 So, you want to know whether an international relations major or international relations degree is going to be worth it, that's why you clicked on this video and we are going to go over if it's going to be worth it for you to spend four years of your life and probably go around $40,000 in student loan debt in order to get this degree. So gently tap the like button, sit back and we are going to go over whether it's worth it and the first thing we're going to do is define what exactly is international relations. Well, this is going to be the study of politics, economics and law on a global level and it has an emphasis on the political science side of things. Things like various current issues and conflicts around the world, how various foreign countries are going to be governed as well as their relationship with the United States as well as other countries. Now, for this major, every year here in the United States of America around 8,000 people are going to graduate with this degree and a few examples of career paths they might go into would be political scientists, fundraising manager as well as public relations specialist. So first let's briefly go over the salary or earning potential of this degree and if you look on payscale.com it shows that international relations majors will make around $49,000 a year starting out and 96,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it's somewhere in the middle. Now we can also look at a few different career paths you might go down and one would be political scientist and you have to get a master's degree for this one but you'd make around 122,000 a year and that's $58 an hour. You could also become a public relation or fundraising manager and they make around 116,000 a year or $55 an hour however it is going to require quite a bit of experience. Those are two of the higher paying options something that's probably a little more realistic just because it's more common would be a public relations specialist and they make around $61,000 a year or $29 an hour. Now according to the US Census Bureau, social science degrees on average are going to make around $2.5 million over an entire lifetime and that's compared to the average of 2.4 for all different types of degrees. However that's in the last 40 years so nobody knows what will happen in the next 40 years and another thing you want to keep in mind is a lot of social science degree graduates end up getting a master's or a doctorate and so it's not really a fair comparison you're sort of comparing apples to oranges because other degrees like engineers for instance only get a bachelor's and so you're comparing the pay from a master's or a doctorate to a bachelor's degree so it's a little bit difficult to do. So overall for this one it's not amazing but at the same time it's not bad I'm going to give it a 7 out of 10 when it comes to salary. Now the next thing we're going to go over is satisfaction and I like to break this down into meaning and job satisfaction so basically meaning is how much you think your career positively impacts the world. Now for this degree you can see on pay scale that the meaning score is 49% and you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it is on the lower side. However that is going to vary depending on what career path you end up going down so for instance for public relations manager it's 65% which again you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and it's slightly above average. Additionally when you look at job satisfaction which is basically just how much you enjoy doing your job on a day-to-day basis it scores around 73% and you can compare that to a good one and a bad one like before and you'll see that that's also above average. So basically what this is saying is depending on what career path you're going for if you are able to actually secure a job you're probably going to be relatively happy with it. Now when it comes to how much people regret their college majors social science degrees in general are the fourth most regretted type of degree and the main reasons is because it's too general and practical hard to find a job without further studies and that is somewhat true with this one but also not true at the same time. So there is a good chance that you won't be able to find a job with further studies a lot of the time people have to get a master's or a doctorate in order to get into those positions that they're aiming for. However when it comes to being too general it really depends on what you've done during college so for instance let's say you want to work in a specific country I'm just going to pick a random one let's say you want to work in Russia for instance. You would want to tailor everything you do around that. You would want to be trying to get work experience and doing internship with people who have experience working in Russia etc etc etc. So this is where the planning part comes in very important that you plan ahead with this degree you don't want to just get it and then you know the end of the four years comes and you're like oh what am I going to do with my life? You want to know what you're getting yourself into. However it is a little bit impractical unless you really plan ahead. So this is one of those degrees where it's kind of high risk high reward because if you do plan ahead and you know what you're getting yourself into this one can be great because there's a lot of opportunities that are happening out there internationally. Whether we like it or not business is becoming more and more international and that is going to change the world in a lot of ways. So I would say your satisfaction is going to be relatively good if you're the right person in the right situation that has a really good plan but realistically speaking that's probably not going to be the case most of the time. So this one is really tough for me to call and it's also extremely subjective satisfaction in general is extremely subjective and a lot of these things are it's really going to depend on the person and their passions and all kinds of other things that are outside of our control. However with that being said I'm going to give this one a score of 7 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. First we're going to be talking about demand aka how much need there is for the skills you're going to learn with this degree out there on the job market. So for political scientists for instance there's only 7,000 jobs available but it is growing at 6% which is faster than average meaning over the next 10 years there's going to be 400 new jobs that are created. For a public relations or fundraising manager there's around 88,000 jobs and it's growing at 9% which is much faster than average and for a public relations specialist this is a very common one there's around 274,000 jobs available and it's growing at 7% which is faster than average. So it does look like some of the career paths you might end up going down have a decent amount of demand but what about the degree itself? Well one thing I like to do is type in the degree name onto monster.com and see how many job listings have that name in their job description. So for instance with international relations degree there's 279 job listings and you can compare that to a really good one like computer science with 141,000 or a bad one like anthropology and you'll see that it's actually lower than the one that I usually use to set the low bar. So that is not generally a very good sign that means that not a lot of business owners and hiring managers are actively looking for someone who has this degree. Now one thing I like to look at is surveys that are sent to businesses throughout the country asking them what college degree types they're looking for what majors they're looking to hire for their business. And whenever you send these surveys out you're going to see that companies are going to be looking for a lot of people who have business degrees, engineering degrees, math, science sometimes technology degrees are up there as well and then depending on you know what industry it's in sometimes health degrees are good. Social science degrees tend to be in the middle or the bottom depending on what industry it is and if you look at these specific degrees that these companies are looking for you'll see that economics is number one and then political science or international relations is number two. So 95% of companies that are looking for a social science degree graduates are looking for economics but only 35% of them are looking for people who graduated with a political science or international relations degree but at the same time it is the second most on the list. So kind of good news and kind of bad news there. So it's in the group of degrees social science degrees that not a lot of companies are looking for but at the same time it is second on that list of social science majors. So overall not very impressive when it comes to demand and this is one of those degrees where you really have to plan things out because you're going to be going down specific career paths you're probably going to have to plan things out way into the future because you might even be working in a specific country. When it comes to demand I'm going to have to give this one a 6 out of 10. Next we're going to be talking about X factors and this is basically anything that I didn't mention before but I still think is pretty important. So we're going to be talking about things like flexibility, how easily automated or outsourced it would be, things that are going to happen in the future. Trends that I kind of predict will maybe happen in the future that could potentially influence this. So when it comes to social science degrees in general they make around 2.5 million dollars over a lifetime. Now keep in mind that's going to vary greatly depending on the degree you get yourself into as well as a bunch of other different factors. So for instance a lot of the people who get social science degrees end up going back to school getting a master's or a doctorate which of course they're going to make a lot more money with that because of the fact that they got higher education. So in many ways it's kind of like comparing apples to oranges because a lot of these people who get social science degrees in fact quite a few of them there's some of them where over 50% of the people who get the degrees end up going back to grad school and that's not really fair to compare someone who has a PhD or a master's to someone who maybe got an engineering degree and only had to get a bachelor's. Now the thing to keep in mind is this is US census data and you know a person's lifetime or at least their work life would be about 40 years or so and so this is data from the last 40 years and that doesn't necessarily mean that 40 years from now when you're ready to retire it's going to be the same way. Now one thing that's interesting to look into here is the different types of careers people go into and how much money they make in each of those career tracks. So for instance people who get social science degrees and then they end up working in computer or math I assume that's like technology industry probably coding for instance will make 3.2 million over a lifetime and people who end up working in management will make around 3.4 million. However it would be much easier to get into a technology related career path if you've got an engineering degree, tech degree or a mathematics degree than getting a social science degree. Much more likely that you might end up working in office support where you make around 1.8 million over a lifetime which is much lower than the average. So this isn't one of those degrees like engineering for instance where pretty much doesn't matter what career path you end up going down you're probably going to make pretty good money. So you definitely want to keep that in mind and that's why it's so important especially if you decide to get a social science degree that you plan ahead. Now one thing I like to do is look up the ZIP recruiter skills index and unfortunately international relations isn't on there it seems like it's just a little bit too general to be on there. However something very similar would be public relations and that is a 46 out of 100 on the skills index. Now you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it's kind of average maybe like maybe on the lower side I guess. Now let's say you became a political scientist chances are it's probably not going to be automated. So that's one of the great things about liberal arts and social science degrees is a lot of the time they are going to teach you skills that aren't going to be automated because of the fact that it's all about critical thinking writing things, reading things, making arguments, communicating with other people and that sort of thing. So in that way these degrees might not teach you skills that lead to you directly making money AKA getting a job however indirectly these skills will likely lead to you having a more successful life not only financially but in other areas as well. Now this degree is very closely related to political science and interestingly enough PolySci was number 10 on the list of the top 10 degrees that create the most millionaires. However the big thing here that I am considering that's extremely important is flexibility and with this degree there's not that much room for error. So even if you have a great plan going in and you've really done your research, you've talked to people who are in the career pass that you're thinking about going down and you've made sure that this is a degree that they recommend that you get and you know the exact steps it's gonna take in order for you to get to your goal. Even if you do all that life sometimes is gonna throw curve balls at you. So a lot of the time if anything goes wrong with your plan unfortunately this isn't one of those degrees that's extremely flexible and you're gonna be able to very easily go into a different career path. So for that reason I do have to give this one a score of five out of 10 when it comes to X factors. So when you add all four up and divided by four the final score is going to be 6.25 out of 10. So with this degree it's honestly kind of like a dark horse sort of degree 10 or 15 years from now it could be really good or it could be really bad and there's just a lot of things that we can't predict. There's a lot of things that outside of our control and there's just no way for us to tell whether this is gonna be a good degree or a bad one. It also depends on the person. So it's gonna depend a lot on you know your personal background, what your strengths are what your passions are and all kinds of things like that. If you do decide to go for this degree make sure you really do your research and know exactly what you're getting yourself into. I would say it would be a good idea if you decide to major in this degree to double major in something else that would be a little bit more practical that aligns with your plans. Or maybe consider not majoring in it at all just minor in it, take extra classes on the side or study it on your own. And like I mentioned before planning ahead is going to be very important. So you wanna figure out what country you're gonna be working in. Probably like a sub region. What sub region of the country do you want to eventually live? Because chances are a lot of the jobs you're gonna be going for are gonna be international which for the right person that's gonna be awesome but you're gonna wanna know the language you're gonna wanna know the customs. You know everything about that country and even about the region of the country you're gonna wanna know extremely well. And a great thing here is to make sure that you have some really invaluable skills outside of your knowledge about that culture or country. So for instance, if you're somebody who knows a lot about Russian culture and you also have skills in accounting or finance that could be extremely valuable to a business who has branches in both countries. Anyways, I've got a huge backlog of suggestions from you guys for different videos that you want me to do. But if you wanna kind of skip the line a little bit and you don't wanna wait for me to make the video because it takes a long time to make these videos and it's a lot of work then check out my college degree ranker down in the description below in my Patreon. In my opinion, this is going to be the best resource that is available on the internet and I have done hundreds and hundreds of hours of research in order to make it and pretty soon I'm gonna be updating it and making it even better. If you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and share the video. That actually helps quite a bit. And then don't leave, don't leave. 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