Comment by harry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harry | Hacker News Reader

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The long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning.

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.

Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it.

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.

Does anyone know of any studies that take into consideration labour-force dropout as well? It's a bit less enlightening if you compare the 95% of science grads who are employed doing science with the 60% of soft studies grads (both numbers purely hypothetical), to compare the most career-driven X-students with all the Y-students is unfair to Y-studies.

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.

I do not have any reports to back this up as the transcript from the meeting is yet to be released. I've been curious to dig into the distinctions and locations used for the selection populations.

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 you have some tremendous selection bias going on.

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.

Definitely, it's from an AACRO conference which is full of collegiate registrars and provosts. The message may ignore contrary data to get a political agenda across. Until I can review the actual reports the argument is based upon, I can't really say for certain. To truly analyze the information across the nation the feds will have to create a US student tracking and lump it in with K-12 & IRS data. There's a quiet movement to do so - but there's resistance to that idea hence the discussion. Resistance stems from the orwellian aspects while proponents trend along "we spend federal dollars on these diplomas, we need to make sure they're doing GOOD for the society somehow." A figure quoted at the same talk was that we spend 3% of our GDP on education.

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.

Payscale make their money by helping companies figure out what salary ranges to offer in new markets, offering benchmarking and other compensation guidance.

This is very true. Most young male engineering grads like to gloat the fact that they make a lot more than their humanities counterparts (perhaps to make up for the misery and lack of female companionship during their undergrad?)

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.

> 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.

Ahhh this is one of the issues I've heard tossed around - what makes for a successful individual post graduation? How can we measure it?

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.

Pretty simple answer to that. You don't. Most college grads don't realize that how much you make at a job is a really poor indicator of your self-worth. But you don't realize this until after you've been on the job for awhile - kind of like high schoolers thinking where you go to college is the ultimate determination of your worth.

so how can we defend the money lent and given by the people (from the federal government) is going to a good cause?

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