Reply to Why would non-one percent families let their kids major in the humanities?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Easy reason: Because parents don't pick majors, their adult children do.

Reason in my family: The humanities are critical, and enhance your ability to succeed.  DH and I both have jobs that are basically translating STEM concepts into policy and persuasive documents.  STEM in the absence of humanities (includes history, communication, ethics, cultural studies, etc) is often useless or harmful.[/quote]
+1

~Philosophy major making a good living[/quote]
I'm very happy that some people have made a good living with humanities degrees. However, nationwide representative data clearly show that humanities majors on average earn far less money than peers who majored in things like STEM or business. [/quote]
[b]That's primarily the kid, not the degree. [/b]Self-motivated kids with humanities and liberal arts degrees do fine. Kids who are not self-motivated will not do fine, regardless of degree type. They are not as likely to finish a STEM degree, so you'll see more of them with completed degrees elsewhere, but it's not like signing up for STEM would have changed their outlook or likelihood of success. [/quote]
NP here. I very much think it's this, though I've yet to see a study that tries to assess whether it's the person or the major. I think it's partially because it's hard to separate these things in the data, and I also think it's because everyone who studies labor markets seems to be so enamored of STEM that they refuse to look critically at the observed correlations.

I grew up UMC/UC and have a STEM PhD (and double majored with a humanities degree). I have a comfortable, UMC/UC lifestyle, though that's at least partially because growing up UMC/UC I know how to navigate the types of workplaces and networks to get the opportunities I have. I also know a lot of people with STEM degrees (esp. in the life sciences) who are underemployed and underpaid. Anecdotally, the people I know who have moved up in financial status the most all have humanities degrees and went into finance, law, or consulting.

There's a lot of things hidden in the data that suggests that people with STEM degrees have better career outcomes. For one thing, those data usually include healthcare, which overall tends to have high-demand whether you are an MA, RN, PA, or MD. Especially at the lower levels of education, you are more likely to always be employed if you want to be...so your lifetime earnings will be higher. Beyond that, anyone with computing skills is currently in high demand, because there's been steep growth in need for those skills. The same is not true for other STEM-related skills, meaning not all STEM degrees are created the same. [b]Nevertheless, I suspect in 5-10 years programming skills will be as ubiquitous as, say, Excel skills, and the premium for having them will be significantly diminished if not gone altogether[/b].[/quote]

+1 This is happening with programming and other general CS skills. A friend that is a director of IT for a T20 school mentioned this recently. Higher ed educators are seeing a trend in students minoring in CS or taking some classes are getting jobs similar to CS majors. Also, there is growing competition in larger markets like NY and CA from coding bootcamps such as General Assembly (no college degree in CS needed).[/quote]
I think this points to another misperception people have about college and long-term financial success. College is not vocational school, and it's very risky to treat it like it is.

I work in an extremely lucrative field of computing right now (AI), but it's not what I went to school to study. It just so happens that skills I gained while studying my STEM field became highly sought after a few years after I graduated, and I had a combination of skills and theoretical underpinning to transform that into a well-paying job. But it's kind of a fluke. When I was in grad school, everything I was doing seemed very niche and not particularly useful...but I really liked it and was good at it. Now I see people clamoring to get degrees in something I learned incidentally, and I also see that the field is changing such that my once niche skills are now becoming commoditized.[/quote]

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