Back in my day (cue my son’s old man voice), college was easy. It was the mid-90s, and there were some that seemed expensive, but there were certainly more economical options. I think almost everyone from my graduating class went to college. That’s just what everyone did. It was probably more than a decade later that I learned that may have just been the case because I had the good fortune to grow up in the Boston suburbs, arguably the best school region in the nation.
Nowadays, it’s more complicated. There have been a billion articles written on the danger of student debt. Millions more have written on the danger of graduating with a degree that doesn’t pay any more.
Fortunately, there are new tools available to help students decide if the school and the field of study are worth it. Specifically, I’m referring to Department of Education’s College Scorecard. You can look at any combination of school and degree. Once again, the Department of Education has shown me that it is a good use of my tax dollars.
I would have never known it was available without the New York Times’ A College-by-College Guide to Which Majors Pay Off — or Don’t (gift article). The Times has taken the data and made their own tool to search schools and degrees. I used The Times because I discovered it first, but it’s worth looking at both.
For my two kids, their preferred fields of study will be an eye-opening experience. (I haven’t shared it with them yet since they are in the 7th and 8th grades.) My oldest loves acting. He knows that it is a long shot, but I don’t think he knows what the average performance arts major makes. It was difficult to find a school where it paid off.
My younger son loves making art and building stuff. We live near the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which has a great reputation for someone studying design and art. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most expensive schools (even after considering aid), and the careers make very little money. I thought that architecture would be a good fit. The NY Times tool doesn’t have it, but the DoE does – except that it appears that there’s a bit of a hole in the data when you look at architecture. Maybe enough people didn’t graduate with it (or, more likely, I’m just using the tool wrong)
The good news is that you can use these tools to find out what makes the most money. The NY Times article was particularly good at this. Very few people would be surprised to learn that STEM degrees do well – particularly math, computer science, and engineering.
Those were the fields that I’ve wanted to push my kids towards for years. It made a lot of sense, until the last couple of years, when AI has gotten extremely good at coding. In fact, while I’m writing this article, I’m coding an application. That sentence is extremely misleading, because my AI is coding away. I just tell it what to change, and it does it. It can take some back and forth to get it exactly right, and this is my first time coding with AI, but I’m up to around 55,000 lines of code. That’s about as many as a good programmer can produce in a year. I think it’s rare to find a software engineer coding anything significant by hand.
That brings us to math. Have you read any headlines lately? Here are a few: AI solved one of math’s hardest problems. Humanity learned nothing (so far), OpenAI forms math advisory group as its AI resolves more than 100 open problems, and The Year Math Changed Forever. That last article’s title is my favorite, because all of these happened in the last MONTH, not year. Suddenly there are mathematicians everywhere feeling very obsolete.
That leaves engineering in the things that I mentioned. I think that has some hope for a little while. There’s a need to make the robots until they can build themselves. I think that will come in about 10-15 years, so not too long after my kids graduate college and join the workforce. I think there will still be engineering things after the robots, so it might be safe for even longer.
Other big careers include lawyers or doctors. Law is already being transformed by AI. They still need fact-checkers to check for hallucinations, but those will become rarer over time. There may be legislation that helps keep the lawyers in business even if AI can technically do their jobs. However, last week AI did brain surgery on a mouse. With AI only about 4 years old, where do you think this goes in another 10 years? I imagine it will get pretty good.
Final Thoughts
I’ve always said that the best way to make money is to provide value to someone. AI is currently providing a lot of value, and the prices right now are low. Perhaps the venture capital money making it cheap will run out, but I can imagine chips getting more efficient as they always do and pricing getting cheaper over the long term.
It’s great that the government gives us great college statistics now, but those are looking in the rearview mirror. Looking through the windshield to see where things are going seems impossible and hopeless.
What do you say? Got anything to give me some optimism? Please? Leave it in the comments.
