointedstick]

Wait a minute: he wants to be rich so he is studying to be an actuary? Hmm, somehow I don't think that adds up. How much do actuaries make these days? It's hard to believe they get "rich". Reasonably well-paid, sure, but "rich" seems a bit much.

Last time we talked, he said that starting pay was in the 70s, and six figures is possible soon enough. Not bad for a new college grad. Not sure if that counts as "rich," but do that for enough time and save enough of your paycheck, and you'll get there.

[Pointedstick]

I've tried to do something about this in the past with one of the victims of this system, but unfortunately he was so embittered by his previous experience that he wanted nothing to remind him of it.

That's artists for ya. 

I agree with you for the most part (no surprise there) but I know of a few exceptions, where people who perform services with a significant value to the potential recipients but are paid almost nothing.

[...]

Anyway, the point is that it is possible for people to be able to do something of value but be thwarted by technical details of business organization, e.g., the makeup and behavior of the publishing industry.

True enough. There are always exceptions. Child-rearing, most notably. But the point remains solid, I think: wealth is the reward for providing direct economic value to others, and poverty is the result of failing to do so.

[MachineGhost]

Last time we talked, he said that starting pay was in the 70s, and six figures is possible soon enough. Not bad for a new college grad. Not sure if that counts as "rich," but do that for enough time and save enough of your paycheck, and you'll get there.

Where does he live?  Because higher pay usually corresponds to higher living costs, so the net income is not that impressive.

[Pointedstick]

Last time we talked, he said that starting pay was in the 70s, and six figures is possible soon enough. Not bad for a new college grad. Not sure if that counts as "rich," but do that for enough time and save enough of your paycheck, and you'll get there.

Where does he live?  Because higher pay usually corresponds to higher living costs, so the net income is not that impressive.

That figure comes from firms in Chicago I believe. I have to assume that in NYC, it would be higher.

[Greg]

http://www.fastcompany.com/3043053/my-c ... e=facebook

Interesting article.

[RobJ]

I'm going to bump this topic because I'm heading towards an important life decision about college.

A little introduction:
Graduating this summer in a bachelor Business/Communication with one job offer already on the table.

After reading this topic I realized I went for the wrong decisions four years ago. I didn't know what to do back then, so I picked something and now I feel I wasted four years of time with a degree. The cost in Belgium is not that high for education so I'm not going to calculate the total cost (probably less than 5k) but the degree itself never helped me with the internship. I learned almost everything on my own in my free time and I even learned some extra skills like Audio Production at a semi-pro level, Coding and computer science.

I know I shouldn't waste too much time on thinking about the past and start taking action.
The options that I have now:

• Take the job and work towards starting my own business. I've got the plan and the skills, the only thing left is money, but I do lose a lot of time.
• I got the opportunity (and skills) to study a subject where the pay is a lot higher (with minimal costs) to be "Well Off". This is not going to stop me starting my own business later on. This will give me 'relatively' more time but less money.

Question for the older guys: Is it sometimes better to just set yourself a goal and start doing it instead of wandering around like most college students without any goals? I wouldn't have gone to college and do stuff different, but unfortunately time isn't reversible so we got to deal with the situation now!

Again, sorry for the bump.

[Pointedstick]

Question for the older guys: Is it sometimes better to just set yourself a goal and start doing it instead of wandering around like most college students without any goals?

Yes, always. If you do something and decide you're on the wrong path, you can change things around*. However, you've probably gained positive things during that time: experience, money, potentially some new friendships. But all the time you spend wandering around doing nothing or trying to "figure things out" is just wasted. Pick a goal and do it, and if it was the wrong goal, use what knowledge you gained to help you figure out what you do want.

Take that job offer, I say. Do it for a while and see if you like it. If you do, perfect! Keep at it until you don't. If you don't, then use the income that the job is providing you to set yourself up for an easy transition into the next thing, or going back to school with renewed focus. There's nothing like spending time in the private sector to give you perspective.

* Needless to say, this applies much less to things like having children. Don't rush into that.

[Greg]

Question for the older guys: Is it sometimes better to just set yourself a goal and start doing it instead of wandering around like most college students without any goals?

Yes, always. If you do something and decide you're on the wrong path, you can change things around*. However, you've probably gained positive things during that time: experience, money, potentially some new friendships. But all the time you spend wandering around doing nothing or trying to "figure things out" is just wasted. Pick a goal and do it, and if it was the wrong goal, use what knowledge you gained to help you figure out what you do want.

Take that job offer, I say. Do it for a while and see if you like it. If you do, perfect! Keep at it until you don't. If you don't, then use the income that the job is providing you to set yourself up for an easy transition into the next thing, or going back to school with renewed focus. There's nothing like spending time in the private sector to give you perspective.

* Needless to say, this applies much less to things like having children. Don't rush into that.

I think it's perfectly fine to rush into having children. With modern TV and internet, children practically raise themselves.

[Pointedstick]

She learns virtually nothing from books on her own. I think that is probably normal but what to do about college and the shrinking pool of decent jobs?

To me, this sounds like a promising student for a vocational track rather than wasting money on a useless liberal arts degree that doesn't help job security.  Geeks have inherited the earth and they're not the kind that don't learn from books.  Trying to compete with them when you're not capable of it seems really foolish.

I want to go back to this because I don't think MG's comment got enough attention, and he's absolutely right. There is no point competing with people who love book learning if you don't. You'll lose, they'll win, and you'll feel bad about yourself and develop an inferiority complex until you leave that world.

Vocational work and the construction trades can be great choices. The lady who did some electrical work in my house makes more than I do on an hourly basis. She's great. The trades--especially ones that don't require large amount of physical strength, can work well for a tough and slightly tomboyish woman. Think electrician, plumber, gas worker ($$$$$ here), HVAC tech, bobcat operator, car mechanic, plasterer, etc. These are easy to learn fields that someone with a penchant for hands-on experience can master quickly, and hourly wages can run $30-100 easy, more in rich liberal places where clueless upper class folks who have never done real labor can be outrageously gouged. You're in CT, right? Perfect!

On the other hand, sexism is a major problem there because a lot of the lower-class men in these fields don't respect women and are dismayed to see them doing traditionally male labor. Knowing Spanish is helpful, too.