Choosing A Degree With A Career Path In Mind

Flawed Advice

Incoming college freshmen are often saddled with the well-intentioned but severely flawed advice to “find themselves” and eventually choose a major based upon love of subject. In an ideal world, yes, every person would be able to do exactly what he or she naturally loves for every day for the rest of his or her life. But in reality, human beings have to find shelter and food, and as such, the best advice is to learn to love your career – rather than finding a career that fits your initial love.

The freshman year of college should be devoted to two things: core curriculum that can be utilized for any version of the bachelor’s degree, and researching what degrees are in demand. Taking random college electives is a very expensive way to find yourself, and it’s best to hold off on specialized classes until you’ve determined major. This is contrary to the stance of most advisors, who consider taking non-essential classes a necessary part of each student’s career path discovery. But where does this leave most students after graduation?

The Truth About Teaching

College advisors offer teaching – both secondary ed and college – as proof that any degree is valuable in the job market. They propagate this mythical concept of “emergency certification” and discuss teaching shortages as if they were cause for national emergency. This sounds fantastic to a future job seeker – after all, there are teachers for every subject, both in secondary ed and at the college level, so that means a student can pursue any degree on the map and still have a nearly guaranteed job, right?

Problem is, none of this is anywhere near reality. The truth is, only a few select subjects have experienced nationwide teaching shortages: special education, math, and English as a Second Language. No other subject has a high demand for teachers; there is no shortage. Yet advisors continue to tout this false information, even going so far as to suggest that almost anyone can be accepted into, for example, the Teach for America program (where you agree to teach in a lower-income school district for a pre-determined period of time in exchange for a teaching job with funding and time for certification). However, schools’ participation in this program is in fact very limited, with good reason. When a school agrees to participate in this program, the agreed amount of time is such that the teacher in training is likely to devote one solid year to teaching for that school, following a year of training in the school. Particularly in subjects that have not experienced a shortage, this arrangement is hardly beneficial to a school. It’s basically a way to train a teacher for someone else’s school.

So-called “emergency certification” is also a falsehood of mythic proportions, only applicable in the three subjects mentioned above that experience consistent nationwide shortages: special education, math, and ESL. By all means, a college student with language studies should consider this career path, as should someone with coursework in math or in special ed. Anyone else? Not so much.

The Worst Degrees for the Job Market

Fine Arts

Examples: theatre, music, dance, and visual arts such as painting, sculpting, etc.

Take a moment and think about a fine arts career path. Do you want to be an actor? A lighting designer? A musician in a piano bar? The next great featured painter at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art? Okay, those are all wonderful aspirations, and you may even have the talent and drive to attain them. But how, exactly, do you expect a formal fine arts degree to further that goal? A fine arts degree is particularly worthless from any university without a fine arts focus. You’re not going to get more auditions or chances for success because you have a fine arts degree. If this is really your passion, get out of college and do something about it. Wait tables while interning at a theatre. Move to L.A. and live in poverty while schmoozing and finding auditions. Accomplish your goal – but reconcile yourself to the fact that a formal fine arts degree won’t get there, and is in fact a waste of valuable time and money.

English

This is a degree that’s in a league all its own, it’s so incredibly useless. Proponents of an English degree will tell you that it indicates a person with good grammar, literary knowledge, and attention to detail. Lately technical writing is advertised as the savior of all unemployed English majors, since it’s a field with a high demand. Trouble is, most technical writing positions aren’t made for English majors. Instead, employers are seeking technology majors with the ability to write. An English major does not teach you how to write instructions for software. And I’ve known many English majors who are incapable of writing beyond angst-ridden victimhood poetry that’s uninteresting to all but, of course, those who truly understand what a deep and meaningful major English truly is. By the way, my minor is in English, so I speak from firsthand experience.

Think about this: how many successful authors have English degrees? Not many. Know why? Successful authors don’t get that way by taking pompous, “analytical” literature classes. These authors have a talent for writing as well as keen intuition, and they use what they learn about the world around them to channel the human experience into words. No formal English class can teach someone how to do that.

Humanities/Social Sciences

Examples: history, political science, sociology

These are especially fascinating subjects to me, personally, which is why I ended up with two useless degrees in history – and history is perhaps the most useful of the conglomeration of humanities and social sciences degrees. These degrees are useful if your goal is law school – but that, too, is a misunderstood career path with little likelihood of monetary success. There are simply too many lawyers altogether, and there are many others who have completed law school and never quite could make it through the bar exam.

As for teaching – there’s already an overabundance of these types of teachers. The market is saturated, and that includes college level teaching, as well. Government? That requires significant experience, and doesn’t especially care about major, so long as it’s something outside of the fine arts. For a government job, you need volunteer work and internships, but not necessarily a humanities degree.

The Degrees with the Greatest Marketability

Health Sciences

Examples: nursing, EMTs, physical therapy, medical school

For as long as our species sticks around this planet, we’re going to get sick and cause injury to ourselves, throughout our entire individual lives. There will always be a demand for health care professionals. Nursing is the most economically practical degree to pursue; most M.D.’s graduate with magnanimous amounts of debt, while nurses can often get the whole package paid for, when utilizing a program such as LVN to RN. Also, although nurses do work very long hours doing difficult work, doctors often work just as many hours, and are forced to protect themselves by purchasing expensive malpractice insurance. In any medical position, an extra advantage is the constant opportunities for continued specialization. A nurse can become a nurse practitioner; a doctor can pursue a specific specialty. With each specialization comes a higher salary.

Engineering

Examples: civil, petroleum, software, mechanical, electrical, chemical

While petroleum engineering is likely to lessen in applicability in the next decade or so, the other engineering fields will only continue to grow, and all are essential to the functionality of global society. Engineers create and oversee everything from virtual networks and applications to highways and stoplights. The degree plans are often very difficult, and rightly so – engineering positions require an unsurpassed attention to fine detail, and lives often depend upon the accuracy of these details. Salary and job demand reflect this, so if you’ve got the ambition, drive, and focus, definitely pursue engineering – it’s an excellent career path.

Technology

Examples: software/hardware/application development, programming, web design

The limitless virtual world is expanding, and with it, the associated spectrum of jobs.

The Wild Card: A Business Degree

Business degrees come in a variety of forms, including the BBA (with a variety of specialties, including finance, accounting, and others), MIS (management and information systems, a new term for a technologically updated business degree), and the MBA (master’s of business administration). I’ve heard business departments tell students that the average MBA grosses six figures per year. That’s garbage, and it’s unfortunate that so many students buy into it. The MBAs that do gross six figures plus annually achieve that through work experience and expertise as well as connections gained on the job. The degree itself comes nowhere close to guaranteeing such a high return.

Additionally, the new MIS bachelor’s degree can best be described as either “business degree lite” or “computer science degree lite” because it takes the easiest elements of both degree plans and combines them into one. The degree receives the least respect in the workplace of all of the business degrees.

However, business degrees are worth quite a bit when accompanied by significant, pertinent work experience. Whether you’re working in retail, restaurants, or at a bank, as long as your work history is consistent and shows some evidence of ambition (such as moving into an assistant or night management position), it can complement the business degrees to a great effect, furthering your chances for success.

Tailoring Your Talents to a Demand

I would never suggest that someone weak in mathematics pursue engineering or physics, regardless of demand. However, I might suggest utilizing on-campus tutoring in order to successfully pursue a degree appropriate to the health sciences career options. These degrees do require more math than a Bachelor of Arts, but the coursework is manageable for anyone that was admitted to a college in the first place. It may take some more time and focus than others, but everyone’s capable. And it’s worth it, too – much better to suffer through additional math classes than to take extra art classes and end up broke after graduation.

Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean you can’t master it. Mastering college coursework of any variety relies much more upon tenacity and drive than sheer intellect. It’s a simple lesson we all should have learned in high school but didn’t – if you do the homework, and meet with the teacher occasionally outside of class to discuss the material, you’re going to survive the class and pass in a reasonable fashion.

This is why it’s so important to avoid choosing a major based on what you find that you love. Often, what you define as your academic passion only receives that designation based upon it coming naturally to you. And even if it truly is your passion, it may not be the best formal degree for the job market. For most of us, it’s definitely not. My history degrees, for example – I continue to love history, but I could have loved and learned about history without formal degrees. I would have been much better off pursuing nursing, although science does not come naturally to me. Self-discipline would have taken me a long way toward a potentially successful career in nursing.

Everyone has the ability to utilize this self-discipline, too. You can take responsibility for your actions, choose to do all of your homework, and choose not to focus on merely the social aspects of a college campus. You can pave a happy career path out of a field that is in demand, whether or not it fits your preconceived notions of your talents.

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