Don't Let the Economy Pick Your Major For You

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/dont-let-the-economy-pick-your-major-for-you/250992/

s college worth it? If I had to limit my answer to one word: yes. For every rung you climb on the education ladder -- from high school, to community college, to four-year university, to doctoral degree -- unemployment for your group goes down and wages go up, as illustrated in this BLS graph:


But that's a 30,000-foot answer. Zoom in, and the complications come into focus. Many community colleges are drop-out factories. Are they all "worth it"? Many schools offer simplistic curricula and their degree amounts to a meaningless, expensive stamp on four wasted years. Are those schools all worth it for every career? Even among the top 50 schools, middle class students often graduate with $20,000, $30,000, even $50,000 in debt. That won't always be a smart price to pay for someone who wants to be an actor, or writer, or construction person, or manufacturing worker, or even software engineer. Even if college protects earnings opportunities in these fields, are the early debt and forgone late-teen earnings worth it for each one of these workers?

That's an impossible question to answer. So the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce does the next best thing. It breaks down employment and earnings by college degree to make the point that not all college degrees are equal, and the major you take greatly influence the money you make. Here are the key graphs of unemployment rates and college earnings by degree, both for recent graduates.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATES BY DEGREE




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