It’s very rare that I turn my nose up at an article steering kids away from college degrees that will never, ever pay the bills. With tuition costs the new bubble, engulfing an entire generation of hard-working kids, it’s time to start telling our students that some college majors will not pay the bills. Some degrees, though exciting and rewarding, will have them working a lot harder, for a lot less money, than anyone has ever sold to them. “You can be anything you want to be” should be amended with an “as long as you don’t mind paying $3k in student loan interest charges per year, on top of a monthly payment, for the next 40 years.”
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I’m under no illusions that all majors are created equal. I do believe that we should warn kids about the dangers of taking it too easy in college, but steering young people away from majors that will lead to fulfilling careers is where I draw the line. Have you ever noticed that doing nice things for others makes you feel good? That pulling in a big paycheck still doesn’t put a smile on that rich lady’s wrinkled face? That in a society we need to help each other and that getting paid for it is a bonus? It’s been shown that once basic needs are met, additional income makes little difference to a person’s happiness (Forbes’s Tim Hartford reports on this here. The film I Am is another wonderful example). I don’t think Alex Planes had Life in mind when penning his nauseatingly narrow minded article The Five Worst College Degrees for Your Career. It was less an analysis of bad degree choices and more an attack on the selfless act of helping others. Every one of Alex’s targeted career choices is one that makes society run a little smoother. It left me wondering if he had recently been jilted by a teacher.
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Alex’s 5 worst college degrees are, along with my responses to each:
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5: Special Education – I’m a special education teacher. On top of being in the most rewarding teaching position that I have ever held, Special Education teachers are in very high demand. A dual-certified Special Education teacher will never want for work. Alex’s median mid-career salary is also way off, unless he only surveyed teachers in the most rural parts of the US.
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4: Human Development – Admittedly I have no idea what Human Developers do, but seeing as this career choice is sandwiched between two very important careers, I can only assume that Alex has no idea what he is talking about.
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3: Elementary Education – It was an elementary school teacher who gave Alex the ability to later string together nonsense and call it fact. An elementary school teacher taught him to identify letters, sounds, words, the parts of a book, how to punctuate a sentence. Ditto on the median salary here too, Alex.
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2: Social Work – Yeah, not important. Of the billions of photos one can easily pull from a Google Search, Alex chooses to punctuate this bullet point with one of a nurse helping an elderly man. Screw old people, right Alex? Gotta get dat money, son! He even adds that “the field is projected to add to its numbers at a faster clip than the national average (161,200 new social workers will be needed by 2020).” So if job security was not a consideration here, what was? Is Alex’s definition of a good career choice one that helps as few people as possible?
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1: Child and Family Studies – We all want our kids to take school seriously and graduate. It’s been shown that being a part of a Head Start program as a small child is directly linked to the student’s high school attendance. This paper by the Baltimore Education Research Consortium is a compilation of the data. Head Start programs don’t run themselves, Head Start teachers do. They inspire our kids to be the best they can be.
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At the very end of Alex’s article is link for a “free”, “shockingly true” retirement report. Sell out much? There’s nothing worse than a 25 year old working every day for his future retirement. But since he baited me to go there, I will. While it’s true that a teacher will never get the opportunity to make $150k per year, it all averages out in the end. Every two weeks, 11% of my paycheck goes into a little closed-system thing called a pension fund. Once I hit 60 years old, I can walk away from teaching and continue to collect 80% of the average of my best three years for the rest of my Life.
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Write about that one, Alex!
