Journalist Ben Casselman (formerly of Wall Street Journal, now of FiveThirtyEight.com) has analyzed economic outcomes of the choice of majors: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major/
He provides a tool in which you can input a major (say political science), and learn the median, 25th and 75th percentile earnings.
From the introduction:
"The link between education and earnings is notoriously fraught, with cause and effect often difficult to disentangle. But a look at detailed data on college graduates by major reveals some clear messages: Don’t be pre-med if you aren’t planning to go to medical school; don’t assume that all “STEM” — science, technology, engineering and math — majors are the same; and if you study drama, be prepared to wait tables.
Those lessons might seem obvious, but there’s evidence that many students aren’t learning them. By far the most popular major in recent years, psychology, is also one of the lowest-paying and leaves more than half its graduates working in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Many of those students no doubt would have chosen to study psychology even if they had known about their uncertain career prospects. But research has consistently shown that many colleges and universities do little to push their students to make informed choices about what to study.
For all the recent skepticism about the value of a college education, a bachelor’s degree is still “worth it” on average. In fact, according to a recent analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average value of a college degree is near an all-time high, even factoring in rising tuitions.
But the key word there is “average.” The same Fed researchers also found that the lowest-earning 25 percent of college graduates earn less than about half of high school graduates — and the high school grads also had four years to make money while the college students were taking on debt. And those figures don’t include the shockingly high percentage of college students who don’t graduate, many of whom end up with the worst of both worlds: saddled with debt, but with no degree to help their job prospects...."
↧