Can you really get a job with any college major?
16 July 2006That’s the thesis of an article here on CareerBuilder. The article argues:
“Don’t worry. The biggest secret in career development is that you can get a job with any major, according to Donald Asher, career consultant and author of “How To Get Any Job With Any Major” (Ten Speed Press). Asher says that even though all majors may not supply equal preparation for all jobs, no job is out of reach simply because of your major.
You have more options than you think. Many students have tunnel vision when it comes to choosing their major – they pick their major on the assumption it’s the only fast track to their lucrative dream job. Problem is, they might hate that major, do badly in it and subsequently rule out a career they might have been great at.
Employers do look at your major when considering your application, mainly because your major helps the employer determine the skills you’d bring to the organization. But other factors, especially your relevant experience, play a big role.”
That optimism is over-enthusiastic in my experience. It’s certainly true that if you’re successful in college, you’ll be able to find SOME job regardless of what your major was. But it’s also true that the more practical majors tend to find better jobs, and tend to find them more easily. An engineering major or a computer science major is going to have a lot more options than the person who majored in Egyptology. My own degree was in political science – a degree whose worthlessness led me to law school, where many others seemed forced into a graduate degree by the same predicament.
The problem with the reasoning of the article is two-fold: first, while some jobs require only general skills that can be demonstrated by success in any major, there are also many jobs that require a specific major for you to be considered. A Computer Science major has both these generic jobs AND the programming jobs available to them – and thus has more options than an art history major.
Second, while it’s true that at some point you could well change careers, you’re better off starting out ahead. The computer science major and the art history major may be worth the same amount on a resume two decades after graduation – but the computer science major can start out with a better job that is more challenging and more likely to give them useful experience. Your major will eventually become less important – but your work experience won’t.
One final note: the article is correct that if you have no chance of success in a major, you’re better off doing well in something you’re actually interested in. If you don’t have the math skills to be a programmer, and you’re not interested in it, you’d have better job prospects with A’s overall in art history than D’s in computer science. So for those college students still deciding on a major, don’t be lulled into picking an impractical major based on the idea that it won’t have any affect on your future employment. But at the same time, don’t force yourself to become something you don’t want to or aren’t able to be.
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One Response to “Can you really get a job with any college major?”
July 24th, 2006 at 11:36 am
[...] That’s what CNN Money took a look at recently in this article. CNN compared the different majors to see what the average starting salaries were, and which ones had the biggest gains. Not suprisingly, all starting salaries were not equal, as I wrote about here. The lowest paying degrees? Traditional liberal arts degrees such as Political Science, which averaged $32,665, Sociology at $30,944, and Communications at $31,876. [...]