6 ms·

It pays to be a double major in college

27 points by lxm 2y ago

chromatin 2y ago
I think this is probably a proxy for some linear combination of IQ and industriousness.
- kevmoo1 2y ago
  Yep!
  - dbcurtis 2y ago
    The paper also mentions a wider funnel of opportunities. I can see that in myself and my adult child. There is a kind of “generalist penalty” in terms of landing certain kinds of specialist positions, but there is a class of troubleshooter jobs and system integration jobs that a generalist is simply much more effective at doing because of the broader perspective.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Or family wealth and ambition. > Xuechao Qian, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and one of the paper’s co-authors, cautions that the paper is not a straight cost-benefit analysis that accounts for the additional time and cost of pursuing a double major.
  - chongli 2y ago
    Right, but how much does IQ confound with family wealth? These things can be difficult to study because of confounders.
- abofh 2y ago
  Or planning for grad-school; I know a few Double Major attorneys that did their undergrad in whatever-they-felt-like since law school was their real destination.
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Reminds me of a guy I know who was not particularly the brightest. He wanted to be a lawyer and received a degree in Mass Communications, because he was told it was an easy major, then followed that up with a very low LSAT score. He's spent the better part of the last 3 decades verifying the contents of container vessels in a railyard.
- jacobsenscott 2y ago
  How so? All you need is money, and maybe a bit more time.
  - ninininino 2y ago
    At least in the American college setting, most people who double major pursue a much higher number of simultaneous courses (also described as 'how many credits you are taking this semester'). This means less time for fun and socializing and more time in class and studying. Industriousness is displayed by the willingness to work harder than is expected of someone with a single major which is the dominant way to do undergrad. IQ would be involved in the ability to study for and take more exams in finals week(s).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- eesmith 2y ago
  You cannot exclude wealth, both family and neighborhood, as a proxy. I did not come from a rich family but we were in the district for the public school which included a lot of professional class parents. The school offered a lot of AP courses. If you do well on the AP test then some colleges would accept that as college credit. This would make it easier to get a double major. However, not everyone could afford the AP tests, and schools from poorer neighborhoods, or from smaller districts, didn't offer as many AP courses.
- computerdork 2y ago
  Agreed, and on top of industriousness is mental flexibility. Being more open to strike out and learn something new to improve their job opportunities (as a double major is just that, learning more than just one subject).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
skilled 2y ago
https://archive.is/fECsD https://archive.is/fECsD (article based on this study: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32095 https://www.nber.org/papers/w32095)
exabrial 2y ago
I'm guessing correlation, not causation
treflop 2y ago
Choosing a path based on the assumption alone that you will land on the average or median is a dangerous game to play.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Seem even more dangerous to assume you're an outlier.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
reaperman 2y ago
This is stating that "workers who double majored in college have more stable earnings than workers who majored in a single subject, meaning they’re less susceptible to sharp swings in income." I think the world requires increasing specialization in knowledge and cross-/multi-disciplinary skillsets are required to achieve excellence. But for this particular effect from the article (earning stability) I wonder if it's more related to a selection bias. I believe people who successfully double-major these days are likely to be more reliable at work. With that increasing specialization, if your niche is experiencing a broad downturn it would seem especially difficult to find another role (though obviously when one does open up, there would be less competition for it). Particularly because: > “They have a wider funnel, a broader set of opportunities to select from, and this seemed to affect their earnings years later,” My feelings here differ from that OSU professor's. Personally I feel that after about 5-8 years of experience, it gets increasingly difficult to transition your career out of your original niche. For younger employees it certainly opens up the opportunity to change careers to any ~entry-level role related to either of their degrees, but mid-career and senior roles generally want someone with specific experience, and few entry-level roles will consider mid-career candidates with unrelated experience. So I do wonder if people who get dual degrees are simply the type of worker who are less likely to get laid off in the first place, regardless of whether they're filling a niche role or something that is garden-variety for one of their degrees.
- echelon 2y ago
  Double majors are smart, hard workers who can endure more pain than average. (Who willingly signs up for that except for driven individuals?) It'd be good if we had more proxies for assessing this.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    > Who willingly signs up for that except for driven individuals? Idiots who didn't read the prospectus. I doubled in CS and EE. In the UK that was called a "joint honours". Not sure many places run them any more, but that was the 80s. What they didn't tell us was that it isn't 50% or one degree and 50% of the other - it's 75% of a comp. sci degree and 75% electronics engineering, taught concurrently by two separate departments. I sometimes had to make a choice between which lecture to take when they were opposite sides of the campus.
givemeethekeys 2y ago
Ah yes. I look forward to seeing “double major” in the nice to haves list in job descriptions /s
- reaperman 2y ago
  This is increasingly likely, even just considering entirely valid reasons for it. As the world gets increasingly specialized, value is often found at the intersection of multiple disciplines/niches. Low-hanging fruit is still there, but getting harder to find and increasingly competitive. Multi-disciplinary endeavors generally are finding more success these days, and to be successful they need to have some team members who know both/all pieces thoroughly.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    There is no valid reason to list "double major" as a job requirement. It's way too specific, and doing so would encourage people to potentially waste time getting a double major they don't benefit from just to check off a box. I double-majored and I find the idea silly and counterproductive. You should only double major if you want to do something involving both majors together or else you want options to do either one separately. It's not worth it to most people because very few people get to straddle two separate fields in their job. You'd be better off getting an extra year or more of income.
    - reaperman 2y ago
      You don’t think there’s any job role which would benefit from someone who double-majored? Personally I think it’s axiomatic that these roles both exist and are increasing in frequency because of natural evolution in the business/global landscape. But I’d be super happy to hear and consider arguments which might disprove my belief. Math and Biology, or Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, or Linguistics and Computer Science? I can definitely imagine roles where these combos would be highly valued and difficult to replicate the same value with two people. NOTE: I do think that if someone can demonstrate mastery and experience in both relevant disciplines that should “count” in lieu of a double major…but I believe that about any degree requirements. We now have so many multi-disciplinary majors like “Mechatronics”, “Computational Biology”, “Bioprocess Engineering” specifically because of this value. So sure, you could “just” get one of those majors instead of the two they combine, but it seems folly to think that all practical combinations already have a unified major at the schools that a particular student might want to study at. It’s reasonable to assume that they might get accepted to schools where the best option for something like this is double-majoring - even if they get accepted to a school with a Mechatronics Program, it might not be as high quality of an education there as another school which doesn’t have that where they could double major in Electrical Engineer and Mechanical Engineering.
firewolf34 2y ago
Now, I'm all for not having to deal with their annoying paywall tactics bullcrap, but I'm wondering, is using archive.org as a way to get around paywalls like WSJ's an abuse? I'm concerned less for their profit and more for the fact that we might get archive.org hit with cease-and-desist's or cause archive.org to have to foot larger bandwidth costs when they're a really good service that's important for the long-term of the internet. I see a lot of people do it, though, so wasn't sure if there's some sort of blind-eye going on.
- skilled 2y ago
  It's really not. WSJ (and others) abuse paywalls by using Google-specific schema to have their paywalled articles show up in Search and Google News. That's my opinion of it. I do share your concern, but I think it ultimately ends up being beneficial for everyone. In the case of HN, the site can propel stories into the stratosphere, and that puts a lot of eyes on the paywalled site. As for blind-eye, the other option would be to disallow paywalled stories entirely. From the official Hacker News FAQ, > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. > In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls.
- curiousllama 2y ago
  Definitely a tragedy of the commons situation. I've used a number of tricks to circumvent paywalls over the years, and they all get shut down after a year or two.
- dang 2y ago
  (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418482.)
- paulcole 2y ago
  > is using archive.org as a way to get around paywalls like WSJ's an abuse HN either shouldn't allow any sort of paywall bypass (other than gifted sharable links) or should ban submissions from sites that have a paywall, IMO. I don't think YC could say with a straight face that they'd be OK w/ one of their portfolio company's content being taken from behind a paywall and shared elsewhere to a very large audience. Actually I do think they could (and would) say that, but I wouldn't believe them.
wakawaka28 2y ago
Wrong. It pays to be a good student, and most double majors are good students. You should not prescribe double majoring to improve income any more than you should prescribe "just any old degree is better than none" to improve income. It amazes me that the people who write articles like this finished college.
zitterbewegung 2y ago
Huh I guess that helped me out since my CS Engineering Degree made us all practically Math double majors if you chose the right classes. People petitioned it to do it. I also took a lot of philosophy classes so that might have helped me too
ghaff 2y ago
Note that the second major is often not a different engineering field.
evtothedev 2y ago
I feel like being a good software engineer is itself like being a double major. You need to know code, but you also need to know the domain you're going for. And I saw this as a double major (history & biology) now running a small software company.
eezing 2y ago
It pays to be a hard worker… thanks for the tip.
hanniabu 2y ago
Now we can scam the next generation into even more debt and getting into the workforce at a later age by convincing them to get 2 degrees
callalex 2y ago
Having gone through this myself, the main skills I learned were how to navigate bureaucracy and manipulate people more powerful than me to do what I want them to do and work way too many hours while ignoring my own mental and physical health. Both of those things are correlated with high income earners, but that doesn’t make them virtues.
jimhefferon 2y ago
I'm a college faculty member. I'll just note one thing in my experience. Everything in life involves tradeoffs and this is not an exception. I have often seen people unable to take something they were interested in because a second major means a lot of juggling. If they are okay with that, then that's fine of course.
alsetmusic 2y ago
To me, this reads as further justification for higher-ed as a gatekeeper to employment. First, you needed a college degree. If you didn’t have one, it’s your fault you can’t advance. Plus, the huge debt that comes with student loans is a natural byproduct, so don’t complain if you’re in that group and still can’t get ahead. People are waking up to the fact that higher-ed, coupled with crushing debt, is quite often a losing scenario. So here’s a new way of framing the problem: you didn’t get a double-major (thus incurring even more debt) so it’s still your fault. To me, this reeks of propping up a failing system rather than admitting that tuitions are out of control and today’s youth have very little hope of building a prosperous life. That it’s in the WSJ only furthers my belief that this is the real justification for the article.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mattnewton 2y ago
Correlation =\= Causation
mbg721 2y ago
How many double-majors have AP or other high-school credit completing their gen-eds before they even walk in the door?

27 points by lxm 2y ago

chromatin 2y ago

I think this is probably a proxy for some linear combination of IQ and industriousness.

kevmoo1 2y ago
Yep!
- dbcurtis 2y ago
  The paper also mentions a wider funnel of opportunities. I can see that in myself and my adult child. There is a kind of “generalist penalty” in terms of landing certain kinds of specialist positions, but there is a class of troubleshooter jobs and system integration jobs that a generalist is simply much more effective at doing because of the broader perspective.
pessimizer 2y ago
Or family wealth and ambition. > Xuechao Qian, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and one of the paper’s co-authors, cautions that the paper is not a straight cost-benefit analysis that accounts for the additional time and cost of pursuing a double major.
- chongli 2y ago
  Right, but how much does IQ confound with family wealth? These things can be difficult to study because of confounders.
abofh 2y ago
Or planning for grad-school; I know a few Double Major attorneys that did their undergrad in whatever-they-felt-like since law school was their real destination.
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  Reminds me of a guy I know who was not particularly the brightest. He wanted to be a lawyer and received a degree in Mass Communications, because he was told it was an easy major, then followed that up with a very low LSAT score. He's spent the better part of the last 3 decades verifying the contents of container vessels in a railyard.
jacobsenscott 2y ago
How so? All you need is money, and maybe a bit more time.
- ninininino 2y ago
  At least in the American college setting, most people who double major pursue a much higher number of simultaneous courses (also described as 'how many credits you are taking this semester'). This means less time for fun and socializing and more time in class and studying. Industriousness is displayed by the willingness to work harder than is expected of someone with a single major which is the dominant way to do undergrad. IQ would be involved in the ability to study for and take more exams in finals week(s).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
eesmith 2y ago
You cannot exclude wealth, both family and neighborhood, as a proxy. I did not come from a rich family but we were in the district for the public school which included a lot of professional class parents. The school offered a lot of AP courses. If you do well on the AP test then some colleges would accept that as college credit. This would make it easier to get a double major. However, not everyone could afford the AP tests, and schools from poorer neighborhoods, or from smaller districts, didn't offer as many AP courses.
computerdork 2y ago
Agreed, and on top of industriousness is mental flexibility. Being more open to strike out and learn something new to improve their job opportunities (as a double major is just that, learning more than just one subject).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

skilled 2y ago

https://archive.is/fECsD https://archive.is/fECsD (article based on this study: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32095 https://www.nber.org/papers/w32095)

exabrial 2y ago

I'm guessing correlation, not causation

treflop 2y ago

Choosing a path based on the assumption alone that you will land on the average or median is a dangerous game to play.

giantg2 2y ago
Seem even more dangerous to assume you're an outlier.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

reaperman 2y ago

This is stating that "workers who double majored in college have more stable earnings than workers who majored in a single subject, meaning they’re less susceptible to sharp swings in income." I think the world requires increasing specialization in knowledge and cross-/multi-disciplinary skillsets are required to achieve excellence. But for this particular effect from the article (earning stability) I wonder if it's more related to a selection bias. I believe people who successfully double-major these days are likely to be more reliable at work. With that increasing specialization, if your niche is experiencing a broad downturn it would seem especially difficult to find another role (though obviously when one does open up, there would be less competition for it). Particularly because: > “They have a wider funnel, a broader set of opportunities to select from, and this seemed to affect their earnings years later,” My feelings here differ from that OSU professor's. Personally I feel that after about 5-8 years of experience, it gets increasingly difficult to transition your career out of your original niche. For younger employees it certainly opens up the opportunity to change careers to any ~entry-level role related to either of their degrees, but mid-career and senior roles generally want someone with specific experience, and few entry-level roles will consider mid-career candidates with unrelated experience. So I do wonder if people who get dual degrees are simply the type of worker who are less likely to get laid off in the first place, regardless of whether they're filling a niche role or something that is garden-variety for one of their degrees.

echelon 2y ago
Double majors are smart, hard workers who can endure more pain than average. (Who willingly signs up for that except for driven individuals?) It'd be good if we had more proxies for assessing this.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > Who willingly signs up for that except for driven individuals? Idiots who didn't read the prospectus. I doubled in CS and EE. In the UK that was called a "joint honours". Not sure many places run them any more, but that was the 80s. What they didn't tell us was that it isn't 50% or one degree and 50% of the other - it's 75% of a comp. sci degree and 75% electronics engineering, taught concurrently by two separate departments. I sometimes had to make a choice between which lecture to take when they were opposite sides of the campus.

givemeethekeys 2y ago

Ah yes. I look forward to seeing “double major” in the nice to haves list in job descriptions /s

reaperman 2y ago
This is increasingly likely, even just considering entirely valid reasons for it. As the world gets increasingly specialized, value is often found at the intersection of multiple disciplines/niches. Low-hanging fruit is still there, but getting harder to find and increasingly competitive. Multi-disciplinary endeavors generally are finding more success these days, and to be successful they need to have some team members who know both/all pieces thoroughly.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  There is no valid reason to list "double major" as a job requirement. It's way too specific, and doing so would encourage people to potentially waste time getting a double major they don't benefit from just to check off a box. I double-majored and I find the idea silly and counterproductive. You should only double major if you want to do something involving both majors together or else you want options to do either one separately. It's not worth it to most people because very few people get to straddle two separate fields in their job. You'd be better off getting an extra year or more of income.
  - reaperman 2y ago
    You don’t think there’s any job role which would benefit from someone who double-majored? Personally I think it’s axiomatic that these roles both exist and are increasing in frequency because of natural evolution in the business/global landscape. But I’d be super happy to hear and consider arguments which might disprove my belief. Math and Biology, or Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, or Linguistics and Computer Science? I can definitely imagine roles where these combos would be highly valued and difficult to replicate the same value with two people. NOTE: I do think that if someone can demonstrate mastery and experience in both relevant disciplines that should “count” in lieu of a double major…but I believe that about any degree requirements. We now have so many multi-disciplinary majors like “Mechatronics”, “Computational Biology”, “Bioprocess Engineering” specifically because of this value. So sure, you could “just” get one of those majors instead of the two they combine, but it seems folly to think that all practical combinations already have a unified major at the schools that a particular student might want to study at. It’s reasonable to assume that they might get accepted to schools where the best option for something like this is double-majoring - even if they get accepted to a school with a Mechatronics Program, it might not be as high quality of an education there as another school which doesn’t have that where they could double major in Electrical Engineer and Mechanical Engineering.

firewolf34 2y ago

Now, I'm all for not having to deal with their annoying paywall tactics bullcrap, but I'm wondering, is using archive.org as a way to get around paywalls like WSJ's an abuse? I'm concerned less for their profit and more for the fact that we might get archive.org hit with cease-and-desist's or cause archive.org to have to foot larger bandwidth costs when they're a really good service that's important for the long-term of the internet. I see a lot of people do it, though, so wasn't sure if there's some sort of blind-eye going on.

skilled 2y ago
It's really not. WSJ (and others) abuse paywalls by using Google-specific schema to have their paywalled articles show up in Search and Google News. That's my opinion of it. I do share your concern, but I think it ultimately ends up being beneficial for everyone. In the case of HN, the site can propel stories into the stratosphere, and that puts a lot of eyes on the paywalled site. As for blind-eye, the other option would be to disallow paywalled stories entirely. From the official Hacker News FAQ, > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. > In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls.
curiousllama 2y ago
Definitely a tragedy of the commons situation. I've used a number of tricks to circumvent paywalls over the years, and they all get shut down after a year or two.
dang 2y ago
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418482.)
paulcole 2y ago
> is using archive.org as a way to get around paywalls like WSJ's an abuse HN either shouldn't allow any sort of paywall bypass (other than gifted sharable links) or should ban submissions from sites that have a paywall, IMO. I don't think YC could say with a straight face that they'd be OK w/ one of their portfolio company's content being taken from behind a paywall and shared elsewhere to a very large audience. Actually I do think they could (and would) say that, but I wouldn't believe them.

wakawaka28 2y ago

Wrong. It pays to be a good student, and most double majors are good students. You should not prescribe double majoring to improve income any more than you should prescribe "just any old degree is better than none" to improve income. It amazes me that the people who write articles like this finished college.

zitterbewegung 2y ago

Huh I guess that helped me out since my CS Engineering Degree made us all practically Math double majors if you chose the right classes. People petitioned it to do it. I also took a lot of philosophy classes so that might have helped me too

ghaff 2y ago

Note that the second major is often not a different engineering field.

evtothedev 2y ago

I feel like being a good software engineer is itself like being a double major. You need to know code, but you also need to know the domain you're going for. And I saw this as a double major (history & biology) now running a small software company.

eezing 2y ago

It pays to be a hard worker… thanks for the tip.

hanniabu 2y ago

Now we can scam the next generation into even more debt and getting into the workforce at a later age by convincing them to get 2 degrees

callalex 2y ago

Having gone through this myself, the main skills I learned were how to navigate bureaucracy and manipulate people more powerful than me to do what I want them to do and work way too many hours while ignoring my own mental and physical health. Both of those things are correlated with high income earners, but that doesn’t make them virtues.

jimhefferon 2y ago

I'm a college faculty member. I'll just note one thing in my experience. Everything in life involves tradeoffs and this is not an exception. I have often seen people unable to take something they were interested in because a second major means a lot of juggling. If they are okay with that, then that's fine of course.

alsetmusic 2y ago

To me, this reads as further justification for higher-ed as a gatekeeper to employment. First, you needed a college degree. If you didn’t have one, it’s your fault you can’t advance. Plus, the huge debt that comes with student loans is a natural byproduct, so don’t complain if you’re in that group and still can’t get ahead. People are waking up to the fact that higher-ed, coupled with crushing debt, is quite often a losing scenario. So here’s a new way of framing the problem: you didn’t get a double-major (thus incurring even more debt) so it’s still your fault. To me, this reeks of propping up a failing system rather than admitting that tuitions are out of control and today’s youth have very little hope of building a prosperous life. That it’s in the WSJ only furthers my belief that this is the real justification for the article.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mattnewton 2y ago

Correlation =\= Causation

mbg721 2y ago

How many double-majors have AP or other high-school credit completing their gen-eds before they even walk in the door?