[yalurker]

How? Because parents, teachers and mass media said to 'do what you love and the money will follow' or some variant, so kids picked majors with no demand in the labor market.

Because affluent, well-connected kids got humanities degrees at Ivy league schools and then used their connections and the prestige of the school to secure high paying jobs, and kids from blue-collar backgrounds didn't realize they can't do the same thing with a humanities degree from the local college.

Because kids who should have gone to trade schools or entered the workforce after high school were convinced they had to go to some college, so they wasted a few years studying something they're not good at and don't care about, so they didn't learn anything to make themselves more employable than they were before they started.

[scarmig]

2001, months worked out of the past 4 months for people with bachelor's degrees Engineering : 3.2 months Literature: 2.8 months Overall: 3.1 months

2009, months worked out of the past 4 months for people with bachelor's degrees Engineering: 3.1 months Literature: 2.7 months Overall: 3.0 months

It's a bit more complicated than people getting worthless degrees in underwater basket weaving.

[mbrubeck]

In other words, the average lit major spent 50% more time unemployed than the average engineering major. That actually shows that field of study does make a major difference, even when times are hard for both.

[scarmig]

My point may have been a bit subtle. The argument is not about absolute levels (no one would dispute that techies have better employment outcomes than fuzzies, both in getting a job and compensation).

People are claiming that recent youth unemployment is due to bad choice of major: the argument seems to go that, as technology is introducing serious economic disruption, people who get humanities degrees are disproportionately left at a significant market disadvantage, which is causing the recent uptick in college graduate unemployment. This, however, doesn't account for the actual historical data, as engineering and literature majors show similar relative employment rates as in 2001.

[InclinedPlane]

This is misleading because it doesn't factor in desire for work, pay, or even hours etc.

If I get a CS degree then make 100k a year for 2 years, then quit because I want to take a 6 month vacation and then go run my own startup that looks on average in bulk identical to someone with a "soft" degree working two separate part time jobs for $10 an hour hopping from job to job every year or so with 3 months of unemployment in between.

[zanny]

Plenty of students go into school not knowing what they want to do, with no direction for finding their talents. If you don't take the first steps to discover what you like to do and build on your talents, you simply have no direction at all, which is much worse than us overflowing with artists or musicians who made music and art with terrible income. At least then we have somewhere to go and funnel talent into.

[fecklessyouth]

What you major in isn't that important. This community needs to break out of the "choose a major for the job you want" shell. That same line of thinking is partly to blame for this whole mess anyway, since college departments can't possibly keep up with changing job markets. College students should learn skills, and their major is simply one way to do that.

[bunderbunder]

Speaking as someone who puts his life in engineers', chemists', and clinical biologists' hands on a regular basis, I think there's at least some wisdom to the idea that folks should be specifically educated for the job they're going into.

Granted, there's also a whole range of people who major in subjects that aren't closely tied to much in the way of non-academic jobs, and end up in careers that aren't closely tied to much in the way of academic subjects. For that case, I have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to reconsider the basic structure of higher education from the ground up, rather than picking at the margins.

The standard bachelor's degree program is fabulous for certain purposes, but other cases make it look very similar to the "bundled channels" thing that is popular with cable and satellite TV providers: An archaic business model which primarily serves to disserve customers by forcing many of them to choose between paying for much more service than they actually want, need, or will use, and getting no service at all. In one corner, you have lots of people who don't really need a full bachelor's degree, but end up going into serious debt pursuing one anyway because no better option is available. In the other, you have lots of people who would love to take some individual classes, but find that the university won't let them if they are not enrolled in a 4-year program. Even if they already have a bachelor's degree. Even if it's in a related field.

[InclinedPlane]

Better yet, people should stop thinking that a 4-year arts&science college degree is a prerequisite for any sort of grown up job. More people would be better served by going to trade or technical schools, or learning on the job, and spending their free time indulging their educational passions or intellectual hobbies via self-study instead of digging themselves into 5 figures of debt learning nothing more than what they could with a mere library card.

[carguy1983]

Yeah, I dunno - people like us were also talking shit on the people who chose CS or MIS or whatever back in '99 based on the fact that there was strong demand in the labor market until the first crash. Now we're talking shit the other way.