Earnings and Unemployment by Major

Tom — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:25:27 +0000

Wall Street Journal posted data from the venerable Center on Education and the Workforce on earnings and unemployment by college major.

There is a relative floor at $40,000 with a wide variation of unemployment (poor clinical psychology). There is a negative correlation between earnings and unemployment rate, but it might be too presumptuous to presume that high-paying majors get their cake and eat it too. Depending on the methodology, the higher earnings might simply reflect the fact they have a job.

Of course, median earnings is only one dimension. Below shows a messy graph that also incorporates the first and third quartiles:

On average, the third quartile was about 44 percent above the median values. Most of the majors had median earnings in the center of the inter-quartile range.

Similar data is also available for Iowa community colleges.

There are important threads in the data with are important to notice. The top 10 paying jobs are:

Petroleum engineering
Pharmacy/Pharmaceutical sciences & administration
Mining and mineral engineering
Naval architecture & marine engineering
Nuclear engineering
Mathematics and computer science
Chemical engineering
Electrical engineering
Metallurgical engineering
Military technologies

These majors are at the core of the STEM disciplines–though the definition of STEM varies. Even though the notion that there is a lack of STEM majors is perpetually overstated, it is clear that STEM majors still provide high wages and an average unemployment rate for college graduates.

This data also reminds folks (parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers) that there is a moral duty to ensure every student has an opportunity to enter these fields. Some think it is only a costly effort to encourage students to enter in STEM majors since they may be under prepared and will inevitable drop-out. This could certainly be the case, but the most important efforts in encouraging STEM tends to take place in high school or earlier.

James Heckman on NPR

Tom — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:37:24 +0000

James Heckman, the Nobel-prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, spoke briefly on National Public Radio. My favorite part was Michael Martin asking why an economist (and there are quite a few of us) is interested in early childhood education:

MARTIN: I hope the question doesn’t bore you. But there are…many people who will wonder why and how an economist got interested in early childhood education.

Prof. HECKMAN: If you start looking at how human beings develop and diverge and you start realizing how poverty really gets created and you start tracing the origins of poverty back, it’s hard not to go back, back, back to the earliest years in the lives of people.

The audio and transcript can be found at the link above.

Tom Schenk Jr. » human capital

Earnings and Unemployment by Major

James Heckman on NPR