What college majors are worth it?

[duyen]

My elder child will be going to college in 2 1/2 years. I am wondering what major should she take so that she can land a good successful career. She is pretty much open and having a good successful career is the most important thing.

What are some majors that you recommend that have most job opportunities and are worth spending money and time for college

[GuitarStv]

I don't think you can pick a field based simply on wanting to land a good successful career.  You need a little more input than that.  Not everyone has skills that will make them particularly successful in every career.  Not everyone will enjoy working in a particular career enough to avoid burning out.

There are plenty of fields that can be good and successful.  Doctors (both people and animal), lawyers, most types of engineering, business, economics, finance, actuarial science, etc.  Any of them can easily lead to good, successful careers.

[Fomerly known as something]

I have an international relations degree.  My career is not international relations.  I’m a firm believer that college is not trade school.  The ability to communicate and critically think are two traits that will lead to a good career no matter what major one picks.

[41_swish]

I think to me it all boils down to how much the degree costs and what you can do with it.

For example, I could stomach taking out 50k in debt for an engineering degree that has a good chance to have a respectable ROI.

However, if it's a liberal arts degree, it's not a hard no, but if you need a bunch of debt for it and the path to getting and ROI on it is risky then it's probably not worth it.

Most STEM degrees are pretty good, and the liberal arts degrees can be good if you get them for an affordable price.

[Freedomin5]

What does she enjoy and what is she good at? She should follow her passion and talents, and then find a way to monetize it. I come from a family of liberal arts degrees (sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics), and we're all in great careers with really good salaries. I would say that just a bachelors is not enough though. We all also have advanced degrees and professional licenses in our fields.

My friend is a history major, went to law school, and became a lawyer. She FIRE'd before me. A cousin studied fine arts, got a masters in architecture, and his building designs now win international awards.
 
Moral of the story, we all trained in areas in which we already had a natural interest and aptitude. Having a passion for the field allowed us to stick with the years of training required to be an expert in our respective fields. Having a natural talent for the field allowed us to more easily understand and apply the concepts, which made us better than the competition. That in turn made us more competitive when it came time to look for work.

Also, I would avoid taking on debt to finance a degree as much as possible. I'd rather work long hours every summer (and get job experience and develop soft skills necessary to be successful in the work world!), spend every weekend applying for scholarships (free money!), and work part-time during the school year (develop time management skills!) before taking on debt.

[GilesMM]

Doctor, Lawyer, Banker - all have decent prospects in most locations. 

[wageslave23]

Accounting and then CPA if she is good with details and self study.  You will easily make 6 figures within 2-3 years.  But will cap out unless you have the ambition and personality to be CFO or the ability to work long hours and network in order to become a partner in a CPA firm.  So on the low end of the degree is a safe, in demand degree that will guarantee you always have a job and decent pay (although can be boring and/or stressful). But the high end jobs where you are making $200k+ are also very attainable if you have the right personality and are willing to put in the time and work.  But you need to work near the major business/finance areas to more easily reach the high end salaries.

[hdatontodo]

Physical Therapy Assistant

higher: Physical Therapist with Masters Degree


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[Omy]

My first thought was any major that helps her build or maintain the robots.

[Bradlinc4]

I second accounting. From talking with my friend who now runs an office of a big 4 accounting firm, they can't even fill their openings with accounting majors and now look to other majors to fill the gap. No one wants to be an accountant, that included me. It's not sexy and there won't be any tv shows made about your work.Though I am sure glad I did it. I ran companies in my twenties and started companies in my thirties. With out my accounting skills it would have been much harder. Only about half the accountants I know practice in any form, most had a similar track to me. Those that still do are very well paid.

 

[Metalcat]

K, as someone who has done an enormous amount of career advising, I'll share my 2c.

In the vast, massive world of careers, an extreme minority have a clear degree path that leads to them, and most of those careers require grad school degrees. So it makes no sense to focus on specific undergrad majors as a key factor in determining career success unless the kid has very strong aptitude for one of the extremely rare undergrad subjects that has a clear pathway to a career.

Like, if your kid is SUPER into software programming or is the captain of the robotics team or the mathletes, then their choice of undergrad isn't likely to have much impact on their future career.

Also, as the holder of not one but two career-specific graduate degrees that lead to specific licenses to practice in specific careers, it is NOT a path I recommend for anyone who isn't specifically passionate about that specific career.

Why? Because getting one of those degrees opens very, very few doors and closes the rest. That's why I have 2, because while I LOVED my previous profession, it was hard on my body and when I sustained an injury that made it impossible to continue in the work I loved, my transferrable skills were so limited that I didn't like any of the options I had for alternative careers.

I was lucky enough to be able to afford not to work and to be able to afford a second round of expensive professional school tuition, so now I'm in a different licensed profession where a lot of my skills are transferable.

My spouse on the other hand? They have undergrad and master's in philosophy and political science. They've built a phenomenal career and have literally limitless possibilities for pivoting. I have two doors open to me in certain jurisdictions, they have literally thousands across the globe.

We're both particularly successful in our fields and make about the same amount of money. But here's the kicker, the skills that make both of us successful weren't anything we learned in school. We're both able to deftly navigate our professions because we are both extremely skilled researchers and networkers.

No matter what profession someone chooses, they need the ability to recruit professional mentorship, they need to be able to research where the opportunities are and what skills/knowledge they need to acquire to be able to compete for those opportunities.

I've told many, many young people that if they are just using university to go to class and get good grades in assignments, they're missing out on at least 50% of the professional development opportunities that being in school can provide.

If you don't have amazing networking skills to teach kids, then help them get access to people who do.

In that process of teaching them how to network, get them in front of people with "good successful careers" who can give them perspective on what those careers entail.

Every "good successful career" has bottles necks somewhere along the line. It's critical to understand where those bottle necks are and what skills/sacrifices are necessary to progress past them. These are the things that a young adult needs to reflect on, not what major has the best stats for grads.

If a particular degree has great stats for grads, like medicine, it means the bottle neck is primarily getting in to medicine, and the sacrifices are having to do med school and residency. Those are some pretty massive bottle necks and sacrifices for a career that are definitely not worth it unless they will love that career.

Take your average young person who has the discipline and aptitude to do well in medicine. Now give them a few hundred thousand dollars to invest, make them work unpaid for 80-100hrs/wk for years, willing to be on-call and do overnights while underpaid for a few more years, make them take endless bullying and abuse while sleep deprived, make them scrape and beg for every speck of mentorship they can find...that kid is likely to end up far more successful than your average MD, hell, they'll probably end up rich before your average surgeon gets their first decent paycheque.

When I look back on my education, the time, money, and energy I put in, just how much I needed to figure out for myself along the way, how hard I had to fight for decent mentorship, I honestly could have invested in hot dog stands and probably been even more successful.

Now that's not to say that I regret my career choices, I'm making that point to say that when choosing a door-limiting degree, you want to make sure that you deeply understand the career you're committing to before doing so, that you understand the path to success and what sacrifices it will take, and you want to compare those to other careers to make sure they're worthwhile.

I have LOVED my professions, they have been deeply and powerfully meaningful to me. But if my goal was just to be successful, I would could have done so many other things.

My spouse also powerfully loves their profession, but they had no clear pathway to get there. They just started working and put in enormous effort to learn and grow and curate the best career experience possible. In the end, we both have amazing, lucrative, interesting careers, but again, I'm limited in the pivots I can take in response to personal or market forces, and I'm limited as to the jurisdictions I can work in. Meanwhile, my spouse has curated a skill set that is valuable everywhere in the world to governments, NGOs, and private sector companies, and they can pivot easily with just about any market forces.

Get your kid talking to different professionals, this will teach them basic networking skills and it will teach them about different professions. Either yourself or with the help of someone who is an expert on careers, put together interview questions with your kid that will help them grasp the key elements of different professions, and help them identify their own strengths and weaknesses and in which industries those strengths and weaknesses would play the biggest roles.

I thought I wanted to be a vet or surgeon until I actually spoke to vets and surgeons. I knew the elements of the careers that I was interested, but I needed a realistic view of the careers in order to know if I would actually fit within them. I learned that I wouldn't and saved myself A LOT of suffering.

I literally *just* got off of a call with a student in my current field and every time I speak to these students in this program that leads to one license and one career, I'm always horrified about how little fucking research they did into the reality of the career BEFORE committing to massive tuition fees and years of unpaid labour. Like, WTF???

But that's how most people make education and career decisions when choosing these extremely limited education paths. They think a career sounds good, they get into the program, and then they're shocked to find out that they still need the exact same business and networking skills that every other profession requires if they have any hope of thriving.

So don't push your kids to pursue any one degree or career path, help equip them with the skills to figure that out for themselves.

[Metalcat]

I think to me it all boils down to how much the degree costs and what you can do with it.

For example, I could stomach taking out 50k in debt for an engineering degree that has a good chance to have a respectable ROI.

However, if it's a liberal arts degree, it's not a hard no, but if you need a bunch of debt for it and the path to getting and ROI on it is risky then it's probably not worth it.

Most STEM degrees are pretty good, and the liberal arts degrees can be good if you get them for an affordable price.

I have a friend with a master's in feminist literature who makes a fortune writing copy for the oil and gas sector.

As I said in my reply before, if the young adult has the ability to be successful with a STEM or professional degree, they have the ability to be successful with pretty much any degree.

[Radagast]

Nursing. Stellar pay, universally and continuously needed, cannot be automated away, high salary / college cost ratio. With a 4-year nursing degree, work the next 8-10 years as hard as you would have while living the lifestyle you would have if you were to go to medical school and you'll be a millionaire before doctors even start paying back their loans.

[Log]

The people I know who are making the most as freshly-graduated 23-year-olds without going to grad school mostly studied comp-sci or some form of engineering. There is nothing "wrong" with aiming for economic optimization, and I would frankly encourage any smart kid from a poor family to pursue one of those kinds of degrees, with the understanding that success in those fields of study takes a lot of raw brain power a lot of people are not blessed with. Accounting or the like can be easier paths to similar employability/stability fresh out of school.

That said, if you have the economic means to be pursuing FIRE, your kids presumably are entering adult life with enormous advantages. Given that you are creating generational wealth and positioning your family in the modern "upper middle class" aristocracy, it's maybe appropriate for them to take advantage of some of that privileged position. The old John Adams quote is not exactly elegant, but it does gesture at what something that's meaningful to me about family legacy and "the American Dream":

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I think "follow your passion" as a society-wide mantra has generally proven harmful, because promising people upward mobility and then guiding them down the wrong path is a clear recipe for bitterness and resentment at society. But you have done the upward mobility thing. Your kids are going to be fine if they get a liberal arts degree and then maybe fart around for a year or two before going to grad school or getting some other certification that leads them to their "real" career. Be real with them about the trade-offs, and acknowledge that outside of specific high-demand fields, grad school is an increasingly necessary differentiator for many people.

[Metalcat]

The people I know who are making the most as freshly-graduated 23-year-olds without going to grad school mostly studied comp-sci or some form of engineering. There is nothing "wrong" with aiming for economic optimization, and I would frankly encourage any smart kid from a poor family to pursue one of those kinds of degrees, with the understanding that success in those fields of study takes a lot of raw brain power a lot of people are not blessed with. Accounting or the like can be easier paths to similar employability/stability fresh out of school.

That said, if you have the economic means to be pursuing FIRE, your kids presumably are entering adult life with enormous advantages. Given that you are creating generational wealth and positioning your family in the modern "upper middle class" aristocracy, it's maybe appropriate for them to take advantage of some of that privileged position. The old John Adams quote is not exactly elegant, but it does gesture at what something that's meaningful to me about family legacy and "the American Dream":

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I think "follow your passion" as a society-wide mantra has generally proven harmful, because promising people upward mobility and then guiding them down the wrong path is a clear recipe for bitterness and resentment at society. But you have done the upward mobility thing. Your kids are going to be fine if they get a liberal arts degree and then maybe fart around for a year or two before going to grad school or getting some other certification that leads them to their "real" career. Be real with them about the trade-offs, and acknowledge that outside of specific high-demand fields, grad school is an increasingly necessary differentiator for many people.

Follow your passion is a great advice if it's paired with tangible and actionable advice on figuring out the business elements of following your passion, and being realistic about how to monetize it.

My feminist lit buddy is passionate about writing, but it's unrealistic for her to make a solid living from writing essays about feminist literature, but she does extremely well writing in the O&G industry where there aren't a lot of writers.

[Radagast]

The thing with liberal arts degrees is that sure there are success stories, but it's not appropriate to judge by the success stories because with a million graduates a year there's bound to be a few. The rewards of a degree should be judged by the median degree earner when considering a future path, unless there's a solid reason to think the prospective student is significantly different than median.

[Metalcat]

The thing with liberal arts degrees is that sure there are success stories, but it's not appropriate to judge by the success stories because with a million graduates a year there's bound to be a few. The rewards of a degree should be judged by the median degree earner when considering a future path, unless there's a solid reason to think the prospective student is significantly different than median.

I guess you missed my previous post where I talked about what it takes to be successful.

Some degrees have a more prescribed and limited path to success while others have a broader one. In either case, the young adult needs to learn the skills to become successful in an industry, in more technical/professional degrees, they learn a lot of the skills to become successful in school, but not all. However, the skills they learn in school come with the trade off of being more limited.

If someone is going to get a less career-specific degree, they will have to also do much more independent learning to figure out how to build a successful and lucrative career. The trade off is that they will have a far broader selection of options available to them.

In the end though, both paths require a lot of independent learning and mentorship beyond just taking classes and getting good grades, and this is what I find most parents fail to teach their kids, largely because no one taught them.

[Radagast]

If someone is going to get a less career-specific degree, they will have to also do much more independent learning to figure out how to build a successful and lucrative career. The trade off is that they will have a far broader selection of options available to them.

I think this is wrong though. Anyone can have a far broader selection of options if they look outside their degree. However some also have the option of a degree with a high median salary, and some don't because, for example, they got liberal arts degrees. (No offense I got a liberal arts degree too! However I am very glad I also got two engineering degrees to put the bacon on the table!)

[Metalcat]

If someone is going to get a less career-specific degree, they will have to also do much more independent learning to figure out how to build a successful and lucrative career. The trade off is that they will have a far broader selection of options available to them.

I think this is wrong though. Anyone can have a far broader selection of options if they look outside their degree. However some also have the option of a degree with a high median salary, and some don't because, for example, they got liberal arts degrees. (No offense I got a liberal arts degree too! However I am very glad I also got two engineering degrees to put the bacon on the table!)

I'll just have to politely disagree with you in the strongest possible terms.

[Log]

The people I know who are making the most as freshly-graduated 23-year-olds without going to grad school mostly studied comp-sci or some form of engineering. There is nothing "wrong" with aiming for economic optimization, and I would frankly encourage any smart kid from a poor family to pursue one of those kinds of degrees, with the understanding that success in those fields of study takes a lot of raw brain power a lot of people are not blessed with. Accounting or the like can be easier paths to similar employability/stability fresh out of school.

That said, if you have the economic means to be pursuing FIRE, your kids presumably are entering adult life with enormous advantages. Given that you are creating generational wealth and positioning your family in the modern "upper middle class" aristocracy, it's maybe appropriate for them to take advantage of some of that privileged position. The old John Adams quote is not exactly elegant, but it does gesture at what something that's meaningful to me about family legacy and "the American Dream":

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I think "follow your passion" as a society-wide mantra has generally proven harmful, because promising people upward mobility and then guiding them down the wrong path is a clear recipe for bitterness and resentment at society. But you have done the upward mobility thing. Your kids are going to be fine if they get a liberal arts degree and then maybe fart around for a year or two before going to grad school or getting some other certification that leads them to their "real" career. Be real with them about the trade-offs, and acknowledge that outside of specific high-demand fields, grad school is an increasingly necessary differentiator for many people.

Follow your passion is a great advice if it's paired with tangible and actionable advice on figuring out the business elements of following your passion, and being realistic about how to monetize it.

My feminist lit buddy is passionate about writing, but it's unrealistic for her to make a solid living from writing essays about feminist literature, but she does extremely well writing in the O&G industry where there aren't a lot of writers.

For sure. I "followed my passion" into music, and later wised up about differentiating between what kinds of music I found most fulfilling to play on one hand, and how to make a decent living with my skillset on the other hand. There are ways to turn all kinds of passions into careers... but in doing so, you will be severely compromising on major aspects of what you're passionate about.

Following a passion can lead to good outcomes, but it's not necessary. My steelman argument for "passion" is that it can perhaps be a motivating force to develop valuable skills, but in turning a passion into a sustainable career, the passion itself is very rarely a lasting source of satisfaction with your working life.

[Cranky]

I think to me it all boils down to how much the degree costs and what you can do with it.

For example, I could stomach taking out 50k in debt for an engineering degree that has a good chance to have a respectable ROI.

However, if it's a liberal arts degree, it's not a hard no, but if you need a bunch of debt for it and the path to getting and ROI on it is risky then it's probably not worth it.

Most STEM degrees are pretty good, and the liberal arts degrees can be good if you get them for an affordable price.

I have a friend with a master's in feminist literature who makes a fortune writing copy for the oil and gas sector.

As I said in my reply before, if the young adult has the ability to be successful with a STEM or professional degree, they have the ability to be successful with pretty much any degree.

My oldest dd has an undergrad degree in English ( she had a fantastic scholarship) and a grad degree in Bible, and she makes a very comfortable living doing technical writing for medical software.

So I think you should study what you want and go from there.

[Smokystache]

If someone is going to get a less career-specific degree, they will have to also do much more independent learning to figure out how to build a successful and lucrative career. The trade off is that they will have a far broader selection of options available to them.

I think this is wrong though. Anyone can have a far broader selection of options if they look outside their degree. However some also have the option of a degree with a high median salary, and some don't because, for example, they got liberal arts degrees. (No offense I got a liberal arts degree too! However I am very glad I also got two engineering degrees to put the bacon on the table!)

"Anyone can have a far broader selection of options if they look outside their degree."
- I won't speak for @Metalcat, but my reaction is that I don't agree with this part of your statement. The benefits of a liberal arts degree are baked into the degree itself -- the focus on critical thinking, writing, and related skills that are not emphasized in more job-tracked degrees. An example: My brother has a degree in aerospace engineering. He's brilliant ... with math and databases and solving computer-based problems. But he'll misspell three words when he writes a check ... and don't even think about asking him to write a paragraph.

I think one thing we often forget is how quickly some career fields change. A 60 year old who went to college at age 18 would have started around 1983 ... a decade before the internet became wide-spread and most businesses weren't using computers except for highly specialized skills  - so before spreadsheet software, before easy access to databases, before email and online marketing, etc.

I certainly agree that simply having a liberal-arts degree isn't enough, by itself, to be successful, and I'd also agree that there are some engineers who write better than Liberal arts graduates. I would also agree that job-tracked degrees like engineering, nursing, and business may start by making a higher income. But I wouldn't buy the argument that those degrees do a great job for preparing one to be successful in another field; whereas liberal arts majors assume from the beginning that they will likely need to apply their skills to a range of possible opportunities.

[2sk22]

Based on my younger daughter's experience, I would say that math is absolutely the best major at the moment. It opens doors to almost anything that your kid might want to do. Of course, it also happens to be the toughest major (except probably electrical engineering which comes a close second).

[Metalcat]

The people I know who are making the most as freshly-graduated 23-year-olds without going to grad school mostly studied comp-sci or some form of engineering. There is nothing "wrong" with aiming for economic optimization, and I would frankly encourage any smart kid from a poor family to pursue one of those kinds of degrees, with the understanding that success in those fields of study takes a lot of raw brain power a lot of people are not blessed with. Accounting or the like can be easier paths to similar employability/stability fresh out of school.

That said, if you have the economic means to be pursuing FIRE, your kids presumably are entering adult life with enormous advantages. Given that you are creating generational wealth and positioning your family in the modern "upper middle class" aristocracy, it's maybe appropriate for them to take advantage of some of that privileged position. The old John Adams quote is not exactly elegant, but it does gesture at what something that's meaningful to me about family legacy and "the American Dream":

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I think "follow your passion" as a society-wide mantra has generally proven harmful, because promising people upward mobility and then guiding them down the wrong path is a clear recipe for bitterness and resentment at society. But you have done the upward mobility thing. Your kids are going to be fine if they get a liberal arts degree and then maybe fart around for a year or two before going to grad school or getting some other certification that leads them to their "real" career. Be real with them about the trade-offs, and acknowledge that outside of specific high-demand fields, grad school is an increasingly necessary differentiator for many people.

Follow your passion is a great advice if it's paired with tangible and actionable advice on figuring out the business elements of following your passion, and being realistic about how to monetize it.

My feminist lit buddy is passionate about writing, but it's unrealistic for her to make a solid living from writing essays about feminist literature, but she does extremely well writing in the O&G industry where there aren't a lot of writers.

For sure. I "followed my passion" into music, and later wised up about differentiating between what kinds of music I found most fulfilling to play on one hand, and how to make a decent living with my skillset on the other hand. There are ways to turn all kinds of passions into careers... but in doing so, you will be severely compromising on major aspects of what you're passionate about.

Following a passion can lead to good outcomes, but it's not necessary. My steelman argument for "passion" is that it can perhaps be a motivating force to develop valuable skills, but in turning a passion into a sustainable career, the passion itself is very rarely a lasting source of satisfaction with your working life.

For me the key is building a sense of what work is actually like and understanding passions within that reality.

Teens base most of what they're passionate about on what they see in the media and the limited exposures they have in life, so those passions are profoundly limited in terms of understanding what they mean in a professional world.

That's where an enormous amount of exposure to what different careers are like can very much help calibrate a young person's understanding of passion in a more realistic way.

FTR, I had passion for something as a teen and I happen to be doing exactly that thing now professionally and I don't have to compromise to do it in a way that makes me a lot of money. But it helps that I actually understood the career when I decided I had a passion for it. I just decided to pursue something else during undergrad because I developed more passions and wanted options that could include multiple passions. Which is exactly what I found in my last career.

The things I ask young people to think about are whether they're passionate about collaborating with people, or coming up with solutions by themselves, are they passionate about details or broader ideas, do they get a thrill out of leadership, or do they prefer clear guidelines? Do they love researching topics in detail or do they prefer running with ideas and working things out as they go? Do they thrive with a regimented schedule like school or do they find themselves more motivated during the summer?

I focus less on "I'm passionate about manatees" and more on "I'm passionate about coming up with ideas after researching a ton about a thing I'm interested in" or "I'm passionate about having my ideas heard," etc, etc.

It doesn't actually take all that much to tease out what professional traits a very young person has that will likely make them more or less successful in different kinds of roles, or what kind of education would facilitate strengthening/shoring up those skills.

The problem I see over and over and over again is that kids are depending on their parents for insight about careers and most parents know fuck all about most careers and don't have the knowledge required to really assess what their kid might actually be amazing at.

For years and years parents have come to me to try and convince their kids to study what I did because I had one of those careers that every parent pushed their kid into.

The first thing I would tell them was "one of the main drivers of me choosing this career was for geographic flexibility." Nothing about the science of the helping people or whatever. Seriously, the #1 factor in me choosing my career was the ability to work anywhere I wanted to live. I was incredibly passionate about being able to choose my location and not getting stuck somewhere I hated because that's where my industry was located.

The look on the parents' faces when it hit them that it never even crossed their minds to think of that was priceless.

Then I would talk about autonomy and responsibility. How I had figured out that there's a massive trade off when it comes to autonomy. You have more freedom, but you also have higher stakes and everything comes down to you, there's nowhere to turn when shit goes wrong, you have to take it on the nose and be very comfortable with getting in shit for your choices.

For me, dealing with authority that I don't respect is more painful than the buck stopping with me, so I will always chose the role where I'm more likely to take the hits with zero support than to deal with the bullshit of crappy authority and have no freedom to do anything about it. I emphasized this as one of the most critical things to determine about a career.

Then I would talk about independent vs collaborative work and highly fluid vs highly prescriptive work. Some jobs are all about pushing the limits and coming up with creative solutions and more unpredictable success, other jobs are all about following a prescriptive pattern as faithfully as possible with very clear rules for success. Are they the kind of person who seeks to perfect things or the kind of person who is comfortable with more grey areas and abstraction?

Different personality types respond very differently under these conditions.

I would go through a whole series of extremely important traits of careers before even touching on the broad strokes subject matter of a career. Because a sales role is a sales role in any industry. A management role is a management role. A research role is a research role. A writing role is a writing role.

It matters more that someone figure out what kind of roles they will thrive in and then from there they can figure out what industries would make most sense to pursue those roles in, and then figure out what education would best facilitate working in those industries.

As a teen I interviewed so many adults to understand various careers, industries, and roles, and in doing so, I was able to see the patterns of roles and industries that would make sense for me. Then I kept doing that kind of research all through undergrad.

By the time I chose my career, I had probably interviewed a few hundred people about their careers, spent many hours in the career center, and changed my major several times.

I can firmly say now looking back that if my goal was to make a lot of money, I would have been best off sticking with just my humanities degree, not bothering with my doctorate, and taking the job I was offered in 4th year to do large scientific equipment sales.

But when I was offered that job, I asked to interview one of the sales reps and decided that although I had a lot of passion about research, I wouldn't enjoy the constant travel aspect of the job, nor did the relentless pressure of sales targets appeal to me either. By that point I had interviewed enough sales people to have a solid understanding of that role and that just because I would be good at it doesn't mean I would thrive in it.

But yeah, if I looked at the median income of people in that role, it sure would have looked like a great option had I not thoroughly researched what the career would really be like day-to-day and how it wouldn't fit with my actual passions.

[duyen]

Thanks all for your replies. I summarized key points below. My DD is introvert and not great at people relationships. She is ambitious about her career and works hard. She is leaning towards medicine (wants to do it in Europe as the costs are low and takes much less time). She can't handle stress that well and is not great with people so I am a bit worried about medicine side. The other option she spoke about is Finance but we both are not sure about the career options there. She doesn't want to go towards Computer Science as per her she's not good with the logic and programming skills.

- Recommended: Engineering, Doctor, Accounting (followed by CPA, so many jobs available), Physical Therapist, Nursing (you’ll become a millionaire before doctors even start their paycheck)
- Go for some form of computers or eng degree; even accounting is fine. But liberal arts and others waste of time. “Follow your passion” is bad advice
- Math major is toughest but opens lot of doors
- Specific degrees open few doors but close many others; so avoid them. Networking more important. Evaluate your major (pros and cons) before taking it. e.g., surgeon or doctor can be very difficult path

[Sailor Sam]

Oh, math.

Here’s the thing about math degrees. They’re exactly the same as any of the liberal arts degrees. It ends with a piece of paper proving someone has spent 4-ish years learning how to problem solve, analyze, communicate, and think critically. The only thing that sets a math degree above a BA is the public’s generalized fear of mathing.

In fact, math majors might emerge little poorer in final skillset since they tend to write fewer papers than those who emerge with BA’s. And just like those BA’s, the newly graduate math’er must go forth into the bright world and flail around trying to figure out what the fuck job is going to hire them. Because it turns out, there just aren’t that many jobs that require someone sit around doing “math.” Just like there aren’t that many jobs that require someone to sit around doing “Russian/anthroplogy/sociology/English.”

All a math degree does is prove someone is smart enough to get through college. Just like a degree in Russian, or anthropology, or sociology, of goddamn mothfuckin’ English.

Signed,
A math major (who does not math at work (because those don’t really exist)

[Log]

...The things I ask young people to think about are whether they're passionate about collaborating with people, or coming up with solutions by themselves, are they passionate about details or broader ideas, do they get a thrill out of leadership, or do they prefer clear guidelines? Do they love researching topics in detail or do they prefer running with ideas and working things out as they go? Do they thrive with a regimented schedule like school or do they find themselves more motivated during the summer?

I focus less on "I'm passionate about manatees" and more on "I'm passionate about coming up with ideas after researching a ton about a thing I'm interested in" or "I'm passionate about having my ideas heard," etc, etc.

It doesn't actually take all that much to tease out what professional traits a very young person has that will likely make them more or less successful in different kinds of roles, or what kind of education would facilitate strengthening/shoring up those skills...

This is a spectacular line of questioning... and I think it's exactly what's wrong with typical "follow your passion" thinking. The way people interpret "follow your passion" is always about the manatees. Choosing a job based on day-to-day realities of the job (solitary thinking, collaboration, spending time outdoors, location flexibility, working with certain kinds of people, etc.) is way more important than it being vaguely related to some pre-existing interest.

So I suppose we can agree to disagree on our interpretations of "follow your passion," and I can otherwise tell OP: listen to Metalcat. This is really excellent advice. Kids don't know shit about careers, so part of the point of college is simply meeting people who they can learn about careers from, and learn which skills are important to develop. If they take that job seriously, they will be highly employable with any generic liberal arts degree.

[41_swish]

I think to me it all boils down to how much the degree costs and what you can do with it.

For example, I could stomach taking out 50k in debt for an engineering degree that has a good chance to have a respectable ROI.

However, if it's a liberal arts degree, it's not a hard no, but if you need a bunch of debt for it and the path to getting and ROI on it is risky then it's probably not worth it.

Most STEM degrees are pretty good, and the liberal arts degrees can be good if you get them for an affordable price.

I have a friend with a master's in feminist literature who makes a fortune writing copy for the oil and gas sector.

As I said in my reply before, if the young adult has the ability to be successful with a STEM or professional degree, they have the ability to be successful with pretty much any degree.

I 100% believe that. I was just saying that if you are going into debt for a degree some have a better chance of having a good ROI than others.

[jeninco]

Oh, math.

Here’s the thing about math degrees. They’re exactly the same as any of the liberal arts degrees. It ends with a piece of paper proving someone has spent 4-ish years learning how to problem solve, analyze, communicate, and think critically. The only thing that sets a math degree above a BA is the public’s generalized fear of mathing.

In fact, math majors might emerge little poorer in final skillset since they tend to write fewer papers than those who emerge with BA’s. And just like those BA’s, the newly graduate math’er must go forth into the bright world and flail around trying to figure out what the fuck job is going to hire them. Because it turns out, there just aren’t that many jobs that require someone sit around doing “math.” Just like there aren’t that many jobs that require someone to sit around doing “Russian/anthroplogy/sociology/English.”

All a math degree does is prove someone is smart enough to get through college. Just like a degree in Russian, or anthropology, or sociology, of goddamn mothfuckin’ English.

Signed,
A math major (who does not math at work (because those don’t really exist)

Seconding that getting that first and second job with a math degree can be a hurdle.

Signed,
A math major (and applied math master) who kinda does math at work. Somewhat.

[twinstudy]

I think everyone is missing the point when they focus on the field or the degree. What's important are your marks, your school and your career path. If you get top marks in finance/maths/computer science from a great school, you will be set to go into investment banking, software engineering or quant, which to me are the fields with the best bang for buck (in terms of earnings). However, if you get mediocre marks in computer science or an MBA from a shitty school, you'll be getting a helpdesk job or maybe working at Macca's. Really, the field (i.e. degree) is not so important as the school which confers it, and your marks in getting it. And for those who say school doesn't matter, I think it matters a great deal, because an 65 average at a top school will be regarded the same as an 80 average at a mediocre school.

[twinstudy]

Signed,
A math major (who does not math at work (because those don’t really exist)

I thought certain jobs in quant and tech do use maths at work?

[Metalcat]

I think to me it all boils down to how much the degree costs and what you can do with it.

For example, I could stomach taking out 50k in debt for an engineering degree that has a good chance to have a respectable ROI.

However, if it's a liberal arts degree, it's not a hard no, but if you need a bunch of debt for it and the path to getting and ROI on it is risky then it's probably not worth it.

Most STEM degrees are pretty good, and the liberal arts degrees can be good if you get them for an affordable price.

I have a friend with a master's in feminist literature who makes a fortune writing copy for the oil and gas sector.

As I said in my reply before, if the young adult has the ability to be successful with a STEM or professional degree, they have the ability to be successful with pretty much any degree.

I 100% believe that. I was just saying that if you are going into debt for a degree some have a better chance of having a good ROI than others.

My ENTIRE point, which I have written now multiple loooong posts about is that the factors that determine success go so far beyond degree choice.

It's insanely reductive to even think "what degrees lead to success" as if that's some kind of universal property, and not highly dependent on the individual human beings involved in these major life decisions.

My entire point is to teach children how to make effective school and career decisions, which requires a lot more analysis and research than just googling median incomes of various grads.

My advice is to take the decision much MORE seriously, not less seriously, but my biggest advice is for parents not to assume that they even have the knowledge to figure this out for their kids.

Parents, aka basic adults, don't generally have special knowledge about careers, they usually have extremely limited knowledge about their own careers, maybe a bit of insight about the careers of their family members and maybe some friends and people they dated.

In no way do general adults have the kind of expansive insight kids need to figure out what kinds of professional roles they would thrive in. So they should recruit help to figure these things out.

And if those parents are not exquisite networkers who can easily recruit that kind of help, then they should DEFINITELY recruit help because learning how to network to get guidance, mentorship, and information is the most critical skill any kid can learn for figuring out their own career success.

If I had listened to the ignorant adults in my life when I was younger, I would have become an architect. Why? Because I was a national math champion and a very skilled artist, and when people think to combine those two broad topics, they automatically go to architecture.

Lol, I can't even begin to describe how BAD architecture would be as a career fit for me. But the median salary sure looks pretty good!

[2sk22]

Oh, math.

Here’s the thing about math degrees. They’re exactly the same as any of the liberal arts degrees. It ends with a piece of paper proving someone has spent 4-ish years learning how to problem solve, analyze, communicate, and think critically. The only thing that sets a math degree above a BA is the public’s generalized fear of mathing.

In fact, math majors might emerge little poorer in final skillset since they tend to write fewer papers than those who emerge with BA’s. And just like those BA’s, the newly graduate math’er must go forth into the bright world and flail around trying to figure out what the fuck job is going to hire them. Because it turns out, there just aren’t that many jobs that require someone sit around doing “math.” Just like there aren’t that many jobs that require someone to sit around doing “Russian/anthroplogy/sociology/English.”

All a math degree does is prove someone is smart enough to get through college. Just like a degree in Russian, or anthropology, or sociology, of goddamn mothfuckin’ English.

Signed,
A math major (who does not math at work (because those don’t really exist)

Seconding that getting that first and second job with a math degree can be a hurdle.

Signed,
A math major (and applied math master) who kinda does math at work. Somewhat.

My daughter, the math major, will be graduating this year with several job offers although she will most likely be going to grad school. In contrast, her friends who are CS majors are finding it a bit harder to get hired. I will admit that it helps that she is at one of the top tech schools in the country but still, from what she told me, the math majors have all found jobs or some slot in grad school.

[jrhampt]

Oh, math.

Here’s the thing about math degrees. They’re exactly the same as any of the liberal arts degrees. It ends with a piece of paper proving someone has spent 4-ish years learning how to problem solve, analyze, communicate, and think critically. The only thing that sets a math degree above a BA is the public’s generalized fear of mathing.

In fact, math majors might emerge little poorer in final skillset since they tend to write fewer papers than those who emerge with BA’s. And just like those BA’s, the newly graduate math’er must go forth into the bright world and flail around trying to figure out what the fuck job is going to hire them. Because it turns out, there just aren’t that many jobs that require someone sit around doing “math.” Just like there aren’t that many jobs that require someone to sit around doing “Russian/anthroplogy/sociology/English.”

All a math degree does is prove someone is smart enough to get through college. Just like a degree in Russian, or anthropology, or sociology, of goddamn mothfuckin’ English.

Signed,
A math major (who does not math at work (because those don’t really exist)

I did applied math/statistics.  It was a graduate degree, had lots of programming and predictive modeling in the class work, and was probably more directly career-relevant than just a math degree.  Also, my job paid for it.

[Paper Chaser]

A young, female plumber would be able to pretty much write her own ticket. Little or no cost of entry with apprentice programs. High wages that will only increase. Constant, steady demand. Cannot be outsourced or replaced by AI. Female plumbers are coveted in a male dominated field.

My former BIL makes way more per year as a trim carpenter than I do as an engineer. He's his own boss (for better or worse).

If I were going to suggest a degree strictly based on expected income, it would likely be in the medical field. Could be hands on like a nurse, surgeon, or  anesthesiologist. Could also be hands off like biomedical engineer, medical device sales, etc. Again, there are jobs here that are difficult to outsource or replace, and there will always be demand for their services.

[Omy]

I'm with Metal on this.

I have a nephew who figured out in his first semester that networking with academia and joining clubs/activities and taking on an unpaid internship (that he's turned into a paid internship) would be the best way to get the most out of his college years. His parents were surprised that he figured this out since they are not particularly good at networking.

He figured out how to get a free ride to a state school and turned down a more prestigious school because he didn't want to be saddled with debt. His assumption is that he will go to a more prestigious graduate school.

I've never met a more focused, well-rounded, young adult. He's not the smartest kid in the room, but he applies himself and looks for mentors when he needs them. I suspect he will be wildly successful in anything he chooses.

The point of this long anecdote is that his major is WAY less important than his drive and the transitional skills he's developed.

[JupiterGreen]

A young, female plumber would be able to pretty much write her own ticket. Little or no cost of entry with apprentice programs. High wages that will only increase. Constant, steady demand. Cannot be outsourced or replaced by AI. Female plumbers are coveted in a male dominated field.

My former BIL makes way more per year as a trim carpenter than I do as an engineer. He's his own boss (for better or worse).

If I were going to suggest a degree strictly based on expected income, it would likely be in the medical field. Could be hands on like a nurse, surgeon, or  anesthesiologist. Could also be hands off like biomedical engineer, medical device sales, etc. Again, there are jobs here that are difficult to outsource or replace, and there will always be demand for their services.

Just out of curiosity, does it take a lot of physical strength to be a plumber? Not looking to pivot careers lol just wondering.

also +1 @Metalcat

My own experience is with two "don't ever get those degrees!" degrees and I am surrounded by others in the same category, all very successful high achieving people. What it takes is: be exceptional. If it is a competitive field, you just have to be better than most of the people or specialize. If you're willing to do that you can work in any field even the competitive ones. I did not take on too much debt though so as many have mentioned, that may be the key.

If someone has no aptitude it pointless to get a STEM degree. And there are a lot of business majors these days, the US is awash with these, the newly minted graduates can't get jobs unless they specialize/know someone. There is some wisdom in "follow your passion" because people tend to have passion for things they also have aptitude for. To the OP it sounds like aptitude falls in the STEM majors for your child, but it won't be for everyone. And thank goodness for that, imagine a world without writers, plumbers, engineers, musicians and bakers etc...it would be terrible 

[Metalcat]

A young, female plumber would be able to pretty much write her own ticket. Little or no cost of entry with apprentice programs. High wages that will only increase. Constant, steady demand. Cannot be outsourced or replaced by AI. Female plumbers are coveted in a male dominated field.

My former BIL makes way more per year as a trim carpenter than I do as an engineer. He's his own boss (for better or worse).

If I were going to suggest a degree strictly based on expected income, it would likely be in the medical field. Could be hands on like a nurse, surgeon, or  anesthesiologist. Could also be hands off like biomedical engineer, medical device sales, etc. Again, there are jobs here that are difficult to outsource or replace, and there will always be demand for their services.

Just out of curiosity, does it take a lot of physical strength to be a plumber? Not looking to pivot careers lol just wondering.

also +1 @Metalcat

My own experience is with two "don't ever get those degrees!" degrees and I am surrounded by others in the same category, all very successful high achieving people. What it takes is: be exceptional. If it is a competitive field, you just have to be better than most of the people or specialize. If you're willing to do that you can work in any field even the competitive ones. I did not take on too much debt though so as many have mentioned, that may be the key.

If someone has no aptitude it pointless to get a STEM degree. And there are a lot of business majors these days, the US is awash with these, the newly minted graduates can't get jobs unless they specialize/know someone. There is some wisdom in "follow your passion" because people tend to have passion for things they also have aptitude for. To the OP it sounds like aptitude falls in the STEM majors for your child, but it won't be for everyone. And thank goodness for that, imagine a world without writers, plumbers, engineers, musicians and bakers etc...it would be terrible

Lol, and my experience is in having two of the kind of career-specific degrees that lead that parents tell their kids to get.

Which is why I've always been able to charge substantial fees to give advice to all of the poor saps in my own professions who never were taught the basics of research, networking, or any basics of even understanding the market they've decided to get into.

I literally had a meeting yesterday with a middle aged military medical professional looking to change careers, and this person is at the end of their new degree.

She was fascinated by how much I knew about the industry and was like "how did you learn all of this stuff? You're only a term ahead of me!!"

And I was like WTF?? This person virtually did ZERO research before spending mid 5 figures and countless hours on a new degree. She looked at the hourly rate that professionals charge and thought "that looks pretty good" and just went for it.

She had zero clue about what the market conditions were, where the barriers to success were, what trade offs and sacrifices need to be made early in the career, later in the career, scalability, etc, etc, etc. She was fucking fascinated by how much I knew and gobsmacked when I said that I found out most of this BEFORE I committed to the degree program.

She was like "BUT HOW???" and I was then gobsmacked because all I did was send a pile of emails to clinics across the country and ask if the owners would spare a few minutes to answer a few questions. From there I got everything I needed to have a strategy as to how to be successful in the field, and knowing my own aptitudes, I knew the trade offs would be worthwhile for me.

I had been considering a different program, but some of the career trade offs weren't so appealing, so I declined that offer despite the option of getting a full ride and instead paid a premium for a different program because the outcome would suit my individual circumstances better.

Had I based my choice on just what I found on Google about the stats of the profession, I 100% would have chosen the first degree with the full ride and the much, much lower overall competition for market share. Instead I picked the more expensive school with the shittier reputation, going into the field with way more competition and much lower overall success rate for grads.

Why? Because I made a lot of phone calls and figured out the barriers to success and identified which barriers would actually be easier for me, an individual, not aggregated data.

Each time I've made a career decision, I've put hundreds and hundreds of hours into research before commiting to expensive, highly specialized, career limiting programs.

And every single step along the way I've had many, many opportunities to make A LOT more money by NOT doing those kind of jobs. I chose these limiting programs/professions because I know what I love, and more importantly, I know what I hate.

But I've basically been criminally underpaid my entire career relative the time, money, and energy I've put in to my careers.

Lol, my favourite was that in my former profession, as I mentioned, my colleagues would often pay me for business advice, which was really basic knowledge that anyone entrepreneurial should know, but they didn't, so that was fun for me.

But I got recruited by a high end financial firm and the owner, who was 5 years younger than me and had a fraction of the education I did, was mocking me in a friendly way about how I put in all this work to reach the level that I had professionally, only to end up just being paid for my time, which every business person knows is a shit and poorly scalable model.

He then said "let me know when you're ready to make real money." And he was right, if what I wanted to do what maximize my income, dropping the entire medical profession and going into business with him as he proposed was by far the best move.

This guy's wife was an ER MD and he referred to her job as a her "cute paid hobby" but he was the one who paid the bills.

Note, he's not as much of an asshole as he sounds, this was all said tongue-in-cheek, but he wasn't wrong. His practice was marketing to medical professionals and he was always kind of horrified at how much harder we all worked and how much less we all made compared to him and his partners.

I declined the offer to make boat loads more money for the same reason I've always turned down opportunities to make boat loads of money, I don't need boat loads of money and I don't enjoy the work involved in making them. I would rather make much less money and do work I love. But I'm a sentimental softie that way.

So yeah, let's maybe not push these degrees on kids, especially without having them talk to at least a few dozen folks in those professions with a well-curated list of interview questions that can ACTUALLY give them insight into whether they would thrive under those conditions or not.

Any, and I mean ANY career that has a high rate of pay should be examined closely for the cost of that pay. There's always a substantial cost, and it comes down to the individual if that cost is worth paying.

[Laura33]

Thanks all for your replies. I summarized key points below.

- Recommended: Engineering, Doctor, Accounting (followed by CPA, so many jobs available), Physical Therapist, Nursing (you’ll become a millionaire before doctors even start their paycheck)
- Go for some form of computers or eng degree; even accounting is fine. But liberal arts and others waste of time. “Follow your passion” is bad advice
- Math major is toughest but opens lot of doors
- Specific degrees open few doors but close many others; so avoid them. Networking more important. Evaluate your major (pros and cons) before taking it. e.g., surgeon or doctor can be very difficult path

Ummm, you seem to have missed one of the major points here.  Yes, some people will tell you liberal arts are a waste of time.  I will just sit here and laugh all the way to my bank account.  Former English major here, married to a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering (with a double major in EE and Physics to boot).  Guess who makes more?  Well, ok, this year I think he beat me.  But I'm only working half-time right now, and he's 50+ hrs/week. 

When you focus on a high-pay career, the first question you need to answer is what do you mean by that?  Do you mean highest pay right out of college?  That's pretty simple:  some version of engineering (just not civil, environmental, or mechanical -- civil is historically the lowest-paid, and the other two aren't far behind). 

The thing is, engineers tend to top out after a while, unless they make a shift into something that brings a non-technical leadership role.  My DH would be making a LOT more money if he had skipped the Ph.D and gotten an MBA instead.  The frustrating thing is that he is way, way smarter than his bosses, and he actually speaks "business" very well.  But those bosses will never see him as their equal and worthy of a VP role, because he has the wrong degree for that role.  Which is fine; we're FI, and he loves doing advanced tech stuff.  But if he wanted to chase the money, his serious technical knowledge would have been a detriment, not an asset.

It's like any kind of business or job:  the skills that get you through the door and help you succeed at the beginning are not necessarily the skills that you need to move to a management level, or an executive level.  So even if you start out as, say, an engineer, if you want to move above that level, you will likely need another degree on top of that, to learn those other skills.  OTOH, someone with, say, a business degree (or even -- gasp! -- English) won't likely make as much to start with, but can be more prepared for that next step.  I strongly agree with what someone wrote above:  liberal arts is not about a specific topic as much as it is about critical thinking, logic, reading comprehension (yes it sounds like something every second-grader should know, but you'd be amazed how many people struggle to really interpret what someone is saying), understanding how to research and synthesize information -- basically, taking thoughts and ideas and words apart and putting them back together in a useful and effective way.  If you really think about it, anyone successful needs to be an effective communicator above all else.  Yes, that's a given with my job, where my ultimate role is to persuade people that I'm right.  But my DH is in as technical a field as you can find -- and if he wants to keep doing that, he needs to be able to convince his boss and his customers that what he is doing is worth the money they are giving him.  [Hmmm, maybe we should change the name of the major from "English" to "language engineer"]

The other thing to think about is whether you want a "safe" mid-level career, making plenty of money but not necessarily the big bucks, or if you want a career that is more polarized, where you have a chance to make really big bucks but most people don't.  Again, engineers, professors, nurses, plumbers, accountants, etc. offer the first choice.  Lawyers and doctors and finance bros offer the second (finance bros can actually be a coupld orders of magnitude above the first two).  But that big money comes with lots of tradeoffs -- lots and lots of years of study and/or very long hours, many tradeoffs in a personal life, a very significant chance of not reaching those highest heights.

The way most people succeed is to find an area that is interesting enough to them that they are willing to put in the work to become really, really good at it.  In the end, the degree matters less than what you make of the opportunities you are presented.  It is better to graduate top of your class in a degree that you were willing to work hard for than to scrape through with Cs in an area you're not really that interested in because someone told you that degree if useful.  It is just as important to throw yourself into contacts with professors and employers and hustle as it is to do well on your work.  Don't worry as much about learning a specific skill or body of knowledge, except as the basics for whatever path you choose (obviously, engineers need to know physics, right?).  Because the world is always changing -- faster than ever, in fact -- and the skills/knowledge you will need to succeed in 20 years are very different than they are now.  And you'll never be able to predict what those future needs will be.  Mental flexibility, a continued drive to learn new things, is far more important than whatever specific universe of knowledge you have when you graduate. 

I really want to emphasize that last bit.  The job I have now didn't exist when I graduated.  Literally.  There were few female lawyers, even fewer female partners, and zero part-time female partners -- and my particular field (environmental) was very very young back then, with not even 5% of the regulations as we have now.  My knowledge of "environmental law" when I graduated (which was basically, "there are three major statutes, and this thing called the Code of Federal Regulations") was entirely useless; I learned on the job, and I had to keep learning to stay in any way competitive. 

But the much, much bigger shift is in what the job actually requires.  When I was in law school, they largely taught research.  The most critical skill back then was finding the best case -- everything was in books, and you literally had to learn how to find things.  There were several companies that had done things like develop outlines with all of the legal principles distilled down to specific numbers (like 8.2.1 kind of thing), and so you had to learn all of those principles well enough to understand where to start to look -- and then follow that trail through a bunch of false starts to get to something useful.  Literally hours and hours to find anything.  Then boolean searching came along (like Google), and the world changed.  Now infinite knowledge -- facts, data -- is at your fingertips.  So now what makes people valuable isn't figuring out how to find information -- it's the ability to winnow through 100,000 meaningless data points to get to the one that actually matters.  It's about distilling and synthesizing more than finding and memorizing.  Luckily, those happen to be my strengths.  And I do mean "luckily":  I never would have been able to predict that shift when I was choosing a career.

Which, to me, circles back to the value of a liberal arts education.  The nice thing about liberal arts is it isn't one thing -- you need to learn science and math as well as writing and history and art.  It inherently trains a degree of mental flexibility and a broad base of knowledge that positions you to learn and adapt.  Even my DH, btw, argues passionately that the traditional engineering education is too narrow, because all of the advances are made where different disciplines cross over.  Yes, we will always need someone who can keep the engines running.  But the engineers who are going to have the best chance at making serious money are the people who can cross disciplines, like neuroscience, or quantum computing, or pharmaceutical manufacturing, etc. etc. etc.

[clarkfan1979]

I have an international relations degree.  My career is not international relations.  I’m a firm believer that college is not trade school.  The ability to communicate and critically think are two traits that will lead to a good career no matter what major one picks.

100%

I am a full-time college instructor. I am also a firm believer that college is not trade school. That is not putting down trade school. That is a great option for other people as well.

College is different than trade school because the focus is critical thinking. Critical thinking is super important in today's world, IMO.

I am an extreme example, but the amount of money and time spent on my degree is a terrible ROI on salary. However, it's been great on building wealth and quality of life.

I got a Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology and basically studied behavioral economics in grad school. It was 2 years full-time in a MA program and another 5 years full-time in a Ph.D. program. I left ABD and it took me another 4 years to finish my dissertation. I left with 57K of student loan debt and my first faculty job paid 40K/year with an option to teach a summer course for another 5K.

I'm now 45 years old and my salary is $61,700/year. However, with health insurance and retirement benefits my total compensation is around $90,000/year. However, my full-time is only about 1,000 hours/year. I work 30 hours/week about 32 weeks/year with 20 weeks of vacation. My wife is a substitute teacher and personal assistant for a real estate agent and makes 25K/year. Our net worth is 1.7 million and our life is awesome. If I wanted to double my income with a soul sucking corporate job, I could do that in about 6 months. If I wanted to triple my salary, I could do that in about 2 years. However, I consider it to be unnecessary. We have a great life and a high paying corporate job would screw that up.

[AuspiciousEight]

Just putting in my .02 cents of how I tend to think about this...

Instead of advising young people to go to a certain specific college or university and getting a certain specific degree to do a certain specific high income, high stress job, I encourage young people to think about what sort of life and lifestyle they want to have first, and why.

Do they want to get married? Have children? Do they want to travel the world? Do they want a minimalistic lifestyle in a small apartment, or do they want a giant house? Do they want to live in the city or the suburbs or country? etc.

I view this as the most important questions - especially the *why* behind each question so they understand themselves better and understand why they want to live a certain sort of life or lifestyle.

After these questions are asked the next most important question is who they want to marry and what relationships they want to have and - again - why. What sort of person is best suited to support their life and lifestyle goals? Frankly I think who you marry and what relationships you have is more important than what career you choose.

The next most important question is what sort of career / job / business will support a certain sort of lifestyle. With a more minimalistic single no children lifestyle expenses can be a lot lower than with a more extravagant married with children lifestyle, so your potential career choices can be much broader if you have lower expenses.

If you want to retire early or have a large family (or do both) or do other expensive things like travelling the world, then you'll need a pretty high income career or business to support these goals. So this sort of limits your career choices to only high income careers, and this needs to be balanced with what sort of life someone wants. 

Finally - once someone has what life they want figured out, who they want to marry, what lifestyle they want, if they want children, travel, retire early, and what sort of career they want, then they can pick what the best college major is to support this career.

So I actually view the college major as not a very important or useful thing to pick, in the grand scheme of things. I think there are a lot of other things and questions that a lot of young people never really think about, which they probably should think about, which are more important than what college major they pick.

In my case - I started my software development career after buying some programming books in high school. With this I was able to start working as a professional software engineer at a young age, completely self taught.

Basically some family members knew a guy who owned a small business who needed some software made, and they knew I was already programming my own video games, so my first software development gig was while I was in high school. I took this experience to a large company after high school and was able to get hired on with no degrees at all.

After this I completed an associated degree at a local community college for free.  The community college that I went to is only 4-5k per year in tuition, so even if I didn't have grants and scholarships pay for it it would have been (and still is today actually) a very affordable education option.

So I actually have no personal money tied up in my career aside from the initial $500 dollars that I spent on technical books in school, yet I make around $150,000 / year. I haven't spent any other money to support my career or education at all, so the schooling and education and training required to do my job was pretty minimal. Most of it is actually  just previous software development experience gained from working at previous companies.

In general though - my career isn't really about the money or roi on my educational investment.

It's more about if my job supports my life, lifestyle, health, relationships, and happiness or not - all of of which are way more important than what sort of job / income / career / college major I chose.

So - to summarize - I tend to think it's more important to think about what sort of life and lifestyle you want to live, including who you marry and what relationships you have, and what sort of career you want to choose, than what college major you choose.

The decision of which college major to choose really should be driven by what sort of life you want to live, and not the other way around.

[GuitarStv]

I think that where some people get tripped up with the STEM/liberal arts divide is in the variability.  Like, when I think back to my engineering courses in university vs the liberal arts ones that I took there was a clear difference between the two.

With the engineering stuff there was a minimum (usually easily gradable) baseline that had to be achieved to pass.  Pass all the engineering classes, and you'll have the baseline necessary to do engineering work.  This is true even if you just barely squeak out a pass in all the courses.  You may not end up the greatest engineer in the world, but you'll be able to do the job because there was no way to pass without having to learn the stuff to a minimum level.

With the liberal arts stuff, it was assumed that you were going to try hard . . . but not always marked in such a way that it rewarded that hard work.  This might just be for the liberal arts courses that I took, but it was pretty simple to pass classes by gaming the system without really getting much actual learning out of the class.  Concepts from earlier classes weren't always structured to solidly form the basis for later classes in the way that the engineering stuff did.  I feel like you got out of these classes what you put into them, but what you got out of them was very unrelated to the marks you ended up with.  (I got a tremendous amount out of the music classes that I took, while only receiving average marks.  I got amazing marks in environmental science, psychology, and philosophy while doing no work, learning dick all, and basically coasting because I was focusing on the engineering stuff I had to take at the same time.) 

This is why liberal arts often get the 'oh, that shit is easy/useless' kind of label - because it can be if your approach towards it is bad.  If your kid isn't interested in liberal arts and is just going to school to party with friends - my suspicion is that they can totally graduate with decent marks by half-assing their way through.  And that will be a shit preparation for a career later in life.  Or they can really hustle and work hard in their liberal arts degree, not necessarily show much more for it in the marks, but pick up tons of invaluable life skills that will serve them well throughout a working career.  These are going to be the folks to can use their degree to enter into and succeed just about anywhere.

If your kid is going into a hard STEM field like engineering, there is less leeway to fuck around.  If they don't work hard, they'll fail out.  If they pass, then they're probably going to be prepared to do work in a particular field to at least some minimum level of acceptability.  The kids who barely squeak through might well be less prepared to switch fields to something else . . . so if it turns out that they don't like what they chose, they certainly could feel stuck after a couple years of working.  Engineering positions can often be draining/time consuming and cause folks to stagnate into their positions until they're incapable of doing anything else.  But there's a minimum level of hard work that goes into the degree, if you can keep that forced continuous learning going, this can be applied to anything that interests you in the future.  I know a great many engineers who have switched into completely different fields from what their degree is (most going into trades - plumbing, electrician, home inspector, pest control, farming but also some who have gone into writing and farming).  I also know a great many engineers who have ended up incapable of doing anything else after half-assedly barely working in a position until they lose the ability to learn new stuff.

So I don't think that it's a matter of 'liberal arts are bad', 'liberal arts prepare you for doing anything', 'STEM is always best', 'STEM folks can't do different things'.  Everything depends on the type of person, their interests, and their approach to work.  Like I said, liberal arts seen to allow a lot more leeway/variability in school.  With STEM stuff (at least with the engineering programs that I was involved with) the degree itself is harder to get, but the careers that it leads to can sometimes lead to mental stagnation that must be constantly fought.  There's no easy/sure-fire cookie cutter way to success.

[41_swish]

You don't NEED a STEM degree. I know plenty of people who have got a great ROI on many different types of degrees, but it really came down to two things. They had the ability to adapt and do something completely unrelated to the degree and/or went to a very affordable school. If you can graduate debt free or very close to it, I think that any college degree is worth it. The point I was making earlier is that spending 60k on undergraduate makes this equation tougher.

[Metalcat]

You don't NEED a STEM degree. I know plenty of people who have got a great ROI on many different types of degrees, but it really came down to two things. They had the ability to adapt and do something completely unrelated to the degree and/or went to a very affordable school. If you can graduate debt free or very close to it, I think that any college degree is worth it. The point I was making earlier is that spending 60k on undergraduate makes this equation tougher.

If I were to spend a large sum on education for my kid, then I would REALLY heavily emphasize that they need to get a hell of a lot more out of the experience than just what they learned in classes.

[Sibley]

Thanks all for your replies. I summarized key points below. My DD is introvert and not great at people relationships. She is ambitious about her career and works hard. She is leaning towards medicine (wants to do it in Europe as the costs are low and takes much less time). She can't handle stress that well and is not great with people so I am a bit worried about medicine side. The other option she spoke about is Finance but we both are not sure about the career options there. She doesn't want to go towards Computer Science as per her she's not good with the logic and programming skills.

- Recommended: Engineering, Doctor, Accounting (followed by CPA, so many jobs available), Physical Therapist, Nursing (you’ll become a millionaire before doctors even start their paycheck)
- Go for some form of computers or eng degree; even accounting is fine. But liberal arts and others waste of time. “Follow your passion” is bad advice
- Math major is toughest but opens lot of doors
- Specific degrees open few doors but close many others; so avoid them. Networking more important. Evaluate your major (pros and cons) before taking it. e.g., surgeon or doctor can be very difficult path

Your daughter will be best served by:
1. working on her communication and people skills. Being an introvert means your social battery is drained by people, not that you're automatically bad at peopling. She's got work to do.
2. working on her coping techniques and methods of stress management.
3. Researching different fields/jobs and talking to people in those fields when possible.
4. Deciding for herself what she wants to do with her life, within the constraints set by outside influences.
5. Making a plan that allows for flexibility when life throws curveballs, executing the plan, and adapting as needed for the curveballs.

[Villanelle]

If your daughter doesn't deal well with stress, medicine is probably not the right fit, for several reasons.  Maybe something like a PT, but even nursing is very high stress, as is nursing school. 

And while I firmly believe that practical, employment considerations should be part of a college major or career path decision, they shouldn't be the only one.  You also need something you have somewhat of an aptitude for and that you might not be miserable doing.  I think "follow your passion" is bad advice in many ways, but "ignore your preferences and chase the money" is equally bad.

Also, life and trends change.  Today's money-making career with people shortages could be the next decade's oversaturated, underpaid field. 

Therapy to help her figure out stress and "not being great with people" (which is often, but not always social anxiety, neurodiversity, or similar) would serve her will in life, no matter what major or career she chooses, and the sooner she does it, the better. 

[Laura33]

If your kid is going into a hard STEM field like engineering, there is less leeway to fuck around.

100% agree with this whole post.  Also, for the OP:  keep in mind that you can do STM with a liberal arts degree, too (I was almost a chemistry major).  They may not have the "E," but science/math/health/etc.?  You betcha.  Many, many liberal arts grads go to med school or into Ph.D programs in other hard sciences.

The thing that I don't like about traditional engineering majors (and both my kids are engineers -- 1 graduated, 1 in college) is that the courseload is so rigorous and structured that you have to know exactly what you want to do as soon as you start; in some cases, you even need to be admitted separately to a particular program, so even if you are admitted to the school, you might not get the major you want.  If you are 17-18 and know for sure what you want, that's awesome.  Like, I look at my DS and realize that "engineer" is a genetic condition, not a job title, so college is just giving him skills to be who he has always been.  ;-)  He is very happily at an uber-techie school and has found his tribe.

OTOH, if you're not sure, that kind of intensive early focus makes it easy to miss other opportunities and fields that you might be really good at and enjoy more.  The feature and the bug of a liberal arts degree is that they force you to try a bunch of different fields.  Which is why I strongly encouraged my DD to choose the liberal arts school with the engineering program, vs. the very engineering-focused STEM school.  She thought she wanted to be an engineer, but she is not nearly as tech/equipment focused as my DS (plus she kept doing the "I want to major in XYZ" and at the same time explaining how she didn't actually like any of the career paths that naturally flow from that major!).  So I wanted her to have options.  Turns out she did major in engineering, but she also really enjoyed some of her liberal arts classes, too -- and boy has her writing improved.  The writing and presentations skills she got from those classes she was "forced" to take are going to serve her well wherever she ends up.

[Metalcat]

Thanks all for your replies. I summarized key points below. My DD is introvert and not great at people relationships. She is ambitious about her career and works hard. She is leaning towards medicine (wants to do it in Europe as the costs are low and takes much less time). She can't handle stress that well and is not great with people so I am a bit worried about medicine side. The other option she spoke about is Finance but we both are not sure about the career options there. She doesn't want to go towards Computer Science as per her she's not good with the logic and programming skills.

- Recommended: Engineering, Doctor, Accounting (followed by CPA, so many jobs available), Physical Therapist, Nursing (you’ll become a millionaire before doctors even start their paycheck)
- Go for some form of computers or eng degree; even accounting is fine. But liberal arts and others waste of time. “Follow your passion” is bad advice
- Math major is toughest but opens lot of doors
- Specific degrees open few doors but close many others; so avoid them. Networking more important. Evaluate your major (pros and cons) before taking it. e.g., surgeon or doctor can be very difficult path

Your daughter will be best served by:
1. working on her communication and people skills. Being an introvert means your social battery is drained by people, not that you're automatically bad at peopling. She's got work to do.
2. working on her coping techniques and methods of stress management.
3. Researching different fields/jobs and talking to people in those fields when possible.
4. Deciding for herself what she wants to do with her life, within the constraints set by outside influences.
5. Making a plan that allows for flexibility when life throws curveballs, executing the plan, and adapting as needed for the curveballs.

Very much this.

A big part of my job now is helping newly disabled people and neurodivergent people navigate their professional options. So much of success is understanding ones own characteristics and working with them instead of against them.

[Scandium]

There are plenty of rankings of these things. Pull up the list and have your daughter look at them
https://www.payscale.com/college-roi
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/slideshows/national-universities-liberal-arts-colleges-with-the-best-roi?slide=24

Spoiler alert: MIT is top. Now getting in there is another matter..

[wageslave23]

Nursing. Stellar pay, universally and continuously needed, cannot be automated away, high salary / college cost ratio. With a 4-year nursing degree, work the next 8-10 years as hard as you would have while living the lifestyle you would have if you were to go to medical school and you'll be a millionaire before doctors even start paying back their loans.

My wife is a nurse. She likes it, but you are basically treated like the hired help. Some Drs are better than others. But neither I or my wife would encourage our kids to go into nursing.  The pay and job security are good. But the hours are terrible or the hours are good but the pay is terrible for a 4 year degree. You are treated like an assistant at best and servant at worst.  And there is no upside unless you become a nurse practitioner.  These are all generalities. But she has worked at several different hospitals in several different states, and also as a school nurse.