‘math skills are correlated to higher earnings’

A study that looked at the correlation between college majors and earnings highlights the role of math skills in this relationship.

The economists examine the large differences in labor-market outcomes across college majors in several ways. In one section of their paper, they look at data on wages by college major obtained through the Census Bureau‘s 2009 American Community Survey. They find that among other things, math skills are correlated to higher earnings. “Wages tend to be high for engineers and low for elementary education majors, suggesting that perhaps much of the wage differences between majors are due to differences in mathematical ability and high school course work,” the authors write.

Apparently, innumeracy has a cost.
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Average wages for some of the most lucrative college majors

I’m surprised at how well a political science major pays, even without an advanced degree.
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Average wages for some of the lowest-paying college majors

Considering that the average salary for educators in Westchester County approaches six figures, it’s surprising to see such low wages for education majors.  I suspect that part-time workers included in this and other categories deflate the average wage.

American Community Survey - Questions on the form and why we ask

Related:  Two recent reports on college majors, salaries, and unemployment rates

Questioning the value of a business major

The value of a business major is being questioned by employers, school administrators, and faculty members.

The biggest complaint: The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don’t develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses.

Companies say they need flexible thinkers with innovative ideas and a broad knowledge base derived from exposure to multiple disciplines. And while most recruiters don’t outright avoid business majors, companies in consulting, technology and even finance say they’re looking for candidates with a broader academic background.

Bring in the liberal arts disciplines and teach writing!

Schools are taking the hint. The business schools at George Washington University, Georgetown University, Santa Clara University and others are tweaking their undergraduate business curricula in an attempt to better integrate lessons on history, ethics and writing into courses about finance and marketing.

Along with more than 20 other U.S. and European business schools, those institutions met last month at George Washington for a conference to discuss ways to better integrate a liberal-arts education into the business curriculum. It was organized by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit group with an arm that studies management education and society. Other participants included Franklin & Marshall College, Babson College and Esade, a business and law school at Barcelona’s Ramon Llull University.

Employers want these changes

Such changes should appease recruiters, who have been seeking well-rounded candidates from other disciplines, such as English, economics and engineering. Even financial companies say those students often have sharp critical-thinking skills and problem-solving techniques that business majors sometimes lack.

I’m reminded of this comment by an employer on why a solid liberal arts education is valuable in the business world.

The issue has nothing to do with distribution requirements, number of courses outside the major, etc. Put simply, when we hire an English major from Swarthmore or Williams we know he or she can write. When we hire an Engineering student (for a non-engineering job, by the way) from Cornell or Princeton or JHU we know they won’t need remedial math. When we hire an anthropology major from Chicago or Wellesley we know he or she won’t need help finding Malaysia on a map. We’ve hired kids with undergrad business degrees from a variety of schools (public and private) and found the talent pool decidedly mixed. Entrance requirements to the honors societies are weak; GPA’s are inflated by classes like “Organizational Leadership” or “Healthcare in Society”. And take a 90 page report and create an executive summary of three pages plus two appendices? Forget it.

We’d rather teach a Phi Beta Kappa in History from Amherst what Organizational Leadership is, than have to teach the Beta Alpha Psi from XYZ business program who Mao was and why you need to understand Communism in order to write a business plan for a product launch for our Beijing office.

Related:  Liberal arts skills are profitable for college graduates

In a tough economy, graduates of top colleges available as personal assistants

Personal assistants with impressive credentials are more available due to the tough job market for college graduates.  This is according to Jill Glist, who opened Lambert Services in 2006.

“The current economy gives us access to amazingly qualified people who are interested and available to work,” she said.

What are their qualifications?

Lambent Services employees are an elite group of intelligent, motivated, and personable individuals and top university graduates who help make clients’ lives run more smoothly.

How nice.  What do these assistants do?  They can handle the minutiae of our lives, helping us deal with the most mundane of tasks.  What are some example?

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According to their bios, many of the professional assistants have degrees from top universities.  Here is a sampling of  information about them, including college majors and highlighted skills.

• Harvard cum laude, Folklore & Mythology – calendar management and travel planning
• NYU, Political Science – event planning and calendar management
• Tufts, Drama & English – writing/editorial and home maintenance
• California College of the Arts, Fine Arts & Crafts – interior design and organization
• UC San Diego, Visual Arts Media – writing/editing and Internet research

Their services don’t come cheap, with hourly rates ranging from $35 to $55.  I don’t think this is a bad deal for the assistants.  They’re probably gaining good (and interesting) experience, earning some money in a down economy with the potential to make personal connections that could lead to more meaty jobs.  But I keep thinking that many of them didn’t need a $250,000 college degree to get to this place.

UPDATE:  Welcome Instapundit readers!  I invite you to check out more of my posts using the categories on the sidebar, in particular the higher education bubble.

‘Schools of education focus on fads, not knowledge and skills’

There are many reasons for the lamentable state of education in the United States today, but perhaps none is greater than our schools of education.

Larry Sand gives a first-hand account.

My experience at California State University, Los Angeles in the 1980s was typical. The courses were easy. Rigor was non-existent. I took eleven courses for credit, receiving ten As and one B and never once feeling intellectually challenged. There was typically an easy mid-term and a final and a paper (which was supposed to show that I knew how to deliver a lesson).

Sometimes the courses were like being back in grade school. I had a lot of fun in my methods classes, especially in Physical Education, where we played games all period.

Sand goes on to describe some recent trends in ed schools, including the practice of facilitating student discovery instead of direct instruction, whole language,  “Culturally Responsive Education” (CRE), and anti-racist math.

A possible bright spot in teacher education

Arizona State University, with the largest undergraduate teacher prep program in the country, has just this year unveiled a “radical” new program, in which students must demonstrate mastery of specific teaching skills as measured by a popular teaching framework. ASU is using the Teacher Advancement Program, a model run by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching.

Related:  If you want a high GPA in college, you might consider majoring in education.

A liberal arts education is good and central planning is bad

To the critics of “frivolous” humanities majors and advocates who want our government to push for more STEM college graduates, Virginian Postrel responds that a liberal arts education is good and central planning is bad.

The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning – the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino,California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the “soft” professions that complement them.

Chemists Struggle Too

The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics convinced that every case of cancer must be caused by smoking or a bad diet, they want to believe that good people, people like them, will always have good jobs and that today’s unemployed college grads are suffering because they were self-indulgent or stupid. But plenty of organic chemists can testify that the mere fact that you pursued a technical career that was practical two or three decades ago doesn’t mean you have job security today.…

The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.

The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently — how to figure out what you don’t know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smart-phone app.

When he was an undergraduate, he wrote in an e-mail, his professors “stressed that they weren’t there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system … but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I’ve often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it.” Whether you learn how to learn is more a question of how fundamental and rigorous your education is than of what specific subject you study.

The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or “green” industries. It’s just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.

Two recent reports on college majors, salaries, and unemployment rates

These two recent reports from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce  are good sources for information on college majors, salaries, and unemployment rates.

What’s it Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors – 5/11

Students’ choice of Majors is just as important as decision to get Bachelor’s Degree

On average, bachelor‟s degrees pay off. But a new study confirms that some undergraduate majors pay off a lot more than others. In fact, the difference in earnings potential between one major and another can be more than 300 percent.

Using United States Census data available for the first time, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is helping Americans connect the dots between college majors and career earnings. In the new report, What’s it Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors, this first-time research demonstrates just how critical the choice of major is to a student‟s median earnings.

Hard Times, College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings: Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal – 1/12

NEW REPORT FINDS THAT RISK OF UNEMPLOYMENT VARIES BY COLLEGE MAJOR

Study also finds that some BA’s outperform graduate degrees in the job market

Unemployment figures show the jobless rate for recent college graduates with Bachelor’s Degrees has been running at an unacceptable 8.9 percent. But, a new study from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce finds that unemployment among job seekers with no better than a high school diploma is a catastrophic 22.9 percent – and an almost unthinkable 31.5 percent among high school dropouts.

So, is college still worth it? A major conclusion of the new report is that it all depends on your major. And while a college degree gives job seekers a formidable advantage over those without, the study points out, not all degrees are created equal, and there are a number of factors that prospective students should consider before sending off their college applications.

Related links for What’s it Worth:

• http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/#term=
• http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1238464-wsj-college-major-career.html?highlight=wsj+from+college+major+to+career
•  http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1239081-11-majors-highest-unemployment-rates.html

Related links for Hard Times:

• http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/want-a-job-go-to-college-and-dont-major-in-architecture/
• http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/unemployment_college_major/index.htm?iid=A_E_News

More jobs for STEM graduates who make technology than for those who use it

People who make technology are better off than people who use technology.

That’s one conclusion of a Georgetown University report on College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings.

For recent graduates in Math and Computing unemployment is low for specialists who can write software and invent new applications (6%), but still comparatively high (11.2 percent) for those who use software to manipulate, mine and disseminate information.

The lower unemployment figure is for computer science and mathematics majors, and the higher one is for information systems majors.  All STEM majors are not created equal.

This chart is from Wikimedia.

UPDATE:  After reading Bonnie’s comment, I changed the post title from For job security it’s better to make technology than to use it to More jobs for STEM graduates who make technology than for those who use it.  “Job security” was a poor choice of words, given the cyclical nature of this industry.  In fact, the report predicted a recovery for information systems workers as the economy recovers.  The truth is that economic fluctuations affect all our jobs, although some are more cyclical than others.

Don’t pick a college major based on today’s hot jobs

A snapshot of unemployment rates by college major shows architects are currently suffering the most while health workers are prospering.

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Ten years ago the unemployment rate for architects was 1.1%.

What will the picture be like in five or ten years?  It’s not out of the question that architecture and health could switch places.  Ten years ago the unemployment rate for architects was an enviable 1.1%, and while we continue to hear that healthcare careers will continue to flourish as the ranks of aging baby boomers increase, that is by no means a sure thing.  Here’s a sign of weakening that should be considered by anyone who believes a health major is a safe bet for future job security.

Despite longtime concerns about nurse shortages in the United States, today’s nurses are learning that a nursing career is not as recession resistant as touted in the past.

A 2009 Vanderbilt University Medical Center study projected a shortage of 260,000 registered nurses by 2025. But hospitals, especially in the New York City metropolitan area, aren’t hiring.

Hospitals in the region were eager to recruit new nurses four or five years ago, said Kevin Dahill, president of the Northern Metropolitan Hospital Association, which represents Hudson Valley hospitals.

“It’s all changed,” he said. “If there is an improvement in the economy, you might see more opportunities opening up. Right now, it’s the lowest turnover and vacancy rate we’ve seen in a long time. For entry level, it’s almost at zero.”

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It’s hard to accurately predict the future when deciding upon a college major.

Of course, some careers are more cyclical than others.  I should know, having living through first a prosperous boom and then a staggering bust in the oil business.  Education was considered a relatively safe major for a while, until recently when budget cuts at public schools brought hiring freezes and left newly graduated teachers unable to find jobs.

Maybe students should consider taking a contrarian approach, and select majors that have been on a downward trend for a few years.  Certainly they should focus on some basics that will serve them well whatever the current job market — work hard to get good grades, take advantage of all learning opportunities, hone their writing skills, and lower expectations for their first job out of college.

Related:  Don’t Let the Economy Pick Your Major For You

Again, STEM college majors are too darn hard for kids these days

Students are choosing the easy college majors.

… Although the number of college graduates increased about 29% between 2001 and 2009, the number graduating with engineering degrees only increased 19%, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Dept. of Education. The number with computer and information-sciences degrees decreased 14%. Since students typically set their majors during their sophomore year, the first class that chose their major in the midst of the recession graduated this year.

This student switched majors when she found an engineering lab project too darn hard.

To avoid getting an “incomplete” for the course, Ms. Zhou withdrew before the lab ended. Since switching majors she has earned almost straight A’s instead of the B’s and C’s she took home in engineering.

The issues:

• … introductory courses are often difficult and abstract…
• … high schools didn’t prepare them for the level of rigor in the introductory courses…
• … Science classes may also require more time … math and science—though not engineering—students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.

Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.

One solution is to make STEM classes easier more accessible.

Educators have tried to tackle the attrition problem with new programs that they say make engineering more accessible. In 2003, Georgia Institute of Technology split its introductory computer-science class into three separate courses. One was geared toward computer science majors, another to engineering majors, and a third to liberal arts, architecture and management majors. The liberal arts course cut down on computer-science theory in favor of practical tasks like using programming to manipulate photographs, says computer science professor Mark Guzdial. Since the switch, about 85% of students pass, he says.

I don’t understand how this information supports the point that STEM-related jobs don’t pay enough:

That may partly be because the jobs don’t pay enough to attract or retain top graduates. Science, technology, engineering and math majors who stay in a related profession had average annual earnings of $78,550 in 2009, but those who decided to go into managerial and professional positions made more than $102,000, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

What is the difference between a science grad who works in a “related profession” vs. one who is in a “professional position”?  In almost any line of work, managers and professionals earn more than other workers.

Related:  College students find that STEM majors are too darn hard

College students find that STEM majors are too darn hard

College STEM students transfer to other majors at twice the attrition rate of all other majors combined.  This is a problem, according to this New York Times article.

 “We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s science talent once the students get to college,” says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter.

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Some possible reasons

Poor preparation in grades 6 through 12 (and I’d also add K-5)  for the rigors of STEM courses.  Could it be that the extreme focus on “engagement” at the expense of actual learning in our public schools is a factor?

But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Related to poor preparation, students are unwilling to work hard.

Some students still lack math preparation or aren’t willing to work hard enough.

Lack of fun projects in lower level college STEM classes is another issue.

Other deterrents are the tough freshman classes, typically followed by two years of fairly abstract courses leading to a senior research or design project. “It’s dry and hard to get through, so if you can create an oasis in there, it would be a good thing,” says Dr. Goldberg, who retired last year as an engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now an education consultant.

And then there’s grade inflation in non-STEM majors.

The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

,,,
While all these factors play a role, I suspect the heart of the  problem is that students are simply poorly prepared for the academic rigors of STEM majors and have failed to develop good study habits while breezing through the American public school system.  I’ve seen this up close.

By contrast, students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and science from an early age.

“We’re in a worldwide competition, and we’ve got to retain as many of our students as we can,” Dean Kirkpatrick says. “But we’re not doing kids a favor if we’re not teaching them good life and study skills.”

This  general theme seems to dominate the more than 1,000 comments accompanying this article.  Here’s one of my favorites.

I have been teaching introductory college physics for fifteen years now. My observation is that for the most part students come to college excited about pursuing a science career, brimming with illusions and/or misconceptions about what that really entails, and as soon as they find out that it is not all about gazing at stars or looking through a microscope, that it is a lot of hard work and (ugh) algebra (the horror !) is involved, they run like the wind. Simple as that.

In my opinion, it is all about how they are brought up in High School. The seem to think that if something is difficult, someone should “make it easy” for them, that anything that they do not like (such as calculus) must surely be disposable and therefore should be simply removed from curriculum and never imposed on them again, that all it takes is the desire to do well. And it is very hard to change them by the time they get to college.

I know, I sound like an old fart.

Speaking as an authentic old fart, I would agree.

UPDATE:  Again, STEM college majors are too darn hard for kids these days