To put it another way, an MIT grad with an engineering degree is going to be much better off career-wise than a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.
From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop.
To put it into other words: where an engineer can make 65k right after graduation an english major will start at 35k. The engineer's salary increases on par with inflation while the english major increases substantially over time and overtakes it on average at the 10 year point. The paraphrased quote from AACROs lobbyist: 'we're seeing through earnings study that technical degrees go stale over the career of an individual, this is shown when comparing the average english major vs the average electrical engineer' There's alot of background nuance (politics) there behind the study but the idea hasn't really been broached before in higher ed. It's really quite interesting to look at on a US scale, but that data hasn't been collected yet.
Oh: I'm not contesting that some soft science degrees aren't total wastes of money. Just that there will always be a place for a gender studies Harvard grad. We just don't need 10,000 of them.
If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees."
ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp
English Majors start at $37,800 and get to $67,500 after 10 years. Electrical Engineering Majors start at $60,800 and get to $104,000 after 10 years.
AACRO has an incentive to overstate the benefits of non-technical college degrees, as these are the most common types of degrees, and these are the degrees that are leading more people to question the value of a college education.
Tenored professorships are nicely paying, hard to get but exist in every discipline (let's pick on Gender Studies) so if 2/100 GS grads become 100K/year tenured profs and 98/100 opt out of the labour force, you're really measuring the wrong thing.
The discussion I paraphrased was made at an AACRO tech conference during a talk about the creation of a federal student tracking database - the speaker was Barmak Nassirian who is a lobbyist in DC for higher ed. I'm going off of the data presented in that talk.
On the same note, I've never used payscale.com for more than a glance. Their methodology sounds valid, but I don't know how they make their money.
I bet they only looked at the english majors who still had a job in the field after many years. If you include all the english majors, including the failed ones who work in a different field then the numbers might make more sense.
I didn't say I agreed with what was said, it's just something that higher ed is talking about at the top of the greater organization and was worth a mention.
Personally I feel state academia is bloated and backwards and many changes need to be made. Admissions should be highly curtailed where the whole nation makes an effort towards math and science instead of 'getting a degree so you can get 10k$ extra starting out.' I'm still not convinced that the federal dollars lost to defaulting loans wouldn't be better spent on k-12 education.
But the reality is that if you graduated with a humanities/social science degree from a ivy league or sub-ivy school, you are bound to do pretty well. As opposed to their state school counterparts, English majors from Harvard have the academic clout to get into a top law/med school which will put them with far greater earning power over engineers in 10 years.
But if you are a true-minded humanities major, you might even become a true humanitarian for a couple of years; maybe travel abroad to a Peace Corps or get a masters at a International Studies program. Then only later, you get on the fast-track to a management program at some Fortune 500 to manage some engineers.
Keep telling yourself that.
Only a small fraction of humanities grads make that transition.
Oh, and the Peace Corps wants folks who can actually do things. Food, shelter, etc come from applied technology.
The feds are putting in place systems to track income as the best metric. But... I hesitate to call a 100k$ rockstar EE major ten times more successful than a rockstar chem e doing water purification work in Guatemala for 10k$ as a humanitarian.
the most overpriced for the value they deliver.