In a move displaying the continued relevance of statistics majors, among others, the U.S. Census Bureau released two studies Wednesday exhibiting the relationships between selection of college major, rate of employment and income. The studies feature data collected from the American Community Survey, which sampled more than 3 million addresses nationwide including both households and living facilities such as prisons. The numbers highlight the strong financial inequalities manifesting for students holding different degrees. Rather than take a side in a debate about disciplines, it would be more useful for studies to reevaluate the concept of a “major” in an increasingly interdisciplinary academic field.
The first study, “Field of Degree and Earnings by Selected Employment Characteristics: 2011,” employed the standard graphs tracking the reported annual incomes of people from different majors. Business was the field with the highest number of majors, clocking in with nearly 20 percent of respondents. Business majors were also the third most likely group to have full-time employment, behind people with degrees in engineering or computer/mathematics. An undergraduate engineering degree also earned its holder more annual income than any other diploma, collecting a cool $92,000 on average. Although the study did check whether respondents possessed advanced degrees, it only sorted incomes by the type of the bachelor’s, thus missing the more specific results about how specialization in graduate school could affect earnings.
The other, more speculative study by the Bureau was titled “Work-Life Earnings by Field of Degree and Occupation for People With a Bachelor’s Degree: 2011.” This report aimed to project the incomes of graduates during a 40-year period by combining averages across different age groups. The data was sorted across not only majors, but also fields of occupation. Though its conclusions are — as the bureau admits — more tenuous because of its method, what’s remarkable is that incomes differed substantially even within the same industry if workers had different academic backgrounds. Although there are many different jobs in the same field, engineers working in sales, for example, would make nearly a million and a half more dollars on average during their careers than liberal arts majors working in the same occupation.
None of these statistics are new; if anything, they reinforce popular stereotypes about what sort of career can be expected from any given major. These ideas seduce students into favoring one discipline over another, when, in actuality, how much money they earn could be just as dependent on their personal resume.
Not only do such studies give a misleading, general impression to students — or their parents, who may be the more likely audience — they also fail to capture the idiosyncrasies of an education. A “major” is just a batch of credits, and it is relied on too heavily by employers — who may screen certain majors out of the job selection process — to make generalizations about the types of employees they are looking for. There may be other, accurate ways to capture a student’s income potential, such as class levels and grades received.
Also, as universities experiment with more interdisciplinary classes that are not so easily defined, these studies will have trouble grouping students into one major or another. Indeed, the bureau’s studies have trouble arranging the majors. In the study, along with the majors “Engineering” and “Physical and related sciences” is another category of “Science and engineering-related fields.”
Given that these major concepts are so haphazard and general, it would be difficult for students to draw any conclusions from studies as these relevant to their individual careers. What the results do lead to, however, is an annual anxiety attack for undergraduates who look at such numbers to help pick a major. These studies would be more helpful for students if they included such metrics as extracurriculars, grades or number of classes taken.
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