College Major Employability

that's a bullshit answer, esp. because now trends suggest that even STEM graduates are struggling to find jobs.you're blaming the victim when chances are every adult, website, school teacher, and guidance counselor told them to go to school. you expect an 18 year old to be able to predict, perfectly, job trends over the next 20 years? hell, that underwater basket weaving degree might actually be more useful than CS after Trump collapses the US economy and everyone is back to subsi

Pace comments that STEM majors are not part of the trend, consider this: I started my undergrad education following the dot com bubble years and was dissuaded to pursue compsci. I went into civil (structural) engineering instead. Over half of my civeng classmates would go to postgrad education -- in engineering, law, whatever -- precisely because of the inability to find a job in civil engineering. About a third of my Master's class (structural engineering @ Berkeley, a top school in the field)

Not really; most university graduates can find jobs relatively easily. Unemployment among young diploma-holders in the US is very low, and the diploma premium to income is high, though of course varies by the major. What will rather happen is that less-well-paying majors will become cheaper.

It seems strange to me that people assume that more education in any field they want will necessarily result in more money.Schools are producing too many Biology Phds. Or Forensic Science undergrads. Such is life. There's no way to predict 100% what the market will be like, so we make do. There's no intrinsic right to a job in the field that one chooses to study, and most people work in fields outside of their major.It's also true that your choice of first (or second or t

That's a false dichotomy. Nobody is suggesting that nobody should choose a liberal arts degree. What's being suggested is that less people should be doing it because there's more supply for those professions than there is demand. There's very high demand for technology degrees and trade skills (welders are in desperate demand, for instance). These truths aren't being communicated to college freshmen as well as they should be, and that's causing a major crisis for a lot of liberal a

We've had a few previous discussion on this and peripheral subjects. Here's a good one:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6224982I'd also invite you to read my comment on it:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226836The "studied the wrong subject" stuff has surprisingly come up in

What's interesting is the quantity of degrees deemed "useful" is shrinking. Even within the commonly accepted STEM grouping there's quite a few degrees that alone, are not quite automatic meal tickets. For instance, biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering aren't extremely employable except with graduate degrees. Perhaps instead of accepting that college students who majored in "useless" degrees are simply stupid and should have gone into engineering/C

It doesn't help that any student can get a loan to study whatever they want, often without any regard for future income potential.Most STEM majors don't have problems finding jobs.The days of an Art History degree being enough to qualify you as a "college graduate" for a 9-5 desk job in an unrelated field are certainly over.Which makes sense, economically. More college graduates means more specialized degrees to fill niche jobs, which generally pay better. Bushiness

I'm not claiming it's number one, just that it's one of 'the professions', degree leads to a job, it pays relatively well. A lot of humanities students are studying just to study (which is fine) without a clear job that it leads to, and many inevitably end up in unrelated roles that don't require their degree and don't compensate for it.I only special-cased EE & CS because that happens to be HN's skew, not because there's something more special

This is far from just affecting tech. Good luck getting a job with any other STEM or finance/admin degree.