“Liar Liar Pants on Fire!” Kids Who Major in Liberal Arts Don’t Make Any Money

In our new “Liar Liar Pants on Fire” series, CIT consultants debunk some of the claims we’re hearing about college admissions.  Here’s Liar Liar Claim#2!

Fiction: If my kid majors in the Liberal Arts, he or she won’t make any money

Truth:

1. “Some surveys show that philosophy majors perform better on average than most of their peers on exams for law, medicine and other graduate schools. And research by the salary data site PayScale showed that philosophy majors rank in the top 100 of all academic fields for average mid-career salary”. Read the Washington Post’s story here

2. “The conventional wisdom is that computer science and engineering majors have better employment prospects and higher earnings than their peers who choose liberal arts.  This is true for the first job, but the long-term story is more complicated. The advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.” Read the New York Times article here

Check Out Liar Liar Claim #1:  “The child of a friend of a friend got into MIT (Yale, Harvard, Middlebury, Wellesley, Stanford, Dartmouth) on a full merit scholarship”