If you are considering going to college (which, from where I'm sitting now, looks like a big fat waste of five-and-a-half years) you should major in engineering of some sort. According to a pretty unreliable "thing found on the Internet," seven out of the top ten undergraduate degrees by salary are in engineering. Surprisingly, sitting only 20 spots lower, a philosophy degree (stupid, Dave!) will supposedly earn you more than business administration, business management and advertising. Twenty spots lower than that, journalism languishes below nursing, English and agriculture. But just above forestry. Which will probably be incorrect by the time you read this.
Friday, January 8, 2010
43
Math. The other white meat.
Those first two are politespeak for drug dealing, right?
My high school science teacher with the tie-dye lab-coat says "YES."
Are you still in touch with him? you just can't trust most of the shit you get on the street.
We communicate through dreams and telepathy.
I've read the list three times but haven't been able to make out the trend yet. I'm not very good with statistics or analytical "left brain" stuff. Luckily I'm unemployed so I can spend another few hours figuring this out.
i knew i should have taken concrete 101. anyway, at the moment i'm totally surrounded by geologists, who seem to do alright too.
I was in a meeting this morning, and I noticed that everybody there, apart from me, was wearing one of those sinister little steel rings on their little finger. There was one moment when 3 of these be-ringed hands were gesturing over the plans on the table that I wished I could have taken a photo as it looked like an image out of a brochure for engineering school.
I definitely had on the best shoes though.
oh, hey, and an undergrad degree in feminist studies gets you nowhere (what? it was the ninties).
Only one of these jobs - two, at best! - actually employs workers, reliably, in offices and/or labs that are located in cities. Just think that's something the kids should all know before they are literally banished to the far-flung suburbs or flyover country for their careers.
But then again, who would PLAN to work at a restaurant or sanitation department or a mass-transit facility? (of which there are many plentiful jobs in cities - some lucrative, some not.)
Something to ponder.
As an industrial engineer, I can positively say that there are a lot of engineering jobs in the city. But, I can also say that most engineers actually want to end up in the middle of Iowa working for General Mills.
Yes, certain types of engineers are absolutely needed in big cities, no doubt. "Chemical Engineers" or "Computer Engineers" really aren't on that list, though. Aerospace engineers might find some good luck in the Pacific Northwest, though! You'll be closer to Seattle than the airport.
that sobbing you hear is me and my media career consoling each other....afeared of irrelevency and knowing that my future will be a sad combination of soul saddening nostalgia and standing in lines for food stamps and SSI checks....Wah/Wah/Wah.
Clearly you would need to be IN one of those professions to understand that graph, so blissfully ingorant! DUm de dum dum dum!
Forestry sounds really peaceful right now. When I was in elementary school I used to look out the bus window and daydream about my perfect job as a milk man. No worries or anything. Just riding around in a cool van with the doors open wearing a really nice jumper delivering milk.
You can't take these lists seriously. Check out the Top 10 College Majors of 1976:
1. Business Administration and The Man
2. Pre-Club Med
3. Betamax Science
4. Synthetic Leisure Suit Design
5. Municipal Bongwater Waste Treatment Administration
6. Strobe Technology
7. Streaking
8. Comparative Hallucinogenics
9. CB Radio Broadcasting
10. Organizational Looting Management
Only numbers 1, 6 and 10 seem relevant today.
8
yes.
I minored in 8.
This makes me want coke, money and a gun.
Coke, Money and a Gun checked in at number 3 in 1987.
I have a gun and Adderal. Would you take a traveler's check?
Bravo.
It's cute what they consider high salaries. Also? Life potential earnings? Unless you monetize (that word!) your engineering skills, you'll languish in your little Dow Chemical lab coat forever engiqueers.
Awww, I'd love an engiqueer of my very own! He could talk calculus to me! It'd be dirty and hot.
Am I reading this right and that you think a starting median salary of 50k-60k is not high?
Context is everything.
Ok, I can go back to school, get the aerospace engineering degree, build my own time machine, then go back and get a degree that will lead to a great career. I'll start tomorrow. Oh, that's the weekend. Now I'm discouraged. Forget it.
Did't the boardgame Life teach us this long ago?
I have a film degree, yet work in finance. I have a high salary, but that is in no way due to the degree. A more interesting graph would be wages vs. soul-crushing career choices.
This is true. Also? All of those people with fine art degrees that they couldn't get a hold of because they can't afford a phone? That could impact the mean ..
I think philosophy gets a bump because so many philosophy majors, schooled in winning pointless arguments, go on to be lawyers.
Probably right! But then, the soul-crushing...
I think some Freddy Neechee guy had something to say about that.
I just look forward to my days as a mid-career Philosopher.
Ha ha, suck it, humanities majors who got laid in college when I had to study! Who's laughing now? Who's eating real food (no ramen!) and saving money for retirement? That's right, ME. The nerd. Ha!
riotnrrd, B.Sc., M.Sc.EE., M.Sc., Ph.D., (so very lonely)
You nerds were making fun of me riding my bike through your precious cluster of buildings on the "other" side of campus because I was covered in oil crayon and carrying four pounds of John Milton. Now that I have a b.a. in reading (essentially), I can siphon off of the coffers of your tax dollars. Who's laughing now?
xo, well-read welfare queen
Well, this chart doesn't tell us all that much.
1. Self reported data? Not necessarily accurate.
2. I glanced at the methodology. Confidence interval is 5-7%. So N is prolly pretty low. I don't think it says how many people actually participated.
3. Professional degrees aren't included. I was a history major, and I make $142K as a writer. But I have an MBA, which seems to open a lot of doors at companies.
Seems to me the worst thing you can do is major in a specialized, quasivocational discipline such as dance therapy, multimedia production, etc. College is too valuable an opportunity to waste on careerist bullshit. You've got your whole miserable life for that.
YES.
I see your 'journalism' and raise you a 'fine arts' degree. Sigh.
I'm happy to see that English made the list. Fuck all, I know that the starting salary for that is on point. Just enough to pay the rent, not enough to ever pay off the student loans that got you sailing thru mediocrity and upper lower class in the first place. Do not major in this unless you have a trust fund.
I am fucking sick of these kind of bullshit surveys.
My question is, how much would you pay NOT to be an ignorant fuck about the world, or literature, science, philosophy etc.
My second question for those who have paid a lot of money and feel rooked by the ´system´; how much would you accept as payment pèr year to unlearn what you encountered in your liberal arts college classroom just so you could be a Dilbert?, i.e. the rise of facism? the poetry of wcwilliams? feminsim? the history of the vietnam war? Constitutional law? the cave analogy?
Yes, you want to pay the bills, but if you think the problem is with the education you are recieving and not with how dominated our lives are by the power of corporations to shape everything in terms of private profit for the already rich than you are duped. But how would you know that with any sophistication if you weren´t introduced to that idea in a useless liberal arts course. I understand the frustration, but if you turn liberal arts colleges into trade schools we might as well just insert the chips in our brains right now so we can ´pay the bills´.
Btw
. There is also a pretty delicious piece in the NYT coming from an interview with a CEO who discusses the intellectual qualities he looks for in job candidates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26corner.html?em
Almost every single one of the qualities this CEO calls for comes from serious educational training in the humanities. Indeed a first-tier design school I taught applied ethics at for 8 years in Manhattan restructured its entire curriculum in order to include a much stronger liberal arts/humanities core, at the behest of leaders in the business community! These leaders wanted critical thinkers, effective communicators, who could write and come to judgments independently.
You're right. I was just being cranky. I think studying the humanities (even philosophy!) is a worthwhile thing to do for its own sake. Even if it leaves me a less-employable Dilbert than the alternative.