Kozlowski: Evaluating the costs and benefits of your major

Whenever new job statistics are released, college students and graduates gain one more reason to… Whenever new job statistics are released, college students and graduates gain one more reason to be depressed.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 24 years and under is 7.7 percent. Although this is better than the nationwide 9.1 percent unemployment rate, it’s still considerable. Landing a job commensurate with the qualification of a college degree and with enough earning potential to justify a crushing amount of debt is becoming more and more challenging. This isn’t a good time to graduate and enter the job market, but many people my age have no other choice.

However, although the employment prospects look bleak for recent college graduates, there are serious shortages of particularly skilled workers in the fields of science and engineering. While some people frantically comb Craigslist for a job, many employers are frantically combing the Web to find somebody to pay handsomely.

This underscores a very serious problem with what people our age have been told in high school and before: that college is the key to success, and that your major doesn’t really matter as most people don’t end up working in their chosen fields anyway. Putting these statements together, it seemed logical that all college majors were created equal and that the diploma was the important thing. The Orwellian reality — that all majors are equal, but some are more equal than others — was never touched upon.

Choosing a major requires careful consideration of costs and benefits. Costs are not just measured in money. A cost is essentially what we have to sacrifice in order to do a particular thing. Every minute I spend writing this column is a minute not spent hardgaining, playing Madden, eating $5 pies or reading the Moustache Column. The cost of writing this column could be measured in virtual touchdowns that would increase my happiness. Similarly, by choosing to be a chemistry major, I might not have time to go to football games or the symphony on the weekends because I have lab reports to write. The cost of majoring in chemistry could be measured in time spent studying when I would rather be doing something else.

On the other side of the equation are the benefits — marketability foremost among them. According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, history majors have an unemployment rate of 15.1 percent, whereas actuarial science majors have an unemployment rate of roughly 0 percent. Of course, as the Wall Street Journal reported, two-thirds of all science, technology, engineering and math majors end up working in fields totally unrelated to what they studied. Yet this doesn’t mean that their major is irrelevant. Employers will look at someone with a 3.9 GPA in math and physics and say, “Wow, this person is really good at math. Let’s hire him for this job that requires a lot of financial number crunching.” Similarly, employers might look at someone with a 3.9 in the humanities and say, “This person has to be really good at writing. Let’s hire him to read  between the lines.” Both these judgments might be totally unfair and inaccurate, but it’s important to remember that what employers see is extremely limited, and that they will by necessity weigh things like choice of major in making a hiring decision.

Unfortunately, the benefits of choosing one major over another were never explained to us. The costs of some majors — such as two semesters of organic chemistry — are well-known. College students are asked to conduct cost-benefit analyses knowing the costs all too well and the benefits not well at all. We should not be surprised in the least that many people choose less-costly majors that don’t have as many job prospects.

I am not on a crusade to turn everybody into a science, math or engineering major. I am not making fun of people with an immense passion for a major they know has little marketability. Many of these people are fully aware of the costs and benefits of what they are doing, and doing something they love might be the most important benefit to them. However, I suspect a lot of people are making decisions about what major to pursue without full possession or consideration of the facts. It should be made clear that there are both costs and benefits to picking a certain major, and that the job market needs to be taken into consideration when students select what to study.

Contact Mark at kozthought@gmail.com.