Reply to What would you advised a teen who is looking for a college major with good earning potential?

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[quote=Anonymous]IMHO, anything besides STEM is a crapshoot.  If he's looking for the conservative play I would go finance, accounting, business, IT, or engineering (basically anything in the business school or the engineering school).  I would avoid the hard sciences and definitely avoid anything in the liberal arts, social sciences, etc.  That will get him a solid job right out of school with good earning potential AND a good backup plan if he ends up going to law school or med school or something and then decides he doesn't like it.  He could always fall back on his undergrad degree and get a job in that field.  The hard sciences are a bit more risky because if you don't go to med school there aren't a whole lot of great options.  Most of them are unemployable with just a BS (same with any of the social science majors) and even with a graduate degree most don't have what I would call "good earning potential".  Any undergrad degree can make the jump to law, but you are in a much better spot to make that jump with one of the STEM undergrads vs. international affairs or psychology and you also have that built in backup plan of having a useful undergrad.  You can't count on law or MBA degrees like you could before either.  Sure, if you can get into a top 10 school for either then you are good to go, but if not then these can end up being nothing more than a waste of money potentially on top of an already unemployable undergrad degree.

As far as insurance against outsourcing there have been a lot of good posts so far.  I would recommend the trades as well, but you already said he's going to college so I assume he doesn't want to go into plumbing, HVAC, etc.  It is true that engineering (particularly software development and IT) are being outsourced a lot these days and we all know plenty of underemployed or unemployed engineers in their 40s and 50s.  That being said, there are specializations you can pursue that make you less likely to be outsourced/offshored and the game changes if he ends up going into management.  You can be an older engineer and still in the workforce, but I'm too risk averse for that so I went into management early and then into senior management when the opportunity arose.  Now my engineering skills don't matter much, but I get to use them enough that I enjoy what I do.  A fellow engineer went to law school and became a patent attorney and that works for him as well.  He puts it better than I do when he says, "as an engineer, the older I got the less respected I was since people assume that I won't know the latest language/technology, etc.  As an attorney the older I get the more respected I am and the more experience/knowledge people think I have."[/quote]

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