In last week’s post we talked about how college is stupid, in that we go about college all the wrong way. As of 2019 41% of recent college graduates work jobs that don’t require a degree (source). College is sold to us at every opportunity, but for the wrong reasons and at entirely the wrong price. The silver lining is that if there’s a wrong way to do college, there must be a right way also. Let’s talk about the smart way to do college.
Pick your Degree before you pick your School
Boiled down to my most salient piece of advice, if you want to do college smart you should pick your degree before you pick your school. If the most important criteria when picking a college are academics, job placement, how it looks on a resume, and cost, then your major should be decided before even looking at colleges.
I know many people change their major while in school, but most of those are people who didn’t have a plan going into college. Usually these are people who just signed up for college and decided on a major without giving it much thought.
There should be lots of thought put into a decision that costs this much money, but sadly that’s often not the case. Deciding where to go to college before deciding on a field of study is like taking an expensive trip overseas without deciding what you want to do there: not a great plan.
Pick your school based on your chosen major
I know of several people who went to small liberal arts colleges and then discovered these colleges didn’t offer engineering degrees. They ended up going into math or physics because they couldn’t do engineering. Take a guess how useful a B.A. in physics is from a small liberal arts college. Hint: not that useful. Most of these students ended up transferring, or going on to grad school so they could get a more useful degree. And that’s after paying a 300% markup for tuition because they went to a private liberal arts school.
So decide on a field of study and then find the best school to pursue that field of study. The best school doesn’t have to be Harvard, but find the best school for your desired field of study for the right price, in the right location. For me that best choice was the University of Nebraska. It was a cheap public university with a great engineering school. It was 20 minutes away from family, and my church had subsidized student housing.
What if I end up changing my major?
Many people do change their major, but if you’ve actually decided on a field of study, you’ll probably stick to at least that relative field. Many people drop out of electrical engineering, but they often switch to some other type of engineering so most of their classes will transfer. I seriously considered switching majors to Laser Physics. It’s not engineering but nearly all of my credits would transfer.
What if I don’t know what I want to study?
Then don’t go to college. College is a really expensive way to try to find out what you want to do for a career. Find something that you can do that will make ends meet in the meantime, and take some time to figure out what you actually want to do.
Not all majors are Created Equal
I think it goes without saying, but some degrees are useful and some degrees are useless. Liberal arts degrees are useless. Useful majors give you marketable skills, which I’m defining as a skill that you can take with you to a different career or that employers are looking for. The problem with college is that most degrees don’t teach you skills. They may teach a lot of facts but it’s hard to get a job where all you do is know facts. Most companies want you to be able to perform some sort of task that bring in revenue.
Heck even underwater basket weaving teaches a more marketable skill than most liberal arts. But lest you think I’m just an apologist for the hard sciences, I don’t think Biology gives you any marketable skills either. There’s a reason most people who get a bachelor’s degree in science end up going to grad school. Most bachelor’s degrees don’t give you marketable skills.
Smart Majors
Why are ten of the top ten highest paid degrees engineering? Because engineering is a marketable skill. Problem solving, computer programming, design, soldering, laboratory work… these are all skills that you can learn in college that employers are interested in. Other non-engineering degrees like teaching, foreign language, or business, also teach marketable skills. As the world gets smaller and more intertwined, being able to speak a foreign language is immeasurably helpful to companies and interpreters are highly sought after.
Business is often called “the universal major of all” because everything is a business, but that makes it marketable. Specialized business degrees like marketing, economics, accounting, and management are always desirable to hiring managers. (My one caveat here is that if you get a business degree just because it sounds like it might be marketable but don’t have a plan on how to use it, that is not a useful degree.)
Not-So-Smart Majors
Art history, on the other hand, doesn’t teach any marketable skills. I’m not saying you can’t get a job with an art history degree or even that you can’t get a job in that field, but it’s not marketable to anyone else. Philosophy or religious studies is another example. Personally I find them to be fascinating subjects, but no one so far has offered me money to philosophize. It’s not a marketable skill.
The same goes for English, or sociology, or psychology. I’m not saying they’re useless degrees, but there is a reason only 27% of college graduates end up getting a job in the same field as their major (source). And 41% of recent college graduates end up in jobs that don’t even require a degree (source) or they go on to get their PHD. The majority of majors are interchangeable because very few of them actually teach you marketable skills.
Trade Schools
What’s a good way to learn skills? Trade schools, community colleges, and apprenticeships offer cheap avenues to learn marketable skills. Apprenticeships and trade schools are becoming passé, but community college is growing faster than ever. People often look down on a 2-year degree as less valuable than a 4-year degree, but an associates in welding will make you way more money than a bachelor’s in psychology ever will.
If you are interested in working with computers but don’t want the stress of getting a computer science degree, you get an associates in information technology or database management for a whole lot less money. Also those jobs are pretty plentiful and well paid. And if you find you really like programming you can then transfer to a university and finish up a 4-year degree.
Again, I’m not anti-college or pro-trade schools or anything, I’m just saying that you should pick a career path before going to college, and you should major in something that makes your marketable for that career path. They say “get a job doing something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” That’s lovely. If you find a company that will pay me to go hiking through the mountains, please let me know. But for the rest of us, employers pay employees to do things because they wouldn’t do them for free. If you want to succeed in life, you need to:
- find a career that is in demand
- Pick a major that will train you to be effective at that career
- Pick a college that is well-equipped to teach you that major
- Work hard to make yourself stand out to employers
Conclusion
While college isn’t the right idea for everyone, there is a smart way to do college. If you decide on a good career first and then pick a major that will equip you to excel in that career, you’re off to a good start. Last post we discussed the wrong reasons to choose a specific college. Today we learned that the smart way to choose a college is to find a good school for your chosen major. In our next post I’ll give my solution to the college problem.
What do you think? Am I being too harsh on liberal arts? What did you study in college? Let us know in the comments below.
