When I was in college every student I knew in the School of Education had been on the verge of flunking out. It and the School of Social Services were the dumping grounds for dum dums.
How much do underwater basket weavers make these days?
I’m done with my MBA, can I sell it?
Hey, I bet those degrees in Womyn’s, Queer, and various minority studies pay exceptionally well. (snicker)
I would call those rates of pay “not a bad living,” if you don’t have a lot of debt, and especially if you’re in a two-earner marriage. As the article points out, many of these can at least find jobs, either because they’re at low levels of the leviathan state (school teacher, social worker) or because they’re useful skills (cooking) or part of the leisure/entertainment blob (athletic trainer).
The first 5 of those college degrees listed lead to government jobs. A 40k/yr median income salary at full time employment with benefits funded by taxpayers is pretty attractive to a jobless liberal arts graduate in a nation with a real world unemployment rate of 20%.
My son studied astronomy . . . well, he took up space.
Medieval Plumbing degrees aren’t too well received either.
2012 Worst Paying College Degrees...?
Federal Government Ethics...
The five on the lowest end of that scale usually wind up in government jobs, so salary is misleading as they rack up tons of benefits not accounted for in salary.
Keep your child out of college for two years starting next September. Why are you working two jobs and missing vacations to saddle your beloved child with tens of thousands of dollars of debt? Keep them home. The universities will laugh like Snuffleupagus did over the Hostess workers, but you decrease the student population by 50% for a couple of years and the universities have to lower tuition.
I can believe that for the Special Education category. If they are going to devote their lives helping children with various disabilities, then God Bless them. Tough work, and appreciated work.
bkmk
This story was floating around FR a month ago, I think. There are soooooooo many degrees missing from the list ... all of the PC ones.
Education is an odd major. If you want to be a teacher, you would normally get a degree in some field, and then get a masters in Education.
I guess if you want to teach general elementary school, you’d get an education degree.
Interestingly, while education in general pays low for a college degree, the unemployment rate for people with education degrees is very low.
5 of the top 20 employment fields for POPULAR majorgs are education degrees; all are higher than civil engineering.
BTW, 5 of the top 7 fields are medical; the other two are agriculture and industrial production. I would NOT have guessed those last two.
My field, electrical engineering, came in 25th, tied with math and environmental science. Behind civil engineering, which in my day was the engineering field for people who couldn’t pass real engineering courses..... :-)
I can say that because my wife is a civil engineer.
BTW,the top 5 employment majors aren’t popular ones. And they include computer science, which I would have thought would be a very popular major and would not have good employment numbers because I thought there would be a glut of programmers.
Astrophysics/astronomy 0%
Geological and geophysics engineering 0%
Physical science 2.5%
Geosciences 3.2%
Math/computer science 3.5%
I wonder why every astronomy major gets a job?
How did they arrive at those figures? Those salaries are pretty good by local standards. The University of Kentucky, for example, pay less than any of those salaries above for Research Analysts or Principle Lab Techs with Master’s degrees in scientific fields.
How about salaries and employment rates for African-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer (their term, not mine) Studies, etc.?
Not listed is degrees in theology. Some of these people takes vows of poverty, outright. Others are doomed to poverty by their choice. Rarely do you become the pastor of a mega church.
How much do poetry majors pull in a year?
I wonder what a degree in transgendered studies pays?