I think this article is very insightful http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4

I think this article is very insightful http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484... I was once an underemployed English major seriously considering applying for grad programs in literature[1]. Instead, I went back to school to build up the necessary math and CS and ended up getting an MS in engineering. Many years later, I was startled with how accurately this article explained what was going on in my head when I was trying to figure out what to do. This article really does an amazing job explaining why people do go into these fields when the market is practically screaming that they shouldn't. [1] this was in the recession of the early-mid 90s, and I was in SoCal which had been very hard hit by government cutbacks. I noticed that humanities majors who graduated just five years later, at the start of the first dot-com boom, did far better. To expand on this a bit - it really showed me how much the conditions you graduate into make a difference! As a new grad, in a recession, you're competing with people with much more experience for entry level jobs. In a boom, those more experienced people are moving into higher level positions, and are often looking to hire new people themselves. If you get one of these jobs, you can build a critical few years of experience. Eventually, a recession will come along, but you're in a far better position to weather it if you graduated into a better economy and got some more experience under your belt. Had I graduated into a better economy, and found better work as a lit major, who knows? My career path might have been dramatically different. This leads to another thing I've noticed - think of your career path as a vector field. What happens with the first couple of arrow can make a massive difference in where you are a decade or more later. Some degrees and majors are more resilient than others. For instance, I've read that graduates of Harvard are less affected by the economy the graduate into than people from less prestigious universities. This may be because the reputation and network provides you with multiple re-entry paths - in short, you can always find an up arrow in that vector field, even if you have to wait a few years to get it. Other graduates who start on a down arrow may get caught in a downward current. Five years later, when things improve, they're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and employers prefer to go straight to the schools than hire someone who seems to have floundered for the last half decade. I think engineering and other in demand majors are also a way to get on to an up arrow on the vector field. Even in a recession, the engineering students still seem to get decent jobs - they may not rocket upward right away, but they get into an updraft to the point where they're positioned to advance once the conditions emerge. They don't get stuck in the underemployment rut that can afflict people with less desirable majors from lower ranked schools. There really is quite a bit of randomness and luck to career paths. You can do great with a lit degree from a relatively unknown college, but some degrees are much more resilient than others.