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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To PP at 09:12, please share whether your undergraduate degree was a liberal arts degree (STEM major?) 
I’m an uneducated fool but you = goals [/quote]

I was a chemistry major at a liberal arts college (not a top 30 one).  Took just as many humanities/social science courses as I did chem courses.  I think it was a fantastic education.[/quote]

I went to a SLAC and double majored in a humanity and a science. It was a fantastic education. It was not, however, the most lucrative route.  Going to engineering school would have been a lot more lucrative.

So I suppose it depends on how you define "value."[/quote]

But the study suggests that it IS on average lucrative in the long-term (lifetime income) compared to the degrees from non-LACs (except for MIT, Stanford).  Going to engineering school is lucrative in the 6-10 year initial period, but not in the 40 year. Many engineers max out their income potential relatively early.  I would say my chem route from a SLAC was fairly lucrative (worked in industry, started my own business and sold it).[/quote]

If you check the data set, it's not as lucrative. It's about half the ROI over 40 years[/quote]

Right, we shouldn't be comparing across majors in this data set.  But for those few liberal arts schools that have engineering departments or kids who do the assorted 2-2, 3-2 programs (for which their are relatively few graduates as it's a tough major) they outperform the average in terms of lucrative (though don't outperform MIT). But if you go major by major the study suggests a liberal arts college degree in the same major has a better lifetime ROI than a university.  Which is interesting because liberal arts majors often take fewer specialized courses in their major than they would in a university setting.  I think engineering is the worst place to assess this data since so few liberal arts colleges matriculate engineers (though the ones that do seem very successful).[/quote]

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