Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Reynolds' "Higher Education Bubble" Meme

Over a lifetime, the earnings of workers who have majored in engineering, computer science or business are as much as 50 percent higher than the earnings of those who major in the humanities, the arts, education and psychology, according to an analysis by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

-from a post on Instapundit

I think the problem with this "research" is probably that no distinctions are made between, say, sociology majors and Classics majors, between an English major at Miami-Dade College and one at Davidson.

A contemporary of mine told me about majoring in physics at UM years ago. He did so spectacularly well during his first two years that he transferred to the University of Chicago, where he majored in nuclear physics. During his senior year at UChi, his professors in that department counseled him to drop the physics track and please go somewhere like law school, which he did. In other words, whatever the case might be now, there was then hardly a comparison between a UM student majoring in nuclear physics and one at the University of Chicago.

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