Which Kinds Of College Degrees Are Worth What

Via Catherine Rampell, research from Andrew Sum on job placement by college major can be found over on the right. Ezra Klein deems this "fairly depressing" as "[a]bout a quarter of college graduates don't have jobs, and an additional 22 percent don't have jobs that use their degree."

I always find the idea of jobs that require a college degree to be kind of a weird one. Do you need a college degree to be a policy-focused political blogger? Well, it's not like teaching. To teach second grade you literally must have a college degree. Teaching children to multiply without a college degree is illegal. By contrast, anyone in the world is allowed to start a policy-focused political blog. But in practice, as best I know all of us in this particular game do in fact have college degrees. Indeed, not only do we have college degrees but on average policy-focused political bloggers went to substantially more selective colleges than did second grade teachers. But, again, I'm pretty sure that if Dylan Matthews wanted to drop out of college and become a professional blogger that he could pull that off. But if you're not Dylan, your resume will probably attract some raised eyebrows here at ThinkProgress if you apply for an entry level gig before finishing school. By the same token, my strung suspicion is that Microsoft overwhelming hires people with college degrees for professional work but Bill Gates himself doesn't have one.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I think looking at this kind of data in terms of what's "required" for what winds up mixing and matching a bunch of different things. I think it's instead instructive to look at this data from Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Esther Cho about learning:

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What this chart attempts to do is show gains in Collegiate Learning Assessment scores by major-type when controlling for the characteristics of the people who go into different fields. What it shows is that not only do education and business majors generally start college with worse test scores than people in the traditional math/science/social science/humanities sphere they generally seem to learn less while in college as well. So even though education majors do much better than humanities majors at getting jobs that require a college degree, that looks to me like it's plausibly an artifact of regulatory policy or BLS categorization. There may be lots of jobs that don't require a college degree but for which the kind of general skills ("including critical

thinking, analytical reasoning, and writing") would be useful. Indeed, I think this is especially important when you try to think about career ladders. There are lots of jobs a person might have such that the job itself neither requires a college degree nor a great deal in terms of "general skills" but where such skills would be very helpful in rising to become a manager or quitting to start your own business.