| Law degrees are another racket. There are too many people in the US with JDs. Only 23% are using them productively. Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends. If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist. Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost. Biotech, data science, AI/ML are also good bets. What's not a safe bet is generic "programmer" likely to be automated out of a job and salaries are likely to crash when there's an oversupply of lower-skilled talent. Most programming will become trivial or eliminated by automation, as is already beginning to happen with AI code completion. |
Half of the trading quants on my team are physics/math PhDs. Very few econ/finance degrees. Not that there are an ocean of these jobs available, and these are probably outliers compared to the 95%+ of people graduating with those degrees, but it is still a data point.