 Okay, so you wanna know if a general studies major or a general studies degree is worth it. Is it gonna be worth going $40,000 in debt and spending four years of your life to get this college degree? All right, so you know the drill, gently tap the like button and we are gonna get right into it. We are gonna answer this question. The first thing we need to think about is what exactly is a general studies degree? Well, of course, I always consult the Oracle, aka Google to figure out what the definition of these different degrees are. And when you type this into Google, inu.edu says what is general studies? It's an extremely flexible focus for a college degree that enables you to strengthen important skills such as communication, analysis, and problem solving. So that doesn't necessarily define exactly what a general studies degree is because there's a lot of different degree paths where you can work on those skills. So in layman's terms, a general studies degree is what you take when you have no idea what you wanna do. And it's almost like a sample platter when you go to a restaurant. You get to sample a little bit of everything and then figure out what you like later on. Now, I think that's a great idea for you to get into at the beginning of college. You might wanna take a bunch of different classes just to figure out what you like. But in this video, we're gonna talk about whether that's a good idea for you to actually major in. Because here in the United States, there's around 14,000 people every single year that graduate with a bachelor's in general studies. Now, as you can imagine, the typical career paths they end up going down are extremely broad. There's a ton of different ones they could potentially go into. Now, usually these websites will tell you specific career paths that a lot of people who graduate with certain degrees end up going down. But as you can imagine with this one, it's not so simple. However, when I was researching, looking at different videos and different forums of people who've actually gotten this degree, a lot of them ended up becoming paralegals or public relations specialists. But that could have just been by chance that people mentioned those. Now, when it comes to earning potential or salary with a general studies degree, you can expect to make around $41,000 a year starting out and 63,000 in mid-career pay. Compare this to a really good one and a bad one and you'll see that it is definitely on the lower side. So let's say you became a paralegal, for instance. The salary there is gonna be $51,000 a year or $24 per hour. Or you might become a public relations specialist. That one is $61,000 a year or $29 per hour. And this degree would likely fall under the category of a liberal arts degree which they make around $2.1 million over a lifetime which is lower than the average of $2.4 million for all types of degrees. So all of those were below average and think about it, it kinda makes sense. If you were a business owner or a hiring manager, how are you gonna tell what a general studies degree is going to bring to the table? What kind of skills are they gonna be able to do for you? What job would you even put them in? Let's assume that you did have the skills. The whole hiring process takes so much time and energy that they're probably just going to assume that you don't and they're not even gonna give you a chance. So overall the salary here is going to be 4.5 out of 10. Now when it comes to satisfaction, I think there's two important things to consider. And the first one is gonna be meaning or how much you think your career positively impacts the world. So for this degree you can see that the meaning score is around 53% on pay scale and you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it's pretty average. Let's say you become a paralegal, the meaning score is actually gonna go down to 45% which is below average. Cover when you look at job satisfaction which is the second factor which is pretty much just how much you enjoy doing your career on a day to day basis. That is gonna go up to 69%. So that's a little bit above average if you compare it to a good one and a bad one. Now when it comes to how much people regret getting a college degree, it's pretty tough to put this one in a category but social science degrees are probably gonna be the most common classes you take here and that is the fourth most regretted type of degree. Around 29% of people regret it and the main reason is because it's too general and practical and hard to find a job without further studies. Now when the issue is that it's too general and then you're gonna take a general studies degree beyond that, that might become a bit of an issue. Now that being said, when it comes to job satisfaction, there's a lot of things that you have to think about. It could have a lot to do with where you live, the people you work with, your boss, the company you work for, you know all kinds of different things that are pretty much outside of the scope of this video. So this is an extremely subjective section for one person it might be amazing and for another person it might be awful but overall I'm gonna give this one a six out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. So now we're gonna be talking about demand and let's go back to the paralegal. There is around 337,000 paralegals here in the US and it is expected to grow about 10% over the next 10 years which means 35,000 new jobs will be created. For a public relations specialist, there's 274,000 and it's growing at 7% over the next 10 years. So the jobs themselves are pretty decent when it comes to demand but like I said before there's not really any careers that they commonly go into. Now when you type in general studies degree on monster.com you're gonna see that around 6,000 job listings pop up. You can compare that to an anthropology degree with 800 and that's a pretty bad one and a computer science degree with 141,000 which is a good one and you'll see that it is on the lower side especially with how many people end up graduating with a bachelor's every year. So this one would be considered a liberal arts or a humanities degree and a lot of the time when companies are surveyed about what type of majors they want to hire the next year. Generally speaking, business, engineering, mathematics, technology, those are the ones that are gonna be at the top. Liberal arts, humanities, these degrees tend to be at the bottom. So a lot of the time, business degrees, 80% of the companies are gonna be hiring business degree grads and only around 10 to 20%, sometimes even less than that are hiring liberal arts graduates. And usually the reason is because they're just extremely general. The company is gonna have a hard time figuring out exactly what your skills are and in this case it's even more general because it's a general studies degree. The overall when it comes to demand I have to give this one a four out of 10. Next we're gonna be talking about X factors and this is another relatively subjective section but it's gonna be anything that didn't fall into the other ones that I still think is important. Now when you see how much a degree makes over a lifetime your average degree is gonna make around 2.4 million. If you look at a liberal arts degree which would be probably the closest to this one you'll see that it makes around 2.1 over a lifetime which is lower than average. Keep in mind a lifetime of working would probably be around like 40 years or so and so this is the last 40 years and maybe 40 years from now it could be completely different, who knows. Now I will note here that if you're gonna do a general studies degree you probably wanna have some kind of concentration on something that's on the left side of this chart and not something on the right. So for instance, engineering degrees make 3.5 million over a lifetime and you can see that it doesn't matter pretty much any career path you go down they make pretty decent money. Even if they become an artist they're still gonna make around $3 million over a lifetime for instance. Now when you look at these Zippercruiter skills index there'll be no surprise here that general studies is not on there. However, let's choose that career path that we keep talking about, paralegal studies. That one has a score of 57 out of 100 and you can compare that to a high one and a low one and you'll see that it is on the slightly higher side of things, it's a little bit average maybe slightly above average. But again, it's really tough to say here because of the fact that general studies is basically just gonna mean that you're a jack of all trades and a master of none. And the main purpose in my opinion especially if you're gonna go $40,000 in debt for college is to learn specialized skills to get specialized knowledge. The truth is if you wanna have a shallow understanding of a bunch of different subjects you can just watch free YouTube videos, you can maybe get a Skillshare course. There's also a ton of free videos online that are offered by some of the best universities in the entire world. So a lot of Ivy League universities like Harvard for instance offer many of their classes online and they'll even tell you what textbook they're using and they'll give you problems so you can pretty much just go along with them. So if you wanted to be a jack of all trades you could likely teach yourself 99% of these skills on your own. Now we are entering into the age of automation and when it comes to automation and outsourcing the thing that's going to save you from not losing your job is having specialized skills. Same thing for outsourcing. Now you could argue that getting a general studies degree is gonna teach you a lot of intangible or soft skills that are gonna help you in your life in other areas besides financial. And it's possible that they might even help you financially it'll just be a little more indirect. It's not gonna get you a job right off the bat. However, later on in your life when you have those skills it might indirectly help you. Now the thing about a degree being extremely general is the flip side to that is they're also pretty flexible as well. So you're not gonna be pigeonholing yourself into one career or another career but in this particular case it's general but not in such a good way. So I would say if you are gonna get a general studies degree I would highly recommend that you focus on an area that's a little bit more practical so you can get your foot in the door, get your first job. Once you get a few years of experience and you do a good job you probably won't have an issue finding another job. So overall with this one I'm gonna give it an X factor score of six out of 10. So doing the math here all four of them add them up divided by four you're gonna have a score of 5.125 out of 10. You guys know I try to be very fair with these videos and I tell it to you straight that is not very good. I think it's a great idea to take entry level classes and a bunch of different things. Usually the 101 classes especially are really entertaining. I enjoyed taking all kinds of entry level classes and a bunch of different subjects. It was a lot of fun. But this is one of those degrees that's likely not going to be very well respected on the job market and it doesn't really teach you specialized skills. So if you are gonna major in this I would highly recommend double majoring in something else that's gonna be a lot more practical. Better yet it would be a good idea to either minor in it or just take extra classes on the side and things that you enjoy. If money isn't an issue and you don't have to worry about going deep in debt maybe you can consider getting this degree and I'm sure there are some people out there who got general studies degree and it turned out really well for them. But for the most part for the average person I would say this is probably not going to be a good idea. Now if you're somebody watching this video who's already gotten the degree and you want my advice on what you should do at this point I would say focus on learning skills, getting work experience, you know, internships are great and then networking. There are quite a few jobs out there that do require a college degree but don't care which major it is. And so I would look out for those types of jobs. There's a lot of government jobs for instance and those can be really good depending on your personality and what kind of job you're looking for. Now if you want help doing more research on these college degrees I did create a college degree ranker in my Patreon down in the description. In my opinion this is a really convenient tool that will make the whole process much easier and I am going to be updating it in the near future and making it even better. If you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button, hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below and leave thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video. Share the video that actually helps quite a bit when you do that and don't leave. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.