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][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]

~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]

Business is a terrible undergrad major.  Terrible.  Research shows that students who major in general business and marketing are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, meaning they hold jobs that don’t require a college degree. They also earn less than those in more math-focused business majors, such as finance and accounting.  In fact, in the latest college degree salary survey from Payscale (see https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/common-jobs-for-majors), business is NOT one of the best-paying college degrees.  When PayScale looked at starting and mid-career salaries of college graduates in dozens of college majors, business came in as the 56th best-paying college degree. It fared worse than such "impractical" college degrees as philosophy, history and American studies.

Philosophy, on the other hand:

[i]...when it comes to earnings for people who only have undergraduate degrees, philosophy majors have the fourth-highest median earnings, $81,200 per year, out-ranking business and chemistry majors, according to the ETS. Bar none, philosophy majors have the highest salary growth trajectory from entry to mid-career.[/i]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/philosophers-dont-get-much-respect-but-their-earnings-dont-suck/[/quote]

Here is a Georgetown research report indicating that business majors earn far more than humanities majors, using BLS data. BLS is the most accurate labor data:

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors

Here is a quote from the report: "STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), health, and business majors are the highest paying, leading to average annual wages of $37,000 or more at the entry level and an average of $65,000 or more annually over the course of a recipient’s career."

You can play around with the data yourself and figure out exactly how much the earnings differential is throughout the entire distribution and over the lifetime, not just the median earnings at graduation.
[/quote]

But both agree that philosophy majors earn more than business majors. 
[/quote]

Your mistake is searching for "business." Very few people actually major in an undergraduate major called "business." They pick accounting, finance, information systems, marketing, etc. You need to compare those actual majors to philosophy. Even within humanities, there is a wide range of salaries between majors. Philosophy is 39k-76k and finance is 49k-109k. Accounting is 47k-103k. So, those are substantially higher than philosophy[/quote]

No, I (first PP) didn't make any "mistake."

PP above wrote, [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]

PP didn't write "accounting, finance, information systems, marketing, etc."  They wrote "business" (which is an undergrad major at some schools).

That is therefore the major I compared to philosophy.[/quote]

Well, that's going to make philosophy look super good because almost nobody who goes to a business school majors in "business." You conveniently picked the crappiest business major to compare to[/quote]

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