Spotted on the way to an appointment in the PATH on one of those newsfeed/ad TV serving things: “Study: degrees in some fields have more value than others” (roughly paraphrased because I don’t have a degree in memory.) And by value, they mean income potential, of course. Because news cycle.
My first reaction was the incredible hope that the study was from academia and was funded by some government agency or another, because what kind of field day could I have with that? (Answer: a great big one.) But no, after tracking it down [PDF] I found out it was from CIBC World Markets. Oddly, they didn’t position it as a recruiting tool with economics being the most valuable field of study of them all (that nod went to engineering.)
The overall theme is something like “these darned kids will never learn, they keep going into fields where there aren’t hot job markets” and they wait until the second last paragraph to ponder why that might be:
[quote]Differences in intrinsic traits such as ability and motivation could be a driver. As well, the joy of learning a less-technical subject, rather than a focus on potential future earnings, could be driving the continual increase in students of relatively low-paying fields of study.[/quote]
Imagine that: it’s possible, just maybe, that not everyone can do engineering, and some people actually don’t want to in the first place!
Not that I’m one to talk. Despite taking an economics course in my undergrad and doing not-terrible at it (by my definition at the time, which was not failing,) I had a joke I used with my business student friends at the time who were baffled that the computer guy was doing better than some of them (my, what low standards we had for ourselves!) and that was this: to pass economics 101, when unsure of the answer one should pick the option that made the least sense. And I wasn’t really kidding.
So kudos to the economics team at CIBC, and on those days where you’re sitting in your cubicle thinking about how you’d give it all up to learn pottery, if only it wasn’t too late, remember this: you make way better charts and graphs than I do.
Anyway, it’s a bit of a bummer that the ultimate problem identified in the paper is the lack of skilled workers for many of the jobs requiring higher-income fields of study (because not enough arts students are switching majors) and not the lack of opportunities for people who opt for “less lucrative” courseloads. Students, regardless of their chosen specialty, really need to get better at marketing themselves, and if we can improve those job prospects, working with the skills we have, the overall economy is bound to improve. Or maybe not – that’s just the options that makes sense to me.