Michael Weisberg (Philosophy, Penn) has called my attention to this recent article in The New York Times on the choice of college majors; a pertinent excerpt:
In their recently published "College Majors Handbook With Real Career Paths and Payoffs" (Jist Publishing), three economists from Northeastern University in
Boston try to quantify just how much students with a variety of majors can expect to earn in their careers. The authors concluded that choosing a major was more crucial to future financial success than the college attended. One of the authors, Paul E. Harrington, an economist and associate director at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern, said that, on average, humanities and education majors fared far worse financially than students in business or engineering.
In 2002, workers with degrees in chemical engineering and accounting were on the high end, earning an average of $75,579 and $63,486, respectively. On the low end, philosophy majors made an average of $42,865 and elementary education graduates $38,746.
Mr. Harrington said the research was not intended to dissuade sociology majors from following their passions. Instead, he hopes the information will help students prepare carefully when choosing a major. He recommends that students contemplating majors in the liberal arts or humanities also take some business-oriented courses. A philosophy major, Mr. Harrington said, should probably get some real-world internship experience.
"The world is a more unforgiving place than it used to be, and investment costs are too high for four years of drift," he said. "If a student doesn't take the right sequence of math courses in high school, they can lose out on the best jobs."
A few obvious points: first, not everyone does, or ought to, frame the question of what major to choose in terms of financial rewards; second, it would be useful to know how the results are affected once you factor in the quality of undergraduate institution (it could be that philosophy majors at Harvard fare better, financially, than business majors at Loyola, for example); third, how does one factor in graduate training? It is well-known that philosophy majors are top performers in the humanities on all kinds of standardized testing (this could, of course, simply be a self-selection effect), meaning, presumably, that they also get in to the best graduate and professional programs, which, presumably, also impacts their lifetime earnings. It is unclear how, if at all, the Northeastern study factored this in.
Some merely anecdotal evidence: when I think back to the folks who majored in philosophy with me at Princeton 20 years ago, there are, besides me, now two law professors (at Texas, American, and British Columbia) and two philosophy professors (at Stanford and Montana); at least two partners at major law firms; a fellow who got an MBA and made a fortune in business; a mathematics professor at a small college (in Kentucky, I think); a private school teacher in New Jersey; and a linguistics professor somewhere in Canada. Our average income, even factoring out our mutli-millionaire, is, I would guess, competitive with the business majors elsewhere...but we also all (with one exception, I think) earned graduate degrees.
Is there hard data on this anywhere? What do others make of this article?
Comments are open; no anonymous postings, of course.
