It is really hard to find a well-paying job in this economy. Half of all recent college grads are ending up under employed or unemployed. A record twenty-five percent of minimum wage jobs are held by college grads. Your major matters. (I’ve seen studies that show your major matters more than school.) A bachelor’s degree in something like biology or psychology may very well have you joining that one third of 18-34 year olds living with their parents. If you have student loans, you may end up stuck trying to pay them off while working two part time jobs.
In January, 2015 I was in Dallas to watch the Ohio State Buckeyes win the first ever College Football Playoff Championship Game over the Oregon Ducks. Coming home through DFW I stopped to grab one last Texas BBQ sandwich and joined in a conversation with a couple recent graduates of the University of Louisiana Lafayette—Ragin’ Cajuns.
One (Music Production) was behind the counter doling out brisket, chips, and beer, and the other (Engineering) was a customer catching a plane to his new energy sector job in Houston. This is just one example of how decisions on choosing a college major today can have widely disparate outcomes.
Two decades ago in his book, “Another Way To Win,” Dr. Kenneth Gray coined the term “one way to win.”
The OWTW strategy widely followed in the US for decades is:
- Graduate from high school.
- Matriculate at a four-year college.
- Graduate with a degree in anything.
- Become employed in a professional job.
Dr. Gray’s message to the then “academic middle” was that this was unlikely to be a successful strategy in the future. The succeeding twenty years have proven him inordinately prescient and not just for the “academic middle.”
I could be the “poster boy” for OWTW. Over a half century ago I graduated with a “nothing” degree and a modest GPA. On a whim I answered a newspaper ad. On the basis of that “piece of sheepskin” I got an interview. I got the job with a Fortune 100 computer company, and my career was launched. (I had never seen a computer.)
What Dr. Gray and I know is that college in American doesn’t work that way anymore.
I’ve written ad nauseam about the reasons. Here’s one of my posts on that subject:
Hopefully, by this point, I have convinced you that the old “pulling a major out of the hat” is not likely to work out well for you. “Get to the point!” you say.
Well here is my advice. I have two interrelated recommendations:
Flip the College Decision Making Paradigm
Dr. Kevin Fleming emphasizes the importance of choosing a career first, a marketable major second, and, lastly, the school. See “Flip the College Decision Making Paradigm,” chapter in his book, “(RE)Defining The Goal: The True Path to Career Readiness in the 21st Century.”
You don’t have to figure out your life’s work. We have entered a world where “lifetime learning” is required. It is likely you will have multiple careers. However Fleming (and I) suggest you begin to chart a course to your first real, well-paying job.
Start exploring careers. Have your parents take you to “Career Night” at your local hospital. Go to “STEM Camp” at a nearby college. Join a club. Start a club. Volunteer. With your parent’s help arrange some “shadow days.” Talk to teachers. Scouting can be a useful resource for some.
You probably have access to free career counseling. I’m not a big fan of high school guidance counselors. Most have been programmed to reflexively funnel you into a four year college. (The more naïve teenagers they can funnel, the better their high school ranking.) However they do have the training and the tools to provide career counseling. Take advantage of that applying a hefty “pinch of salt.”
There are other, more objective, sources of career counseling available at a price. One example is https://www.MapInMe.com. (For this service you’ll need to be at least a sophomore.)
This shouldn’t be viewed as a chore or high pressure. The volunteering you do is going to check some boxes that need to be checked in any event. As you get more confident in interacting with adults who are strangers, your social skills will improve. Exploring, learning about stuff and yourself, can be fun.
Teens’ career searches progress at different rates. (My dentist set the record. He knew he wanted to be a dentist at age twelve.) Hopefully by your junior year you’ll have a career or two in mind. At this point, with your parent’s help you need to do the research on the post-secondary education required. This could very well turn out to be a particular college major. Pin down that major, and you will be well positioned to start the process of selecting a school.
There is a secondary, but very significant, advantage to the “Fleming Flip.” Arriving at the gates of the ivied halls without having identified a career and a major increases the probability that you will require additional semesters to complete your degree. Those semesters translate into expense dollars. (Seventy-five percent of students require more than four years to graduate. Sifting through various majors is a major culprit.)
The third argument for choosing a career and a major before the school is that you can’t make an intelligent decision on student loans unless you have a target career.
Make It Marketable
You have been given a lot of bad advice about “following your passion.” Over several decades of your working life your passion is going to change. You may not be that good at your passion. (At one point in my life I was playing tennis night and day. I was never going to be good enough to make a living at it.) Most importantly your passion may not be marketable.
College today is a competition for a few good jobs. There are two candidates for every suitable position. Marketable majors tend to be academically difficult. Employers know this.
When forty percent of high school graduates matriculate at four year colleges employers have hundreds of applicants. The hiring process is essentially a filtering process. (In the-good-old-days when seven percent went on to college the only major screen was “a degree in anything.” Today you may be faced with a resume robot programmed with complex criteria.) You may be the absolute best fit imaginable for the open position, but you are never going to get an interview to prove that with your degree in Underwater Basket Weaving.
There is an important corollary here. The economy rewards smart people. However you may very well be smart enough to get a college degree, but not smart enough to graduate with a challenging, marketable major and get a well-paying job given the existing imbalance in supply (college grads) and demand (good jobs).
You need to do some research on this. The good news is that you have the Internet. Here’s one list of ten marketable majors:
Notes:
This post is going to draw a lot of pushback in the nature of, “I graduated with a degree in Canadian Studies, and now I’m making $1,500,000 annually as the CEO of Reingeer Incorporated. If you dig a little deeper, I’m pretty sure most of these comments are coming from folks who graduated pre-Great Recession of 2008. College in America doesn’t work the way it used to.
I know that arranging a shadow day feels a little weird, but the person you are going to be shadowing is going to be thrilled. Their spouse and kids have no interest in their job at all. Your hanging around is going to be the highlight of their week. Junior Achievement has a “job shadowing” program for middle schoolers.
Don’t underestimate the power of volunteerism. I’ve met a young lady who has done a lot of volunteer work at hospitals. She’s a sophomore and believes nursing is in her future. She knows that good grades are a requirement. She may change her mind, but she has a good foundation for making a career decision. She is also laying down a robust foundation for being accepted into this highly competitive field.
Don’t get me wrong. I think passion is a great thing. I’ve had several over seventy-five years—one, duplicate bridge, lasted a half century. Just don’t confuse a hobby with your career.
Psychology is the most popular major in the US. In 2013-14 nine percent of graduates got a degree in Psychology. If college graduates with a bachelor’s are “a dime a dozen,” in today’s economy then those with a bachelor’s in Psychology must be five cents a dozen. And yet, it seems, nobody thinks about this until they graduate, asking, “What can I do with a degree in Psychology?” The answer is likely to be, “Make lattes.”
When you are doing research on marketable majors you are likely to come across PayScale.com or studies that use PayScale data. This is another of those “pinch of salt” deals. PayScale collects their information through surveys. Guess which employees are more likely to respond to a survey?
Speak Your Mind