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Myths About Choosing a College Major

59 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
This is terrible advice (IMO obviously). On the statistical level it basically amounts to "disregard the currently accepted best practices". On the individual level none of it matters. The right school won't make a high achiever out of someone who's been a low achiever for 18yr and the wrong one won't make a low achiever out of someone who's a high acheiver. Depending on where you start in life (i.e. social and economic class) you're probably only going to be able to go up/down a few rungs anyway and returns on time spent stressing over having a strategic plan for college diminish very quickly. I take particular issue with 5. You should know what you want to do unless you've got so much money and time that you don't mind pissing a way a lot of both taking classes you don't actually need. I partially agree with 3/4. New grads are hired for who they know or what they know. Nobody cares if you've got a major in psychology if you've spent the last two years working with some education grad students writing software to teach kids math.
- foota 9y ago
  Although I'm not sure it's something that can be manipulated for gain, I do think some people do better in different university environments.
CalChris 9y ago
Myth 5 and 6 are not myths at all. You need a strong preparation for most STEM majors and at least at Berkeley, for engineering you need to apply to the COE and for a specific major. L+S is different.
- mamoswined 9y ago
  Yep, engineering was a different college within my university and that's common in many public schools. It was not easy to switch in, they only allocated a few spots a year for it.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    Tell me about it. I was the victim of some of this bad find yourself advice. I had a 3.8 when I petitioned to transfer into EECS from L+S. I got in but the following semester EECS was heavily impacted and they turned away 4.0s. The liberal arts are awesome. I took a ton of their classes. You really can find yourself there. Engineering is not awesome. You cannot find yourself there. You can only suffer which was I will admit, gloriously awesome. But I had nightmares for years afterward that I hadn't finished this rec or that rec. EECS sent me to the hospital my senior year. It's a tough route but I'm tougher for it.
    - tfmatt 9y ago
      I had a recurring nightmare in which I registered for a class at the beginning of the semester (generally a summer semester) and I somehow forgot about it the very end of the semester. I've know others to also have this exact same nightmare.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
How I picked my major: During high school everyone one day was assigned to look at professions by going on to the bls.gov website . I picked Computer Science for two reasons . 1. I feel like I would enjoy the job 2. The job market for CS majors has high growth and low unemployment 3. Median pay was above average .
- madengr 9y ago
  Did you actually like it prior to choosing it?
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Yes
- gozur88 9y ago
  >I picked Computer Science for two reasons . Clearly you weren't cut out for math :)
  - giggles_giggles 9y ago
    He's a programmer, he just has problems with off-by-one errors
    - fhood 9y ago
      reasons[2] returns "Median pay was above average". I see no issue here.
      - smichel17 9y ago
        The original comment is 1-indexed, though.
        zitterbewegung 9y ago
        Only on the view
tn_ 9y ago
|Myth 5: It’s important to choose a major early. I mean, I think it's good that Georgia / Arizona State have created "meta-majors" to give students more exposition on specific majors.. but I wish high-schools would provide that information before students sign up for a 20k-40k+ / year experiment to find out they don't want to become w/e it is they originally signed up for.. When I was a sophomore in high-school, a teacher went out of her way, tapped into her network and helped me land my first professional programming gig. I was still probably going to be a programmer as I had been coding for 5+ years already, but being exposed to that environment helped re-affirm that it was the path that I wanted to take.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  I also had a clear path thanks to some volunteer work I lucked into around age 15 mixed with my own computer obsession, but most kids don't have that. I don't see how you could do it outside of the usual "XYZ after school club".
  - fma 9y ago
    When I was in high school, I had summers off. I volunteered at the "Main library" of my county...a huge library and volunteered in their computer lab. I also volunteered at the local science museum and continued to do so on weekends during school. I have to travel to downtown, which required me to take a public bus. For graduation, we are required some volunteer hours. If we do more hours, we get special recognition. Volunteering is a great way to get some exposure to different careers and areas...There are a lot of opportunities of people just want to look.
- zolthrowaway 9y ago
  I resonate with this so much. I honestly feel incredibly lucky to end up where I did. My sophomore year of high school, I took a programming class almost entirely on accident. I took a business class with a teacher my freshman year and really liked her. The only other elective she taught was an intro to C++ course. It's like a light switch went off in my head that this is what I am supposed to do with my life. I had my sophomore and junior year to do projects and really solidify that this is the thing for me. I had plenty of help a long the way. I had a few particularly great professors and a life-changing internship at a startup. I feel so lucky to have these experiences that are almost random chance that things worked out for me. I can't imagine what it's like to try to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life with only a high school classes and possibly a part-time job. How can you decide you want to do something with such a narrow and outsider perspective? I had much more exposure than most to what I wanted to do and it still took a lot of luck and wrong turns to get here. I can't imagine how hard it must be with even more limited exposure.
zelos 9y ago
How come Chemical Engineering is right up the top of earnings? As someone who dropped out of chemical engineering to be a software developer, I clearly made the wrong choice ;-)
- madengr 9y ago
  "As someone who dropped out of chemical engineering.." You answered your own question ;-)
- projectileboy 9y ago
  In those sorts of charts, chemical engineering typically includes petroleum engineering, which can be pretty lucrative.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I have a weirdly specific insight into this. I was an oil and gas recruiter in Houston between 2014-2015... right on the cusp of the most recent O&G price crisis. So I graduate, watch all my engineering friends get nice fat 90k/year or even higher salaries (this is Houston equiv to ~120-130 Bay Area), start buying big trucks, big houses, spending like crazy. My candidates start doing the same, except for the oldest and most experienced, who would always warn about valleys in the field. Lo and behold in 2014 gas prices plummets from something like 100$/barrel to 40, and suddenly almost every single one of my Chem E buddies is out of a job, and all my candidates are getting laid off, and I myself am busting my ass to keep employed because now we have maybe 2-3 jobs popping a month that get instantly targeted by every recruitment firm in the city, let alone thousands of unemployed candidates. Anyway, one of my chem E buddies that was really good at saving money fucks off to SF to do Hack Reactor and has a great time of it. One by one more of my friends do similar, either doing a bootcamp or just jumping straight into automation type jobs. One of them even swapped to patent law. A lot of my candidates start putting things like "python" and "Matlab" on their resumes. Long story short, the O&G industry can make you a lot of money, but it is extremely variable, and you get extremely specialized. A mech E with "rotating equipment" can't do a "static equipment job," according to hiring managers. Chem E can't do liquid natural gas jobs, even if they've got 15 years experience on all sorts of different projects. Etc. A lot of my candidates and friends just decided they'd go for a field with a lower barrier to entry and a much lower barrier for skill transfer. (I did as well in the end)
cm2187 9y ago
On myth 1 ("STEM always delivers"), I think the variation mostly reflects people going into research & teaching vs working in the private sector. But no one is forced into research (quite the opposite). I actually do think that the downside for STEM is limited if earnings is something that matters to you. [edit] Also the other thing to consider is that humanities is a bit of a one way trip whereas STEM is not. I have seen numerous people with engineering background getting into political science, history, even opera singing! I hardly ever met someone who studied humanities becoming an engineer.
- cirgue 9y ago
  > I have seen numerous people with engineering background getting into political science, history, even opera singing! I hardly ever met someone who studied humanities becoming an engineer. Hi, now you have. I did a double major in political science and econ, currently a machine learning engineer. Humanities is not at all a one-way ticket unless you expect it to lead directly to a job. Humanities education is for you, not for your employer. > I have seen numerous people with engineering background getting into political science, history, even opera singing! I hardly ever met someone who studied humanities becoming an engineer. Anecdotally, my experience is the opposite.
BlackjackCF 9y ago
I think choosing a major is important if you're the kind of person who thrives on having that sort of structure. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you know you're that type of person, it's probably paramount to choose a major that you like and do it early on so it'll set you on the right path for your career.
jcadam 9y ago
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but my advice: If you're graduating from high school and don't know what you want to do for a living, join the military - it'll grow you up fast and will provide you with great options for financing your education once you do figure it out.
- maccard 9y ago
  I'm not going to downvote you for it, but this is terrible advice. If you're graduating form high school and don't know what you want to do for a living, don't make a multi-year commitment to a job that has a very significant chance of ruining your life. You can get out of waiting tables after 12 months if you want to, but you can't just drop out of the army, and waiting tables has a significantly smaller chance of removing one or more of your limbs.
  - no_one_ever 9y ago
    Your cautionary advice could also be directed to students who are unsure what they want to study and willing to go into serious debt to aimlessly explore. Sure you sign a year-long contract, but the military pays for it.
  - solatic 9y ago
    Depending on where you get your figures from, somewhere between 80-85% of the jobs in the US military are non-combat, where there is as little risk of losing a limb as there is going about your day-to-day civilian life and losing a limb in a car crash. If you didn't find something in your breadth-but-not-depth high school studies that grabbed your interest to the point where you decide that it's worth pursuing a four-year college commitment to study it in further depth, I struggle to understand how twelve months in a minimum wage job (a repetitive daily routine that affords you little if any spending money) would help clarify a direction.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    And while waiting tables, you might consider community college. It's a lot cheaper way to try some things and figure out what you want.
adjkant 9y ago
This is a good article in my opinion but it just requires context, situational application, and some reading between the lines. #1 is certainly true and is good to be aware of. CS doesn't usually see this, but many physical sciences do see it. #2 I didn't know was a myth, so I'll be conveniently ignoring that one. #3 is absolutely true, but as others have mentioned is not very applicable to individuals who will usually go to the best school they can get into and afford. However, it's a very useful consideration when it comes to politics, social considerations, and more. #4 is absolutely true. You can make a good living with any degree, but you should always keep the practicality in mind no matter what major you are. You can't just major in philosophy and expect a job - you need to have a direction, seek internships in college, etc. That direction often changes and evolves until one settles into a career that uses those philosophy degree skills but isn't perhaps what you picture when you think about jobs for philosophers. Many have pointed out the flaws in #5 for STEM / Engineering, but for someone deciding what they want to do within a set of options in the same range, it often is very true. See a communications major's plentiful varying career paths and possible compatible social science degrees that can be switched to easily. #6 is usually not true, but I think there's a larger point to take away, which is that you don't need 5 classes in Y and 10 classes in Z to do job X. Often mixing subjects with your interests and having that classic liberal arts balance can be very useful. Psychology can be helpful in getting along with coworkers in any office. Philosophy and ethics could certainly lead to better corporate ethical action if it was widespread enough. I would revise #6 to be "don't box your eduction in by your major". That isn't to say you need to study a full liberal arts curriculum or create your own major either, but simply to develop other relevant skills or interests you have that can aid your life and major. Obviously, this is a charitable reading, but I think there is some good value hidden here.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > #4 is absolutely true. You can make a good living with any degree, but you should always keep the practicality in mind no matter what major you are. You can't just major in philosophy and expect a job - you need to have a direction, seek internships in college, etc. That direction often changes and evolves until one settles into a career that uses those philosophy degree skills but isn't perhaps what you picture when you think about jobs for philosophers. I didn't do any of this stuff and I majored in Japanese and here I am working in computer programming. I don't think it really makes that much of a difference what you major in. Anybody who's completed a college major has acquired excellent tools to learn new skills.
carlob 9y ago
Coming from a European country, I really have a hard time understanding this no-major thing. As a matter of fact I even have trouble understanding majors at all. Across the pond, when you go to university to study X you study X (and if X requires Y as a prerequisite also Y). Nobody prevents you from walking into a lecture hall in comparative linguistics if you are studying biology, you just won't get any credits for it. Experiencing a large range of topics, helping you understand what you want to do, and teaching you to think is supposed to be the role of high school around here.
- projectileboy 9y ago
  The goal of a liberal arts education (which is not unique to the United States) is to provide a well-rounded base of knowledge combined with critical thinking skills. For college students on this track, specifying a major becomes less important.
  - pc86 9y ago
    Majors are still important in a liberal arts education, unless you're majoring in Liberal Arts, in which case your career prospects are probably going to suffer substantially.
  - hawkice 9y ago
    Can you graduate without a major? It never even occurred to me to try or ask anyone about it.
    - rankam 9y ago
      Some schools have an interdisciplinary degree which is close, I think. If I recall, you essentially have an advisor that oversees the classes you take and makes sure that you have "enough" credits in each subject (STEM, literature, humanities, etc) but you don't have to declare that X subject will be the focus of my studies.
    - moftz 9y ago
      If you don't have a major, then what are you really graduating from? Some schools have majors called "University Studies" that lets you essentially be undeclared for awhile until you figure out what you want to do but you can't graduate with this on a diploma. You still have to pick something. If you want a liberal arts education, then choose majors like English. If you want something specific, pick something specific.
dogruck 9y ago
This list of myths is composed of non-myths.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
>Dr. Carnevale wouldn’t speculate as to why women make their choices. I'll help him out. Go watch a Norwegian documentary called Hjernevask (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask). A comedian wonders aloud why, in the most gender-equal country in the world, women still prefer lower-paying jobs. Its success led Norway to shut down its Gender Studies Institute. Not everything is the cause of rampant misogyny.
- SilasX 9y ago
  I would think that it's, at least, less of a mystery in Norway (or the Western Europe/Nordic model in general) -- at high marginal rates of taxation, and a wide variety of public benefits for free, there's less of an upside to making more money, so the enjoyment of the work itself matters more.
  - likelynew 9y ago
    The comparison is between two genders in the same country, and not two different countries.
    - SilasX 9y ago
      "in the most gender-equal country in the world" is inviting a comparison across countries, and the point is relevant regardless.
emodendroket 9y ago
I'm really tired of hearing moralizing about people picking the wrong college major. Unless you have a crystal ball and can see four years into the future you're better off just studying something you care about; you've got a whole lifetime to do stuff you don't really want to do.
- the_gastropod 9y ago
  I think this general idea, popular though it is, is troubling. At 17 years old, what kid knows what their life passion will be? How can they have a life passion without much life experience or knowledge? Why do we expect people to work a "whole lifetime" doing stuff they don't really want to do? I think encouraging young people to learn marketable, in demand skills, in order to get a good paying job is solid advice. I wish this advice were coupled with encouraging some frugality, which would free most people up to do what they really want to do, without much concern for finances, by the time they're 30.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    > I think this general idea, popular though it is, is troubling. At 17 years old, what kid knows what their life passion will be? Well, they don't, of course; that's why so many of them end up changing their majors. At least it's a better ideal than asking 17-year-old kids to anticipate what the job market will be like in four years. > Why do we expect people to work a "whole lifetime" doing stuff they don't really want to do? How many people would be doing the exact same job they're doing now if they had no need for the money? It's not zero percent, but it's certainly not 100 percent either.
    - the_gastropod 9y ago
      > At least it's a better ideal than asking 17-year-old kids to anticipate what the job market will be like in four year At virtually any time in modern history, majoring in engineering is going to be more lucrative than majoring in History or English. Accounting, mathematics, law, etc. all have pretty high likelihood of continuing to be lucrative fields. Let's also not discount trade schools. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC workers, masons, etc. make solid livings, and get to start their careers ~4 years earlier. These are good options that we often neglect / look down upon. > How many people would be doing the exact same job they're doing now if they had no need for the money? It's not zero percent, but it's certainly not 100 percent either. Yea. I assume it's much closer to 0 than than 100 percent.
baron816 9y ago
RE: Myth 2. The theory I’ve heard is that women choose those lower paying fields because they want the flexibility those field offer as that makes child rearing easier. More government support for child care and longer school hours would therefore make it possible for more women to go into more demanding and higher paying fields. I also suspect that many men choose higher paying and “harder” fields because they’re expecting that it will make them more desirable to women. Women don’t feel that same pressure. In other words, rich men are more willing to marry a teacher or social worker. Rich women, not so much—they want to marry someone even richer.
- jessewmc 9y ago
  Just as a tangent, the term for this is 'hypergamy' and one can find more research and writing on it searching for that.
  - komali2 9y ago
    The term "hypergamy" has been almost entirely co-oped by redpillers, in my experience.
    - fwn 9y ago
      The academic inaccuracies of some internet subculture doesn't make the phenomenon less adequate to mention. I think they probably just thought that the term hypergamy sounds cool, so they adopted it to appear scientific.
      - komali2 9y ago
        >I think they probably just thought that the term hypergamy sounds cool, so they adopted it to appear scientific. I 100% agree with this, however the way they use the term does fit in perfectly with its definition.
    - tfmatt 9y ago
      Redpillers? What is this? English is not my first language. Thank you
kpwagner 9y ago
"The top quarter of earners who majored in English make more over their lifetimes than the bottom quarter of chemical engineers." This is an important statement. Success in a field is as important as the field itself. Those who lack the IQ or personality for an area of study and subsequent employment will find their life harder than it needs to be. My philosophy: there is value in being in the top ten percent--not that I've always lived by those words. While the earnings chart is very compelling. I'm a little confused by the labelling. Why are the high and low end of the horizontal bars set to the 10th and 90th percentile? Does this mean the data point used as the high on the chart is the average (or median) of the sample of earners in the 90th percentile?
- kemitche 9y ago
  90th percentile is probably used so that outliers (Bill Gates) don't overly skew the bar charts. I don't understand your final question though. 90th percentile means that, for the data set, 90 percent earned less and 10 percent earned more. The end of the bar is the 90th percentile mark.
  - kpwagner 9y ago
    Ah, okay. That kind of makes sense. If that is true, then the writer's comment about quartiles is wrong--or at least misleading. The outliers thing came to my mind too; it's such a big factor.
mrep 9y ago
Those numbers seem low. 90th percentile for computer science shows under 5 million which if we assume a 40 year career and even pay throughout one's career (to make it easy), they would make under $125,000 a year. Fresh new grads at big companies make more than that and they employ a lot of people.
- pc86 9y ago
  > Fresh new grads at big companies make more than that and they employ a lot of people. "A lot" <> {everyone,the majority,a plurality,a statistically significant number} $125/yr average for programmers across the US sounds just about right. I live in a low COL area where new grads are lucky to hit $55k/yr. I make less than $125k as a team lead with direct reports and budgetary responsibilities, and my boss' boss (the director of our profit center) is somewhere in the $150-165k range. Sounds bad compared to $400k total comp at Netflix, but my mortgage is $900/mo, I have a yard, and I pay next to nothing (comparatively) in taxes.
  - mrep 9y ago
    I would expect more than 10% and its not just the valley that is paying that. Most other major cities are hitting that (although usually not quite as much as the valley). I would not expect groupon which is in chicago to be in the top 10% of salary and they are paying average over that (also, glassdoor salaries are usually low from what I have seen): https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Groupon-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E301291_D_KO8,25.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Groupon-Software-Engineer-S...
- tfmatt 9y ago
  I assume you aren't taking into account location.
  - mrep 9y ago
    yeah, because the article didn't either
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
king07828 9y ago
I wish, I wish, I wish someone would have had this talk with me pre-college: "Why are you going to college? To learn a skill that you can use to pay the bills with, i.e., to make money, right? If the goal is to make money, then wouldn't it be a good idea to try a major where they literally teach you to make money? Which college does that? Does engineering, science, or liberal arts teach you how to make money? Or do they just teach you how to spend other people's money? Hint, as an engineer you are someone else's cost. The college of business literally teaches you how to make money, especially in finance, where they teach how to start with a pile of money and make it a larger pile of money. Granted, some grounding in the hard sciences is nice, but minors are good for that. Final recommendation is Finance major with Computer science minor, and then get an MBA after that as quickly as you can.” I have bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science, a law degree (years later in night school), and an MBA (years later again in night school). I do not like that the only advice on picking a major was “do what you enjoy/love”. I loved each of my majors when getting them and when applying them, but I did not enjoy learning the hard way that I want to be the guy paying others to make money for me, instead of the guy getting paid to make money for someone else.
- mandelbrotwurst 9y ago
  I would have advised you to consider more carefully what you are optimizing for and why. Financial services have a role in a society where we measure value using money - at a minimum we at least need to maintain systems to do all of the accounting. However, as the amount of energy / labor that we spend as a group focusing on one set of problems increases, we are left with a decreasing amount to solve all of the rest of the society’s problems. If everyone is a banker, who will grow our food and build our houses? I strongly disagree with your premise that all majors outside of finance “just teach you how to spend money”. Every area of study provides you with knowledge that you can use to solve real problems that we collectively face. “Do what you love” is idealistic advice that does not take into consideration the realities of a system which makes it extremely difficult to survive let alone thrive without money, but money should be a means, not an end.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
nitwit005 9y ago
> Interpretive dance may not be in demand, but the competencies that liberal arts majors emphasize — writing, synthesis, problem solving — are sought after by employers This sort of analysis always seems a bit silly. So sought after that they struggle to get hired? If you reduce what's being learned to an extremely generic term like "problem solving", it stops being meaningful. Every major should be learning "problem solving", so of course any employer is going to check the box on your skills survey to mark it as a desired skill.
eric_b 9y ago
Work hard and strive towards excellence in your chosen field, and you'll succeed long term. Huh, imagine that.
alexanderstears 9y ago
These articles always read like someone attacking a strawman. No college degree will make you rich. What a college degree offers is a change in how competitive you are for higher paying jobs. No one really gets wealthy working in STEM careers, but technical ability is one of the most direct routes to having at least a middle class life. The choice of school matters, the choice of major matters, but not in predictable ways and it's important to weigh the costs and benefits together. Yeah, private schools have better alumni networks, but do you want to spend 4x on your undergrad to access those? To what extent can you substitute hard work for buying access? When I was in high school, I seriously considered becoming a doctor. However, I ran the numbers - becoming a doctor vs. going into business and working as hard as I'd have to work to become a doctor. Becoming a doctor probably pays off, but not until you're in your 40s. However, you can put away a lot more money in your 20s and 30s working rather than studying medicine so the break even point is very sensitive to the ROI. But the point is the same choose your own adventure, but at least weigh the options.
Tomminn 9y ago
Nursing? I don't understand.

59 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

This is terrible advice (IMO obviously). On the statistical level it basically amounts to "disregard the currently accepted best practices". On the individual level none of it matters. The right school won't make a high achiever out of someone who's been a low achiever for 18yr and the wrong one won't make a low achiever out of someone who's a high acheiver. Depending on where you start in life (i.e. social and economic class) you're probably only going to be able to go up/down a few rungs anyway and returns on time spent stressing over having a strategic plan for college diminish very quickly. I take particular issue with 5. You should know what you want to do unless you've got so much money and time that you don't mind pissing a way a lot of both taking classes you don't actually need. I partially agree with 3/4. New grads are hired for who they know or what they know. Nobody cares if you've got a major in psychology if you've spent the last two years working with some education grad students writing software to teach kids math.

foota 9y ago
Although I'm not sure it's something that can be manipulated for gain, I do think some people do better in different university environments.

CalChris 9y ago

Myth 5 and 6 are not myths at all. You need a strong preparation for most STEM majors and at least at Berkeley, for engineering you need to apply to the COE and for a specific major. L+S is different.

mamoswined 9y ago
Yep, engineering was a different college within my university and that's common in many public schools. It was not easy to switch in, they only allocated a few spots a year for it.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Tell me about it. I was the victim of some of this bad find yourself advice. I had a 3.8 when I petitioned to transfer into EECS from L+S. I got in but the following semester EECS was heavily impacted and they turned away 4.0s. The liberal arts are awesome. I took a ton of their classes. You really can find yourself there. Engineering is not awesome. You cannot find yourself there. You can only suffer which was I will admit, gloriously awesome. But I had nightmares for years afterward that I hadn't finished this rec or that rec. EECS sent me to the hospital my senior year. It's a tough route but I'm tougher for it.
  - tfmatt 9y ago
    I had a recurring nightmare in which I registered for a class at the beginning of the semester (generally a summer semester) and I somehow forgot about it the very end of the semester. I've know others to also have this exact same nightmare.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

How I picked my major: During high school everyone one day was assigned to look at professions by going on to the bls.gov website . I picked Computer Science for two reasons . 1. I feel like I would enjoy the job 2. The job market for CS majors has high growth and low unemployment 3. Median pay was above average .

madengr 9y ago
Did you actually like it prior to choosing it?
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Yes
gozur88 9y ago
>I picked Computer Science for two reasons . Clearly you weren't cut out for math :)
- giggles_giggles 9y ago
  He's a programmer, he just has problems with off-by-one errors
  - fhood 9y ago
    reasons[2] returns "Median pay was above average". I see no issue here.
    - smichel17 9y ago
      The original comment is 1-indexed, though.
      - zitterbewegung 9y ago
        Only on the view

tn_ 9y ago

|Myth 5: It’s important to choose a major early. I mean, I think it's good that Georgia / Arizona State have created "meta-majors" to give students more exposition on specific majors.. but I wish high-schools would provide that information before students sign up for a 20k-40k+ / year experiment to find out they don't want to become w/e it is they originally signed up for.. When I was a sophomore in high-school, a teacher went out of her way, tapped into her network and helped me land my first professional programming gig. I was still probably going to be a programmer as I had been coding for 5+ years already, but being exposed to that environment helped re-affirm that it was the path that I wanted to take.

liveoneggs 9y ago
I also had a clear path thanks to some volunteer work I lucked into around age 15 mixed with my own computer obsession, but most kids don't have that. I don't see how you could do it outside of the usual "XYZ after school club".
- fma 9y ago
  When I was in high school, I had summers off. I volunteered at the "Main library" of my county...a huge library and volunteered in their computer lab. I also volunteered at the local science museum and continued to do so on weekends during school. I have to travel to downtown, which required me to take a public bus. For graduation, we are required some volunteer hours. If we do more hours, we get special recognition. Volunteering is a great way to get some exposure to different careers and areas...There are a lot of opportunities of people just want to look.
zolthrowaway 9y ago
I resonate with this so much. I honestly feel incredibly lucky to end up where I did. My sophomore year of high school, I took a programming class almost entirely on accident. I took a business class with a teacher my freshman year and really liked her. The only other elective she taught was an intro to C++ course. It's like a light switch went off in my head that this is what I am supposed to do with my life. I had my sophomore and junior year to do projects and really solidify that this is the thing for me. I had plenty of help a long the way. I had a few particularly great professors and a life-changing internship at a startup. I feel so lucky to have these experiences that are almost random chance that things worked out for me. I can't imagine what it's like to try to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life with only a high school classes and possibly a part-time job. How can you decide you want to do something with such a narrow and outsider perspective? I had much more exposure than most to what I wanted to do and it still took a lot of luck and wrong turns to get here. I can't imagine how hard it must be with even more limited exposure.

zelos 9y ago

How come Chemical Engineering is right up the top of earnings? As someone who dropped out of chemical engineering to be a software developer, I clearly made the wrong choice ;-)

madengr 9y ago
"As someone who dropped out of chemical engineering.." You answered your own question ;-)
projectileboy 9y ago
In those sorts of charts, chemical engineering typically includes petroleum engineering, which can be pretty lucrative.
- komali2 9y ago
  I have a weirdly specific insight into this. I was an oil and gas recruiter in Houston between 2014-2015... right on the cusp of the most recent O&G price crisis. So I graduate, watch all my engineering friends get nice fat 90k/year or even higher salaries (this is Houston equiv to ~120-130 Bay Area), start buying big trucks, big houses, spending like crazy. My candidates start doing the same, except for the oldest and most experienced, who would always warn about valleys in the field. Lo and behold in 2014 gas prices plummets from something like 100$/barrel to 40, and suddenly almost every single one of my Chem E buddies is out of a job, and all my candidates are getting laid off, and I myself am busting my ass to keep employed because now we have maybe 2-3 jobs popping a month that get instantly targeted by every recruitment firm in the city, let alone thousands of unemployed candidates. Anyway, one of my chem E buddies that was really good at saving money fucks off to SF to do Hack Reactor and has a great time of it. One by one more of my friends do similar, either doing a bootcamp or just jumping straight into automation type jobs. One of them even swapped to patent law. A lot of my candidates start putting things like "python" and "Matlab" on their resumes. Long story short, the O&G industry can make you a lot of money, but it is extremely variable, and you get extremely specialized. A mech E with "rotating equipment" can't do a "static equipment job," according to hiring managers. Chem E can't do liquid natural gas jobs, even if they've got 15 years experience on all sorts of different projects. Etc. A lot of my candidates and friends just decided they'd go for a field with a lower barrier to entry and a much lower barrier for skill transfer. (I did as well in the end)

cm2187 9y ago

On myth 1 ("STEM always delivers"), I think the variation mostly reflects people going into research & teaching vs working in the private sector. But no one is forced into research (quite the opposite). I actually do think that the downside for STEM is limited if earnings is something that matters to you. [edit] Also the other thing to consider is that humanities is a bit of a one way trip whereas STEM is not. I have seen numerous people with engineering background getting into political science, history, even opera singing! I hardly ever met someone who studied humanities becoming an engineer.

cirgue 9y ago
> I have seen numerous people with engineering background getting into political science, history, even opera singing! I hardly ever met someone who studied humanities becoming an engineer. Hi, now you have. I did a double major in political science and econ, currently a machine learning engineer. Humanities is not at all a one-way ticket unless you expect it to lead directly to a job. Humanities education is for you, not for your employer. > I have seen numerous people with engineering background getting into political science, history, even opera singing! I hardly ever met someone who studied humanities becoming an engineer. Anecdotally, my experience is the opposite.

BlackjackCF 9y ago

I think choosing a major is important if you're the kind of person who thrives on having that sort of structure. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you know you're that type of person, it's probably paramount to choose a major that you like and do it early on so it'll set you on the right path for your career.

jcadam 9y ago

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but my advice: If you're graduating from high school and don't know what you want to do for a living, join the military - it'll grow you up fast and will provide you with great options for financing your education once you do figure it out.

maccard 9y ago
I'm not going to downvote you for it, but this is terrible advice. If you're graduating form high school and don't know what you want to do for a living, don't make a multi-year commitment to a job that has a very significant chance of ruining your life. You can get out of waiting tables after 12 months if you want to, but you can't just drop out of the army, and waiting tables has a significantly smaller chance of removing one or more of your limbs.
- no_one_ever 9y ago
  Your cautionary advice could also be directed to students who are unsure what they want to study and willing to go into serious debt to aimlessly explore. Sure you sign a year-long contract, but the military pays for it.
- solatic 9y ago
  Depending on where you get your figures from, somewhere between 80-85% of the jobs in the US military are non-combat, where there is as little risk of losing a limb as there is going about your day-to-day civilian life and losing a limb in a car crash. If you didn't find something in your breadth-but-not-depth high school studies that grabbed your interest to the point where you decide that it's worth pursuing a four-year college commitment to study it in further depth, I struggle to understand how twelve months in a minimum wage job (a repetitive daily routine that affords you little if any spending money) would help clarify a direction.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  And while waiting tables, you might consider community college. It's a lot cheaper way to try some things and figure out what you want.

adjkant 9y ago

This is a good article in my opinion but it just requires context, situational application, and some reading between the lines. #1 is certainly true and is good to be aware of. CS doesn't usually see this, but many physical sciences do see it. #2 I didn't know was a myth, so I'll be conveniently ignoring that one. #3 is absolutely true, but as others have mentioned is not very applicable to individuals who will usually go to the best school they can get into and afford. However, it's a very useful consideration when it comes to politics, social considerations, and more. #4 is absolutely true. You can make a good living with any degree, but you should always keep the practicality in mind no matter what major you are. You can't just major in philosophy and expect a job - you need to have a direction, seek internships in college, etc. That direction often changes and evolves until one settles into a career that uses those philosophy degree skills but isn't perhaps what you picture when you think about jobs for philosophers. Many have pointed out the flaws in #5 for STEM / Engineering, but for someone deciding what they want to do within a set of options in the same range, it often is very true. See a communications major's plentiful varying career paths and possible compatible social science degrees that can be switched to easily. #6 is usually not true, but I think there's a larger point to take away, which is that you don't need 5 classes in Y and 10 classes in Z to do job X. Often mixing subjects with your interests and having that classic liberal arts balance can be very useful. Psychology can be helpful in getting along with coworkers in any office. Philosophy and ethics could certainly lead to better corporate ethical action if it was widespread enough. I would revise #6 to be "don't box your eduction in by your major". That isn't to say you need to study a full liberal arts curriculum or create your own major either, but simply to develop other relevant skills or interests you have that can aid your life and major. Obviously, this is a charitable reading, but I think there is some good value hidden here.

emodendroket 9y ago
> #4 is absolutely true. You can make a good living with any degree, but you should always keep the practicality in mind no matter what major you are. You can't just major in philosophy and expect a job - you need to have a direction, seek internships in college, etc. That direction often changes and evolves until one settles into a career that uses those philosophy degree skills but isn't perhaps what you picture when you think about jobs for philosophers. I didn't do any of this stuff and I majored in Japanese and here I am working in computer programming. I don't think it really makes that much of a difference what you major in. Anybody who's completed a college major has acquired excellent tools to learn new skills.

carlob 9y ago

Coming from a European country, I really have a hard time understanding this no-major thing. As a matter of fact I even have trouble understanding majors at all. Across the pond, when you go to university to study X you study X (and if X requires Y as a prerequisite also Y). Nobody prevents you from walking into a lecture hall in comparative linguistics if you are studying biology, you just won't get any credits for it. Experiencing a large range of topics, helping you understand what you want to do, and teaching you to think is supposed to be the role of high school around here.

projectileboy 9y ago
The goal of a liberal arts education (which is not unique to the United States) is to provide a well-rounded base of knowledge combined with critical thinking skills. For college students on this track, specifying a major becomes less important.
- pc86 9y ago
  Majors are still important in a liberal arts education, unless you're majoring in Liberal Arts, in which case your career prospects are probably going to suffer substantially.
- hawkice 9y ago
  Can you graduate without a major? It never even occurred to me to try or ask anyone about it.
  - rankam 9y ago
    Some schools have an interdisciplinary degree which is close, I think. If I recall, you essentially have an advisor that oversees the classes you take and makes sure that you have "enough" credits in each subject (STEM, literature, humanities, etc) but you don't have to declare that X subject will be the focus of my studies.
  - moftz 9y ago
    If you don't have a major, then what are you really graduating from? Some schools have majors called "University Studies" that lets you essentially be undeclared for awhile until you figure out what you want to do but you can't graduate with this on a diploma. You still have to pick something. If you want a liberal arts education, then choose majors like English. If you want something specific, pick something specific.

dogruck 9y ago

This list of myths is composed of non-myths.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

>Dr. Carnevale wouldn’t speculate as to why women make their choices. I'll help him out. Go watch a Norwegian documentary called Hjernevask (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask). A comedian wonders aloud why, in the most gender-equal country in the world, women still prefer lower-paying jobs. Its success led Norway to shut down its Gender Studies Institute. Not everything is the cause of rampant misogyny.

SilasX 9y ago
I would think that it's, at least, less of a mystery in Norway (or the Western Europe/Nordic model in general) -- at high marginal rates of taxation, and a wide variety of public benefits for free, there's less of an upside to making more money, so the enjoyment of the work itself matters more.
- likelynew 9y ago
  The comparison is between two genders in the same country, and not two different countries.
  - SilasX 9y ago
    "in the most gender-equal country in the world" is inviting a comparison across countries, and the point is relevant regardless.

emodendroket 9y ago

I'm really tired of hearing moralizing about people picking the wrong college major. Unless you have a crystal ball and can see four years into the future you're better off just studying something you care about; you've got a whole lifetime to do stuff you don't really want to do.

the_gastropod 9y ago
I think this general idea, popular though it is, is troubling. At 17 years old, what kid knows what their life passion will be? How can they have a life passion without much life experience or knowledge? Why do we expect people to work a "whole lifetime" doing stuff they don't really want to do? I think encouraging young people to learn marketable, in demand skills, in order to get a good paying job is solid advice. I wish this advice were coupled with encouraging some frugality, which would free most people up to do what they really want to do, without much concern for finances, by the time they're 30.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > I think this general idea, popular though it is, is troubling. At 17 years old, what kid knows what their life passion will be? Well, they don't, of course; that's why so many of them end up changing their majors. At least it's a better ideal than asking 17-year-old kids to anticipate what the job market will be like in four years. > Why do we expect people to work a "whole lifetime" doing stuff they don't really want to do? How many people would be doing the exact same job they're doing now if they had no need for the money? It's not zero percent, but it's certainly not 100 percent either.
  - the_gastropod 9y ago
    > At least it's a better ideal than asking 17-year-old kids to anticipate what the job market will be like in four year At virtually any time in modern history, majoring in engineering is going to be more lucrative than majoring in History or English. Accounting, mathematics, law, etc. all have pretty high likelihood of continuing to be lucrative fields. Let's also not discount trade schools. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC workers, masons, etc. make solid livings, and get to start their careers ~4 years earlier. These are good options that we often neglect / look down upon. > How many people would be doing the exact same job they're doing now if they had no need for the money? It's not zero percent, but it's certainly not 100 percent either. Yea. I assume it's much closer to 0 than than 100 percent.

baron816 9y ago

RE: Myth 2. The theory I’ve heard is that women choose those lower paying fields because they want the flexibility those field offer as that makes child rearing easier. More government support for child care and longer school hours would therefore make it possible for more women to go into more demanding and higher paying fields. I also suspect that many men choose higher paying and “harder” fields because they’re expecting that it will make them more desirable to women. Women don’t feel that same pressure. In other words, rich men are more willing to marry a teacher or social worker. Rich women, not so much—they want to marry someone even richer.

jessewmc 9y ago
Just as a tangent, the term for this is 'hypergamy' and one can find more research and writing on it searching for that.
- komali2 9y ago
  The term "hypergamy" has been almost entirely co-oped by redpillers, in my experience.
  - fwn 9y ago
    The academic inaccuracies of some internet subculture doesn't make the phenomenon less adequate to mention. I think they probably just thought that the term hypergamy sounds cool, so they adopted it to appear scientific.
    - komali2 9y ago
      >I think they probably just thought that the term hypergamy sounds cool, so they adopted it to appear scientific. I 100% agree with this, however the way they use the term does fit in perfectly with its definition.
  - tfmatt 9y ago
    Redpillers? What is this? English is not my first language. Thank you

kpwagner 9y ago

"The top quarter of earners who majored in English make more over their lifetimes than the bottom quarter of chemical engineers." This is an important statement. Success in a field is as important as the field itself. Those who lack the IQ or personality for an area of study and subsequent employment will find their life harder than it needs to be. My philosophy: there is value in being in the top ten percent--not that I've always lived by those words. While the earnings chart is very compelling. I'm a little confused by the labelling. Why are the high and low end of the horizontal bars set to the 10th and 90th percentile? Does this mean the data point used as the high on the chart is the average (or median) of the sample of earners in the 90th percentile?

kemitche 9y ago
90th percentile is probably used so that outliers (Bill Gates) don't overly skew the bar charts. I don't understand your final question though. 90th percentile means that, for the data set, 90 percent earned less and 10 percent earned more. The end of the bar is the 90th percentile mark.
- kpwagner 9y ago
  Ah, okay. That kind of makes sense. If that is true, then the writer's comment about quartiles is wrong--or at least misleading. The outliers thing came to my mind too; it's such a big factor.

mrep 9y ago

Those numbers seem low. 90th percentile for computer science shows under 5 million which if we assume a 40 year career and even pay throughout one's career (to make it easy), they would make under $125,000 a year. Fresh new grads at big companies make more than that and they employ a lot of people.

pc86 9y ago
> Fresh new grads at big companies make more than that and they employ a lot of people. "A lot" <> {everyone,the majority,a plurality,a statistically significant number} $125/yr average for programmers across the US sounds just about right. I live in a low COL area where new grads are lucky to hit $55k/yr. I make less than $125k as a team lead with direct reports and budgetary responsibilities, and my boss' boss (the director of our profit center) is somewhere in the $150-165k range. Sounds bad compared to $400k total comp at Netflix, but my mortgage is $900/mo, I have a yard, and I pay next to nothing (comparatively) in taxes.
- mrep 9y ago
  I would expect more than 10% and its not just the valley that is paying that. Most other major cities are hitting that (although usually not quite as much as the valley). I would not expect groupon which is in chicago to be in the top 10% of salary and they are paying average over that (also, glassdoor salaries are usually low from what I have seen): https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Groupon-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E301291_D_KO8,25.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Groupon-Software-Engineer-S...
tfmatt 9y ago
I assume you aren't taking into account location.
- mrep 9y ago
  yeah, because the article didn't either
deleted 9y ago
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king07828 9y ago

I wish, I wish, I wish someone would have had this talk with me pre-college: "Why are you going to college? To learn a skill that you can use to pay the bills with, i.e., to make money, right? If the goal is to make money, then wouldn't it be a good idea to try a major where they literally teach you to make money? Which college does that? Does engineering, science, or liberal arts teach you how to make money? Or do they just teach you how to spend other people's money? Hint, as an engineer you are someone else's cost. The college of business literally teaches you how to make money, especially in finance, where they teach how to start with a pile of money and make it a larger pile of money. Granted, some grounding in the hard sciences is nice, but minors are good for that. Final recommendation is Finance major with Computer science minor, and then get an MBA after that as quickly as you can.” I have bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science, a law degree (years later in night school), and an MBA (years later again in night school). I do not like that the only advice on picking a major was “do what you enjoy/love”. I loved each of my majors when getting them and when applying them, but I did not enjoy learning the hard way that I want to be the guy paying others to make money for me, instead of the guy getting paid to make money for someone else.

mandelbrotwurst 9y ago
I would have advised you to consider more carefully what you are optimizing for and why. Financial services have a role in a society where we measure value using money - at a minimum we at least need to maintain systems to do all of the accounting. However, as the amount of energy / labor that we spend as a group focusing on one set of problems increases, we are left with a decreasing amount to solve all of the rest of the society’s problems. If everyone is a banker, who will grow our food and build our houses? I strongly disagree with your premise that all majors outside of finance “just teach you how to spend money”. Every area of study provides you with knowledge that you can use to solve real problems that we collectively face. “Do what you love” is idealistic advice that does not take into consideration the realities of a system which makes it extremely difficult to survive let alone thrive without money, but money should be a means, not an end.
- emodendroket 9y ago

nitwit005 9y ago

> Interpretive dance may not be in demand, but the competencies that liberal arts majors emphasize — writing, synthesis, problem solving — are sought after by employers This sort of analysis always seems a bit silly. So sought after that they struggle to get hired? If you reduce what's being learned to an extremely generic term like "problem solving", it stops being meaningful. Every major should be learning "problem solving", so of course any employer is going to check the box on your skills survey to mark it as a desired skill.

eric_b 9y ago

Work hard and strive towards excellence in your chosen field, and you'll succeed long term. Huh, imagine that.

alexanderstears 9y ago

These articles always read like someone attacking a strawman. No college degree will make you rich. What a college degree offers is a change in how competitive you are for higher paying jobs. No one really gets wealthy working in STEM careers, but technical ability is one of the most direct routes to having at least a middle class life. The choice of school matters, the choice of major matters, but not in predictable ways and it's important to weigh the costs and benefits together. Yeah, private schools have better alumni networks, but do you want to spend 4x on your undergrad to access those? To what extent can you substitute hard work for buying access? When I was in high school, I seriously considered becoming a doctor. However, I ran the numbers - becoming a doctor vs. going into business and working as hard as I'd have to work to become a doctor. Becoming a doctor probably pays off, but not until you're in your 40s. However, you can put away a lot more money in your 20s and 30s working rather than studying medicine so the break even point is very sensitive to the ROI. But the point is the same choose your own adventure, but at least weigh the options.

Tomminn 9y ago

Nursing? I don't understand.