Business Insider reports on the bottom 20 college majors, with the warning "what not to study". The list looks extremely random including everything from visual and performing arts to international relations to math and computer science (!).
The author explains these majors have the highest unemployment rates.
Here are a few reasons why you can and should ignore this study.
- Presumably the journalist is advising college students, who will soon become new college graduates. But the analysis references college graduates which include anyone with a college degree, ranging from a new college graduate to someone who's worked for 40 years. New college graduates have a much higher unemployment rate than all college graduates. (See this recent Huffington Post article.)
- Students do not randomly select a college major. Thus, students who choose to major in international relations are not the same type of people who decide to major in engineering. If an international relations student were to switch major to engineering, it would not follow that this person's employment prospect had suddenly brightened. It might even worsen because (a) the student could be relatively less competitive against other engineering majors; and (b) the student and the major might now be mismatched.
- If everyone followed this journalist's advice, then each college would need a very small number of majors. Unless the economy suddenly produced a bonanza of jobs, where would the unemployed go? You got it... the unemployment rate would accrue to the several remaining majors, instead of being spread out over hundreds of majors. The unemployment rate of these "good" majors would rise to the level of the average unemployment rate. Oops.
- Not everyone needs or wants a job. Changing majors doesn't change that reality.
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There is an even bigger howler in the article. The analyst at Bankrate equated "job stability" with low unemployment rate, using language such as "Having a high-paying job doesn't necessarily mean you'll have job stability, and vice versa." So, majors with high unemployment rates are bad because people job-hop.
But the unemployment rate is not a measure of job tenure, and thus not an indicator of job stability. In fact, if people job-hop a lot, the unemployment rate will be relatively low, because the same job can be held by multiple people in the course of a year.
Let's imagine a country of 10 people with 5 jobs. The unemployment rate is 50%. If no one changes jobs, the same five people are employed always, and the rate is stable at 50%. The government stipulates that no person can hold on to the same job for longer than 6 months. We put the 10 people in a circle, and every other person is given a chair and seated. Every 6 months, each person moves clockwise by one slot: the five previously seated no longer have a seat, the five seats now occupied by the five previously standing. Everyone is now employed 6 months out of the year. The employment rate is now 100% (counting part-timers).
Thus, unemployment rate of zero can coincide with high job instability.
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