You aren’t going to be successful in any profession if you don’t have other skills. I worked for a long time for an engineering firm, a lot of engineers never get promoted or get anything other than a COL increase because they have no skills other than the tasks they know how to do. And after twenty years of just COL increases, engineers don’t make that much money.
And most of the STEM fields require a certain skill set to get through. Not everyone has the ability to get through DifEq. And as someone who went back to school and eventually picked up a business degree - a heck of a lot of people don’t have the skill to make it through Cost Accounting and Econ either.
The vast majority of my friends were liberal arts majors. None of them are bartenders now that they are in their 40s (though I’m semi-retired and thinking about getting a coffee shop job). They are product managers and project managers and IT managers and programmers and release and change managers and UI specialists and data analysts. Or they got graduate degrees and are librarians or teach. I don’t think life will be much different for the next generation - most careers that exist today didn’t really exist when I was in college - who would have guessed that there would be a career for a “Six Sigma Blackbelt” (I spent a few years doing that) or an “IT Software Asset Manager” (another of my careers). Or my friends became artists and made a decision not to run the corporate rat race.
I never understand the blanket advice to go to a STEM field. For me, the outcome of trying to muddle my way through a STEM degree would have been me dropping or failing out. Well, either that or I could become an engineer that designs bridges that fail. Pure quantatitve skills are just not in my skill set. I do, however, now have an excellent and lucrative career which draws on the things that I am good at-- in my case data analysis, visualization, writing and strategic thinking. And I’m doing that with the classic “stupid” degree. I was a film major in undergrad. And I actually draw on the stuff I learned there every day. IMHO, 90% of every office job is basically storytelling.
The trick is to find the overlap between “things I’m good at”, “things I enjoy doing” and “things that are likely to lead to my being able to pay rent”. IMHO, it’s smart to think a few years ahead and understand what different career paths look like. But at the same time, trying to dispassionately game the job market is just as likely to backfire. New fields and industries pop up all the time, and once-solid industries can quickly go the way of the buggy whip. No matter what field you are in, to be successful you will need to be engaged, adaptable, and ready to take advantage of opportunity.
Your definition of success is different than mine. And probably different than the OP’s 17 year old kid, who is floundering with zero direction in his life right now.
I’d say that an engineer with 20 years of solid experience and job security is definitely successful.*
Stability is good! I’ve had the same job title for 30 years,(and also the same spouse for 30 years ) I make enough money to live comfortably, and that’s enough.
Not everybody wants to get promoted. I’m good at techie stuff. Leave me alone all day on my computer, please. I am terrible at customer relations and office politics. Somebody else can manage that, please.
*and I’m guessing that the OP would be a proud father of such an engineer…even if he never gets a promotion.
But did you get hired because you had a film major ? No, you got hired for other reasons.
I would hire you too–because you’ve written some of the most interesting posts on this site! Your Peace Corps work, your adventures in Africa and adaptations to the cultures you’ve lived in—that’s all stuff that nobody learns in college.
Of course, lots of 17 year old kids going to college are not cut out for those kinds of adventures, just like you are not cut out for an engineering degree.
But a 17 year old who goes for a practical degree, (not film!) is likely to get a decent job when he is 23.
What age were you when you started your lucrative career?
Regardless of your major:
Learn to write. Specifically - can you take a concept and explain it in a 10 page paper, a 5 page paper, a 20 slide powerpoint deck, an email (without scrolling), and a tweet? Master the art and science of communication while in school.
Learn statistics. If you want to join the business world, you have to justify your existence regularly. Being able to argue your point with stats gives you an unfair advantage that you need to take. Few can handle simple correlations from Excel already. Even better is when you can drop a multi-variant analysis on the table and watch people realize that they can not argue against your point.
Take an intro finance class. Know the basic terms and why they matter. That will help you with the stats class.
After that - depends on what you want to do in your 20s (since most of us shift careers over the years).
I majored in biology. I graduated with a lot of interesting facts, but I’d be hard-pressed to name a single skill that my degree got me that I couldn’t have gotten majoring in something else.
A person who focuses on acquiring a single skill for a specific job is setting themselves up for major disappointment. What are they going to do when they can’t get that particular job? Or they graduate and realize that that job is horrible?
I don’t think a student should study whatever they want without thinking about their career prospects. But college really isn’t designed to be vocational ed, and it shouldn’t be treated that way.
That’s got to be un-normalized by region of the country; I don’t doubt the relative rankings, but I have to wonder if the salaries reflect relatively high-pay, high-cost-of-living areas as much as elsewhere. I have my doubts that a mid-career MIS major makes 92k as a median salary in most of the country, if you throw out NYC and San Francisco.
I mean, it says that the median salary for an education major (i.e. teacher) is 55,200. That’s in the ballpark of what well-reviewed teachers who are ready to retire make in Texas, not mid-career 10-15th year teachers.
Similarly, the computer science and MIS median salaries seem high- there are people making that, but I doubt it’s the median for mid-career (i.e. 15-20th year out of school).
By the time newly-enrolled students graduate, there will be market saturation.
Anyone who wants to go into a health-care field should work in that field in some capacity, even if it’s a volunteer position. No, I’m not talking about a few hours of job shadowing, either.
For that matter, they should have some employment experience under their belt before they graduate. Nowadays, an increasing number of people are indeed graduating from college with NONE whatsoever. :eek:
It’s always been viewed that way - and the burnout rate is astronomical and always has been.
MHO: Anyone who’s considering nursing should definitely get a CNA certificate, which isn’t very expensive and takes a month or two, and work in that capacity before proceeding. They will know immediately if they want to pursue this further or not.
[QUOTE=USNews and World Report]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts an astounding 38.4 percent employment growth in this profession between 2012 and 2022. To frame this rapid increase another way, the BLS expects an industry currently boasting 86,700 physicians assistants to add 33,300 new positions by decade’s end. A trio of factors should spur this growth, including heightened demand for health care services from the country’s swelling aging population, increased prevalence of chronic diseases and a physician shortage that has become more serious in recent years. Couple the growth projection with a razor-thin 1.2 percent unemployment rate – one of the lowest on our Best Jobs of 2015 list – and the job outlook for physician assistants is quite strong.
[/QUOTE]
Definitely do not go into a major you have no idea if you’ll be good at or not. Being in Computer Science, we saw waaaay too many kids declaring themselves CS majors on day 1 who had no idea what the major was at all, let alone have any background in the field or even the necessary Math background. At one place we had a goal of 60% drop rate in the 1st two courses and another 50% drop rate in Data Structures. And that wasn’t nearly enough.
Go with something you like, are competent at and have a chance of parlaying into something. There’s nothing wrong with most Liberal Arts majors. Just keep it general. Take a lot of courses in other fields. Don’t do anything narrow like Renaissance Literature (if you want to get a career going that’s not based on that).
Note: Forget law school. There’s a super saturation right now and unless you go to a top school, the chances of finding a job are small.
Indeed, thanks to Baby Boomers, the growth curve for health services it really good for the foreseeable future. A wide variety of job types there. Some don’t need a 4 year degree.
Same thing with pharmacy school, although in that case, the school doesn’t matter unless you attend a non-accredited for-profit school (and there are quite a few of them popping up, mostly in big cities). However, it’s hard to get a non-retail job without a residency, which some people are doing just so they’ll have a job that pays more than minimum wage. :eek:
I left that field almost 4 years ago, a decision for which I’ve had 100% support.
Very interesting read!
I think some of the previous posters nailed the point perfectly!
Liberal arts are the most accessible but also the riskiest of degrees! If you don’t have considerable networking skills you will fail, after all most of these degrees truly only teach you how to better network with people.
Engineering degrees are for a certain type of people. They provide job security, are tremendously hard and require a lost youth. I could certainly not finish such a degree without gaining 20 kilos and shedding a few years of the top.
Business degrees where the thing when i went to college! Now there is an abundance of people with this type of degree and employers are actively hiring from other specializations (you can learn business, don’t need to study it type)
Medical field should be a calling and only option for said people.
We have a hard time finding skilled Agile developers with years of experience. But by the time a high school student goes to college, gets a degree in CS, and gets enough experience to be useful, the market will have moved ten years and we could be back to 2002 and “offshore everything to WiPro or Tata - they’ll do it cheaper!” Which is why we have a hard time finding those people - a lot of them got laid off after the dot com bust and found different careers.
Information Security is difficult to find people. Again, though, everyone wants someone with some experience. But its a field where everyone seems short right now, and probably will continue to be. (eSecurity is often stressful, constantly changing. It isn’t a “comfortable” job.)
This actually seems pretty reasonable to me. Here’s the salary schedule for Richardson ISD. A teacher with 15 years of service is making $54K. It’s also true that a teacher with 25 years of teaching is making $56kish, because teaching sucks like that. Furthermore, a lot of people with education degrees are not teachers 10-15 years in–they are principals or in other administrative roles, and make significantly more. Furthermore, many people with education degrees go work for publishers or test writers. Finally, quite a few leave the field entirely and may well be doing anything from managing a coffee shop to selling insurance.
I think the main point we are making, then, is that focusing on what jobs are open in your community right now is not a great plan. Trends come and go, you want a degree that works with who you are and what you want out of life.
For example, I’d hate to be a person who opted (pretty sensibly) to major in petroleum engineering 3.5 years ago and elected not to go into something I had a real passion for.
To expand a little on this. The biggest mistake I think some people make is that they are looking for a career they can be average at. They don’t want to WORK. They troll the internet looking for something that is fairly automatic and easy to do but in enough demand that they can pay the bills. But if it’s automatic and easy enough, the market will, soon enough, be flooded with people willing to do it for cheap. If you want to be safe at your job, if you want financial security, you need to be GOOD at something that most people can’t do and can’t learn to do just by half-assing their way through classes for a few years. And that means you’re going to have to work hard to learn skills and/or content.
Once you accept that, emotionally, I think it’s easier to think in terms of choosing a career you’d be good at. And at that point the average salary doesn’t really matter because you aren’t going to be making that. You’re going to be making what really good people in the field make. So look at that and see if it’s something you can live on.
Honestly, I would not look at college in the context of trying to market-time the next hot industry in 5 years. Look at college at getting a bunch of hard and soft skills and experience that will make you desirable to any employer when you graduate and allow you to adapt to market conditions as the evolve.
My specific community is the New York City area. So finance, law and technology are big. Media and entertainment too, but that’s not my field.
Finance people are always complaining about regulations preventing them from making more than a couple hundred thousand a year.
Law is kind of hit or miss. You could make six figures at a top law firm, or you might struggle to find any job.
Technology is technology. You might be working in the bowels of some dull bank’s backoffice or be crammed in with 50 developers in some startup’s openplan office.
I would tend to agree with this.
This is an example of the Dilbert Principle in action. You want your best and brightest doing the actual technical work. The less intelligent people can do the easy stuff like order donuts or yell at developers when tasks aren’t completed.
My personal theory is that people are successful with liberal arts degrees because they take jobs in sales, marketing or management. These degrees are a lot easier than engineering or math degrees. People who take liberal arts tend to take them because they are easier, which gives them more time to socialize and network, rather than bury their heads in notebooks and equations.
It’s easier to be likable and popular rather than smart because even if you are super-smart, you still have to do something super-smart with it like write a killer app or invite something awesome. Likeable people just have to be likeable.
The mistake is going to college for a specific degree to target a specific job. Computer science is an incredibly broad industry. A CS degree gives you a wide breath of skills and theoretical context that will be applicable, regardless of which way the industry goes in ten years.
First of all, computer science builds on prior work. Even though FORTRAN was useless when I was forced to take the class, it provided a useful introduction to other languages.
Second, the industry doesn’t change THAT much. A strong programmer can learn new languages relatively easily. A good PM can learn Agile in a day (its’ BS anyway, like most formal project management methodologies).
Third, company’s always want “years of experience”. That’s because they are managed by idiots who studied liberal arts who think someone competent with 10 years experience will work for their low salary.
Finally, you WILL get laid off at some point in your career. Really that’s actually better for you than staying at the same static job for 40 years.
) I make enough money to live comfortably, and that’s enough.