 Is a neuroscience major or neuroscience degree worth it? That's what we're going to be talking about today, but before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, I talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers and opportunities that will lead you to success. And I also go over some of the common financial traps that so many people fall for. If that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, then go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. So first of all, let's talk about neuroscience and exactly what it is. So neuroscience is going to be studying all kinds of different things that are related to the brain. So we're talking about psychology, chemistry, as well as biology, all of those things that are related to the brain. Now this is a relatively rare degree, only about 5,700 people graduate with a bachelor's every year. So we're going to go ahead and evaluate this degree and then I'm going to rank it in a bunch of different important areas. First, we're going to talk about salary. So according to pay scale with a neuroscience degree, you're going to make around 47,000 starting out an $80,000 in mid-career pay. Now there are a number of different career paths that you can go down with a neuroscience degree. One interesting one you could do is you could learn about machine learning, which is basically people trying to replicate the brain using coding as well as hardware. You could also go to medical school and become a neurosurgeon. You could go down the researcher route and become a scientist. So let's say you wanted to become a medical scientist. They make around $88,000 a year. However, you usually will have to get a doctoral level degree in order to become a scientist. And that's kind of the problem that you see with a lot of these different types of career paths that you could potentially go down. For instance, if you wanted to become a neurosurgeon, sure, they're going to make a lot of money, probably over $400,000 a year. But you're also probably going to have to go through about 15 years of schooling and training. The truth is it's not a very obvious progression from getting a bachelor's degree in neuroscience and finding a job with just a bachelor level degree. Many of the jobs out there will require you to have, at the very least, a master's level degree and sometimes even higher. So you might end up getting a neuroscience degree, which is great and all, but then you end up working in something that's completely unrelated to neuroscience. So it's very important that you make sure to do your research and know exactly what you're getting yourself into and exactly what career path you're trying to go down. Overall, when it comes to pay, I'm going to go ahead and put this one at about seven out of 10. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about satisfaction. So when it comes to satisfaction, I like to look at two different things. The first one is going to be meaning and meaning is basically how much you think your degree positively impacts the world. So for instance, if you are someone who gets to professionally eat food, for instance, you're like a professional food taster, that might have a really high job satisfaction score, but it might not have nearly as high of a meaning score. And according to Payscale, people who graduate with a neuroscience degree report about a 59% meaning score, meaning 59% of them think that their career significantly positively impacts the world. Now also, according to Payscale, if you became a medical scientist, that would have about an 83% meaning score. That's much higher than average. And you do tend to see that with the science related degrees. People who get science related degrees and they end up working in science, you know, as a medical scientist, for instance, do tend to have very high meaning. The job satisfaction score for that career is also 73%, which is also higher than average. So if you are able to find a job as a scientist after graduating with a neuroscience degree, you'll probably be very happy with your career. Overall, I'm going to go ahead and give the satisfaction section a 7.5 out of 10. I think the key word here is if you're able to find a job because a lot of people unfortunately graduating with a neuroscience degree will not be able to find a job with just a bachelor's in the science field. That's why next we're going to be talking about demand. Now, going back to the medical scientist job, there's about 138,000 jobs available right now. And it's growing at 6%, which is faster than average. Now, if you look at science related jobs in general, they do have decent growth. It's not going to be amazing like health or technology is, but it's pretty decent. However, what you're going to notice is a lot of the careers require either a master's or a doctorate. And usually the advice that I give on this channel just because of the fact that there's so much cost associated with getting a master's or a doctorate is you want to secure the bag with your bachelor's degree. And what I mean by this is after graduating, after spending that four years to get your bachelor's degree, you want to be able to get a job. If you want to, you have the option of going back to school and getting a master's or a doctorate, but you don't want to be in a situation where you absolutely have to. And so if you know exactly what you want to do and you know that you need to get a neuroscience degree in order to get there, and you know that you're probably going to have to get a master's or a doctorate, then this can be a really good choice. But when it comes to just bachelor's degrees, I have to be fair here and rank this one extremely low. For this section, I'm going to have to give this one a 5.5 out of 10. Again, I know this is very low and it's true. It's very subjective. If you know exactly what career path you're going for, then it might not matter. Now let's go ahead and discuss the X factors of getting a neuroscience degree. X factors range anywhere from how well respected the degree is, how easily automated it is, and all kinds of other different factors. Now when it comes to X factors, I would say it's not a very flexible degree. It's not going to be like a business degree where let's say you choose to go down one career path and then five years in, you decide you don't want to do that anymore. It's very easy for you to switch, redirect, and go down a different career path. With a neuroscience degree, the set of skills that you're learning are extremely niche and they're pretty much only going to be good for the most part if you go down certain career paths. So unfortunately, you do risk pigeonholing yourself into only certain careers. With that being said, I will say that neuroscience degrees in general are going to be relatively well respected. This means that if you're applying for just kind of a general job that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with neuroscience, people will be kind of impressed with a neuroscience degree. A lot of companies have the hiring philosophy that they just want to hire the smartest possible people and they don't really care what degree they get or what kind of background they have. They're going to take their chances on the brain power and then train them later on. Now, when you look at the degree earnings of all different types of degrees and all different types of careers throughout a lifetime, you will see that neuroscience, which falls under biological science is going to be below average. The average person who graduates with a degree will earn around $2.4 million throughout a lifetime, whereas someone who graduates with a biological science degree will earn around $2.3 million. So it's below average. However, it will vary quite a bit depending on what career path you go down. So for instance, if you end up working in management, you would make around $2.9 million in a lifetime. And if you end up working with computers, you might make around $3 million in a lifetime. But with that being said, it is a lot lower than you would like to see across the board. If you knew exactly what you wanted to do, and let's say I'm just going to make this up off the top of my head, let's say you wanted to become a machine learning expert. What you could do is you could double major in neuroscience and something like computer science, for instance, learn both of those skills. And that would prepare you extremely well for becoming a machine learning expert. So if you know exactly what you want to do, and you know exactly what steps you need to take in order to get there, then this can be a good degree. But if you don't plan it out or you do plan it out, but you make a mistake, unfortunately, there's not a lot of wiggle room here. You will likely have to go back to grad school in order to get a good job. And I've talked a lot about grad school on this channel, how it takes a long time. And it's also extremely expensive. So overall for X factors, I'm going to give this one a six out of 10. So when it comes to pros and cons, some of the pros here are if you do end up getting a job in science and you're someone who really loves science, they do tend to be pretty happy and satisfied with their careers. Another pro is that if you know exactly what you want to do, let's say you want to become a brain surgeon, then this can be really good for you because being a neuroscientist would be a great prerequisite to becoming a brain surgeon. Another pro is that I think it's generally speaking a relatively well respected degree. And by that I mean if you applied to just kind of a random business job with this degree, something that you know companies need, they might respect the fact that this is a more difficult degree, and you're probably smart. And so they might want to hire you for that reason. Cons here are that it's not very flexible. The skills that you learn in neuroscience are not going to be as easy to translate into other areas or other types of careers. A second con here is that it's going to be very difficult for you to get a job with just a bachelor level degree. And the third thing is the jobs that are available with just a bachelor's level degree are probably not going to pay that well. So the overall score here is going to be 6.5 out of 10. I think this is one of those degrees where it's not horrible, you know, if you have a really good plan going in, if you know exactly what you're doing, this can be great. It also can pair really well with other types of degrees depending on what career path you're going to go down. I would advise if you're looking at this degree to make sure that you thoroughly research it, really spend quite a bit of time researching it. And I would honestly say you might want to contact people that are in the career paths that you're considering and talk to them and ask them if they would advise you getting a neuroscience degree. This is all extremely subjective and it's going to be different depending on who we're talking about, what your interests are and all kinds of other things. But if you are interested in looking at my personal rankings of all the different types of degrees, I do have that down in the description below in my Patreon. I update the college degree ranker as much as I can whenever I find some data that I think would fit into the ranker. I put it in there. If you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. And comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. that you have on the video. And before you go, make sure to check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.