 Is an exercise science degree or exercise science major worth it? That's what we're going to be talking 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 we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that will lead you to success and we also go over how you can avoid some of the common financial mistakes that so many people end up falling for. That sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already like most of you haven't because only around 20% of you do. Hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. So what exactly is an exercise science degree? What is it all about? This degree will basically prepare students for a bunch of different science related and fitness related careers. These are going to be occupations that of course promote health as well as physical fitness. There's going to be quite a bit of kinesiology, biological science, nutrition, as well as physiology. Now exercise science and the fitness industry in general is extremely popular. You can see this with all the YouTube channels that have millions and millions of subscribers and so it's not surprising to see that 25,000 people graduate with this degree every year. That's a lot. This is one of the most popular degrees and some of the most popular careers that people end up going into are going to be exercise physiologist, athletic trainer, and PE educational teacher. So let's talk about salary or earning potential of this degree. With an exercise science degree you can expect to make around $38,000 a year starting out and $61,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to a really high paying degree like petroleum engineering or a really low paying one like recreational therapy and you'll see that this one is a little bit above the lowest one but not much. Now one career path you might go down and a lot of people want to go down this career path is becoming a personal trainer. So a fitness trainer is going to make around $40,000 a year which is $19 per hour and you only need to get a high school degree generally to get into it. Jillian Michaels for instance probably the most famous personal trainer in the world does not have a degree. Bob Harper as well another really famous personal trainer doesn't have a degree. I think you see what I'm getting at here. There's tons of different examples of successful personal trainers who don't have a degree. A lot of them don't have any degree never mind having an exercise science degree specifically. And the truth is a lot of people who hire a personal trainer don't really care all that much about your knowledge. It's kind of a sad truth. They don't even care about your accolades if you're on TV calling yourself an expert. All people really care about is the results that you get them and how much you can motivate them to get in better shape. Now one other career path you might go down is becoming an exercise physiologist and this one makes around 49,000 a year which is $23 an hour. Now all degrees out there make around $2.4 million over a lifetime according to the Census Bureau. An exercise science is a biological science which makes on average around 2.3 million over a lifetime. That's below average and exercise science is one of the lower ones in that group of degrees of biological sciences. So one of the good things is if you are able to become a personal trainer that's one of those careers out there that's relatively entrepreneurial where you kind of get what you put in. There's physical trainers on YouTube for instance that make millions of dollars a year. So it's one of those careers kind of like a real estate agent for instance that's going to be high risk but also high reward. However overall for most of the people who graduate with this degree it's not going to pay all that well. I'm going to give this one a score of 5 out of 10. Next we're going to be talking about satisfaction and I break this one up into job satisfaction as well as meaning. Meaning is how much you think your job positively impacts the world and job satisfaction is how much you enjoy doing your job on a day to day basis. Which if you compare that to a really good one like radiation therapy is 91% and a really bad one like plastics engineering technology is 31%. One career path you might go down is athletic trainer and for that one the meaning score is 77% and the job satisfaction score is 78% which again is well above average. Compare that to a really good one like clergy or a really bad one like a parking lot attendant. Now I didn't know whether to classify this one as a health science degree or as a science degree but health science degrees are the fifth least regretted type of degree whereas science degrees like physical science and biological science are the second most regretted. So it's really hard to say which one is which but what you can say is it's not so easy for you to get a job with just a bachelor level degree. Now that being said it's going to have a lot to do with factors that are completely outside the scope of this video. It's going to be totally subjective and what matters to one person might not matter to another person. For instance for some people salary is going to be the most important thing whereas for other people maybe you're like a minimalist or something salary isn't going to matter that much. It's also going to change depending on where you live the company you work for the industry you work in who you work with what kind of pace the environment is is it fast paced is it not fast paced is it a leadership position or is it not a leadership position all kinds of different things are going to change your job satisfaction but overall I'm going to give this one a pretty good score of 8 out of 10. Now when it comes to demand when you look at a personal trainer for instance there are a lot of them out there there's 373,000 and it's going at 15% which is much faster than average meaning over the next 10 years there's going to be 57,000 jobs that are created but again you only need a high school diploma in order to get into this one generally speaking so you're going to be competing with a lot of other people for those jobs and I'm not really surprised there that this one is so popular personal trainers are becoming extremely popular I mean I'm thinking about getting one myself especially with the quarantine belly that I've put on or at least I will whenever the gym's open about what 20 or 30 years another career you might go down is becoming an exercise physiologist and they are growing at around 11% which is much faster than average as well however again there's not that many jobs out there only around 19,000 meaning over the next 10 years there's going to be 2,200 new jobs that are created and this is a very popular degree where tons of people are graduating with it every year because they're so passionate about exercise and it's just simple supply and demand there's not going to be enough job openings for all of those people so one test that I like to do is to type into monster.com exercise science degree and you'll see that only 709 jobs pop up for a computer science degree you're going to see 141,000 and for anthropology one that's not very good you're going to see 800 so this one is actually below the lowest bar it's worse than the one that I use as an example of one that's not very good and that's not a good sign that's way worse now I'll admit that's not a perfect test by any means don't get me wrong but overall when it comes to getting a bachelor's degree for this one there's not going to be very much demand I'm going to give this one a score of 4 out of 10 next we're going to be talking about x factors and that's anything that didn't make it into the other list so for instance we're going to be talking about automation how easy it is to outsource how flexible the degree is how flexible different career paths are the skills that you learn and how valuable they are so let's classify this one as a biological science degree and over a lifetime you're going to make around 2.3 million dollars that's a little bit lower than the average of 2.4 million dollars for all different types of degrees and all different types of occupations so generally speaking biological science degrees are pretty average when it comes to how much money you make over a lifetime and it gets even a little bit worse when you consider the fact that many people who get a science degree end up going to grad school getting a master's or a doctorate which means they have more investment both time as well as money in many cases and of course if you get a master's or a doctorate you're probably going to earn more money but at the same time it's likely going to take a lot more time and you might end up deeper in student loan debt now when it comes to the skills that you learn i couldn't find a skill that perfectly matches up here the closest one that i found was physical therapy and that had a rating of 66 out of 100 on the skills index whereas you know something like software engineering it's really good is 88 out of 100 and industrial sewing is eight so physical therapy ranks really high but i'm pretty sure they're more referring to the career of physical therapist that probably doesn't apply nearly as much as exercise science although quite a few exercise science majors end up going on and becoming physical therapists so when it comes to the skills there i think obviously exercise science is a very very valuable skill to learn if you're able to keep yourself healthy throughout your lifetime first of all you're going to have a much better life in general you're going to be happier you're going to live longer etc and it probably won't directly result in you making more money you know exercise science isn't a super respected degree by any means but indirectly it'll probably result in you making more money and having more success now another thing that's pretty good here is the likelihood of automation is going to be relatively low it's probably not going to be automated or outsourced i mean think about it people are always going to want to work one on one or maybe you know one on five like one person with a very small group when they're trying to get exercise this is why companies like CrossFit are so popular because a lot of people really enjoy the camaraderie and the competition and just being around other people whereas working out on your own is a little bit boring now with exercise science especially if you become a trainer there is going to be pretty good opportunities for you to start your own business it's sort of like a real estate agent where it's kind of high risk high reward you might be a real estate agent that doesn't make hardly any money at all or maybe you just sell a house every couple years just from your family or your friends people that you know i would assume that there's probably an extremely high failure rate with people who try to start their own businesses as trainers however if you are successful you can charge hundreds of dollars an hour in order to train people but the truth here is most of the jobs that are good that you would get into at this type of degree are going to require additional schooling going to physical therapy school for instance and there's many jobs out there that people are going for that you don't actually have to have this degree in order to get into additionally it's probably not going to be a very well respected degree so for instance if you got an engineering degree and then you decided you know what i don't want to be an engineer there's tons of different careers out there that you can go into just because of how well respected it is let's say you got an accounting degree for instance and you decided i don't want to be an accountant well first of all there's like a million different types of accounting jobs and then second of all there's tons of other types of careers that you can go into with an accounting degree business degrees tend to be extremely flexible unfortunately exercise science doesn't really have either of those things going for it so when it comes to x factors i'm going to have to give this one a five out of ten so the pros here are you're probably going to have a very high job satisfaction rating you'll also likely stay in shape which is really good it'll make you happy overall and it'll probably lead you to having more success and it can be a really good stepping stone degree where you're going to learn a lot about the body if you're thinking about majoring in something in health care the cons here are that it's going to be relatively low income for a lot of different careers the jobs that require a bachelor's degree generally are going to be very saturated there's just way more people graduating than the number of jobs out there and a lot of the higher paying careers are going to require further study so overall i'm going to give this one a 5.5 out of 10 now like i always say this is extremely subjective for one person it might be 10 out of 10 for another person it might be one out of 10 i think a lot of people are going to argue that although a lot of physical trainers out there don't have a degree more of them should have a degree because they probably know what they're doing better and be a lot less injuries and all that sort of thing and and hey i'm not going to argue with you i'm just presenting the facts to you guys and you can do what you want with them if you still want to go down this career path you know there's something that you're looking for just make sure that you plan it out and you know exactly what you're getting yourself into talk to people that are in the career paths that you want to go down they've maybe gotten the degree and ask them what you should do in order to stand out and increase your chances of success they'll probably say something like getting internships work experience learning extra skills networking getting actual you know work experience is a really big one with this and just kind of some food for thought here stuff that i researched that i didn't necessarily put in the script you could become a personal trainer a gym manager you could become a teacher you could also work for the government if you want to go to extra school you could become a health care worker there's a lot of great health care opportunities out there so one obvious example is if you wanted to become a physical therapist that would make a lot of sense for you to get an exercise science degree so if your plan is to become a physical therapist this one could make sense for you but i think just overall the recommendation that i give is for people to make sure that they secure the bag with their undergraduate degree and the reason for this is because plans change all the time i swear when i was first in undergrad when i was taking all these like chemical you know chemistry classes biology classes etc it seemed like everybody was a pre-med major most people thought that they knew what they wanted to do but they ended up changing their mind so it's always good to have a backup plan and getting a degree in undergrad where you know for sure that you can get a job is a good idea even if you end up deciding that you want to go to grad school at least it's your choice and it's not something that you have to do there's a big big difference there overall if you want help finding a perfect college degree for you check out my college degree ranker down in the description below it's going to be in my patreon where i upload exclusive content and if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc especially if you've gotten an exercise science degree share this video with all of your friends and definitely do not forget to check out my other videos right here i made them just for you