No, as it states at the top of the page I linked to, this set of figures comes from a survey of people with a bachelor’s degree only. I assume the salaries for people who go to law or business school are higher, although they’re probably balanced out by us poor suckers who got a PhD in English 
I would think the fact that there is typically ONE professor and MANY PhD students in a class would tell you they all can’t be professors.
Plus if the only thing you can do with a PhD in a particular field is become a professor, I tend to think that’s a bullshit degree. I mean can’t a PhD in biochemistry go work at Pfizer or Merck or companies with names like “BioGen” or “GenetX” or something?
But if you want the data to be useful, it has to represent actual career opportunities related to the degree. Otherwise, all it might be measuring is the fact that people who get degrees tend to be the kind of people who would make more money even if they didn’t have the degree. In other words, it may just be measuring intelligence, hard work, coming from the middle class and presenting well, whatever.
I’m sure the education received in a general arts type college degree would confer some benefit in terms of helping you make better, more informed decisions that would in turn lead to more rapid promotion and all that, but that assumes you are the kind of person who thinks hard about decisions in the first place and who has the intelligence to apply disparate knowledge in making specific decisions. People like that would tend to succeed whether or not they have a degree.
A humanities degree does have utility, as there are still jobs out there which require a degree - any degree- as a minimum qualification for application. So a person with a degree will have more open doors than a person without. The question is whether the value of that today is worth spending four years out of the work force and paying $20,000-$50,000 per year for the privilege. You’re starting out your post-college life from a pretty big fiscal and career hole compared to the person who went straight to work out of high school, so you’d better make significantly more than he does to catch up. A degree in health care, education, or in the STEM fields is still an obviously excellent investment. General studies degrees or degrees in various humanities are more questionable.
How do you measure “relatedness,” though? People who have humanities degrees generally spend four years reading dense, complex material, looking for patterns, and writing a LOT. They get good at doing these things, and I’d argue that these are transferable and valuable skills. But it might not be immediately obvious from the job title that the person is using abilities he or she developed as a humanities major (and of course, there are other ways to learn these skills, but four years of immersion in the written word is a damned good way).
Well there are typically a few professors for a very small number of PhD students at a particular PhD granting institution’s dept. That university is creating more PhDs than it needs. Then there are lots of small colleges with faculty who teach that subject/dept that don’t offer PhD degrees, so they consume PhD grads and produce none. Not saying you’re wrong about your overall point but I don’t think your thought experiment is as simple as you say.
Sure. Biochemistry is a lucrative field. My friend’s problem was that his professor kept deferring work on his thesis subject for ‘just a little while’ until the professor’s own work was done. And ‘just a little while’ never ended. I believe my friend eventually requested and received an advisor change, but only after he wasted a lot of time going nowhere while being paid little more than minimum wage.
Another problem with a lot of the statistics floating around regarding the value of a degree is that much of it comes from the colleges themselves - things like after-graduation employment rates, starting salaries of recent graduates, etc. And colleges have a vested interest in massaging these numbers to make them look as good as possible - to the point where there have been several recent scandals involving schools inflating their job statistics to attract more applicants.
Another factor to consider in analyzing all this data is that some of these fields have bifurcated salary distributions which aren’t visible when you just look at the mean or the average income. Law is one of those fields - apparently, salaries of lawyers are either extremely high, or quite low. A person who graduates from Harvard and becomes a corporate lawyer can make a fortune. The guy who gets a law degree from a state school and goes to work in a law office in a strip mall handling divorces and wills of the local populace, not so much.
Not every kid who says they are going to college actually does. Most kids will mumble out something even if they really have no plans at all.
So what trade school did you go to? Because to me this comes across as “In no way do I look down on those “functional retards” for going to trade school. I think it’s a great idea for a certain type of people. Not my type, mind you, but the retarded ones. But I don’t mean that in a demeaning way. Salt of the earth, those retards. Great people.”
The one sure thing is that there is no sure thing in careers. You will never be able to say “Yes, I chose right” until the day that you retire. Until then, you will need to be nimble, adaptable, and always ready to read and react to the labor market.
I entered university in 1999 Silicon Valley. I graduated in 2003, to a very different economy. I knew a lot of people who gritted their teeth through a “useful” tech major they had no natural interest in, only to graduate into a burst bubble.
I have a family member who made a reasonable living as a house painter. He was to he point where he could start his own business. But he was eventually priced out of the market by low-wage laborers who would work for much less than a middle-class living. He went back to school, at a fairly advanced age, to become a teacher.
Another family member’s job was outsourced, so he went with it and worked abroad for several years. There are places where you can get by quite well and advance quickly by virtue of being foreign.
I majored in something unbelievably dumb, semi-struggled for years, got a temp position nine months ago to make ends meet. in those nine months my salary has rose from $12 an hour to $35 an hour.
Another family member got the definitive safe, boring, secure job. She diligently saved for retirement. Her
Surprises happen to almost all of us. How many people invested in real estate under the premise that it was a safe investment? How many people studied something that was a “sure bet”, only to find their job outsourced?
There’s a common misconception that ought to be addressed. It’s that there are now a lot more people graduating from college with liberal arts majors that have no obvious application for any jobs, and this is why there are so many college graduates who can’t get anything except boring, poorly paid jobs. The problem is that this is mostly wrong. Consider these statistics:
In general, there are no more graduates from American colleges and universities with bachelor’s degrees with majors in liberal arts subjects than there were 45 years ago. (The chart shows the trend from the early 1970’s to the late 2000’s, but the trend actually started about 45 years ago and continues today.) How can this be, you ask, since the number of people graduating from college today is much larger than it was 45 years ago? It’s because most of the growth in the number of college students is in non-liberal arts fields.
For the purposes of this post, liberal arts consists of the following fields - humanities (English, foreign languages, philosophy, linguistics, art history, music theory and history, area and cultural studies, religion, theology, etc.), social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, gender studies, ethnic studies, etc.), and natural sciences (mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, etc.). Non-liberal arts is everything else - education, business (including management and marketing), engineering (including computer science), nursing, medical technology, library science, music performance, art (as opposed to art history), architecture, agriculture, journalism, public administration, public relations, etc. Non-liberal arts fields also includes various things that it wasn’t possible to get degrees in at all 45 years ago, like video game design.
Basically, liberal arts fields are the ones that were thought of as academic fields 45 years ago. They are fields with long histories of research in them. Generally you need to get a graduate degree to get a job in these fields. Non-liberal arts fields are the ones that generally allow one to get a job with just a bachelor’s degree. You can become a school teacher, an engineer, a nurse, a medical technician, an architect, a journalist, a musician, a commercial artist, etc. with just a bachelor’s degree. In a sense, they are a little like fields studied at a trade school. Yes, you have to get a four-year degree for these non-liberal arts bachelor’s degrees, and, yes, you have to take courses outside your major to get some diversity, but the courses tend to be more directly applicable to a job than in liberal arts fields.
So if the fields which graduates major in tend to much more be fields in which one can get a job just out of college, why are there so many people complaining that one can’t get a job commeasurate with one’s degree these days? Partly it’s because the number of people graduating from college 45 years ago was a smaller proportion of the population. Partly it’s because the portion of graduates who were men and white and of Northern European Christian ancestry and from well off families and who went to prestigious colleges was greater back then. It was more common back then for businesses to offer jobs to graduates with liberal arts degrees not related to the work they would be doing, especially if the graduate was white, male, from a well off family, etc. Hiring back then was more a matter of offering jobs to people from your own background. As long as they had a college degree in anything, it was O.K. Once you give up that sort of unspoken agreement and find it necessary to look at a much wider pool of applicants, it’s not surprising that the competition will be greater and there will be more disappointed applicants.
Somehow I think the answer is a bit more complex than “everyone was racist”.
What sort of work did businesses hire college graduates to do 45 years ago? They didn’t have all the specialized IT, systems and data processing jobs we have now. Chances are, you graduated college with your liberal arts degree and got a job in sales, marketing, advertising, management, business operations or some other area that didn’t require specific knowledge like accounting or engineering does.
A lot of it has to do with the overall health of the economy too. Wehn the econom sucks, it’s tough for everyone to find decent jobs.
I didn’t say that it was entirely that people were more racist back then. I said that some significant part of it was that it was more acceptable to hire according to such stereotypes. A lot of women didn’t get the jobs that they were qualified for back then. A lot of minorities didn’t get the jobs that they were qualified back then. In any case, my point was that the main problem isn’t just that there are too many liberal arts majors. The proportion of liberal arts majors among college graduates has dropped considerably. The real increase in graduates is in majors which prepare a student with courses for their immediate employment after college.
Genius,
Your hard working, honest, bright young son/daughter will succeed without trade school or 4, 6, 8 years of college.
Johnny or Jenny ain’t getting hired until an institution of “higher education” rife with “learned professionals” get their paws in the deal.
It’s not your fathers alma mater, folks,
Boiler plate hoop hopping, degree milling, stereotyping, institutionalizing, demoralizing, book selling “path to a career”
That’s the truth, it’s the AMA running the show,
I seriously wish more folk would choose a vo-tech post high school rather then college. At least in the US, we seem to be producing more skill-less paper pushers then anybody that can actually build/repair something.
I don’t see how an economy that pushes out all manufacturing can ever hope to survive, and that is what we get if it is considered that “Tradeskills” are bad things.
The economy isn’t pushing out manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs maybe, but not manufacturing itself.
I lived in a rather poor area and had only one relative who went to college. Many of my friends went to college, but I knew it wasn’t for me at that time. Instead I joined the US Air Force and became an aircraft mechanic. I grew up near an airport and always wanted to work on planes and worked on my own cars including rebuilding engines and transmissions.
As far as brains, I’m a pretty bright guy, if I have to say so myself. I’m a member of Mensa, the high IQ society.
I made the military a career and started taking college classes at night and on weekends. I went for a BS in Education as I was training aircraft mechanics. When I finally retired, I was an enlisted guy with a Masters degree in computers and Human Relations. The internet boom and Y2K scare was happening and I could see opportunities from them.
Life is long. What you start out to be as a teenager will probably change a few times during your lifetime. Look forward and see what is coming down the road. Take advantage of it.
Very good article in today’s New York TImes on this question.
Young adults, by far, fared much much better through the recession if they had a degree than if they did not. For example, employment rates for those with a bachelor’s slipped from 69% to 65% after the recession. Without a degree? The employment rate dropped from an already ugly 55% to 47%. People with a four year degree saw a drop of 5% in wages, versus 10% for those without.
Associate degrees saw a drop in employment from 64%-57%, and a drop in wages of 12%.
A four year degree is still the best chance to achieve economic stability. To say otherwise is harmful to the bright poor young people. The sons and daughters of the rich are going to get their education no matter what. But when you tell families that education is a waste of time, and young people that they are not college material, you are hurting their prospects for the rest of their life.
I would add that for people considering a trade school-you have to choose your course of study very carefully…many trades are in decline as well. For example, my nephew did a 4 year program to become a machinist-he could not find any decent work in that trade (the jobs paid terribly, and were not secure). He eventually started his own business (refinishing floors). My cousin had the same experience-he worked as a machinist for a few years, saw that there was no opportunity, and became an IT guy. Years back, there was no demand for skilled caninetmakers-now there is (people want custom kitchens). So, you never know.
That’s because you appear to have some sort of blue collar mindset that the only legitimate form of work is performed with one’s hands. The fact is our modern economy can manufacture most stuff people need with a fraction of the workers we needed decades ago. There is no shortage of “stuff” or people to fix or replace it. And that’s a good thing. It basically frees up people to educate themselves and come up with new and better ideas for the future.