3 ms·

TBF these numbers can be... messy. For example, at least one statistic is based on earnings 5 years out of school. 5 years out of school I was making less tha

TBF these numbers can be... messy. For example, at least one statistic is based on earnings 5 years out of school. 5 years out of school I was making less than 30k as a research assistant. A few months later I was making easily 100k+ more than most senior SDEs, and doing exactly what I would be doing if I had a trust fund to pay the bills. Many of my classmates who became doctors were in similar situations -- working through residencies at T+5 years but setting themselves up for mid 6-low 7 salaries in the near future. So earnings over even a medium-term time horizon can be extremely misleading. You really need that 35-45 year career to get the full picture. Any college grad salary number with less than a 6 or evne 10 year time horizon is going to be a poor representation of what's really going on.

mr_tristan 8y ago
But... I can't help but wonder about how many of the graduates from the 75% of schools that take most of their applicants just end up doing something that basically required none of the education they acquired. I'd bet it's far more common then the scenarios you present. https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-majors/ https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-majors/ I'm not sure the 600,000 humanities degrees lead to that kind of hockey puck style career path.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  https://www.chronicle.com/article/Over-Time-Humanities-Grads/242461 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Over-Time-Humanities-Grads... But again, the problem is that it takes until mid-career to really assess lifetime earning potential, and that's an extremely late indicator. If the winds change, we have to wait 10 years to find out. We need a more fine-grained model of how those high earnings are happening and a way of tracking progress/bottlenecks along those tracks. E.g., I suspect the law job/salary crunch should be far more worrying than near-term earning potential of humanities majors. It's also worth pointing out that salary isn't everything and our society would be utterly screwed if everyone optimized for lifetime earnings. Fortunately, plenty of people are optimizing a multi-objective function that includes QoL and job satisfaction; see e.g. teaching in particular. I'd have a hard time telling a teacher that they made a bad career choice by not going into tech or becoming a plumber, and I'd have an equally hard time arguing that teachers shouldn't be college educated.

mr_tristan 8y ago

But... I can't help but wonder about how many of the graduates from the 75% of schools that take most of their applicants just end up doing something that basically required none of the education they acquired. I'd bet it's far more common then the scenarios you present. https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-majors/ https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-majors/ I'm not sure the 600,000 humanities degrees lead to that kind of hockey puck style career path.

throwawayjava 8y ago
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Over-Time-Humanities-Grads/242461 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Over-Time-Humanities-Grads... But again, the problem is that it takes until mid-career to really assess lifetime earning potential, and that's an extremely late indicator. If the winds change, we have to wait 10 years to find out. We need a more fine-grained model of how those high earnings are happening and a way of tracking progress/bottlenecks along those tracks. E.g., I suspect the law job/salary crunch should be far more worrying than near-term earning potential of humanities majors. It's also worth pointing out that salary isn't everything and our society would be utterly screwed if everyone optimized for lifetime earnings. Fortunately, plenty of people are optimizing a multi-objective function that includes QoL and job satisfaction; see e.g. teaching in particular. I'd have a hard time telling a teacher that they made a bad career choice by not going into tech or becoming a plumber, and I'd have an equally hard time arguing that teachers shouldn't be college educated.