Reply to Old (2019) NYT article—“In the salary race, Engineering majors sprint, but English majors endure”

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[quote=Anonymous]A must-read for all parents and students, especially the parents who come popping off on DCUM denigrating humanities majors and going on about ROIs to their "investments".

For those prone to popping off without reading, the article is based on a detailed NBER working paper, https://www.nber.org/papers/w25065 using data and rigorous econometric analysis, which can always be critiqued and even refuted on methodological grounds, but not with anecdotes and opinions. The paper will probably be further peer reviewed and published in a serious academic journal soon.

"The conventional wisdom is that computer science and engineering majors have better employment prospects and higher earnings than their peers who choose liberal arts. This is true for the first job, but the long-term story is more complicated. The advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up. 
This happens for two reasons. First, many of the latest technical skills that are in high demand today become obsolete when technology progresses. Older workers must learn these new skills on the fly, while younger workers may have learned them in school. Skill obsolescence and increased competition from younger graduates work together to lower the earnings advantage for STEM degree-holders as they age.
Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal arts education fosters valuable “soft skills” like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don’t create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers."

I haven't read the paper thoroughly so not sure if they have looked at whether the "catch up" happens because non-STEM majors are more likely to go into certain graduate courses that produce a steeper income trajectory. Also, whether the much higher immediate salaries for STEM graduates act as disincentive to go to grad school relative to non-STEM graduates with lower starting salaries, or delay going to grad school, both of which can add up to a salary "penalty" as people grow older.

Intuitively speaking, the obsolescence of relatively narrow technical skills, no matter how advanced they are, is a very real thing. And this doesn't mean that STEM graduates can't acquire the soft, adaptable skills. It's more that those skills might be on the average lacking because of the nature of their college education (maybe to some extent) and more likely because they could not develop those skills in the coding jobs they got right after college.

Bottom line. College is to acquire education, not a trade. Building an educated child is not like building a business, so forget the ROI. In the long run, your child is more likely to thrive if they study what they are most excited about in college (including STEM), and develop well-rounded, critical-thinking skills that are transferable to different (and unpredictably evolving) fields.

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