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Education IT

Liberal Arts Majors Eventually Earn More Than STEM Majors (indstate.edu) 122

The conventional wisdom that liberal arts majors earn less than compsci majors may be true for the first job, but not necessarily for an entire career, reports the New York Times, in an article shared by jds91md (and republished by Indiana State's College of Arts and Sciences). "By age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up." This happens for two reasons. First, many of the latest technical skills that are in high demand today become obsolete when technology progresses. Older workers must learn these new skills on the fly, while younger workers may have learned them in school. Skill obsolescence and increased competition from younger graduates work together to lower the earnings advantage for STEM degree-holders as they age.

Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don't create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers.

Some other interesting stats from the article:
  • STEM salaries grew more slowly -- and the field experienced a higher exit rate. "Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills."
  • High-paying jobs in management, business and law raise the average salary of all social science/history majors.

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Liberal Arts Majors Eventually Earn More Than STEM Majors

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  • by crow ( 16139 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:43PM (#59250626) Homepage Journal

    Looking at the average salary when you have a few CEOs making millions tossed in doesn't mean much for what most people can expect. The median salary gives much more useful information, but you really want a sense of the distribution.

    And anything meaningful should break down post-graduate education. I once saw a study of the value of various degrees that excluded anyone with post-graduate degrees, and not surprisingly, the worst majors were psychology and pre-med. Those degrees are pretty useless without grad school, and they probably have a very high percentage of graduates who were excluded in the study. So, yes, a liberal arts degree with a law degree probably beats most STEM degrees, and for those with 20+ years of experience, an MBA probably also beats most STEM degrees, but for those not getting those post-graduate degrees, STEM is probably still a winner.

    • Also, is the time value of money considered? Savings/investments from 20 years earlier should be reasonably more valuable than reaching the same remuneration way later in life.
    • Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:36PM (#59250750)

      The median salary gives much more useful information, but you really want a sense of the distribution.

      Also maybe we should compartmentalize the results into:

      Anyone who went to Harvard/Yale
      STEM
      Business Majors
      All other Majors / schools

      Anyone really think that last section will come out ahead of STEM...

      • Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @08:46PM (#59251192)

        Also maybe we should compartmentalize the results into: ...

        TFA does NONE of that. There is no data, no explanation of methodology, and no references to anything other than a paywalled NY Times article.

        Probably written by an English major.

        What TFA appears to be doing is comparing the salaries of CEOs to engineers, while ignoring Starbucks baristas and Uber drivers.

        I dismiss TFA as unsubstantiated nonsense. I does not match any of my observations from looking at friends, family, and coworkers. The techs are doing way better, and the gap does not narrow with age.

        • Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ranton ( 36917 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:21AM (#59252246)

          TFA does NONE of that. There is no data, no explanation of methodology, and no references to anything other than a paywalled NY Times article.

          And everything it does say to hint about its methodology is suspect. First off I don't see any direct mention of statistics which show Liberal Arts majors ever make more on average, just that they catch up. If they catch up but don't start making more, then they are still making less over their career. Second, this comment is most telling about their methodology:

          STEM salaries grew more slowly -- and the field experienced a higher exit rate. "Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills."

          If they are removing STEM workers who moved into management from their calculations, but are including art history majors who eventually go into management or law, then of course Liberal Arts majors are catching up. They are removing many of the highest paid STEM workers from their calculations because they apparently don't count as STEM anymore. I cannot be sure they actually are doing this, but without any precise explanation of their methodology these types of statements are all we have to go on.

          High-paying jobs in management, business and law raise the average salary of all social science/history majors.

          It would be interesting if they showed the average earnings of STEM trained individuals who entered management, business, and law compared to Liberal Arts trained workers. They probably have access to this information if they did an even remotely competent job of running this study, and it would be one of the more direct ways of showing which type of education was more valuable.

          That said, I think most good STEM educations have a decent amount of post-secondary Liberal Arts classes so I don't think these discussions should really be about STEM vs Liberal Arts. More of STEM vs STEM + Liberal Arts vs Liberal Arts, and I would clearly choose the middle option. My experience was that STEM majors took far more English / History / Sociology / etc. classes than the number of hard science classes taken by English / History / Sociology / etc majors.

        • Perfectly valid criticisms of this particular study, but I can understand what is probably going on here. So many STEM jobs are “forty and out” positions occupied by nerds too far over on the spectrum to network their way into the kind of jobs that will ease you through to a cushy retirement.

          Take pre-law or business, on the other hand, and you will become part of the golf buddy network for life.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

      I never thought STEM made more than liberal arts majors in the long run. But STEM does get you a big leg up in the early jobs after school. And parents seem to be nearly in a panic that the kids must get that job immediately which is why there's a big push for STEM jobs.

      • So my youngest son is 28. He finally got his degree in Business Management last year but still does not have a job. He lives with his older brother, a single lawyer. His brother bought his cheap car and I pay his car insurance and he puts his living expenses on my credit card. Is it time to panic yet?
    • by Alex Clark ( 6278030 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @12:40AM (#59251600)
      I think this paper illustrates this point, I think using the same dataset: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew... [georgetown.edu] I should say I haven't been through the methods, so it may be misrepresenting in a different direction!
      • Good read. Much better than TFA this post refers to. It has actual statistics and breaks down the data is multiple ways so you can actually think about it critically, rather than just taking it or leaving it. I'd mod you up if I had points. Only down side is that it is from 2015 and the most recent data is from 2013.
  • STEM management (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:49PM (#59250638) Homepage
    They're saying that managers in a STEM field aren't working in STEM. Meanwhile, they are saying that poets who become managers (literally - this is the article's example) are still non-STEM therefore non-STEM pays.

    His makes the following comment: "we should be wary of the impulse to make college curriculums ever more technical and career focused.". Hmm. Well, my own degree was pretty technical but on the theory side. I've been working for 27 years just fine, as programmer and manager of programmers. I can assure you that as a manager of developers you still do need to be technical. You may be fooling yourself if you think you're up on the latest syntax in v48 of whatever language or framework is in current use, but fundamentals take a long time to shift and knowing different bits of syntax in language du jour simply isn't it.

    Study is...well...I suggest they go back to their own STEM field for a bit and consider their use of stats, then head to the philosophy department to polish up the consistency and coherence of their argument and position. Although to be fair he does say he's an economist where "things in field have changed much less." He's right - the field still doesn't actually work. Oh, and by an astonishing co-incidence he's Director of Social Policy. So no self-interest there then.
    • They're saying that managers in a STEM field aren't working in STEM. Meanwhile, they are saying that poets who become managers (literally - this is the article's example) are still non-STEM therefore non-STEM pays.

      No, it says the averages are for everybody who "majored in" stem vs not, whatever they went on to do with it:

      Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some

      • by mccalli ( 323026 )
        Yes but they've assumed that going into management is exiting STEM. That doesn't necessarily follow at all.
    • the reason they left is they couldn't find jobs. America shipped the factories to China. That means if you're a mechanical or electrical engineer, well, good luck finding anything in your field. Those jobs are factory management, design and process improvement and they're few and far between in the states.

      I know several mechanical engineers working in accounting and generic business analyst jobs for just this reason. It also means they never really earn to their full potential.

      I keep saying this, bu
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I worked with a guy who had a history degree. BAE taught him to code and he was pretty good at it. It's a shame employers are less willing to train people these days.

  • I studied computational linguistics and every day I had to use everything related to problem solving, critical thinking, and adapt. I currently work as a software engineer. Is this bait?
    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      I think it's less bait and more an attempt to create a narrative.

      Because you're right, it's impossible to get a STEM degree without learning those skills.

    • This should be everyone's first reaction, this is obviously not true. And liberal arts doesn't get anywhere near the skills mentioned. This article is the polar opposite of the truth
  • "Soft skills"??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stevegee58 ( 1179505 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:52PM (#59250644) Journal
    The so-called soft skill of problem solving is basically ALL engineers do. When did problem solving become a soft skill?
    • I think they get it through "experiential learning", when you fail enough you eventually find the edge of the failure space.
    • Engineers tend to be good at a particular type of problem solving and pretty poor at others. It's like the Jobs/Woz dynamic—while Woz was good at solving specific technical problems, he needed someone like Jobs to make those technical solutions relevant, funded, and appealing to consumers. Throughout my life I've met many engineers and only a small handful were decent communicators—they're also the ones that tend to work their way up to management.

      • by t0rkm3 ( 666910 )

        Wrong.

        You've developed a selection bias based on your observations and rhetoric espoused by the liberal arts majors that the 'soul of artist or human cannot exist in an engineer' whereas all of the data shows that this is exactly opposite. Look into any large and well formatted study of intelligence and it finds that those who have a higher intellect tend to do better at all fields, rather than a single metric. Those that are better at a single metric are outliers and are thus fun for idiots to point at and

        • A part of some liberal arts educations goes by names like "rhetoric" and "debating": learning the skills to be convincing, with a complete disdain for the truth. Whole fields of liberal arts are devoted to manipulating minds, such as advertising and politics.
    • by novakyu ( 636495 )

      They aren't talking about problem solving; they are talking about "problem-solve"ing. i.e. The soft-skilled bastardization of actual systemized approach to solving complex problems. It's what managers call it when they do the cargo-cult version of what their more competent subordinates do.

    • that's the "problems" they're talking about. It was implied in the sentence but, well, that kind of soft implication common to business writing is the kind of thing engineers are bad at :P.
    • I always thought "soft skills" meant dealing with people. So problem solving soft skills would be working through disagreements, constructive criticism, team building, etc. As opposed to solving engineering problems for which one would use hard skills.
  • by nyet ( 19118 )

    IOW we value stupid over smart

  • I guess teachers win the race with raise every year, whether the economy, or performance, is good or bad. Probably a better case for tech workers to unionize.
  • By age 40... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:57PM (#59250658)

    The people who majored in the more-useless subjects have given up trying to make money in their fields, and are now working in jobs that pay actual money.

    So that boss of yours who is absolutely useless, but is making $150,000 a year? That degree in Art Appreciation never actually paid off, but giving up on his dreams sure helped.

    • by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Exactly, as opposed to the average engineer that is living the dream he/she wanted. Commuting to work during rush hour, working in noisy open plan offices where we have no privacy, getting micromanaged by eight different bosses doing programming work with zero input on what he fixes going back home in traffic. Doing overtime to fill out all the TPS forms. Engineers are living it.

    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      The people who majored in the more-useless subjects have given up trying to make money in their fields, and are now working in jobs that pay actual money.

      So that boss of yours who is absolutely useless, but is making $150,000 a year? That degree in Art Appreciation never actually paid off, but giving up on his dreams sure helped.

      I know I'm not working in my educational field (and never intended to, at least for my undergraduate degree). Both my undergraduate and graduate degree were in non-STEM subjects and, while my having a graduate degree helped me get my current job, my adding of STEM skills (specifically SAS and just starting python for data science) post-educationally is what is going to get me up and out to a new job in my company.

      Assuming of course I don't get my dream job that I actually did go to school for. 3-stage int

  • Finance runs the world. In the end other job exists so that they can leverage it into making them money.

  • A lot of people with fuckoff degrees go into sales. Salespeople get promoted because they sell themselves instead of working.
  • by timholman ( 71886 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:10PM (#59250688)

    From the article:

    "Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability . Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don't create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers."

    So let me get this straight ... people in STEM careers are not problem solvers, critical thinkers, or adaptable? Seriously? Has someone misled me about what I've spent my entire career doing, and watched other engineers do?

    This is yet another example of that tired old trope: "Engineers and scientists aren't actually normal people. They're not quite right in the head." It may be wishful thinking for those unfortunate people who put themselves deeply in debt to earn a liberal arts degree with no job prospects (and reinforced by TV shows like "The Big Bang Theory"), but it's far from the truth. I've been hearing variations on this tired theme for nearly 40 years.

    The very best communicators, critical thinkers, and problem solvers that I have known in my career have been engineers and scientists. Indeed, a STEM degree provides the very foundation of critical thinking and problem solving, as it forces you to deal with the world as it actually is, instead of pretending that opinions are equivalent to facts, or that declaring "this is the way the world ought to be" is a substitute for a real solution.

    I also find it interesting that this article does not compare lifetime earnings between STEM and non-STEM majors. So how long does it take for earnings to "catch up"? Fifteen years? Twenty? It's disingenuous at best.

    • The claim is 100% BS.

      I have a sister and two nieces that are liberal arts grads. None of them earn near what I do with a BSEE.

      One can go to transparentcalifornia.com and see teacher salaries.

      It's simply not accurate.

    • by Memnos ( 937795 )

      And in many cases, the only reason those earnings caught up at all is because the non-STEM major took on three more years of debt and near-zero earnings to get a law degree or an MBA.

    • by rastos1 ( 601318 )
      STEM people are problem solvers. Liberal Arts majors are problem creators. Ajit Pai, Trump, Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, ...
    • I believe that the best communicators you know are STEM people, and that's largely true for myself as well, but the absolute worst communicators I know are ALSO STEM people, and it shows that communication was never part of any schooling that they had.

      But in any case, solving problems between people is not the same as most kinds of technical or scientific problem solving. My code is (I hope) deterministic. I can iterate on a solution, I can write partial stopgap solutions if need be; I know that there is al

  • Where they fuck up actual progress and make more money doing it.
  • Every unsuccessful IT project has some non-STEM managers pulling the strings! Sorry not trying to be facetious but I've seen managers with great soft skills that are totally out of their depth when crap starts hitting the fan... you know, the point when expensive consultants start being brought in.
  • When one looks at many degrees, its more about indoctrination. Many of the degrees furthermore provide information and knowledge that could be easily obtained by anyone through self study, without the added indoctrination of the corrupted and biased college establishment. Many people who have degrees lack real world experience and actually can be rather incompetent. The heavy rote memorization and regurgitation of "facts" in fact is sort of like brain washing which drives out real world faculties and comm

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:25PM (#59250720) Homepage Journal

    Where's the calculation of the delta over those 20 years considering asset accumulation and investment returns? Not even a rough Rule-of-72 here?

    Did a poet conduct this survey?

  • by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:29PM (#59250736) Homepage

    I'm sure gender studies graduates will rejoice, but thanks to my STEM critical thinking skills I smell bullshit. :-)

  • by Fringe ( 6096 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:37PM (#59250754)

    This is pretty much a trolling article. They don't actually cite any data, beyond the same nebulous site that gave us Jobs that are costumes. [census.gov] No better specifics.

    And the title implies English majors (their specific) catch up to STEM, but note that they then switch from STEM to "the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154"
    Ummm... you left out PhysEd, GynoContemporary Studies, Archeology, etc. Stick to STEM vs Underwater Basket Weaving, for consistency.

    For the last 20 years, there's also the retirement paradox... how many workers retired in their 40s after a brief tech run? How common is that for poets? But what will the stats show? A zero-income period for the STEM grad. Because you don't count margaritas on the beach.

    So why didn't they cite with more specificity? Perhaps because the same site also shows that STEM graduates work in non-STEM managerial jobs [census.gov]. The trouble is the classification of 'STEM'.

    • Why would a non-STEM major, such as the author, think data is important? That's something a STEM major would consider important!

  • Science. Technology. Engineering. Mathematics. For fucks sake, these disciplines often involve solving problems and thinking critically. What a daft article.
  • There are a few main causes for the limitations in the purely technical career path. I'd argue that primarily, the issue is generated from the assumption of equal capability, and the correlated rejection and avoidance of 'irreplaceable people.' From this view, if a company has an employee that is a 'super star,' where the employee is a master of multiple fields and is able to transcend boundaries that restrict others - this is a liability. For if the company relies upon this worker and a structure and expec
    • And to get to the dead-center of it, I'd also argue that technical people are viewed as workers, whereas managers are viewed as a ruling class of sorts. I've worked on both sides within the same company and the difference in treatment is wildly perceptible.
  • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:57PM (#59250826) Journal

    A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

    What exactly do these people think that programmers and other "STEM" people do?

    "Problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability" are the primary requirements.

  • I have regularly pointed out the numerous articles about businesses looking for liberal arts majors rather then people with MBAs or specific skillsets for the very reasons pointed out in the summary. In fact, the executives or hiring managers interviewed in these articles use those exact words: A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

    Needless to say, the trolls come out to claim the facts presented aren't true as well as mod me down f

    • > A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

      Please provide data that STEM graduates lack such "soft skills."

      > But that's the way it is nowadays. Facts are anathema to reality. Only ones uneducated beliefs are real.

      What facts? I read the article. I found no data indicating social science majors out earn engineers, short term, or long term.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

      Problem solving and critical thinking are the very essence of "hard skills", as is adaptability if you mean something other than "good at taking orders" by it.

      "Soft skills" are what's useful for salesmanship: persuasive speaking, reading the mood of a person or a room, being sensitive to when someone is receptive to information, or is likely to be instead offended, that sort of thing.

      Everyone who's been around a while knows that the very best at sales make way more money than the very best at anything techn

  • by wyattstorch516 ( 2624273 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @06:03PM (#59250848)
    By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.

    You expect me to believe 40 year history majors are averaging 131K? Maybe if they limited the survey to Silicon Valley but even that is a stretch. This sounds like a survey suffering from selection bias. Successful people are more likely to participate because those who consider themselves failures don't like to engage in surveys that confirm it.
    • If you read the last part of the section you quoted it gives you a major hint: "high-paying jobs in management, business and law."

      A lot of history majors continue on to law school or get into politics (or do both). Many also become high school teachers, but that's not a horrible salary and they get the summers off.

      Obviously this study isn't rigorous enough to draw any hard conclusions from, but I suspect there's some truth to it. Personally, I think the best thing a college student can do is to spend an ext

      • Obviously some people get high paying jobs no matter what their major is but this report specifically talks about the average salary. The average salary for all college graduates is approximately 59K, you would expect this to be somewhat higher for those around age 40 (possibly 90K) but in no way can the number they cited be the average.

        A lot of history majors may go into law (although from my experience Political Science was the preferred major for that) but even then up to 30% of new lawyers have troub
  • by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @06:26PM (#59250892)

    My brother-in-law is the chief endocrinologist at his regional hospital. One day, I asked him how many people the hospital employs. He said, "About 5000." Then I asked him how many of those are actual doctors or nurses. He said, "Fewer than 1000. I'm head of the department and I have no idea what these people do all day long." Meanwhile, a lot of them make two to three times what he makes and they don't have a medical degree. To add insult to injury, those useless people decide how much money he's going to make. Take it or leave it.

    The point is that the people with all the knowledge are getting buttf*cked by what Douglas Adams would call "Ship B" people.

  • I looked at the article, but I did not find any study to verify the article's assertion.

    There is the usual "employers value communication skills more anything else" survey. But I don't see anything that verifies the conclusion that liberal arts majors earn more over their career.

    It seems to assumed that top level management all come from liberal arts backgrounds, but I see no evidence of that.

  • This is interesting but one thing to factor in is that savings grow over time. I am a middle-aged person stuck in tech, I haven't thrived when I try to branch out. I don't get raises any more. But I've been putting the max into my 401(k) since I was 25 and damn if it isn't getting to be a pretty good number. Unless the economy implodes (which is possible) I think I can retire at 55.
  • Most US math and engineering has been moved to Ireland, New Zealand and other such low cost nations.
    Their top experts do the "problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability" in a different time zone and send the results back to the USA.
    Re the not "require specialized skills" at the top of any US profession?
    What list of smart nations are doing the thinking for the USA then?
    What is the US exporting to the world?
    Movies and languages? History and art? Book chapters on lifestyle and faith?

    For t
    • Judging by your writing style, you seem to be doing okay with your English degree with a concentration in poetry.

      • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Someone is working hard to keep the USA in its needed engineering.
        Wonder who if its "social science" and "history" all the way down?
  • by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:00PM (#59250966)

    Having a background on both STEM and the humanities, I completely get where this article is coming from, and I'd go even further.

    Firstly, the arts and the humanities make you much more hype proof. How many billions of dollars are wasted investing in hyped up technologies? Blockchain, VR, the paperless office, if you have a humanities background it's much easier to predict which technologies will be widely embraced, and which will be relegated to a niche.

    Take Virtual Reality. If you've done media studies, you know that technology being available is only one factor in its adoption. Just as important are things like:
    - Developing a new visual language (e.g. hollywood's film language and semiotics, cuts and editing, etc), which takes decades. Investors mostly ignored this part.
    - How the technology fits in existing social patterns, norms and behaviours. VR exhibits the same errors in thinking we saw with smell-o-vision and video calling: that if you can "add another sense" to the medium, it will automatically be better. Just like an amplifier that goes to 11, technologists can be enamored with and captured by overly simplistic visions of reality. What did people actually want? SMS. People prefer technologies that allow them to finely sculpt their social identities, to present themselves optimally to others. Cutting yourself off by wearing a headset fundamentally doesn't mesh with being social.

    Point being: the humanities allow you to think long term, and grasp more of the factors that play a role in how society and technology intertwine. If you have a feel for this, you can make a lot of money, or at the very least avoid wasting it.

    Secondly, arts and humanities are vital in building good products. In theory, design is a field where both meet. In practise only companies such as Apple have really been able to optimally inform design with humanities insights. Steve Jobs famously credited taking calligraphy courses with giving him a better feeling for this. Nokia was another example, at the time when they still employed ethnographers like Jan Chipchase.

    The point here: the best and most popular products are well designed, and a good designer is someone who understands that his/her job is not about understanding technology, but about understanding people.

    Having a background in both I highly recommend having a bit of both. It will allow you to think more critically about all the technological promises and hype, while at the same time shielding you from the humanities impulse to overthink things sometimes.

    • Having a background in both STEM and the humanities, I agree that it's good to have a bit of both.

      However, I am quite sure that while the critical thinkers are indeed spread across the whole spectrum of jobs, there is absolutely a higher concentration of critical thinking happening in the minds of people working in STEM.

      Side note: Silicon valley, in particular, has been invaded by people that think they're engineers, but really they're closer to humanities or business majors in their thinking processes. Thi

      • there is absolutely a higher concentration of critical thinking happening in the minds of people working in STEM.

        It's great that there's critical thinking in STEM people.
        But what about their social skills and insight about user needs?

    • Your STEM education made you a bullshit detector, not liberal arts

  • OK (Score:2, Funny)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
    Go ahead and invest $200k in student loans into your future, that degree in "Gender Studies" is really going to pay off apparently.
    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      that degree in "Gender Studies" is really going to pay off apparently

      It will. Because you are going to have to staff the department of gender equality that your company was required to create as a condition of your last settlement.

      Judges and civil litigation attorneys all have frat pledges which they have to honor.

      • haha, never seen a company have those. sounds like something a state run by SJW shitheads would have.. say California?

  • This trend is not new. It was noticed with respect to vocational degrees (but not STEM) by the writers at the WSJ in 2016:

    Over time, liberal-arts majors often pursue graduate degrees and gravitate into high-paying fields such as general management, politics, law and sales, according to an analysis by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, a trade group representing more than 1,350 schools. Once people reach their peak-earnings ages of 56 to 60, liberal-arts majors are earning an average $66,185, the association found. That’s about 3% ahead of the earnings pace for people with degrees in vocational fields such as nursing and accounting, though it remains more than 20% behind science and engineering majors.

    source [wsj.com]

    Of course, that doesn't mean that "cumulative" earnings will match, but it's interesting that we started seeing that years ago.

    The WSJ reported [wsj.com] on this specific version of the trend in May this year

  • Wow looks like that degree in lesbian dance theory won't go to waste after all.

  • by UnConeD ( 576155 ) on Sunday September 29, 2019 @10:40PM (#59251406)

    >A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

    Uh. What do they think an engineering education is like?

    • by Rozzin ( 9910 )

      A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

      Uh. What do they think an engineering education is like?

      As an engineer who's been interviewing a lot of new engineering graduates, I'm actually starting to wonder that myself: what is engineering education like, these days?

      I've lost count of the candidates I've interviewed with master's degrees from what I'd thought were reputable schools, who can't problem-solve their way out of a paper bag. Som

  • I've experienced this problem first hand. I've been in my current position since late 2016 and have had a raise of barely 4% (total!) since then. My cost of living has increased significantly more than that in the same time frame.

    I think a big part of that is that STEM workers - particularly those in more specialized roles such as my own - tend to be (perhaps irrationally) loyal to their employers, and employers realize that. Employers are likely also well aware what a colossal pain in the ass it is
  • That you make more because us stem people can retire earlier.
  • You can bet your ass this "study" is by a liberal arts major. It's funny how incompetent they are, even in their areas of specialty. They're comparing apples to oranges. STEM majors complete their major and enter the work force, but a significant number of liberal arts majors go on to get professional graduate degrees or PhDs (lawyers, doctors, etc.) while the "study" still counts them as a liberal arts major. Pure underhanded cheating. Let's see the study comparing the earnings throughout life of people w
  • Since when are problem solving and critical thinking "soft skills" that you don't get from STEM? I attribute a lot of those skills of mine to a math/theory-leaning CS degree. Of course one should also get familiar with some philosophy so you are aware of the most common logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks... STEM is not just about "learning technologies".

    • I hope things have improved since I graduated, but back then the "soft skills" mandatory elements of the engineering degree I did were pretty poorly conceived

      They generally amounted to talking slowly to the engineers to give them some rudimentary skills that were, according to the stereotype, lacking, The nerds however were bored and pissed that they had to sit through the lame classes, or counted them as credit-without-effort and approached them with the corresponding amount of zeal.

      I don't think they repr

  • I am willing to bet this screed uses at least three different techniques from 'How to Lie with Statistics" and is undoubtedly written by a liberal arts major.
  • A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability

    Do they really think that STEM does not require those "soft" skills? WTF! Working as a software engineer requires that you understand your own field as well as each of the fields you are working with so that you can determine how best to apply the tenants of SE to the target field.

  • A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability.

    I've been in IT for 40 years and didn't need a liberal arts education to learn those things. I took math and physics and learned those things. In high school. To say STEM doesn't teach those things shows ignorance in those that wrote the statement.

    I personally know journalism and music majors that ended up in IT because they couldn't find well-paying jobs based on their degree. And it turns out they were actually good at computers. I wanted to be a math teacher, and when I realized how poorly math teachers

  • As other commenters have pointed out, the mean is going to be heavily skewed by high-income outliers such as CEOs. For anyone in a STEM field there is a point where we consider switching to a management track vs. remaining on a technical track. Switching to management leads to potentially higher earnings but as you "climb the ladder," or, rather, the pyramid, there is increasing competition for fewer management positions. Staying on a technical track means continuously updating your skill base and focusing
  • Is this satire???? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ogrenix ( 6203326 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:48AM (#59252314)
    "A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability" Are you actually insane? These are not liberal arts skills, not remotely. These are science based skills. Go find a liberal arts student that has a modicum of critical thinking. I'll wait.
    • by jbengt ( 874751 )

      "A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability" Are you actually insane? These are not liberal arts skills, not remotely.

      While I don't think those are what people typically refer to as "soft skills", they are definitely liberal arts skills. The "Arts" in "Liberal Arts" means skills, not the fine arts, and the liberal arts are the skills educated citizens need to ensure a successful free society - skills that come from studying a wide range

  • Women are in demand because they have vaginas and its politically correct to hire and promote them at all cost. They tend to get more liberal arts degrees, but that's irrelevant because they're needed for management to avoid scrutiny. They also need to be paid more to avoid scrutiny. With this conclusion, am I am liberal arts or stem major?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills.

    So, are they not counting these high paying management positions? Because that makes zero sense, especially when you consider the following statement:

    By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.

    So for liberal arts majors you ARE counting management positions that they move into?

  • By age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.

    But are those people still doing jobs related to their majors by age 40?

    Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal arts education fosters valuable “soft skills” like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don’t create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers.

    Is that a fancy way of saying people in those majors find jobs outside their majors?

    By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.

    Ah. So it *was* a fancy way of saying those people got jobs outside their majors...

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