10 ms·

The most-regretted (and lowest-paying) college majors

45 points by mikequinlan 4y ago

_aavaa_ 4y ago
https://archive.ph/tOtFg https://archive.ph/tOtFg
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
https://archive.ph/tOtFg https://archive.ph/tOtFg
welcome_dragon 4y ago
Non-paywalled link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905021117/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/02/college-major-regrets/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220905021117/https://www.washi...
buscoquadnary 4y ago
> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college. I've experienced the exact opposite with that, that often those with humanities specialization are the least able to think critically and most likely to inject personal biases. They often adapt to another job not because they have some edge but more because their unable to pay bills and forcing yourself to learn something is very easy when the alternative is starvation. Further this points to the ugly truth, a college degree doesn't matter any more than your HS GPA, the important part is you have it. It serves simply as an easy way for employers to filter people out when attempting to determine who to hire. It functionally serves as an easy way to vets large swathes of people.
- mmartinson 4y ago
  > Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college. I've experienced this exactly. I have a philosophy degree. I floundered a bit career-wise post undergrad, self-studied for a practical entry vector into a programming job, and 8 years later have a super rewarding career as a software engineer. I felt my humanities undergrad, especially the critical thinking and writing skills I developed, have helped me advance much more quickly. If I were to change anything, I would have liked to do a CS minor.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    I'm confused by this exchange. buscoquadnary: "often those with humanities specialization are the least able to think critically" mmartinson: "I've experienced this exactly... I felt my humanities undergrad, especially the critical thinking and writing skills I developed, have helped me advance much more quickly." My own opinion is that buscoquadnary's claim is merely anecdotal impression and doesn't hold up to empirical generalization. I'm not even claiming that humanities graduates are better at critical thinking, only that I've seen no evidence that they're worse than others. I've seen a lot of people in tech who are not particularly good at critical thinking.
    - anamexis 4y ago
      mmartinson quoted the part of the article agreeing with their statement.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        Ah, you're right, thanks. I kind of skipped over the quoted part, because I had just read the comment that it was replying to. Though I'm still confused why mmartinson's reply didn't more directly address the previous comment, if it was meant as a refutation.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        FreakLegion 4y ago
        Easier to see if you put them side by side. buscoquadnary: [quotes article]. I've experienced the exact opposite. mmartinson: [replies with quote repeated]. I've experienced this exactly.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    To be fair I'd say it depends on the major (and on the school) I'd say there are more "modern" humanities majors (not naming them - but you can say it's "underwater basket weaving") that sound pretty much just a guide for "wokism" I feel that the more traditional (and wider field) humanities, like Philosophy, Sociology, History (or even literature) etc might give a more useful knowledge base
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > I've experienced the exact opposite with that, that often those with humanities specialization are the least able to think critically and most likely to inject personal biases. Agree. It appears that the modern humanities curriculum emphasizes group think over critical thinking.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  I have had the EXACT same experience with humanities majors. I actively avoid hiring anyone from those on my teams even with bootcamp experience. The best employees I've had are from technically focused universities with some kind of STEM background.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    I was a philosophy major, and my former coworker who is now on the Swift Runtime team at Apple was an English major. I would recommend reconsidering whether this bias is just based on your anecdotal data. Also, I would recommend not bragging publicly about this bias, for legal reasons. Do your bosses know that you actively discriminate against humanities majors, and are they ok with that? Is it company policy? Do the public job postings say that humanities degrees do not meet the job requirements? Your comment does suggest that humanities majors are applying for jobs at the company.
    - stuckinhell 4y ago
      We have official human resources policies that back up our hiring practices after a series of poor hires.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        What's the policy exactly? Do the job postings have specific degree requirements?
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      I agree that it is unwise to blanket-reject any humanities major. But I'm at a loss for what legal reasons you are referring to (IAAL). Although political party/activity is a protected attribute in some states, I don't think college major is protected anywhere. I can't imagine that it could be protected, since nearly every employer filters applicants based on major for at least some jobs. The only argument I could imagine is that major is a proxy for political belief, and that using it as a pretense is illegal. This would be pretty tough to prove, especially since many people who major in STEM disciplines are politically aligned with humanities majors. What am I missing here?
- Julesman 4y ago
  Just because I majored in Sociology doesn't mean my web coding is Marxist. :)
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    Q. What is a Marxists favorite programming paradigm? A. Functional Programming because it has no state.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      A: Functional Programming, because it lies about having no state.
- peanutcrisis 4y ago
  The description of "being locked into a narrow programming language" really doesn't help the case of the author. What does it mean for a programming language to be "narrow"? That also implies a conflation of programming methodology with programming languages, which really hurts the author's case since they don't really know their facts when they're arguing for how the humanities supposedly makes one more "versatile", relative to someone coming from STEM. It's also a poor reflection of their rigour when it comes to "critical thought".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kazinator 4y ago
    The author seems to overlook that people with majors STEM have decent backgrounds in humanities, because they still take the courses and maybe even minor in something in the humanities. You might be able to get through some vocational school without an exposure to topics not related to the intended job, but the university experience is much better rounded regardless of what people major in. Likewise, humanities majors earn their science credits. The humanities contains hard disciplines. Mathematics is categorized in the humanities. So is philosophy, and universities tend to teach logic under the umbrella of philosophy. Philosophy, math, logic: all brutal at the third and fourth year levels.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      How is mathematics categorized in the humanities when it's literally the M in STEM?
      - kazinator 4y ago
        That's the way it is. Math is one of the Liberal Arts, going back centuries, whereas the STEM acronym is recent. That said, some schools offer degrees under science---if you major in math, you get a B.S.. Whereas in others you get a B.A. By one measure of what is a Liberal Art, people with math degrees can be just as unemployable as historians or political scientists. The question is what's the M doing in STEM, really, besides completing a pronounceable dictionary word. For instance, in the phrase "STEM jobs", only the STE are jobs; nobody works in mathematics, as such, other than academics.
- twblalock 4y ago
  College education does matter for a lot of careers. Good luck learning electrical engineering or structural engineering on the job, for example. That might have been possible 100 years ago but many industries are far too complex for that today. This is precisely why STEM degrees are more valuable: they are not just credentials; they are backed by a set of job skills that employers need. Is the value of a humanities or art degree mainly signaling? Yes, in most cases. But not all degrees are like that.
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    The words "a lot" and "careers" are doing an awful lot of work here. Has anyone quantified this statement beyond looking at job postings for degree requirements? I'm not convinced that actual requirements for a lot of jobs have actually increased in the past 30-40 years, at least not in a way that would be met by a typical 4 year college education. My hypothesis is that employers just started seeing resumes with degrees becoming increasingly common, and just started tossing out those without, similar to what happens with high school diplomas. I'm also not entirely convinced that the "college grad wage premium" is entirely, or even mostly due to having a college degree. I suspect that a significant number of those benefitting from said premium would probably find a way to earn more than the median high school graduate anyway. Granted I am not terribly familiar with research in this particular area, so I'd appreciate a correction if I'm on the wrong track.
- bovermyer 4y ago
  I would argue that an engineer responsible for designing bridges to not kill people fifty years from now better damn well have a college-level understanding of their craft. College education isn't just some kind of societal gateway, though it is also that.
- silicon2401 4y ago
  I think it's simpler: if you're able to get a degree, you're already intelligent to some extent. That intelligence is then trained by having education in general. The difference is if you chose a major without good career prospects, you basically just have to do additional work to get the idealism out of your system and come around to a practical field. All these philosophy, sociology, literature, etc majors didn't need the major to switch into STEM etc, they were always ready for it. They just had to accept that the humanities weren't going to give them the life they wanted.
- xkcd-sucks 4y ago
  It's interesting that humanities training (at least history, political science, languages) seems to be important in the military, at least for leadership and some specialist roles
sho_hn 4y ago
> The most-regretted (and lowest-paying) college majors The article does not actually include a list or a link to the source material. Unless there's images the archive links aren't loading?
- iddan 4y ago
  The sources mentioned in the article: - Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking - Ben Schmidt's analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics - Douglas Webber
- mikequinlan 4y ago
  The article has a few links to source material https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2020-report-economic-well-being-us-households-202105.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2020-repor... https://observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/duckdb-degrees https://observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/duckdb-degrees https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx?year=2021 https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx?year=202... http://www.doug-webber.com/data.html http://www.doug-webber.com/data.html A link to an older article in The Atlantic: https://archive.ph/ZTnXJ https://archive.ph/ZTnXJ
swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
We tell college kids, “follow your dreams,” but do not give them hard facts about job salaries, opportunities, risks, number of job positions open, or the nature and day to day work they will do while on the job, or how much extra education they will need before being qualified to start a career.
- dividefuel 4y ago
  Even worse, in college you get hit with a survivorship bias, as you're mostly exposed to the professors who "made it" in these fields and managed to find a career.
  - grendelt 4y ago
    This. Plus you don't see the countless other faculty who are trying to "make it" by hoping to adjunct their way into a fulltime position. Living hand to mouth in hopes of just earning a stable paycheck - nevermind at a particularly prestigious institution (those roles are reserved for those who "made it" and attended an equally prestigious intitution).
- zwieback 4y ago
  We definitely didn't tell our kids that, more like "make sure you get a business minor if you pursue something with low earning potential". I think kids do still hear that but not from any of the parents I know.
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  All that information will be out of date by the time they graduate. 8 years is a long time —- colleague talk starts as a freshman in high school.
  - Hextinium 4y ago
    In junior year of HS (US) my teachers forced us to sit down and actually write out a budget for our expected wages and then run some years of expenses month by month. That was very eye opening and I think would still be relevant in 8 years.
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
I studied semiotics at Brown... but almost everyone working next to me studied CS/IT/DS for undergrad. I often wonder if I would regret studying semiotics if I never learned to code (granted, I was writing code before college). I do think studying semiotics is part of what got me interested in doing something meaningful with my life. Anyone else here have an unconventional degree while also being a relative success story?
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I have two guys I work with that got their degree in Economics or Poli Sci, then they went back to school to get a degree in Info Sec. So that's kind of a success story I guess.
- jorts 4y ago
  A friend of mine was a percussion major who ended up being a developer for a now public company, then became a sales rep for another now public company, and is now a founder at a new startup.
gnicholas 4y ago
> Dombrowski’s degree in Slavic linguistics has taken her to a career in academic information technology, high-performance computing and helping researchers use computers to analyze languages. It appears this person also has a library sciences degree (MLIS), which was probably more important for enabling this career path. From https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/quinn-dombrowski https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/quinn-dombrowski: > Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It seems disingenuous or misleading of this article to make it seem like a degree in Slavic linguistics (she actually has two, BA and MA) is what allowed her to pursue this career. It's also probably relevant that she went to college at the University of Chicago, a very prestigious/selective school. My main question about the data is: how does this break down by school type? There's not much risk majoring in History at Yale, since your rigor/ability is attested to by your mere admission to the institution. You also have access to an amazing alumni network (including many History and other humanities majors). But if you're at a second- or third-tier university, majoring in History is a riskier choice because of the less-powerful alumni network and the lack of a signal that you are a highly skilled and capable worker. EDIT: fixed mis-pasted quote
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  > It seems disingenuous or misleading of this article to make it seem like a degree in Slavic linguistics (she actually has two, BA and MA) is what allowed her to pursue this career. You would be incorrect there. Academic librarians typically need a subject matter graduate degree in addition to a master's in library science. Many actually have PhDs. You could argue that those degrees may not necessarily be relevant "on the ground," but they certainly present a barrier to hiring.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    This person doesn't work as an academic librarian. She is an academic technologist, which does not require any advanced degrees. In fact, even the Associate Director of Academic Technology position at Stanford does not list an advanced degree in the required credentials OR preferred credentials: https://careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/associate-director-academic-technologies-18733 https://careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/associate-director-ac...
csw-001 4y ago
Education has value beyond improving income potential. It would be really interesting to see correlation between those those who entered college only (or primarily) to improve income, and those who sought a humanities degree for other reasons, to see if they got out of the degree what they wanted. This analysis also doesn't include minors or elective courses - I'm wondering how many folks (like myself) chose to pursue a humanities minor to get a lot of the value-add of studying something like philosophy without being pigeon-holed in a humanities pathway?
antiterra 4y ago
The American system is like 50% general studies for an undergrad degree. So, while I believe being well-rounded is highly desirable, the cost of university today is too high to force people to study what they don’t want. If humanities degrees were halved in time and cost, it would not be prohibitive to study a trade or technical academic subject in addition. Also, law school degrees are fraught, lots of schools have been accused of fudging or hiding graduate salaries. Plenty of people just aren’t cut out for destroying their lives with a biglaw job schedule or are saddled with huge debt in a public sector. There’s also no guarantee you’ll get hired, if you graduate in an off year, you can miss an opportunity you would have had the year previous or after and can never full get back, even climbing a long ladder and hoping for a lateral.
- kube-system 4y ago
  > the cost of university today is too high to force people to study what they don’t want. The value in a guided education is that it is guided. If you want to study what you want, just go to a library and study what you want for free.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    "Sat in a library and did self directed study for 4 years" probably wouldn't be taken seriously on a resume by many employers.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Of course it won't. There are many reasons for this, and one of those reasons is that guided educations have value.
    - davidn20 4y ago
      Of course, that's why you show value. When I dropped out of college, I knew I couldn't rely on a piece of paper to say I was smart. I was lucky, it's easy to show value in CS. I don't need anyone's permission to build an amazing web app. That said, there is always something you can do to show value or bring value.
mistrial9 4y ago
[flagged]
- ryanklee 4y ago
  If you pay a huge amount of money to go to college and then have trouble supporting yourself for the rest of your life, there is a money problem. The problem is money. Framing it as a money problem is narrow, but accurate with regard to what matters here. There is more to college and learning than making money -- but money is sine qua non in life. If you don't have it, then pain and suffering will cast a long shadow over nearly everything else.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  They talk about not living off your parents as an adult, not being a burden on others after your parents escape you, being able to take care of yourself and your family...
- dcist 4y ago
  Okay, but colleges that teach about the rest of life (language, cultures, arts, etc.) charge money and will kick out students that don't pay money.
- throwaway8582 4y ago
  > To my eye, they talk about money, they frame the question about money When 18 year old kids with no income are taking out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans to pay for an education, the question of whether that education will allow them to make enough money to pay it back is pretty important. > language, cultures, arts, shared values, shared concerns, common intellectual experience. You can get all of this stuff without going without going to college and spending ridiculous amounts of money. Go to museums, watch YouTube, visit relevant internet forums, buy used college textbooks, etc. I taught myself Spanish this way. It was something I wanted to do, but I knew it probably wouldn't make me any money of it (I haven't), so I'm glad I did that rather than spending $100k+ to learn it in college.
  - kcplate 4y ago
crackercrews 4y ago
> the top quarter of history majors earn $4.2 million over their career. That puts them above the bottom quarter of earners from even the highest-paying majors, such chemical and aerospace engineering. Two things likely influence this. First, these history majors probably come from elite universities. Second, the bottom 25% of highest paying majors probably include lots of people who don't work for their entire career. For example, women who decide to stay home with kids.
- writeinpencil 4y ago
  I'm a history/philosophy major who ended up as a programmer. Pure speculation but I wonder if another part is that history helps you think hard about groups of people and how to lead them / how they work together. I think it also conveys things that traditional management theory might not (I haven't studied it so I can't say for sure), but things like uncertainty and the contingency of events come through in a big way. My advice for any younger people reading this is to do something practical and something for passion. I regret not getting a technical education that would have had much better employment prospects and having to claw my way through the back door, but I also wouldn't trade away my humanities education for anything. EDIT: FWIW I did not go to an elite university and make a good living as an engineering manager. I also talked on a plane once to a guy who said the best people he met in IT were NSA cryptographers, but the second best were people like me. His theory was that people who studied humanities and then went on to do technical work must have had a passion for it since they had to work extra hard to get into the field. Maybe that's a big part of it, maybe studying history has nothing to do with it and they just went into other high paying fields.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    I suspect most people who go into a history major out of high school come from a background which informed them that it's something they can do, and still be okay. Many kids couldn't go into history simply because their parents would be vehemently against it. Among history majors, we can probably find a good many individuals whose parents supported them in their choice, and a good bulk of that support likely has economic roots.
gnicholas 4y ago
Much of the discussion here reminds me of Bryan Caplan's work on the relative value of what students learn versus the value of education as signaling. His piece in the NYT was posted here [1] a few hours ago. It's a super-condensed version of his book, which goes into great detail on his research hypothesis versus others, and policy recommendations (which he admits are too extreme to be enacted). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736028 2: https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652 https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
chadash 4y ago
The value of a specific major could go up tremendously based on which school you went to. For example, for earning potential alone, I'll take an English degree from University of Pennsylvania over a business degree from 2nd-tier State School X. If my child were going to U of Penn, I'd even tell them to avoid Wharton undergrad, where the grading curve is harder than in liberal arts there, which could make your job prospects worse. At top schools, the degree itself (especially with a high GPA) is worth a ton, regardless of what you major in. The lower down on the prestige rankings that you go, the more likely you'll need a "practical" major to get a high paying job.
bovermyer 4y ago
I have a degree in history, though my college experience was spread across six years, two continents, and four different majors (one of which was CS). Though my career is not even remotely dependent on my skills and knowledge gained from my history education, I daresay it gives me a whole lot better context on humanity and life in general.
allendoerfer 4y ago
> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college. I am sick of this weird non-logic: You are technical, so you must be bad at domain knowledge, talking, presenting, leading, social skills and now apparently of all the things even critical thinking. You come across it all the time in the non-SV business-world. If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing. It is your insecurity talking, not your critical thinking.
- kazinator 4y ago
  Another take: whoever wrote is writing from a position of privilege. "A humanities major at an Ivy League college opens up higher-earning opportunities later in life, like when you take over the reins of the family corporation." It's also simply an outdated view. The strategy of going into humanities and finding higher earning later in life probably worked quite a bit better in 1972 than 2022. Simply going to university was a sign of privilege half a century ago, and so you wouldn't discuss the associated prospects without assuming privilege. Those not privileged who got into that environment would have been lifted in status by the contacts and the association with privilege. Today, having a university degree is not an earmark of privilege, and you are less likely to make relationships at university which connect you with privilege. Depending on the school.
- archduck 4y ago
  They are using a type of logical inference called abduction: based upon one's observations of an unexplained phenomenon, one formulated a hypothesis as to why it is so. > If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing. The logical fallacies you are using here are ad hominem and the straw man argument.
jd_illa 4y ago
humanities major here. My complaint with the way many humanities topics are taught is there is almost no attempt to consider how students will practically apply the knowledge in the "real world". I don't think you need to abandon theory or critical thinking skills to pay attention to this.
jkingsbery 4y ago
> “When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don't really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.” This is a false dichotomy. I had the good fortune to study Math and Computer Science at a liberal arts school. During the course of my undergraduate degree, I had to spend a fair amount of time writing about STEM, in addition to actually doing STEM things. I've found, for example, reading and critiquing a paper on some ML research and asking "Is this true?" uses many of the same skills as asking "Is this true?" in other areas. And I was able to take plenty of Humanities classes as an undergrad as well. It is possible to get both a liberal arts education and a STEM education at the same time. > Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. While I actually am a fan of liberal arts generally, this is an uninformed argument. Most CS programs I know of do not teach anything all that specific to the moment. At least when I was in school, and soon after, many programs included at least some course work in Lisp, ML (the programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)), or Haskell, with the idea that they would teach a lot of programming language precisely so that you can learn how to pick up things later. No programs I'm aware of prepare students for a particular certificate. And, if they did, outside of consulting these certificates seem to not be particularly popular in computer science or software engineering fields. I suppose if an education in Humanities had prepared these particular people to make such a crummy argument, that would be a reason not to pursue a degree in the Humanities.
fmajid 4y ago
Studying the Humanities is the ultimate Veblen good. A way to signal your family is so rich (or so well connected) you don't need to worry about your major's job prospects.
known 4y ago
landosaari 4y ago
How does this compare with having a technical degree and not being hired?[0] "I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness." -treyfitty [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697528
nunez 4y ago
> Regardless of major, half of those who went to private, for-profit schools regret their decision, perhaps because students at for-profit schools are much more likely to struggle to repay their student debt. Similar regrets plague only 21 percent of those who went to public colleges and universities and 30 percent of those who attended private nonprofits. I'd like to see more historical data on this. Those kids eventually become adults with kids. Imagine a world where the prevailing public opinion is to skip college instead of attend it...

45 points by mikequinlan 4y ago

_aavaa_ 4y ago

https://archive.ph/tOtFg https://archive.ph/tOtFg

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

https://archive.ph/tOtFg https://archive.ph/tOtFg

welcome_dragon 4y ago

Non-paywalled link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905021117/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/02/college-major-regrets/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220905021117/https://www.washi...

buscoquadnary 4y ago

> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college. I've experienced the exact opposite with that, that often those with humanities specialization are the least able to think critically and most likely to inject personal biases. They often adapt to another job not because they have some edge but more because their unable to pay bills and forcing yourself to learn something is very easy when the alternative is starvation. Further this points to the ugly truth, a college degree doesn't matter any more than your HS GPA, the important part is you have it. It serves simply as an easy way for employers to filter people out when attempting to determine who to hire. It functionally serves as an easy way to vets large swathes of people.

mmartinson 4y ago
> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college. I've experienced this exactly. I have a philosophy degree. I floundered a bit career-wise post undergrad, self-studied for a practical entry vector into a programming job, and 8 years later have a super rewarding career as a software engineer. I felt my humanities undergrad, especially the critical thinking and writing skills I developed, have helped me advance much more quickly. If I were to change anything, I would have liked to do a CS minor.
- lapcat 4y ago
  I'm confused by this exchange. buscoquadnary: "often those with humanities specialization are the least able to think critically" mmartinson: "I've experienced this exactly... I felt my humanities undergrad, especially the critical thinking and writing skills I developed, have helped me advance much more quickly." My own opinion is that buscoquadnary's claim is merely anecdotal impression and doesn't hold up to empirical generalization. I'm not even claiming that humanities graduates are better at critical thinking, only that I've seen no evidence that they're worse than others. I've seen a lot of people in tech who are not particularly good at critical thinking.
  - anamexis 4y ago
    mmartinson quoted the part of the article agreeing with their statement.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Ah, you're right, thanks. I kind of skipped over the quoted part, because I had just read the comment that it was replying to. Though I'm still confused why mmartinson's reply didn't more directly address the previous comment, if it was meant as a refutation.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - FreakLegion 4y ago
        Easier to see if you put them side by side. buscoquadnary: [quotes article]. I've experienced the exact opposite. mmartinson: [replies with quote repeated]. I've experienced this exactly.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  To be fair I'd say it depends on the major (and on the school) I'd say there are more "modern" humanities majors (not naming them - but you can say it's "underwater basket weaving") that sound pretty much just a guide for "wokism" I feel that the more traditional (and wider field) humanities, like Philosophy, Sociology, History (or even literature) etc might give a more useful knowledge base
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> I've experienced the exact opposite with that, that often those with humanities specialization are the least able to think critically and most likely to inject personal biases. Agree. It appears that the modern humanities curriculum emphasizes group think over critical thinking.
stuckinhell 4y ago
I have had the EXACT same experience with humanities majors. I actively avoid hiring anyone from those on my teams even with bootcamp experience. The best employees I've had are from technically focused universities with some kind of STEM background.
- lapcat 4y ago
  I was a philosophy major, and my former coworker who is now on the Swift Runtime team at Apple was an English major. I would recommend reconsidering whether this bias is just based on your anecdotal data. Also, I would recommend not bragging publicly about this bias, for legal reasons. Do your bosses know that you actively discriminate against humanities majors, and are they ok with that? Is it company policy? Do the public job postings say that humanities degrees do not meet the job requirements? Your comment does suggest that humanities majors are applying for jobs at the company.
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    We have official human resources policies that back up our hiring practices after a series of poor hires.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      What's the policy exactly? Do the job postings have specific degree requirements?
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I agree that it is unwise to blanket-reject any humanities major. But I'm at a loss for what legal reasons you are referring to (IAAL). Although political party/activity is a protected attribute in some states, I don't think college major is protected anywhere. I can't imagine that it could be protected, since nearly every employer filters applicants based on major for at least some jobs. The only argument I could imagine is that major is a proxy for political belief, and that using it as a pretense is illegal. This would be pretty tough to prove, especially since many people who major in STEM disciplines are politically aligned with humanities majors. What am I missing here?
Julesman 4y ago
Just because I majored in Sociology doesn't mean my web coding is Marxist. :)
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  Q. What is a Marxists favorite programming paradigm? A. Functional Programming because it has no state.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    A: Functional Programming, because it lies about having no state.
peanutcrisis 4y ago
The description of "being locked into a narrow programming language" really doesn't help the case of the author. What does it mean for a programming language to be "narrow"? That also implies a conflation of programming methodology with programming languages, which really hurts the author's case since they don't really know their facts when they're arguing for how the humanities supposedly makes one more "versatile", relative to someone coming from STEM. It's also a poor reflection of their rigour when it comes to "critical thought".
- deleted 4y ago
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- kazinator 4y ago
  The author seems to overlook that people with majors STEM have decent backgrounds in humanities, because they still take the courses and maybe even minor in something in the humanities. You might be able to get through some vocational school without an exposure to topics not related to the intended job, but the university experience is much better rounded regardless of what people major in. Likewise, humanities majors earn their science credits. The humanities contains hard disciplines. Mathematics is categorized in the humanities. So is philosophy, and universities tend to teach logic under the umbrella of philosophy. Philosophy, math, logic: all brutal at the third and fourth year levels.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    How is mathematics categorized in the humanities when it's literally the M in STEM?
    - kazinator 4y ago
      That's the way it is. Math is one of the Liberal Arts, going back centuries, whereas the STEM acronym is recent. That said, some schools offer degrees under science---if you major in math, you get a B.S.. Whereas in others you get a B.A. By one measure of what is a Liberal Art, people with math degrees can be just as unemployable as historians or political scientists. The question is what's the M doing in STEM, really, besides completing a pronounceable dictionary word. For instance, in the phrase "STEM jobs", only the STE are jobs; nobody works in mathematics, as such, other than academics.
twblalock 4y ago
College education does matter for a lot of careers. Good luck learning electrical engineering or structural engineering on the job, for example. That might have been possible 100 years ago but many industries are far too complex for that today. This is precisely why STEM degrees are more valuable: they are not just credentials; they are backed by a set of job skills that employers need. Is the value of a humanities or art degree mainly signaling? Yes, in most cases. But not all degrees are like that.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  The words "a lot" and "careers" are doing an awful lot of work here. Has anyone quantified this statement beyond looking at job postings for degree requirements? I'm not convinced that actual requirements for a lot of jobs have actually increased in the past 30-40 years, at least not in a way that would be met by a typical 4 year college education. My hypothesis is that employers just started seeing resumes with degrees becoming increasingly common, and just started tossing out those without, similar to what happens with high school diplomas. I'm also not entirely convinced that the "college grad wage premium" is entirely, or even mostly due to having a college degree. I suspect that a significant number of those benefitting from said premium would probably find a way to earn more than the median high school graduate anyway. Granted I am not terribly familiar with research in this particular area, so I'd appreciate a correction if I'm on the wrong track.
bovermyer 4y ago
I would argue that an engineer responsible for designing bridges to not kill people fifty years from now better damn well have a college-level understanding of their craft. College education isn't just some kind of societal gateway, though it is also that.
silicon2401 4y ago
I think it's simpler: if you're able to get a degree, you're already intelligent to some extent. That intelligence is then trained by having education in general. The difference is if you chose a major without good career prospects, you basically just have to do additional work to get the idealism out of your system and come around to a practical field. All these philosophy, sociology, literature, etc majors didn't need the major to switch into STEM etc, they were always ready for it. They just had to accept that the humanities weren't going to give them the life they wanted.
xkcd-sucks 4y ago
It's interesting that humanities training (at least history, political science, languages) seems to be important in the military, at least for leadership and some specialist roles

sho_hn 4y ago

> The most-regretted (and lowest-paying) college majors The article does not actually include a list or a link to the source material. Unless there's images the archive links aren't loading?

iddan 4y ago
The sources mentioned in the article: - Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking - Ben Schmidt's analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics - Douglas Webber
mikequinlan 4y ago
The article has a few links to source material https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2020-report-economic-well-being-us-households-202105.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2020-repor... https://observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/duckdb-degrees https://observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/duckdb-degrees https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx?year=2021 https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx?year=202... http://www.doug-webber.com/data.html http://www.doug-webber.com/data.html A link to an older article in The Atlantic: https://archive.ph/ZTnXJ https://archive.ph/ZTnXJ

swagasaurus-rex 4y ago

We tell college kids, “follow your dreams,” but do not give them hard facts about job salaries, opportunities, risks, number of job positions open, or the nature and day to day work they will do while on the job, or how much extra education they will need before being qualified to start a career.

dividefuel 4y ago
Even worse, in college you get hit with a survivorship bias, as you're mostly exposed to the professors who "made it" in these fields and managed to find a career.
- grendelt 4y ago
  This. Plus you don't see the countless other faculty who are trying to "make it" by hoping to adjunct their way into a fulltime position. Living hand to mouth in hopes of just earning a stable paycheck - nevermind at a particularly prestigious institution (those roles are reserved for those who "made it" and attended an equally prestigious intitution).
zwieback 4y ago
We definitely didn't tell our kids that, more like "make sure you get a business minor if you pursue something with low earning potential". I think kids do still hear that but not from any of the parents I know.
sfvegandude 4y ago
All that information will be out of date by the time they graduate. 8 years is a long time —- colleague talk starts as a freshman in high school.
- Hextinium 4y ago
  In junior year of HS (US) my teachers forced us to sit down and actually write out a budget for our expected wages and then run some years of expenses month by month. That was very eye opening and I think would still be relevant in 8 years.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

I studied semiotics at Brown... but almost everyone working next to me studied CS/IT/DS for undergrad. I often wonder if I would regret studying semiotics if I never learned to code (granted, I was writing code before college). I do think studying semiotics is part of what got me interested in doing something meaningful with my life. Anyone else here have an unconventional degree while also being a relative success story?

buscoquadnary 4y ago
I have two guys I work with that got their degree in Economics or Poli Sci, then they went back to school to get a degree in Info Sec. So that's kind of a success story I guess.
jorts 4y ago
A friend of mine was a percussion major who ended up being a developer for a now public company, then became a sales rep for another now public company, and is now a founder at a new startup.

gnicholas 4y ago

> Dombrowski’s degree in Slavic linguistics has taken her to a career in academic information technology, high-performance computing and helping researchers use computers to analyze languages. It appears this person also has a library sciences degree (MLIS), which was probably more important for enabling this career path. From https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/quinn-dombrowski https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/quinn-dombrowski: > Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It seems disingenuous or misleading of this article to make it seem like a degree in Slavic linguistics (she actually has two, BA and MA) is what allowed her to pursue this career. It's also probably relevant that she went to college at the University of Chicago, a very prestigious/selective school. My main question about the data is: how does this break down by school type? There's not much risk majoring in History at Yale, since your rigor/ability is attested to by your mere admission to the institution. You also have access to an amazing alumni network (including many History and other humanities majors). But if you're at a second- or third-tier university, majoring in History is a riskier choice because of the less-powerful alumni network and the lack of a signal that you are a highly skilled and capable worker. EDIT: fixed mis-pasted quote

actually_a_dog 4y ago
> It seems disingenuous or misleading of this article to make it seem like a degree in Slavic linguistics (she actually has two, BA and MA) is what allowed her to pursue this career. You would be incorrect there. Academic librarians typically need a subject matter graduate degree in addition to a master's in library science. Many actually have PhDs. You could argue that those degrees may not necessarily be relevant "on the ground," but they certainly present a barrier to hiring.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  This person doesn't work as an academic librarian. She is an academic technologist, which does not require any advanced degrees. In fact, even the Associate Director of Academic Technology position at Stanford does not list an advanced degree in the required credentials OR preferred credentials: https://careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/associate-director-academic-technologies-18733 https://careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/associate-director-ac...

csw-001 4y ago

Education has value beyond improving income potential. It would be really interesting to see correlation between those those who entered college only (or primarily) to improve income, and those who sought a humanities degree for other reasons, to see if they got out of the degree what they wanted. This analysis also doesn't include minors or elective courses - I'm wondering how many folks (like myself) chose to pursue a humanities minor to get a lot of the value-add of studying something like philosophy without being pigeon-holed in a humanities pathway?

antiterra 4y ago

The American system is like 50% general studies for an undergrad degree. So, while I believe being well-rounded is highly desirable, the cost of university today is too high to force people to study what they don’t want. If humanities degrees were halved in time and cost, it would not be prohibitive to study a trade or technical academic subject in addition. Also, law school degrees are fraught, lots of schools have been accused of fudging or hiding graduate salaries. Plenty of people just aren’t cut out for destroying their lives with a biglaw job schedule or are saddled with huge debt in a public sector. There’s also no guarantee you’ll get hired, if you graduate in an off year, you can miss an opportunity you would have had the year previous or after and can never full get back, even climbing a long ladder and hoping for a lateral.

kube-system 4y ago
> the cost of university today is too high to force people to study what they don’t want. The value in a guided education is that it is guided. If you want to study what you want, just go to a library and study what you want for free.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  "Sat in a library and did self directed study for 4 years" probably wouldn't be taken seriously on a resume by many employers.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Of course it won't. There are many reasons for this, and one of those reasons is that guided educations have value.
  - davidn20 4y ago
    Of course, that's why you show value. When I dropped out of college, I knew I couldn't rely on a piece of paper to say I was smart. I was lucky, it's easy to show value in CS. I don't need anyone's permission to build an amazing web app. That said, there is always something you can do to show value or bring value.

mistrial9 4y ago

[flagged]

ryanklee 4y ago
If you pay a huge amount of money to go to college and then have trouble supporting yourself for the rest of your life, there is a money problem. The problem is money. Framing it as a money problem is narrow, but accurate with regard to what matters here. There is more to college and learning than making money -- but money is sine qua non in life. If you don't have it, then pain and suffering will cast a long shadow over nearly everything else.
readthenotes1 4y ago
They talk about not living off your parents as an adult, not being a burden on others after your parents escape you, being able to take care of yourself and your family...
dcist 4y ago
Okay, but colleges that teach about the rest of life (language, cultures, arts, etc.) charge money and will kick out students that don't pay money.
throwaway8582 4y ago
> To my eye, they talk about money, they frame the question about money When 18 year old kids with no income are taking out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans to pay for an education, the question of whether that education will allow them to make enough money to pay it back is pretty important. > language, cultures, arts, shared values, shared concerns, common intellectual experience. You can get all of this stuff without going without going to college and spending ridiculous amounts of money. Go to museums, watch YouTube, visit relevant internet forums, buy used college textbooks, etc. I taught myself Spanish this way. It was something I wanted to do, but I knew it probably wouldn't make me any money of it (I haven't), so I'm glad I did that rather than spending $100k+ to learn it in college.
- kcplate 4y ago

crackercrews 4y ago

> the top quarter of history majors earn $4.2 million over their career. That puts them above the bottom quarter of earners from even the highest-paying majors, such chemical and aerospace engineering. Two things likely influence this. First, these history majors probably come from elite universities. Second, the bottom 25% of highest paying majors probably include lots of people who don't work for their entire career. For example, women who decide to stay home with kids.

writeinpencil 4y ago
I'm a history/philosophy major who ended up as a programmer. Pure speculation but I wonder if another part is that history helps you think hard about groups of people and how to lead them / how they work together. I think it also conveys things that traditional management theory might not (I haven't studied it so I can't say for sure), but things like uncertainty and the contingency of events come through in a big way. My advice for any younger people reading this is to do something practical and something for passion. I regret not getting a technical education that would have had much better employment prospects and having to claw my way through the back door, but I also wouldn't trade away my humanities education for anything. EDIT: FWIW I did not go to an elite university and make a good living as an engineering manager. I also talked on a plane once to a guy who said the best people he met in IT were NSA cryptographers, but the second best were people like me. His theory was that people who studied humanities and then went on to do technical work must have had a passion for it since they had to work extra hard to get into the field. Maybe that's a big part of it, maybe studying history has nothing to do with it and they just went into other high paying fields.
- kazinator 4y ago
  I suspect most people who go into a history major out of high school come from a background which informed them that it's something they can do, and still be okay. Many kids couldn't go into history simply because their parents would be vehemently against it. Among history majors, we can probably find a good many individuals whose parents supported them in their choice, and a good bulk of that support likely has economic roots.

gnicholas 4y ago

Much of the discussion here reminds me of Bryan Caplan's work on the relative value of what students learn versus the value of education as signaling. His piece in the NYT was posted here [1] a few hours ago. It's a super-condensed version of his book, which goes into great detail on his research hypothesis versus others, and policy recommendations (which he admits are too extreme to be enacted). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736028 2: https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652 https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...

chadash 4y ago

The value of a specific major could go up tremendously based on which school you went to. For example, for earning potential alone, I'll take an English degree from University of Pennsylvania over a business degree from 2nd-tier State School X. If my child were going to U of Penn, I'd even tell them to avoid Wharton undergrad, where the grading curve is harder than in liberal arts there, which could make your job prospects worse. At top schools, the degree itself (especially with a high GPA) is worth a ton, regardless of what you major in. The lower down on the prestige rankings that you go, the more likely you'll need a "practical" major to get a high paying job.

bovermyer 4y ago

I have a degree in history, though my college experience was spread across six years, two continents, and four different majors (one of which was CS). Though my career is not even remotely dependent on my skills and knowledge gained from my history education, I daresay it gives me a whole lot better context on humanity and life in general.

allendoerfer 4y ago

> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college. I am sick of this weird non-logic: You are technical, so you must be bad at domain knowledge, talking, presenting, leading, social skills and now apparently of all the things even critical thinking. You come across it all the time in the non-SV business-world. If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing. It is your insecurity talking, not your critical thinking.

kazinator 4y ago
Another take: whoever wrote is writing from a position of privilege. "A humanities major at an Ivy League college opens up higher-earning opportunities later in life, like when you take over the reins of the family corporation." It's also simply an outdated view. The strategy of going into humanities and finding higher earning later in life probably worked quite a bit better in 1972 than 2022. Simply going to university was a sign of privilege half a century ago, and so you wouldn't discuss the associated prospects without assuming privilege. Those not privileged who got into that environment would have been lifted in status by the contacts and the association with privilege. Today, having a university degree is not an earmark of privilege, and you are less likely to make relationships at university which connect you with privilege. Depending on the school.
archduck 4y ago
They are using a type of logical inference called abduction: based upon one's observations of an unexplained phenomenon, one formulated a hypothesis as to why it is so. > If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing. The logical fallacies you are using here are ad hominem and the straw man argument.

jd_illa 4y ago

humanities major here. My complaint with the way many humanities topics are taught is there is almost no attempt to consider how students will practically apply the knowledge in the "real world". I don't think you need to abandon theory or critical thinking skills to pay attention to this.

jkingsbery 4y ago

> “When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don't really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.” This is a false dichotomy. I had the good fortune to study Math and Computer Science at a liberal arts school. During the course of my undergraduate degree, I had to spend a fair amount of time writing about STEM, in addition to actually doing STEM things. I've found, for example, reading and critiquing a paper on some ML research and asking "Is this true?" uses many of the same skills as asking "Is this true?" in other areas. And I was able to take plenty of Humanities classes as an undergrad as well. It is possible to get both a liberal arts education and a STEM education at the same time. > Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. While I actually am a fan of liberal arts generally, this is an uninformed argument. Most CS programs I know of do not teach anything all that specific to the moment. At least when I was in school, and soon after, many programs included at least some course work in Lisp, ML (the programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)), or Haskell, with the idea that they would teach a lot of programming language precisely so that you can learn how to pick up things later. No programs I'm aware of prepare students for a particular certificate. And, if they did, outside of consulting these certificates seem to not be particularly popular in computer science or software engineering fields. I suppose if an education in Humanities had prepared these particular people to make such a crummy argument, that would be a reason not to pursue a degree in the Humanities.

fmajid 4y ago

Studying the Humanities is the ultimate Veblen good. A way to signal your family is so rich (or so well connected) you don't need to worry about your major's job prospects.

known 4y ago

landosaari 4y ago

How does this compare with having a technical degree and not being hired?[0] "I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness." -treyfitty [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697528

nunez 4y ago

> Regardless of major, half of those who went to private, for-profit schools regret their decision, perhaps because students at for-profit schools are much more likely to struggle to repay their student debt. Similar regrets plague only 21 percent of those who went to public colleges and universities and 30 percent of those who attended private nonprofits. I'd like to see more historical data on this. Those kids eventually become adults with kids. Imagine a world where the prevailing public opinion is to skip college instead of attend it...