3 ms·

The only person I know who majored in Egyptology is now a pediatric oncologist making probably half a mill a year in Manhattan. I agree — it’s about the person,

• brailsafe 4y ago
  Ya but wouldn't that be because in medicine, the initial degree is sort of arbitrary as long as you place very highly and cover some core subjects?
  • throwaway22032 4y ago
    Sure. The point is more that a person's choice of degree is _correlated_ to earnings, jobs, etc, but the job they take is causatively related. If you want to work on botany you might study botany and work as a botanist. It's not the degree that means you end up with a botanist's salary - it's the fact that you wanted to be a botanist!
    • brailsafe 4y ago
      > If you want to work on botany you might study botany and work as a botanist. It's not the degree that means you end up with a botanist's salary - it's the fact that you wanted to be a botanist! I suppose that's part of the nature of analyzing the numbers though isn't it? How likely it is, even with a botany degree and a goal to be a botanist, that you actually do become a botanist, and the salary outcome is one way to normalize different pathways and outcomes. For example, if the normalized salary range of people who studied botany ended up in the $300k range, it might mean that it was more likely that people who initially wanted to get into botany ended up instead becoming physicians, and then you could poke into the why of that and see if there's actually some other signal that stronger for people who actually get into professional botany, like having dabbled in weed growing and having connections in that industry