San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)

THE MOST-REGRETTED COLLEGE MAJORS

Nearly half of the students who majored in humanities and arts fields have studier’s remorse as of 2021; engineerin­g majors have the fewest regrets

- BY ANDREW VAN DAM

Nearly 2 in 5 American college graduates have major regrets. That is, they regret their major. They include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues. When he delivered his 2011 State of the Union address in the shadow of the Great Recession, President Barack Obama plugged math and science education and called on Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Since then, the number of new graduates in the arts and humanities has plunged.

Meanwhile, nearly half of humanities and arts majors have studier’s remorse as of 2021. Engineerin­g

majors have the fewest regrets: Just 24 percent wish they’d chosen something different, according to a Federal Reserve survey.

As a rule, those who studied STEM subjects — science, technology, engineerin­g and mathematic­s — are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those in social sciences or vocational courses second-guess themselves.

There doesn’t seem to be much relationsh­ip between loans, gender, race or school selectivit­y and your regrets. Though, as you may have guessed, our analysis of Fed data shows that the higher your income is today, the less you regret the major you chose back in college.

Regrets have remained relatively steady since 2016, the earliest year for which we have consistent data. The most notable exception, education, went from below-average regrets before the pandemic to above-average regrets in 2021. Life sciences, on the other hand, have seen a steady and substantia­l decline in regret.

The annual Fed’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionma­king also asks if folks regret the specific school they went to. Those in vocational programs are most likely to regret their school, while education majors are least likely.

Regardless of major, half of those who went to private, for-profit schools regret their decision, per

because students at for-profit schools are much more likely to struggle to repay their student debt. Similar regrets plague only 21 percent of those who went to public colleges and universiti­es and 30 percent of those who attended private nonprofits.

A substantia­l majority of vocational and technical students (60 percent) wish they’d gone for more schooling, while less than 40 percent of law, life science and engineerin­g students believe the same.

The burgeoning regret among humanities and arts majors may help explain why humanities graduates are a dying breed.

“There’s a pretty significan­t change underway,” historian and digital humanist Ben Schmidt said. “The numcause have dropped by 50 percent, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rebound.”

By 2021, discipline­s such as history, English and religion graduated less than half as many students as they did in their early 2000s heyday, relative to the overall size of the graduating student body, according to Schmidt’s analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

According to Schmidt, the Great Recession sparked the beginning of a downward spiral in humanities such as history, art, philosophy, English and foreign languages.

“In the period of the Great Recession, you had Barack Obama out there saying we need more STEM majors and fewer English majors,” Schmidt said. “That was a story you were hearing from a lot of people in influentia­l positions ... and I think that made a difhaps ference.”

In the decade since our national pivot to STEM, the number of people graduating with computer science degrees has doubled. Every STEM field notched significan­t gains. Nursing, exercise science, medicine, environmen­t, engineerin­g, and math and statistics are all up by at least 50 percent. Among the humanities, only two increased: cultural, ethnic and gender studies, and linguistic­s.

Schmidt said it’s possible that the nation’s PRO-STEM campaign led many humanities graduates to regret their choice of degree in retrospect, even if a different major may not actually have improved their employment opportunit­ies at the height of a global downturn. They were struggling, and their degree was an obvious scapegoat.

In an analysis published in the Atlantic a few years back, Schmidt noted that while culture wars and student debt didn’t explain the humanities data well — even Christian colleges and colleges with generous financial aid have seen declines — it does line up with a wave of younger millennial­s who, scarred by the financial crisis, are increasing­ly fixated on majors with better job prospects.

Over their lifetime, a typical history or journalism major can expect to earn about $3.4 million, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data from 2014 to 2018 by economist Douglas Webber. A typical economics, biological sciences or chemistry major can expect to make $4.6 million over that same time, adjusted for inflation.

But those typical earnings hide that who you are matters just as much as what you study. Many of the highest-earning humanities majors earn more than the lowest-earning STEM majors, Webber’s research shows. For example, the top quarter of history majors earn $4.2 million over their career. That puts them above the bottom quarter of earners from even the highest-paying majors, such chemical and aerospace engineerin­g.

Humanities specialist­s argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunit­ies later in life bebers they don’t lock students into a narrow programmin­g language, certificat­ion or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled.

“Having training to ask hard questions is pretty significan­t, and that applies across all kinds of different career situations,” said Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University.

Dombrowski’s degree in Slavic linguistic­s has taken her to a career in academic informatio­n technology, high-performanc­e computing and helping researcher­s use computers to analyze languages. In her spare time, she founded the Datasitter­s Club and co-founded an effort to archive Ukrainian websites before they’re destroyed by Russian hackers and mortars.

“When we work with undergradu­ates on digital humanities projects,” Dombrowski said, “it’s often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don’t really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.”

Schmidt said that while he now spends much of his time coding and analyzing data, he’s still glad he studied humanities.

“I don’t regret my undergrad major in part because I was able to pick up all the programmin­g languages I needed on my own,” Schmidt said. “I didn’t need a computer science course to do that,” he added.

But Dombrowski said she understand­s undergradu­ates’ desire to walk into a highly paid tech career immediatel­y out of college.

“It’s fine to tell people that this sets them up for brighter prospects in the longer term for their career,” Dombrowski said. “But students — especially [those] who’ve taken on substantia­l student debt — have immediate needs for paying rent and then paying those loans back.”

 ?? TIMOTHY A. CLARY AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES ?? By 2021, discipline­s such as history, English and religion graduated less than half as many students as they did in their early 2000s, relative to the overall size of the graduating student body.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES By 2021, discipline­s such as history, English and religion graduated less than half as many students as they did in their early 2000s, relative to the overall size of the graduating student body.

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