6 ms·

On path to riches, no sign of fluffy majors

47 points by cwan 15y ago

true_religion 15y ago
Historically, the liberal arts were practiced by the rich. Engineering, and to a lesser extent the professional fields like Law and Medicine were intended to let smart bourgeoisie bootstrap themselves. I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers?
- stcredzero 15y ago
  So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers? It's just the newspaper version of a repost.
- Pooter 15y ago
  > I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". Well, no. Honestly, though, if your whole goal for education is maximizing your earnings potential, you're missing one of the major values of education - learning stuff to expand your mind and personal horizons. Perhaps it's just a bourgeois upbringing and lifestyle that allows me to subscribe to that kind of ideology, though.
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  More to that point, liberal arts were practiced by the rich in societies with rigid class structures. If you were the scion of a comfortable fortune, you majored in the "classics" or the liberal arts because you wanted, more or less, to have the background to enable you to live an exciting and fulfilling life of leisure. To make great conversation at cocktail parties and charity balls. To provide the intellectual background behind gentleman-scholarship and amateur pursuits. To help you toy around with a novel or two. And so forth. This isn't the way our society works anymore, and the liberal arts curricula never really adapted with the times. To some extent, liberal arts is still a valuable major for those wanting to pursue Law, and whose colleges do not have a discrete "pre-law" curriculum. Other than that, however, liberal arts is fairly impractical. Still valuable for intellectual development, but intellectual development of a sort that's not prized or valued or applicable to modern working society.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    That's the typical stereotype of liberal-arts education's history, but I don't think it's that historically accurate, though it probably does describe some of the Victorian era's schooling more specifically. But the traditional liberal arts weren't greatly separated from what we now think of as the sciences, though they were indeed separated from engineering and crafts. "Amateur pursuits" typically included not only "toy[ing] around with a novel or two", but also toying around with a telescope and a beaker or formula or two; most great scientists and mathematicians before the modern era were a product of liberal-arts education. It's also been popular in the American context, which isn't a society that has a rigid class structure. That at least used to be connected with a certain view of democracy and self-government, which held that liberal-arts education was a prerequisite for a working democratic society (e.g. Thomas Jefferson's views).
    - true_religion 15y ago
      I'll grant you that---I forgot about the time period where "natural philosophy" was science.
- hugh3 15y ago
  I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers? Well, the constant supply of graduates with six figures of debt and a degree in medieval basket weaving complaining that they can't find a decent job suggests that this obvious lesson still hasn't sunk in. Besides, not everything in your newspaper has to be new. Oh, and a third thing: it fits in well with the recent "higher education bubble" meme. Higher education isn't overpriced if you do it right, but it is overpriced if you study the wrong things.
deleted 15y ago
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asolove 15y ago
College is an opportunity to push yourself to do more work and study more unusual thoughts than you would otherwise ever do. If you take advantage of that opportunity, it is equivalent to four years of work experience. If you don't, it's a waste. So it isn't the major, it's the difficulty. Study English at a state school, and you could graduate after four years of writing mediocre analysis, never having learned to push yourself and or entertain new ideas. But go to St. John's or Oxford and rigorously study the great books of literature, and you will push yourself and leave with a valuable degree of self-mastery.
demallien 15y ago
It is interesting to compare and contrast this article with a recent article from the NYTimes, talking about the Civil War and education: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/from-the-playing-field-to-the-battlefield/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/from-the-pla... Specifically, at the time of the Civil War, students were mostly studying the classics - even if engineering and other disciplines were available at some institutions. West Point, for example, was essentially an engineering school at the outbreak of war. I wonder what value students at the time saw in their degrees that we don't see now, and I wonder what has happened to change that perception / reality...
- adestefan 15y ago
  At the time of the Civil War college students were from wealthy families. They didn't go to college to get a well paying job.
JonnieCache 15y ago
If I had an english degree, rather than the usual tired excuses, I'd go around telling people: "The study of humanities imbues us with a rich internal, emotional wealth such that graduates do not feel the compulsive need for ultimately harmful acquisitive obsessions throughout their lives, whereas holders of science degrees are condemned by their mechanistic brainwashing to toil furiously for worthless material rewards." Fortunately I did CS though. Humanities students are free to license it from me.
- martythemaniak 15y ago
  Maybe I didn't spend enough time in humanities courses (my engineering degree allowed for only 1 humanities course in 4 years), but let's be honest - there's a remarkably large number of really stupid engineers. I don't mean stupid in the classic sense, since they can understand their discipline and perform their work, but they have zero intellectual interests or pursuits outside of their field. Try starting a discussion on politics or history or any of the other humanities topic, and you're not likely to get very far.
  - Apocryphon 15y ago
    Or rather, they have a lot of opinions on politics or history, but also very uneducated ones.
  - chadgeidel 15y ago
    Wow, my CS degree (at an engineering school) required 23 or 25 credits in the humanities.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    Incidentally, it also works the other way around. There are a lot of people in every branch of the humanities who have no intellectual interests outside their field. Try starting a discussion about anything that isn't a humanities topic and see how far you get. Well-roundedness is not something one gets just from studying the humanities. Knowledge of science, mathematics, and basic engineering are also essential. This gets overlooked a lot in discussions where the issue is framed as "high salary versus a well-rounded education".
rquantz 15y ago
I expect that there are a lot of other factors that would predict future earnings better than major. Plenty of people get degrees in philosophy or English with the intention of following it with law school. On the other hand, plenty of people major in English because they don't know what they want to do, or because they're actually majoring in football. How many people just fall into engineering or CS? Probably not as many as fall into anthro. My guess is, the people who value making a lot of money and who major in English do just fine for themselves, the people who lack drive and ambition who major in English work at McDonald's, and the people who major in humanities because they value things besides money live in an artists' commune in Brooklyn making art and music and not really caring that they're not making as much money as you are.
mentat 15y ago
"No sign" is classic headline overstatement. I have a bachelor and a masters in non-CS subjects but have spent most of my time programming or doing security. When someone needs to talk to the "business" people, that's usually me and it's because of the skills that I picked up studying other things. I think I probably make more than I would have if I'd studied CS. Nonetheless, the plural of anecdote is not data.
jfruh 15y ago
I wonder to what extent studies like this have things backwards to a certain extent? It's not that an engineering degree is more lucrative than an English degree, exactly; it's that if you want to be an engineer, you major in engineering, and then you go into a more lucrative field. Does that make sense? It's not that the degree that has some major predicative power -- it's that some fields are more lucrative than others, and people who want to go into those fields choose particular majors. I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person.
- owenmarshall 15y ago
  >I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person. As a study that compares bachelor degree to bachelor degree, this is still useful. To wit, I don't know of a school that charges more for a lucrative BS in CS than a less-useful BS in psychology, nor one that charges less for degrees that can only be used as stepping stones. That said, a study that includes post-bachelor degrees in the ranking would be interesting. What would be especially informative would be a combined ranking that factors the average cost of education in with the average earnings increase/decrease. Perhaps a masters in psychology still gets you less than a BS in mathematics, perhaps not, but it would be neat to see.
  - jarek 15y ago
    > To wit, I don't know of a school that charges more for a lucrative BS in CS than a less-useful BS in psychology My alma mater, a public university in Ontario, Canada does this, but it appears to have more to do with government regulation of certain programs. Per-term fees differ by faculty, with arts and mathematics (not inluding CS) being almost the same, CS being much higher, and engineering slightly above CS.
pumpmylemma 15y ago
I'd really like to see a longitudinal study that models something like: log(mean_realized_income) ~ log(mean_expected_future_income) People who go into humanities don't expect to make a million dollars. Research like this verifies common assumptions, but to me they always have a sunspot study feel to them.
larrykubin 15y ago
How about Philosophy? Here is a huge list of notable people who studied philosophy who have done quite well for themselves. http://healthcareethicscanada.blogspot.com/2008/12/philosophy-degrees-and-famous-people.html http://healthcareethicscanada.blogspot.com/2008/12/philosoph... George Soros, Cartleton S. Fiorina, Ricky Gervais, Ethan Coen, the list goes on and on. Also, Peter Thiel, Paul Buchheit, and Paul Graham all studied philosophy if I recall correctly.
- pjscott 15y ago
  I'm sure you can find a long list of people who've done exceptionally well who majored in any common subject. This tells us very little about what sort of money someone majoring in philosophy is likely to make.
  - irahul 15y ago
    > I'm sure you can find a long list of people who've done exceptionally well who majored in any common subject. Or people who have't majored at all - Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. Parent post is making rules out of exceptions.
jfruh 15y ago
To put it slightly more succinctly, it's not that some majors are more lucrative than others; it's that some industries are more lucrative than others. You should really figure out what kind of work you want to go into, and part of your calculus for that should be how much money you'll make, if that's important to you, and then figure out an academic path that prepares you for that. If you think of college as a black box that spits out a high-paying job at the end, then you're frankly in trouble.
brockf 15y ago
Anecdote: I'm 22, have a successful web application business that earns more than any of those median earnings, and am scaling my involvement (and earnings) down to begin my PhD in cognitive science (under the umbrella of psychology, for most). Why would I leave the "path to riches" to earn - at best - the same as I've made as a teenager? Meaning. Research and teaching give meaning to an otherwise dull life of emailing people I've never met about issues that no one will remember in a few years time. It's fun to work with people, fun to talk about issues that no one quite understands (language acquisition, in my case), and exhilarating to teach students who will hopefully outperform me in every way. This community is largely driven by money. People ask "How hard is it to make an app that makes $XXXX in revenue?" at least once per week. But there are other things that provide meaning and drive in people's lives. I've forgotten it on a fair share of occasions, but I hope I never look down on someone who dedicates four years (or more) of their time to studying the arts/humanities as opposed to the "hard" sciences or engineering.
- codedivine 15y ago
  Aah. I am doing a PhD and always feel that I should leave PhD to start a company to build something more meaningful than systems that nobody uses. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
  - brockf 15y ago
    Totally. To some people, being independent with their own business - regardless of what the do - is meaningful enough. I find some meaning there too. But in 25 years, for me, I'd rather say I teach students about the developing mind than help build websites. To each their own, for sure.
- drinian 15y ago
  It's a lot easier to go look for meaning once you have a solid financial base.
  - marcusbooster 15y ago
    And less likely you'll actually find it.
Homunculiheaded 15y ago
I did an undergrad in English and then went on to do grad work in CS, I definitely feel that a background in the humanities has been able to give me insights into technical problems that people with purely technical background do not typically seem to have (not to mention all the communication skills that come in handy). My personal opinion is that degrees in the humanities are excellent, but that they should be followed up with a more pragmatic graduate degree (or pragmatic skill-set if grad school isn't your interest). There is way too much of a divided between technical fields and the humanities, and most people I've known are trained to think that interest in one completely excludes interest in the other.
- jessedhillon 15y ago
  I did a double major in Political Science and CS, and also several semesters of philosophy courses. I would agree that there is a roundedness in my education that I don't perceive in my engineering peers -- like an interest in the minutiae of politics; pausing to ask abstract and esoteric questions. (Maybe that's just my personal bias to consider those things I do as being in the set of well-rounded behaviors.) Additionally, I don't feel that I struggle in understanding social situations and norms, not as much as the typical engineer. But also I feel at times that my CS knowledge is not as deep as it could be -- I am probably at or below average for CS majors in my theoretical understanding, despite having some major engineering accomplishments.
  - irahul 15y ago
    > pausing to ask abstract and esoteric questions Is there something in CS that prevents CS majors from asking abstract questions? The CS I know has a large, abstract part and any and all concrete things you see today originated from abstract reasoning. Didn't Lisp originate from an abstract paper implementing a turing-complete machine from basic operators? This is the second post I am replying to which talks about insights and abstract questions which technical(or CS) people supposedly lack. It would really help to have a couple of concrete examples.
    - jessedhillon 15y ago
angdis 15y ago
No doubt some parents will use this article as "ammo" when forcing their college-age kid to major in something "useful" rather than in something the kid is actually interested in and passionate about. There may not be enough engineers at the moment and that inflates salaries. However, the way out of this is not to encourage folks to major in engineering "for the money." Much better to have a smaller number of engineers who are intrinsically motivated.
bluekeybox 15y ago
I studied art on my own for a long period of time, and I find that it helped me understand things like information design, human resource management, and promotion strategies -- many of the "soft skills" that most engineering schools do not stress upon. I believe that education in humanities does not incapacitate people in any way, and the "critical thinking" skill it teaches is actually an extremely worthwhile and essential skill. However, there is a perception (based on some legitimate evidence) that it is easier to "wing it" in college if you are majoring in humanities. In other words, the very best humanities graduates may indeed be all very smart, however the portion of people who winged it while in college is probably higher among the humanities majors (it's hard to get away with a wrong math answer). So if you have little people experience, hiring an engineering graduate can be a "safer" bet depending on your industry. Which leads to engineers being biased to hiring other engineers. I personally believe that both "soft" and "hard" skills are desirable (but of course I am biased myself since I believe that I possess both...)
- imgabe 15y ago
  I agree that critical thinking is an important skill, but doesn't a science / engineering education teach this just as well?
  - bluekeybox 15y ago
    The way I see it, the difference between the main method taught in the hard sciences (the empirical or scientific method) and between critical thinking as taught in the humanities is that the latter does not frown upon "intuitive" knowledge the way the first one does. In the empirical method, you are encouraged to put on a blindfold and pretend to be perfectly unbiased when making a decision. That works very well for things about which you can actually pretend to be unbiased. Less so for things where you have to make conclusions based on your life experience. Critical thinking (as opposed to the scientific method) becomes important when doing things like hiring people. I cannot afford to go outside, put on a mask, randomly sample people, spend a few years with each, write down the results, and generate a correctly averaged profile of my perfect employee. On the other hand, I do have an intuitive "feeling" for what type of people I am compatible with, what type of person is most likely to be smart and productive, and I have to make decisions based on this. At the same time I have to take into account my own biases. Critical thinking as taught in the humanities is about balancing biases, while the empirical method as taught in the hard sciences is about attempting to remove bias altogether. The latter is superior but very expensive.
damoncali 15y ago
Is it really so surprising that people who study how to make things (physical or otherwise) wind up with more money than those who study something else?
richcollins 15y ago
Completely unrelated but why in the hell does their article page show my Facebook friends' status updates http://cl.ly/2n0B1S2b080n3V0y3329 http://cl.ly/2n0B1S2b080n3V0y3329 Looks like a "we need more social in our business" decision.
- VMG 15y ago
  the image doesn't render on chrome, you have to download it
  - richcollins 15y ago
    used grab on OS X (creates tiff ...)
joshklein 15y ago
Please note that this is an article about average people, making the headline entirely sensationalistic ("no sign"?). The average engineer has a set of skills that can easily be plugged directly into a corporate widget machine to profitable ends, and is paid accordingly. The average "fluffy major" has a set of skills inapplicable to much of anything. But what happens if you stop thinking about the average? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know plenty of fluffy major C-levels and directors. But I also like JonnieCache's take on it in these comments; fluffy majors know better than to care about such base needs as material wealth!
- tatsuke95 15y ago
  These were my thoughts exactly. Any intelligent, ambitious individual will find a way to succeed, regardless of the chosen University major. But the practical skills taught in BUS, CS, ENG etc are more valuable in a corporate setting, and hence for the majority of folks who just want to get a job.
hammock 15y ago
The problem with averages is that they don't tell you the distribution of salaries. Take a look at the top 1000 earners in the US and tell me what their degrees are in. Something tells me it's not going to be petroleum engineering.
isleyaardvark 15y ago
Isn't there a sort of selection bias? Slackers who go to college will choose easier majors, and won't even bother with engineering. There's no reason a smart, hard-working English major can't earn a good salary.
logjam 15y ago
Engineers, scientists, and "business" people need more training in the liberal arts, not less. Those 4:00 AM moments are the ones we need more education for....questions of ethics, of weighing values, of being able to see and reason from multiple viewpoints, of being able to communicate efficiently, of being able to empathize accurately. Don't get me wrong - I also wish all of us were more educated in highly abstract thought (math). It's just that many of us stop learning and questioning the day we learn to count. If "value" or "riches" is a number to us, we need what the humanities reveal more than anyone. "Riches" is in the eye of the beholder, one supposes. I got a B.S. in biochemistry before my M.D., have fairly extensive software engineering experience and training, have a modestly low Erdos number....and yet I tell you my colleagues and I would be better docs and engineers with a strong emphasis in our early training on the humanities. In my case, I'd have been much better off turning my minor in English into a major, learning to draw and sculpt and create more, writing more, reading more philosophy/ethics/history, learning more foreign language. We need more medical students and programmers who major in the humanities. Medical schools in particular nowadays push hard for people from the humanities (those students also need to take a relatively few science requisites) We need people who move between disciplines more easily. We need fewer specialists. Those 4:00 AM moments...when you lack data, when you lack algorithms, when you need to understand broad fields, understand and communicate with people, and make the right ethical decisions require the liberal arts at least as much as our ability to count. To paraphrase a dead poet or two, our lives ain't about laying pipe. Go read and think over poetry and literature and history and the dilemmas a thousand cultures already worried over - we'll be better engineers or entrepreneurs or doctors.

47 points by cwan 15y ago

Historically, the liberal arts were practiced by the rich. Engineering, and to a lesser extent the professional fields like Law and Medicine were intended to let smart bourgeoisie bootstrap themselves. I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers?

stcredzero 15y ago
So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers? It's just the newspaper version of a repost.
Pooter 15y ago
> I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". Well, no. Honestly, though, if your whole goal for education is maximizing your earnings potential, you're missing one of the major values of education - learning stuff to expand your mind and personal horizons. Perhaps it's just a bourgeois upbringing and lifestyle that allows me to subscribe to that kind of ideology, though.
jonnathanson 15y ago
More to that point, liberal arts were practiced by the rich in societies with rigid class structures. If you were the scion of a comfortable fortune, you majored in the "classics" or the liberal arts because you wanted, more or less, to have the background to enable you to live an exciting and fulfilling life of leisure. To make great conversation at cocktail parties and charity balls. To provide the intellectual background behind gentleman-scholarship and amateur pursuits. To help you toy around with a novel or two. And so forth. This isn't the way our society works anymore, and the liberal arts curricula never really adapted with the times. To some extent, liberal arts is still a valuable major for those wanting to pursue Law, and whose colleges do not have a discrete "pre-law" curriculum. Other than that, however, liberal arts is fairly impractical. Still valuable for intellectual development, but intellectual development of a sort that's not prized or valued or applicable to modern working society.
- _delirium 15y ago
  That's the typical stereotype of liberal-arts education's history, but I don't think it's that historically accurate, though it probably does describe some of the Victorian era's schooling more specifically. But the traditional liberal arts weren't greatly separated from what we now think of as the sciences, though they were indeed separated from engineering and crafts. "Amateur pursuits" typically included not only "toy[ing] around with a novel or two", but also toying around with a telescope and a beaker or formula or two; most great scientists and mathematicians before the modern era were a product of liberal-arts education. It's also been popular in the American context, which isn't a society that has a rigid class structure. That at least used to be connected with a certain view of democracy and self-government, which held that liberal-arts education was a prerequisite for a working democratic society (e.g. Thomas Jefferson's views).
  - true_religion 15y ago
    I'll grant you that---I forgot about the time period where "natural philosophy" was science.
hugh3 15y ago
I doubt there is anyone anywhere who has taken on an english major and said "this will make me my first $1,000,000". So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers? Well, the constant supply of graduates with six figures of debt and a degree in medieval basket weaving complaining that they can't find a decent job suggests that this obvious lesson still hasn't sunk in. Besides, not everything in your newspaper has to be new. Oh, and a third thing: it fits in well with the recent "higher education bubble" meme. Higher education isn't overpriced if you do it right, but it is overpriced if you study the wrong things.

deleted 15y ago

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asolove 15y ago

College is an opportunity to push yourself to do more work and study more unusual thoughts than you would otherwise ever do. If you take advantage of that opportunity, it is equivalent to four years of work experience. If you don't, it's a waste. So it isn't the major, it's the difficulty. Study English at a state school, and you could graduate after four years of writing mediocre analysis, never having learned to push yourself and or entertain new ideas. But go to St. John's or Oxford and rigorously study the great books of literature, and you will push yourself and leave with a valuable degree of self-mastery.

demallien 15y ago

It is interesting to compare and contrast this article with a recent article from the NYTimes, talking about the Civil War and education: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/from-the-playing-field-to-the-battlefield/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/from-the-pla... Specifically, at the time of the Civil War, students were mostly studying the classics - even if engineering and other disciplines were available at some institutions. West Point, for example, was essentially an engineering school at the outbreak of war. I wonder what value students at the time saw in their degrees that we don't see now, and I wonder what has happened to change that perception / reality...

adestefan 15y ago
At the time of the Civil War college students were from wealthy families. They didn't go to college to get a well paying job.

JonnieCache 15y ago

If I had an english degree, rather than the usual tired excuses, I'd go around telling people: "The study of humanities imbues us with a rich internal, emotional wealth such that graduates do not feel the compulsive need for ultimately harmful acquisitive obsessions throughout their lives, whereas holders of science degrees are condemned by their mechanistic brainwashing to toil furiously for worthless material rewards." Fortunately I did CS though. Humanities students are free to license it from me.

martythemaniak 15y ago
Maybe I didn't spend enough time in humanities courses (my engineering degree allowed for only 1 humanities course in 4 years), but let's be honest - there's a remarkably large number of really stupid engineers. I don't mean stupid in the classic sense, since they can understand their discipline and perform their work, but they have zero intellectual interests or pursuits outside of their field. Try starting a discussion on politics or history or any of the other humanities topic, and you're not likely to get very far.
- Apocryphon 15y ago
  Or rather, they have a lot of opinions on politics or history, but also very uneducated ones.
- chadgeidel 15y ago
  Wow, my CS degree (at an engineering school) required 23 or 25 credits in the humanities.
- pjscott 15y ago
  Incidentally, it also works the other way around. There are a lot of people in every branch of the humanities who have no intellectual interests outside their field. Try starting a discussion about anything that isn't a humanities topic and see how far you get. Well-roundedness is not something one gets just from studying the humanities. Knowledge of science, mathematics, and basic engineering are also essential. This gets overlooked a lot in discussions where the issue is framed as "high salary versus a well-rounded education".

rquantz 15y ago

I expect that there are a lot of other factors that would predict future earnings better than major. Plenty of people get degrees in philosophy or English with the intention of following it with law school. On the other hand, plenty of people major in English because they don't know what they want to do, or because they're actually majoring in football. How many people just fall into engineering or CS? Probably not as many as fall into anthro. My guess is, the people who value making a lot of money and who major in English do just fine for themselves, the people who lack drive and ambition who major in English work at McDonald's, and the people who major in humanities because they value things besides money live in an artists' commune in Brooklyn making art and music and not really caring that they're not making as much money as you are.

mentat 15y ago

"No sign" is classic headline overstatement. I have a bachelor and a masters in non-CS subjects but have spent most of my time programming or doing security. When someone needs to talk to the "business" people, that's usually me and it's because of the skills that I picked up studying other things. I think I probably make more than I would have if I'd studied CS. Nonetheless, the plural of anecdote is not data.

jfruh 15y ago

I wonder to what extent studies like this have things backwards to a certain extent? It's not that an engineering degree is more lucrative than an English degree, exactly; it's that if you want to be an engineer, you major in engineering, and then you go into a more lucrative field. Does that make sense? It's not that the degree that has some major predicative power -- it's that some fields are more lucrative than others, and people who want to go into those fields choose particular majors. I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person.

owenmarshall 15y ago
>I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person. As a study that compares bachelor degree to bachelor degree, this is still useful. To wit, I don't know of a school that charges more for a lucrative BS in CS than a less-useful BS in psychology, nor one that charges less for degrees that can only be used as stepping stones. That said, a study that includes post-bachelor degrees in the ranking would be interesting. What would be especially informative would be a combined ranking that factors the average cost of education in with the average earnings increase/decrease. Perhaps a masters in psychology still gets you less than a BS in mathematics, perhaps not, but it would be neat to see.
- jarek 15y ago
  > To wit, I don't know of a school that charges more for a lucrative BS in CS than a less-useful BS in psychology My alma mater, a public university in Ontario, Canada does this, but it appears to have more to do with government regulation of certain programs. Per-term fees differ by faculty, with arts and mathematics (not inluding CS) being almost the same, CS being much higher, and engineering slightly above CS.

pumpmylemma 15y ago

I'd really like to see a longitudinal study that models something like: log(mean_realized_income) ~ log(mean_expected_future_income) People who go into humanities don't expect to make a million dollars. Research like this verifies common assumptions, but to me they always have a sunspot study feel to them.

larrykubin 15y ago

How about Philosophy? Here is a huge list of notable people who studied philosophy who have done quite well for themselves. http://healthcareethicscanada.blogspot.com/2008/12/philosophy-degrees-and-famous-people.html http://healthcareethicscanada.blogspot.com/2008/12/philosoph... George Soros, Cartleton S. Fiorina, Ricky Gervais, Ethan Coen, the list goes on and on. Also, Peter Thiel, Paul Buchheit, and Paul Graham all studied philosophy if I recall correctly.

pjscott 15y ago
I'm sure you can find a long list of people who've done exceptionally well who majored in any common subject. This tells us very little about what sort of money someone majoring in philosophy is likely to make.
- irahul 15y ago
  > I'm sure you can find a long list of people who've done exceptionally well who majored in any common subject. Or people who have't majored at all - Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. Parent post is making rules out of exceptions.

jfruh 15y ago

To put it slightly more succinctly, it's not that some majors are more lucrative than others; it's that some industries are more lucrative than others. You should really figure out what kind of work you want to go into, and part of your calculus for that should be how much money you'll make, if that's important to you, and then figure out an academic path that prepares you for that. If you think of college as a black box that spits out a high-paying job at the end, then you're frankly in trouble.

brockf 15y ago

Anecdote: I'm 22, have a successful web application business that earns more than any of those median earnings, and am scaling my involvement (and earnings) down to begin my PhD in cognitive science (under the umbrella of psychology, for most). Why would I leave the "path to riches" to earn - at best - the same as I've made as a teenager? Meaning. Research and teaching give meaning to an otherwise dull life of emailing people I've never met about issues that no one will remember in a few years time. It's fun to work with people, fun to talk about issues that no one quite understands (language acquisition, in my case), and exhilarating to teach students who will hopefully outperform me in every way. This community is largely driven by money. People ask "How hard is it to make an app that makes $XXXX in revenue?" at least once per week. But there are other things that provide meaning and drive in people's lives. I've forgotten it on a fair share of occasions, but I hope I never look down on someone who dedicates four years (or more) of their time to studying the arts/humanities as opposed to the "hard" sciences or engineering.

codedivine 15y ago
Aah. I am doing a PhD and always feel that I should leave PhD to start a company to build something more meaningful than systems that nobody uses. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
- brockf 15y ago
  Totally. To some people, being independent with their own business - regardless of what the do - is meaningful enough. I find some meaning there too. But in 25 years, for me, I'd rather say I teach students about the developing mind than help build websites. To each their own, for sure.
drinian 15y ago
It's a lot easier to go look for meaning once you have a solid financial base.
- marcusbooster 15y ago
  And less likely you'll actually find it.

Homunculiheaded 15y ago

I did an undergrad in English and then went on to do grad work in CS, I definitely feel that a background in the humanities has been able to give me insights into technical problems that people with purely technical background do not typically seem to have (not to mention all the communication skills that come in handy). My personal opinion is that degrees in the humanities are excellent, but that they should be followed up with a more pragmatic graduate degree (or pragmatic skill-set if grad school isn't your interest). There is way too much of a divided between technical fields and the humanities, and most people I've known are trained to think that interest in one completely excludes interest in the other.

jessedhillon 15y ago
I did a double major in Political Science and CS, and also several semesters of philosophy courses. I would agree that there is a roundedness in my education that I don't perceive in my engineering peers -- like an interest in the minutiae of politics; pausing to ask abstract and esoteric questions. (Maybe that's just my personal bias to consider those things I do as being in the set of well-rounded behaviors.) Additionally, I don't feel that I struggle in understanding social situations and norms, not as much as the typical engineer. But also I feel at times that my CS knowledge is not as deep as it could be -- I am probably at or below average for CS majors in my theoretical understanding, despite having some major engineering accomplishments.
- irahul 15y ago
  > pausing to ask abstract and esoteric questions Is there something in CS that prevents CS majors from asking abstract questions? The CS I know has a large, abstract part and any and all concrete things you see today originated from abstract reasoning. Didn't Lisp originate from an abstract paper implementing a turing-complete machine from basic operators? This is the second post I am replying to which talks about insights and abstract questions which technical(or CS) people supposedly lack. It would really help to have a couple of concrete examples.
  - jessedhillon 15y ago

angdis 15y ago

No doubt some parents will use this article as "ammo" when forcing their college-age kid to major in something "useful" rather than in something the kid is actually interested in and passionate about. There may not be enough engineers at the moment and that inflates salaries. However, the way out of this is not to encourage folks to major in engineering "for the money." Much better to have a smaller number of engineers who are intrinsically motivated.

bluekeybox 15y ago

I studied art on my own for a long period of time, and I find that it helped me understand things like information design, human resource management, and promotion strategies -- many of the "soft skills" that most engineering schools do not stress upon. I believe that education in humanities does not incapacitate people in any way, and the "critical thinking" skill it teaches is actually an extremely worthwhile and essential skill. However, there is a perception (based on some legitimate evidence) that it is easier to "wing it" in college if you are majoring in humanities. In other words, the very best humanities graduates may indeed be all very smart, however the portion of people who winged it while in college is probably higher among the humanities majors (it's hard to get away with a wrong math answer). So if you have little people experience, hiring an engineering graduate can be a "safer" bet depending on your industry. Which leads to engineers being biased to hiring other engineers. I personally believe that both "soft" and "hard" skills are desirable (but of course I am biased myself since I believe that I possess both...)

imgabe 15y ago
I agree that critical thinking is an important skill, but doesn't a science / engineering education teach this just as well?
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  The way I see it, the difference between the main method taught in the hard sciences (the empirical or scientific method) and between critical thinking as taught in the humanities is that the latter does not frown upon "intuitive" knowledge the way the first one does. In the empirical method, you are encouraged to put on a blindfold and pretend to be perfectly unbiased when making a decision. That works very well for things about which you can actually pretend to be unbiased. Less so for things where you have to make conclusions based on your life experience. Critical thinking (as opposed to the scientific method) becomes important when doing things like hiring people. I cannot afford to go outside, put on a mask, randomly sample people, spend a few years with each, write down the results, and generate a correctly averaged profile of my perfect employee. On the other hand, I do have an intuitive "feeling" for what type of people I am compatible with, what type of person is most likely to be smart and productive, and I have to make decisions based on this. At the same time I have to take into account my own biases. Critical thinking as taught in the humanities is about balancing biases, while the empirical method as taught in the hard sciences is about attempting to remove bias altogether. The latter is superior but very expensive.

damoncali 15y ago

Is it really so surprising that people who study how to make things (physical or otherwise) wind up with more money than those who study something else?

richcollins 15y ago

Completely unrelated but why in the hell does their article page show my Facebook friends' status updates http://cl.ly/2n0B1S2b080n3V0y3329 http://cl.ly/2n0B1S2b080n3V0y3329 Looks like a "we need more social in our business" decision.

VMG 15y ago
the image doesn't render on chrome, you have to download it
- richcollins 15y ago
  used grab on OS X (creates tiff ...)

joshklein 15y ago

Please note that this is an article about average people, making the headline entirely sensationalistic ("no sign"?). The average engineer has a set of skills that can easily be plugged directly into a corporate widget machine to profitable ends, and is paid accordingly. The average "fluffy major" has a set of skills inapplicable to much of anything. But what happens if you stop thinking about the average? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know plenty of fluffy major C-levels and directors. But I also like JonnieCache's take on it in these comments; fluffy majors know better than to care about such base needs as material wealth!

tatsuke95 15y ago
These were my thoughts exactly. Any intelligent, ambitious individual will find a way to succeed, regardless of the chosen University major. But the practical skills taught in BUS, CS, ENG etc are more valuable in a corporate setting, and hence for the majority of folks who just want to get a job.

hammock 15y ago

The problem with averages is that they don't tell you the distribution of salaries. Take a look at the top 1000 earners in the US and tell me what their degrees are in. Something tells me it's not going to be petroleum engineering.

isleyaardvark 15y ago

Isn't there a sort of selection bias? Slackers who go to college will choose easier majors, and won't even bother with engineering. There's no reason a smart, hard-working English major can't earn a good salary.

logjam 15y ago

Engineers, scientists, and "business" people need more training in the liberal arts, not less. Those 4:00 AM moments are the ones we need more education for....questions of ethics, of weighing values, of being able to see and reason from multiple viewpoints, of being able to communicate efficiently, of being able to empathize accurately. Don't get me wrong - I also wish all of us were more educated in highly abstract thought (math). It's just that many of us stop learning and questioning the day we learn to count. If "value" or "riches" is a number to us, we need what the humanities reveal more than anyone. "Riches" is in the eye of the beholder, one supposes. I got a B.S. in biochemistry before my M.D., have fairly extensive software engineering experience and training, have a modestly low Erdos number....and yet I tell you my colleagues and I would be better docs and engineers with a strong emphasis in our early training on the humanities. In my case, I'd have been much better off turning my minor in English into a major, learning to draw and sculpt and create more, writing more, reading more philosophy/ethics/history, learning more foreign language. We need more medical students and programmers who major in the humanities. Medical schools in particular nowadays push hard for people from the humanities (those students also need to take a relatively few science requisites) We need people who move between disciplines more easily. We need fewer specialists. Those 4:00 AM moments...when you lack data, when you lack algorithms, when you need to understand broad fields, understand and communicate with people, and make the right ethical decisions require the liberal arts at least as much as our ability to count. To paraphrase a dead poet or two, our lives ain't about laying pipe. Go read and think over poetry and literature and history and the dilemmas a thousand cultures already worried over - we'll be better engineers or entrepreneurs or doctors.