Payscale, a site that collects data on US salaries, has a new report out. It looks at people with just undergraduate degrees, so doctors and lawyers are not included. Nor are college professors.
The charts look at salary at the beginning of one’s career and at mid-career. It’s sorted according to schools or majors. It’s worth a look. If you’ve paid $200,000 for a child’s education at an intense 4 year liberal arts college and find she might be earning more had she gone to Podunk U, you can reflect for a while on what your values really are.
But here’s an interesting remark from the NY Times (below shortly); if the claim about where philosophy majors tend to be is as well based as it sseems to be, then it might make a difference to those who are looking at why we see a lower number of women in philosophy. On the other hand, do note the the claim might be right about those who major in philosophy and don’t go to graduate school, and wrong about those who do go to graduate school.
So here it is:
who would have thought that philosophy majors in mid-career would earn more than information technology majors in mid-career? This is probably because students who major in philosophy are more likely to go to elite schools, whereas students who major in I.T. are likely to go to pre-professional-type schools that don’t even offer philosophy as a major, Mr. Lee says. So it’s not really the choice of major that’s making the difference – it’s the school.“A student’s choice of major has a huge impact mid-career, enormous,” says Mr. Lee. “But you generally don’t see people majoring in philosophy” — or other “soft” majors, he says — “except in top schools.”
Do notice that the remark about where philosophy majors are found is not based on anecdotal evidence; they have tons of data linking salaries and education. The only people they are not factoring in are those who do not work or those who go to graduate school.
The comparison between philosophy and IT strikes me as kind of misleading, or at least odd. First, IT is ranked right below philosophy; that makes me wonder if the difference is statistically significant, as the NYT post seems (at least to me) to imply.
Second, there are plenty of technical/industrial majors that come out above philosophy on the mid-career median salary rankings: aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, environmental engineering, civil engineering, management information systems, computing and information systems, industrial technology, environmental science. Presumably the Ivies aren’t producing the bulk of those highly-paid engineers; they’re coming out of schools like CMU, Berkeley, and MIT. But I would consider those latter to be both elite and pre-professional, which means the explanation is making use of a false dichotomy.
And third, if `it’s not really the choice of major that’s making the difference – it’s the school’, then why do they have a list by majors on the site in the first place?
[…] thanks, Feminist Philosophers, for the […]