Dr. Richard Vedder
Dr. Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, wrote a column at Forbes headlined “Majors Matter.”
Bankrate.com has just published its latest assessment of the financial attractiveness of 162 college majors. After talking to Bankrate’s Adrian Garcia, I like how they do their analysis. It appropriately puts top emphasis on postgraduate earnings of students-70% weight in its rankings. But its also recognizes that job availability varies by major, so it puts a 20% weight on the average unemployment rate of graduates by major, using a Census Bureau definition of unemployment, albeit slightly different from that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last 10% of the rankings is based on the proportion of students going on to get further degrees. The more education it takes to acquire earnings, the costlier it is, so rankings are adjusted downward when a large proportion of majors go on for further education….
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