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One way in the US to help pick an economically viable major is to use the BLS Occupational Outlook...

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/mobile/home.htm

It gives estimates of salary and future demand for pretty much all occupations. Recommend this to your children to help them understand how their major selection could impact their future career.

This is fun to look at!

Computer and Information Technology Occupations:

Computer Programmers: $86,550

Software Developers: $107,510

Web Developers: $73,760

I think the difference in pay is because they state Web Dev requires an associates degree, the other two a bachelor's.

Of course, this data is generalized. I am an SWE, with an associates. I make a little more than their "Software Developer" role. Also suggests there may be a lot of devs who don't respond to salary threads.

Even as a non-American, this is fascinating. I wonder if other countries have it.

You make it sound more complicated than it is.

Good grades and a degree in Math/CS/Statistics/Physics/Engineering (or Business/Finance/Economics in a top uni) = high paying job.

Life sciences pay much less unless you are ready to pursue a PhD or MD, in such case the numbers are somewhat comparable.

A person who pursued biochemistry bachelor as a terminal degree or studied English literature has all information to know the opportunity costs of their decisions.

That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar.

I'm familiar with a certain materials science startup in England that lost out on a round of funding in the dotcom bust and went bankrupt soon after. The chief chemist, a very capable man, went back to his native country in the Former Eastern Bloc and worked in a shipyard for a couple of years. It was that bad.

but his similarly skilled native born co-worker, probably found his footing in a decent job. The privileges of citizenship. And I don't say that in a sarcastic way.

There was nothing that the OP said that would imply the person wasn't a citizen, much less that they had troubles because of their citizenship.

Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.

Picking a major should not be like Indiana Jones picking which grail to drink from.

Even better would be true market rate pricing for majors.

Why are all majors 4 years? Why does a poetry major cost the same as an engineering major?

The universities say there's value in a liberal arts education beyond actual economic value? Fine, but someone is going to be subsidizing it somewhere - if the schools actually value it beyond the market rate and want to donate funds from more economically viable majors to it then fine, but it shouldn't be the students paying for the overpriced poetry degree.

If degree costs were reflective of their true economic value then there would be less risk. An economically useless degree would at least be cheap in cost (if not in time).

All majors being the same length and cost is a sign that something is broken.

> Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.

Oddly enough, a couple of the best programmers I have ever work with are now CTOs at their respective companies. One of them had an english degree and the other a music degree.

Just yesterday there was an article here on HN about the importance of writing.

So, which majors would you consider non-viable?

Would you agree that their college education was a waste of time and money?

Not at all. In fact the english degree is probably one of the more useful degrees to have. Knowing how to write and communicate effectively is key to many jobs, and is useful over an entire career. I should add, that he told me he even felt this way.

I'm not so sure about the music degree, but I can see the general skills of being detail oriented and working with a team as an IC to create something bigger as key life skills useful in any job.

Meanwhile, I got a CS degree when OO was big and nearly minored in business. I haven't looked at OO in years for programming, but the business courses I took have been key every step of my career. I wish I had taken more writing classes.

>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition

That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors.

It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they hear that psychology or sociology are STEM and therefore a meal ticket, and end up taking out loans for a worthless degree simply because they had it drilled in their heads that they needed to go to college and major in something "useful".

Why is this being downvoted? Strange.

I graduated in 2007 and your observation is the same as mine. Students go to school without really thinking about what is next. I'm guessing that is a result of a middle/upper middle class upbringing. I noticed international students were a lot more driven, on average. I went to a small, liberal arts college that was not highly selective in admissions.

Even with the talented and studious, very few had any real idea of what was next. Why do we encourage so much debt just for the supposed sake of edification.

I will say, though, that it was a really fun time in my life. So maybe that's worth it?

I think lots of it is due to bad biased advice. True story, on my first day of college, at the convocation, the university president told his true story about how he decided to stay at university for an extra year "to study the classics" and what an amazing decision this was for him. He encouraged everyone to seek erudition.

I wonder how many students accepted that as fact. Because it is indeed a great strategy if you are wealthy and have a social-network safety net waiting to bail you out with a nice job after graduation. But for working class students like myself, it is horrible advice. I couldn't have graduated a moment too soon, I need to help my mom with rent, pay loans, etc.

You have wealthy "successful" academics and others giving advice that is noble but unrealistic and downright harmful in some cases.

It's more complicated, and a deeper problem than that.

For example, I'm one of those former psych majors, and though those majors are full of people who aren't good at math, there's also a lot of them who know more computer science and math than some of the comp sci majors I've worked with. In fact, a common problem for psych majors and other students is to take the first couple of psych courses, think it's a breeze, and then hit advanced courses with cognitive modeling, neuroscience, epidemiology, and genetics, and realize it is basically STEM.

The problem with this is that everyone who took those first couple of classes, or didn't, has this stereotype of psych as all involving people laying around on couches discussing past lives or something. So you might have a psych major who did a thesis involving neural network models and cognition, maybe with some imaging involving a cutting edge system in the imaging center, working with physicists, and they will get looked down on by employers. Meanwhile the comp sci undergrad who barely gets python and did their group final project on some kind of toy webapp is qualified.

I have family who are making significant money in web development who are actually English majors, who just happened to have the right connections at the right time. When I was in undergrad, comp sci was filled with a glut of unmotivated students who just wanted a degree for a job, and we were all being told that there wasn't going to be demand for comp sci degrees because there would be too many grads in it and you could always learn that stuff through different means. My father, who is now in medical administration with an MD, talked me out of biochem and biology degrees because he couldn't find employment with those degrees and had to go on to grad school.

So what do we make of a degree? Does my dad's biochem degree suddenly become more valuable when it's a stepping stone to an MD program? Did that family member with a "worthless" liberal arts degree waste their money when they're making a comfortable income in the tech sector?

The deeper problem is that people are seen one-dimensionally, as equal to some degree, rather than their experiences, like college is some glorified vocational certification program.

Whenever we talk about "worthwhile" versus "worthless" degrees at some level what we're accepting is this idea that someone's skillset is defined by the degree, rather than the degree being an indicator of part of a skillset.

Society used to see things in the latter way, and at some point it transitioned to the former.

I'd say a bigger problem isn't that undergraduate psych is easy, but rather just that _so many_ students that don't really know what they want to do take it, causing like a permanent glut of psych undergrads.

My major was also very popular, but about 1/3 students in computer engineering drop or switch majors, most after the first year. Fair or not weedouts and things to reduce the glut of undergrads. At least at my school the graduation rate for the psych school was way higher.

Reading your comment really affected me just now. I work in the video games industry, and since entry-level positions are quite competitive (video games are quite popular with younger folks), people make a lot of decisions to take a focused, employer-attractive, career path to be hired. Firms will often hire aspiring designers that have worked doing QA for a few years as well as programmers that have spent a lot of time intentionally studying C++ and rendering.

I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm my coworkers have, but sometimes I feel like the expertise in the industry is too overspecialized. Perhaps it's a product of larger-budget games being more conservative by financial/organizational necessity, but I'd appreciate if the people working there were more well-rounded. I would love more game designers to have a liberal-arts background to inject into their ideas.

>The deeper problem is that people are seen one-dimensionally, as equal to some degree, rather than their experiences, like college is some glorified vocational certification program.

This wasn't a problem when college was an exclusive program with standards that maintained prestige. Those standards have been gradually eroding as we faced collective political and corporate pressure to "open college up to everybody."

Intelligence and ability are heavily skewed distributions. The purpose of college was once to develop and certify those near the top. Now we're in some weird PC transition zone where standards have been lowered (this is evidenced by the fact that the distribution of intelligence has not changed, but nearly 50% of people have a degree).

Imagine if we decided that everyone needed to learn and play basketball and started letting everyone into the NBA. Imagine what would happen to the sport if we decided there were too many straight black men playing and we needed better representation of women and other groups. Sure, if you institute society-wide training, people on average might get a little at basketball, but nothing will change the fact that a tiny percentage of the population is able to play at a professional competitive later.

The only difference here is that intelligence is far less visible. There's far more room for decades of excuses and second chances when we have drilled into two generations now that anyone is capable of being a rocket scientist and all we need to do is go to school and try. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I don't fully agree with your post, but you do make some good points. In The Netherlands I have seen some majors go downhill (hello psychology!), while others became a bit tougher actually (hello computer science!).

In the Netherlands though, what I've noticed is that high school was tough (if you did STEM high school that is). IMO, high school was way tougher than university, considering the skills you had at the time and effort you needed to put in.

Even computer science is a cake walk compared to that, because at university people tend to be more motivated than in high school.

Just to put numbers on that, nothing pays off quite like science and engineering: https://studentloanhero.com/featured/majors-students-debt/

I truly believe that it should be illegal for state-funded universities to collect tuition from students that are "undecided" in their major.

So students remain undecided as long as possible to enroll in as many undergrad classes as possible? your proposition makes no sense to me. I believe as an 18 year old, you need to begin seriously taking responsibility for your decisions, and if you choose to go to school, you absolutely should pay for it. the cost argument is totally separate, colleges should be much more affordable IMO, but there shouldn't be free rides for remaining "undeclared", that would have perverse incentives.

I guess what I said was too ambiguous. What I meant was that undecided or undeclared should not even be allowed to go to university

I'm not sure I agree with that. I was undecided for 2 years (of the typical 4 at a US institution). It wasn't a problem and didn't cost me anything. Expecting an 18 year old to commit to a program seems a bit excessive (yes, we do it for professional programs like nursing and engineering - but not all students are the same, both of those programs have high wash-out rates, and at least with engineering, if you get a job doing other things).