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Majors that pay: STEM — and government

November 29, 2012 by

Payscale’s Majors That Pay You Back starts with engineering majors: Petroleum engineers start at $98,000 and earn a median mid-career salary of $163,000.  Then comes other STEM majors such as applied math, computer science, statistics and physics.

Government is the top-earning non-STEM major, as measured by mid-career pay, at the 14th spot. Government majors start at $42,000 and hit $95,600 by mid-career, according to Payscale.

Economics is 15th and international relations is 16th. Then it’s back to STEM majors till urban planning pops up at #40.

Education is #110 with a median starting salary of $37,200 and mid-career median of $55,000.

Some of the lowest-paying majors — special education, Biblical studies, social work and child and family studies — make the list of Majors That Change the World.

Most new jobs don’t require a college degree, notes Cost of College. However, most of the fastest growing jobs — retail sales, home health aide, personal care aide, clerical worker — pay poorly.

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Pell isn’t for the poor any more

October 9, 2012 by

Designed to help low-income students go to college, Pell Grants increasingly are going to middle-class students, an analyst writes.

What’s a degree worth in job market?  Virginia’s new data base answers that question — at least for graduates who work in the state.

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Microsoft engineers teach high school

October 3, 2012 by

Microsoft engineers are teaching high school computer classes (with the help of regular teachers) to encourage young people to pursue technical careers, reports the New York Times. The company, founded by education philanthropist Bill Gates, has issued a report on educating young people for science, math and technology jobs,  A National Talent Strategy.

There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 14,000 American students received undergraduate degrees in computer science last year, the Computing Research Association estimates. And the wider job market remains weak.

“People can’t get jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.

Microsoft pays engineers a small stipend to teach at least two high school classes a week for a full school year.

Google funds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders as well as computer science workshops for high school teachers, the Times reports.

Fewer high school students are taking computer science, according to the U.S. Education Department.  However, the number of computer science bachelor’s degrees has been rising for four years, after years of decline.

In 2012, a new graduate with a computer science degree started at $58,300, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

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Tennessee: 2-year degree pays off

September 27, 2012 by

New associate-degree graduates in Tennessee average higher earnings than four-year graduates. Health care, construction and technology are top-earning fields for two-year graduates.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Community colleges will get $500 million in federal grants to fund job training.

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Learn more, earn more

September 21, 2012 by

People who learn more, earn more. However, the rate of return is high on associate degrees because community college tuition is so low.

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‘Middle’ skills lead to middle-class jobs

September 19, 2012 by

Career technical education is “the missing middle ground in American education and workforce preparation,”  concludes a new report. There are 29 million jobs paying middle-class wages — $35,000 to $75,000 a year — that are open to workers with employer-based training, industry or college certifications, apprenticeships and associate degrees.

Students need to know there’s a third path to success that gets them much farther than a high school diploma and doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree, writes a community college president.

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10 low-earning college majors

September 15, 2012 by

Anthropology leads Kiplinger’s Worst College Majors for Your Career. It combines low pay and high unemployment. Anthro majors are twice as likely as the average college graduate to end up working in retail in a job that doesn’t require a college education.

Unemployment rate: 6.9%
Recent grad employment rate: 10.5%
Median salary: $40,000
Median salary for recent grads: $28,000
Projected job growth for this field, 2010-2020: 21%
Likelihood of working retail: 2.1 times average

Many anthropology graduates “are studying a culture they didn’t expect: the intergenerational American household, as seen from their parents’ couch.”  Nearly a third of recent grads are in low-paying office or sales jobs. Recent graduates average $28,000 per year, less than the median pay for someone with only a high school diploma. Students interested in foreign cultures would do better to major in international relations, Kiplinger suggests.

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Fine arts, film/photography, studio arts, graphic design and drama/theater also are low-earnings, high-retail majors.  Also on the list: philosophy and religious studies, sociology, liberal arts and my major, English.

I’d guess that arts and theater majors understand they’re going to struggle to make a living. Do sociology majors know their odds?

Ann Althouse quotes from Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

I’m not sure writing bad poetry constitutes practicing art or enlarges the soul.

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Study: 2-year for-profit students earn more

August 29, 2012 by

Associate degree students at for-profit colleges raise their earnings as much as community college students — or more — concludes a new study. Students who choose the more costly for-profit option are nearly twice as likely to earn a degree as community college students, even though the for-profit students are more likely to be poor, black, single parents and GED holders.

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Britain: More degrees are worth less

August 22, 2012 by

College –and debt — for all isn’t just a U.S. thing. Students must be told the whole truth about the value of a college degree, writes Fraser Nelson in Britain’s Telegraph.

To listen to ministers talk about university education, it is as if Britain has entered an academic arms race with the rest of the world. China’s universities, we’re told, are spewing out six million graduates a year: we must compete, or we’re doomed. In the Blair years, a national target was set: half of all young people ought to enter higher education. They’d have to get into debt, but they were reassured it would be a worthwhile investment.

The real picture is more complex, Nelson argues. “In many lines of work, those who did not get the A-levels for university now have a future just as bright (or otherwise) as the graduates.”

Students are told they’ll earn much more with a degree — but a degree in what? Golf Management? Trade  Union Studies? The college premium diminishes for students with less rigorous degrees, especially for men. Humanities graduates also fare poorly, according to a recent government report, Nelson writes.

Those who graduate in the subjects I studied, history and philosophy, can expect to earn a paltry £35 a year more than non-graduates. For graduates in “mass communication” the premium is just £120 a year. But both are better value than a degree in “creative arts”, where graduates can actually expect to earn £15,000 less, over a lifetime, than those who start work aged 18.

Almost a third of recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t require higher education and one in 10 is “on the dole.”

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Algebra pays

August 13, 2012 by

Learning algebra is essential for low-income minority students who hope to go to college, writes Ryan Hall, who teaches eighth graders at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn.

 Algebra requires students to learn how to see patterns, how to generalize these patterns into rules, and most importantly how to make connections and solve problems.

If nothing else, mastering algebra is like doing push-ups, Hall writes. “Algebra makes your brain stronger.”

Math isn’t just for “math people,” Hall writes. All students can master algebra if they’re willing to “struggle and persevere.” His school devotes two hours a day to math. Teachers are coached on planning and executing lessons.

For every two-hour lesson plan I deliver, I spend many hours preparing that plan to ensure that it is flawless for my students. And we are driven by data. We assess regularly to know who is getting it and who is not, and then we intervene with supports for any students who need them.

But hey, these are kids. So we also play games like algebra Pictionary and algebra Taboo to help students learn vocabulary and practice communicating. We race to see who can factor the most polynomials in a minute. We have “Mathletes” practice at lunch and compete on Saturdays.

When his students said they should get paid for going to school, he devoted a class to calculating how much extra they’d earn as adults if they succeeded in class.

We basically found the additional income of having a college degree over the length of a normal career, and then divided that by the total hours they spend in classrooms from K through 12. They were amazed at how much they actually “earn” — and of course, they were even more invested after that.

Two hours day for math? It’s not surprising that 98 percent of his eighth-grade algebra students passed New York’s Regents exam.

 

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