College Degrees and Earnings

When students reach out during office hours it is rarely about anything I teach. The leading questions I receive:

• “What degrees have the best job prospects?” 
• ”What would you study if you were in school now?” 

I probably receive these questions because I’m quite open about loving all things science, technology, engineering, and math. Students know I love art, music, and creative writing, too. My wife has engineering degrees and works as a technical writer and information architect.

Students rightly want information because they’re borrowing money, their families are paying a fair sum, and every student I know works while in school. I worried about getting a job when I was a student. I still worry about being employed year to year.

Now, survey data suggests students would choose different college degree programs if they had access to detailed information about future earnings and job prospects.

More info is available about which college majors pay off, but students aren’t using it

Washington Post
By Jon Marcus
Dec. 25, 2020

An analysis by the Georgetown center using College Scorecard data found that nurses with associate degrees from a community college in California make more than graduates of a dozen master’s degree programs at Harvard. Electrical and power transmission installers with associate degrees from a community college in West Virginia earn $80,400 in their first year, or more than twice the median income of bachelor’s degree recipients generally. In all, 27 percent of workers with associate degrees make more than the median salary for their counterparts with bachelor’s degrees.

But surveys find that students generally don’t know these things, or even what they can expect to make in the careers toward which they’re studying.

A survey of nearly 3,000 students by scholars at Rutgers University found that they overestimated their salary prospects. In another study, freshmen and sophomores at New York University overestimated the average earnings of male business graduates by $34,750. And only 13 percent of 376 community college students surveyed could correctly rank four general categories of majors by salary, according to yet another study, by scholars at Stanford and the universities of Michigan, Chicago and California at Irvine; those students overestimated earnings by an average of 13 percent.

Once they were given accurate income information, 12 percent of the NYU freshmen and sophomores said it would make a difference in the major they chose. Some of the community college students also said that they would change their majors; for every 1 percent increase in salary associated with a major, the likelihood they would choose that major rose between 1.4 percent and 1.8 percent.

But that requires them to have the facts.

Yes, students need the facts. So, why don’t they have them?

It’s not that difficult to use various online tools to locate mean and median earnings for various college majors. It’s also easy to locate data such as the student loan default rates based on college majors, too.

Data support what might seem obvious: STEM degrees are the best paying at all levels. Plus, you don’t always need a graduate degree to advance in those careers. Most of the arts and humanities are only “valuable” after you add a graduate degree or specialized certifications.

Back to what I tell my students: Double major if you can and consider how the degrees relate. Studying both business and a language? That’s a great idea. Maybe you can study art and computer science. Employers want tech skills, yes, but they also value communication and creativity.

We need to stop telling high school students “get a college degree” as if that’s the entire story. Which degree? Why? What about the double-major approach or at least minoring in something that balances the primary degree?

I would never tell someone who hates technology to study computer science. But, I would tell an art student to consider user interface design courses. I’d tell a music lover to spend time mastering digital media production.

Students choose college with careers in mind. The least we can do is provide them with career information.