 All right. The reason you clicked on this video is because you want to know if an interdisciplinary major or interdisciplinary studies degree is worth it. Is it going to be worth going $40,000 in student loan debt and spending probably four to five years of your life getting this degree? And that is exactly what we're going to be talking about today. So sit back, gently tap the like button. We are going to go over what exactly this degree is and what it's all about. Now, first of all, I always like to look up what the definition of the degree is on Google. And when you do that, you are going to get a very general scatterbrained answer because realistically, there pretty much isn't a definition. So for instance, it says here a major in interdisciplinary studies provides a student with a flexible degree specifically oriented to career goals. So basically in layman's terms, this is the build a bear workshop of degrees. So let's say you want to become a professional YouTuber, but there's not necessarily a degree that exists right now for that. You could just create your own degree and mix maybe film and communications and a couple other things and boom. So in theory, this sounds really cool because you get to study exactly what you want and tailor it to whatever career you're going for. And every year here in the United States around 5000 people graduate with a bachelor's and interdisciplinary studies. Now, usually when I look up these degrees on BLS and other websites, it'll tell me what career paths people tend to end up going down. But with this degree, it could literally be anything. However, from my research, some of the common career paths that I saw were public relations specialists, political scientists, journalists, marketer, human resources, etc. So let's very briefly go over earning potential or salary. So according to pay scale with this degree, you would expect to make around $42,000 a year starting out and 64,000 in mid career pay, you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it's on the lower side. Now there are a ton of different career paths you can go down, but one of the more common ones I saw was a public relations specialist and they make around $61,000 a year or $29 an hour. You could also become a reporter, correspondent or news analyst and they make $46,000 a year or $22 an hour. A higher paying one that you could potentially look into would be a human resource manager and they make $116,000 a year or $56 an hour. However, it usually takes around five years of experience in order to get the job. Now this major would likely be considered a liberal arts degree and they make around $2.1 million over a lifetime and that's compared to the average of $2.4 million so it's a little bit below. So of course, it's really hard to say how much you would make. It would depend on what your focus was in and what extra classes you took, the internships you did, etc. But overall, it seems that it is going to be on the lower side for the average person. So I'm going to go ahead and give this one a 5 out of 10 when it comes to salary. Now when it comes to satisfaction, to be honest with you, this is really difficult for me to even make, especially with a degree like this because it's extremely subjective. For one person, this could be amazing and for another person, it could be awful. There's so many things that are going to go into whether you're satisfied with your career or not. Did you have a good plan? Did you know exactly what you were getting into? What are your interests? What are your passions? What things do you not like? And then it also has a lot to do with the career path you go down, the company you work for, your coworkers, your boss, the industry that you're in, all kinds of things that you might not necessarily be able to predict. But with that being said, I like to break this one down into two different sections and the first one is going to be meaning and that's basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world. So when it comes to meaning, this degree scores 56% and you can compare that to a really good one and a bad one and you'll see that it's kind of average or slightly above average. Now, let's say you go into a specific career path of public relations manager that has a meaning score of 65% which again is above average. Same with the job satisfaction. It's 73% and you can compare that to a really good one and a bad one and you'll see that it is also above average. So basically what this means is that if you are able to get a job doing what you are aiming for, you're likely going to be pretty happy. So if you are able to get a job with the career path that you were looking into, you'll likely be pretty satisfied with it. But that's a big if because this is one of those degrees where business owners and hiring managers aren't going to know exactly how you can help their business. One big advantage that common degrees have is that business owners and hiring managers are going to recognize them. So it's almost like they have real estate inside of people's brains who make decisions. So with some of the more common degrees just because of the fact that people are more familiar with them, even though you might have learned really valuable skills, they aren't going to know that and so they're going to trust it less. But with that being said, we're going to go ahead and give this one a rating of 7 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next, you're going to be talking about demand, which is basically how much need is there for the skills that you have on the open market. So for the PR specialist career, you can see that there's around 274,000 jobs and it's growing around 7%, which is faster than average. However, for the reporter, correspondent or news analyst, you'll see that there's 52,000 jobs and it's declining at negative 11%, meaning over the next 10 years, they are going to lose 5,800 jobs. That's pretty bad. Now, interdisciplinary studies also oftentimes has one of the highest unemployment rates out of any type of degree. And if you look up interdisciplinary studies on monster.com, you see 1,280 job listings and you can compare that to a good one and a bad one. And you'll see that it is definitely on the lower side. So that basically means that not a lot of businesses are looking for people who have that specific degree type, which makes a lot of sense because you're not really specializing in anything. It's sort of just a little bit of everything. And even if you are specializing, they're not going to know what that is. So generally speaking, when they survey businesses and ask them what degree types they're going to be hiring, business and engineering are almost always at the top. You'll see that it's usually around 80% of businesses are trying to hire business degree grads and engineering grads. And that makes a lot of sense because engineering degrees and business degrees are extremely flexible. You can work in almost any industry for any business and a ton of different career paths. Now for this degree, it would probably fall under social science or humanities and that's going to be down towards the bottom. So only around 20% of businesses are looking to hire social science grads and 5.9% for humanities. So overall, having a degree in general is going to open some doors for you. There's a lot of careers out there that require a degree and it doesn't really matter what major it is. However, when it comes to degrees, this might be one of the ones that has the least demand. I'm going to have to go ahead and give it a four out of 10. Next, we're going to talk about X factors. And this is basically anything that we didn't talk about before but is still important. So I like to talk about flexibility, how easily something would be automated, how easily something would be outsourced, etc. So usually in this section, I will talk about how much you make over a lifetime and also how easy it would be for you to switch from career to career. But the thing is, this is interdisciplinary studies and it could be all kinds of different things. So I guess the big thing here is you want to make sure that if you pursue interdisciplinary studies, that you have at least some classes in a practical skill that's going to be able to get you a job, aka get your foot in the door. Once you're able to get into your first job, if you do a good job, then you'll probably be able to get other job offers relatively easily. But a lot of the time it's kind of that catch 22 situation where you need two years of experience, but you need to get a job in order to get two years of experience, which can be really frustrating. So with that being said, the degrees that are on the left here are ones where you generally are going to make more money over a lifetime. So for instance, engineering is about 3.5 million over a lifetime. That's definitely the best one. Computer and math is 3.1 million. Then you see a pretty steep drop off and you've got science, business, physical science, et cetera. And then all the way at the end, you're going to see psychology, arts, education, those are the ones where you make the least money over a lifetime on average. Now, this isn't necessarily going to be the same over the next 40 years as it was the last 40 years. Nobody really knows the future. However, if your degree is more towards the left, that's probably going to be a good sign. Now, again, when it comes to skills, I like to look at these zip recruiter skills index. And you know, they don't have interdisciplinary studies as a skill because it's extremely general. However, here's a screenshot of the most valuable skills. And you can see that a lot of the technology and business related skills are going to be at the very top. So you've got like software engineering, project planning, patient care, you see a lot of healthcare skills there as well. And then here is a screenshot of some of the ones that are at the very bottom. So compositing, yoga instruction, surveillance, styling, towing, pastry chef skills, dog care, toddler care. So, you know, these aren't necessarily things that don't have any value, especially in my opinion, I'm definitely not saying that these skills don't have value. What I am saying is that according to zip recruiter, at least, these are the types of skills where business owners and hiring managers don't see very much value on the open market in terms of you getting a job. And that's at this particular time in history specifically, okay? So maybe these skills were extremely valuable 50 years ago, 100 years ago, but right now, for whatever reason, there's not that much value on the open market in terms of people hiring you for a job. So that doesn't mean that these aren't valuable skills in other types of context. So for instance, you see toddler care here. I mean, I think it's incredibly important to raise children the right way and take care of them. That's obviously a very valuable skill, but in this context, it isn't. So that's something that you would want to keep in mind if you're looking at different skills that you want to learn when you're making an interdisciplinary studies degree. Now, when it comes to likelihood of automation, one of the careers that I saw people go into sometimes, and a lot of the time they have to end up getting a master's degree, so they end up going back to school, would be political scientists. And you know, good news here is they're probably not going to be automated. So Will Robots Take My Job has political scientists with a 4% chance of automation, which is relatively low. And same thing goes with them being outsourced. Chances are they're also not going to be outsourced. So yeah, that's a good thing as well. But again, it's very difficult to say here just because of the fact that there's so many different things that you could study and therefore so many different career paths that you could go down. So if you've studied Shakespeare, Star Trek or Harry Potter's for a degree, there's a good chance that business owners and hiring managers aren't necessarily going to want to give you a job. Now, of course, there are more practical and useful degrees that you could study, but the problem here is that business owners and hiring managers probably won't recognize them. So unfortunately, when it comes to X factors, I have to give this one a 5 out of 10. So when you take all the scores and divide by four, you're going to get 5.25 out of 10. That's not very good. So yes, theoretically, you could make this one work if you had a great plan, you knew exactly what you're doing, you reached out to people who were in the career that you were going for and you knew exactly the steps that you had to take in order to get there, basically. But there's pretty much no room for error here. You'd have to have a foolproof plan because when it comes to going $40,000 in debt for a college degree and spending four years of your life, you want to make sure that you learn specialized skills that are going to be able to get you a job. And let's say that you do learn specialized skills, the problem here is that business owners and hiring managers aren't going to be able to know that interviewing and the whole hiring process takes a long time. And if they see that you got some random degree, they're probably not going to give you the benefit of the doubt and they're not going to give you an interview. So you really want to consider maybe just minoring in this one, taking extra classes in it, just learning the skills on the side. If you really have your heart set on a specialized degree, then maybe consider double majoring in that degree, and then another one that's a little more practical. Or if you're really interested in something that's outside of college, keep in mind that everything can be learned, but not everything can be taught. So in my opinion, especially in the near future, there's a lot of careers or just opportunities in general out there that you are only going to be able to get into if you just do them in real life. And then there's also other types of careers where the best way to get into them is not necessarily to go to college, but to maybe get a certification or just start doing it right after high school. So for instance, something that I can speak on is starting YouTube, I don't think I would ever go and study YouTube in a college. I just don't think that's a great place in order to learn the skill of YouTube. With a lot of skills out there, the best way to learn is to just start doing it. It's almost like riding a bike. You could read a book on how to ride a bike. You could hire a coach who gives you a pep talk on how to ride it, but you're not going to know how to ride it until you actually get on the bike and start pedaling. But with that being said, if you want to do more research on college degrees and you don't want to wait for my video to come out, then check out my college degree ranker down in the description below in my Patreon. That makes the whole process quite a bit easier. It basically takes all of the important statistics and puts them into one spreadsheet and I'm going to be constantly updating it as time goes on. If you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button, hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and definitely share the video. That actually helps quite a bit. Sharing, I think, probably helps a lot more than hitting the like button. I'm not really sure why everyone says to hit the like button because sharing probably helps a lot more. But anyways, check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.