As college costs and student debt skyrocketed over the past several years, a debate began brewing over the purpose of college.
Some, including many parents helping to foot the bill, will argue that given the cost, maximizing earnings potential should be a major component of any college experience. Others will say the students’ time in college is about expanding horizons and discovering new talents and knowledge. University administrators will often tell you the ideal college experience should be some elusive combination of both.
A new study suggests that, for students, potential earnings may play a role in how they approach college, but they certainly take other factors into account.
When students found out their major’s average earnings are less than they thought, that’s not enough to push them to change majors.Students who have no information about the earnings potential of their major tend to overestimate how much they’ll make after college, according to a study released published last week by Rutgers’ University Education and Employment Research Center. But even when students found out their major’s average earnings are less than they thought, that’s not enough to push them to change majors, the researchers found.
“The money is one factor, but then there’s a lot of things that people are weighing,” said Michelle Van Noy, associate director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers and a co-author of the study. Those factors can include things like input from family and friends, career services and, of course, students’ interests and skills. “It’s a process of exploration,” Van Noy said. The study was based on surveys with nearly 5,000 Rutgers students.
The study comes amid a several-years long movement to provide students with more data at both the school and program level in hopes that it will help them make more informed decisions. The Department of Education recently proposed offering data or financial literacy information in place of accountability measures with more teeth.
The Rutgers study suggests that earnings information isn’t the only thing influencing students’ behavior. “Over the past several years, there’s been a lot more emphasis on providing more data to help guide decision-making,” Van Noy said. But she added, “The data are one piece of a big puzzle.”
Students majoring in science, engineering, technology and math fields had particularly high earnings expectations.Once students receive the data they do adjust their earnings expectations after college, the study found. Students majoring in science, engineering, technology and math fields had particularly high earnings expectations, according to the researchers. Van Noy suspects that the anxiety surrounding post-college earnings and the attention paid to STEM fields in those conversations may be part of the reason why students’ pay expectations are so much higher than the reality in those fields.
“Students have built in their minds that ‘I’m going to earn a lot of money,’” she said. “In reality that’s a little bit tempered.”
While majoring in a STEM field is less risky than specializing in the humanities or social sciences, there’s still a wide earnings range within the STEM sector that’s based on things like major and job choice. At the same time, it’s still possible to have a lucrative career with a liberal arts major, but students need to know the correct job pathways to pursue.
That’s something colleges could and should be helping with, according to Van Noy. Students arrive at their campus with different backgrounds and some may have more access than others to the kinds opportunities that can help them understand their major and career options. “Having an intentional approach to help students go through a process of exploration is important,” Van Noy said. “It’s the one institution that can try to help equalize a lot of differences in social networks.”
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