As anyone who is about to graduate from college knows, the big question is, how much money will I make and will I be able to pay off this student loan?
CNN reported on a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers that reports the average salary for 2010 graduates with a BA is down 1.7% to $47,673, compared to $48,515 last year. Such is the recession.
But —not all degrees are created equal. Turns out, the parents were right. What are you going to do with that philosophy degree? Open up a philosophy shoppe? Alas, suffer the poor liberal arts major. Their salaries are expected to drop 8.9% to $33,540 this year. But not so fast, smug parent: Business management degrees were down almost as much: 8% to $42,094. The message here is, you just can’t be a generalist anymore. No more renaissance men and women. You have to specialize.
Indeed, the place to be is science, engineering, and computers. The average pay for students earning computer-related degrees has climbed 5.8% to $58,746, says CNN. Electrical engineering majors’ salaries have jumped the most, by 3% to $59,326. (technical degrees in my book are specialization–versus, say, an English major or even a broad biology major. The above are the kinds of degrees that lead directly to a specific job).
Salaries dipping, job offers picking up only slightly–it’s a tough time to be entering the workforce. Adding insult to injury, as salaries dip, college tuition has only risen. You have to really think hard before choosing that liberal arts degree or the education degree, or the social work degree. In fact, there’s growing evidence that college students are weighing their choices much more carefully today in light of the rising costs. That means fewer teachers, social workers, and English majors in the future.
What makes me a little sad in these salary figures is the decline of liberal arts and with it the sort of person who prefers a wide range of knowledge over a specialist. Where have the jack-of-all-trades gone? We love those sorts at cocktail parties. You know the one–the guy or gal who can talk intelligently about almost anything, and has milked a cow, climbed a mountain, and read Homer. Yet everyone today seems to be a specialist. Academics probably started this craze, with their tunnel vision and increasingly myopic research themes, like Winged Words: Flight in Poetry, a real book. But now we’re all doing it. There are specializers up and down the corporate, academic, and public sector worlds. Niches, they’re called. And they make a lot more money. The focused resume, the clear path from point A to B–that’s what gets rewarded. Ambling: not so much.
But at what cost? The liberal arts taught you how to think, which we all could use a little more of these days. More thinking, less yelling. A liberal arts degree is akin to ambling, and ambling leads to discoveries. But ambling through early life is about as defunct as the library card catalogue. Sure it’s more efficient to google something. But what’s lost is the serendipity of finding a completely new idea or book as you flip through the cards on the way to your Dewey decimal number.
Maybe the shift to specialization is a symptom, not the cause, of our increasingly narrow worlds, as we gravitate online and off to those most like us and lose the art of communicating with others unlike us. We’re specializing socially–echo-chambers, some call them–so it makes sense we specialize in work and even leisure (foodies anyone?).
We should encourage the renaissance man, but in this competitive world, we reward (and laud) the specialist. Electrical engineers earn nearly twice as much as the liberal arts major. Sigh. While I love an analytical mind, if that engineer can also milk a cow, frame up a house, and riff on Ian McEwan, then the world would be a better place.
