>Interesting to note that computer/math degree holders don't fare far better than recent humanities and liberal arts graduates. Journalism majors perform even better.
...if you only look at the unemployment numbers. Scroll down and look at the earnings numbers and you will see a very different picture.
I would be very interested to see the standard deviations on these unemployment and earnings numbers. I'd be willing to bet that they are much larger for humanities/liberal arts/journalism majors than for the engineering/computer science/math majors.
A liberal arts degree is very much what you make of it: if you are smart, motivated, and disciplined, you can get an incredible education and emerge with a much sharper mind. On the other hand, if you are lazy, stupid, and/or unmotivated, you can carefully pick classes and profs that require minimal effort to get by, and graduate without developing yourself in any meaningful way. I went through college with both types of people. I knew one guy who chose English as his major because he thought it would be the easiest major. He was right, mostly because he made it true: every semester when it was time to sign up for classes in the next semester, he would build a matrix of all of the books on the reading lists of all of the available classes, and then figure out which combination of classes had the greatest amount of overlap. This saved him a lot of money on books, a lot of time on reading, and probably some effort on writing. At the end of four years he had a degree and a job, and that's all he really cared about. If he had put half as much effort into work as he put into avoiding work, he could have had himself a hell of an education.
A technical degree, on the other hand, doesn't allow for such a wide range of effort inputs: if you put in minimal effort you won't just waste your time, you will fail. I saw this happen as well. More commonly, I saw people realize, "Holy shit, this stuff is serious, I can't just cruise!" and switch majors to something where they could get away with minimal effort.
As Jtsummers pointed out, humanities/liberal arts majors seem to enter into a wider range of employment fields, including (as ghurlman pointed out) software. As yummyfajitas pointed out, ability bias accounts for a large portion of the college wage premium. However, over the last few decades the percent of people going to college has increased dramatically. Some of those new people most likely have suitable levels of ability to attend college, but a lot of them almost certainly do not. Those who do not either fail out or gravitate to programs that will allow them to graduate despite the fact that they are not getting a true college education, like the English major I mentioned above. I think that these people are pulling down the numbers for such majors. If you were somehow able to sort out the "serious" liberal arts graduates from the "slackers," I think that you would find that those individuals who put in the effort to truly benefit fromt their liberal arts educations have unemployment and earnings numbers at least comperable to people with technical degrees.
...if you only look at the unemployment numbers. Scroll down and look at the earnings numbers and you will see a very different picture.
I would be very interested to see the standard deviations on these unemployment and earnings numbers. I'd be willing to bet that they are much larger for humanities/liberal arts/journalism majors than for the engineering/computer science/math majors.
A liberal arts degree is very much what you make of it: if you are smart, motivated, and disciplined, you can get an incredible education and emerge with a much sharper mind. On the other hand, if you are lazy, stupid, and/or unmotivated, you can carefully pick classes and profs that require minimal effort to get by, and graduate without developing yourself in any meaningful way. I went through college with both types of people. I knew one guy who chose English as his major because he thought it would be the easiest major. He was right, mostly because he made it true: every semester when it was time to sign up for classes in the next semester, he would build a matrix of all of the books on the reading lists of all of the available classes, and then figure out which combination of classes had the greatest amount of overlap. This saved him a lot of money on books, a lot of time on reading, and probably some effort on writing. At the end of four years he had a degree and a job, and that's all he really cared about. If he had put half as much effort into work as he put into avoiding work, he could have had himself a hell of an education.
A technical degree, on the other hand, doesn't allow for such a wide range of effort inputs: if you put in minimal effort you won't just waste your time, you will fail. I saw this happen as well. More commonly, I saw people realize, "Holy shit, this stuff is serious, I can't just cruise!" and switch majors to something where they could get away with minimal effort.
As Jtsummers pointed out, humanities/liberal arts majors seem to enter into a wider range of employment fields, including (as ghurlman pointed out) software. As yummyfajitas pointed out, ability bias accounts for a large portion of the college wage premium. However, over the last few decades the percent of people going to college has increased dramatically. Some of those new people most likely have suitable levels of ability to attend college, but a lot of them almost certainly do not. Those who do not either fail out or gravitate to programs that will allow them to graduate despite the fact that they are not getting a true college education, like the English major I mentioned above. I think that these people are pulling down the numbers for such majors. If you were somehow able to sort out the "serious" liberal arts graduates from the "slackers," I think that you would find that those individuals who put in the effort to truly benefit fromt their liberal arts educations have unemployment and earnings numbers at least comperable to people with technical degrees.