 Is doing an agriculture major and getting an agriculture 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, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are going to 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. If that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. So an agriculture degree is going to teach you the principles and practices of farming. Now farming is tough and it's even harder to learn farming and agriculture in a classroom setting. Tough time never lasts, only tough people last. However, an agriculture degree does cover a wide variety of subjects outside of just becoming a farmer. You're going to learn some of the basics of engineering, finance, exporting, that sort of thing as it pertains to farming. But the truth is, if you want to work in agriculture, getting a college degree might not always be your best choice. Now around 39,000 people graduate with an agriculture related degree every year. However, only around 2100 of them graduate with an agriculture degree specifically. And there are other careers that you can get into besides just becoming a farmer. You could be an agriculture consultant, a farm manager, a scientist. However, the majority of job openings that you see out there are going to involve either being on a farm or working as a farmer. And the thing about being a farmer or a rancher or an agricultural manager is you don't actually need a college degree. A high school diploma is fine. But with that being said, first we're going to be talking about the salary that you would expect in the careers that you would go into if you've got an agriculture degree. So this degree you would expect to make around $45,000 a year starting out in your first five years and then mid-career pay, which is basically after 10 years of working, is going to be on average around $77,000 a year. Now one career path that you might go down is becoming an agricultural and food scientist. They make around $65,000 a year. Another career path you could go down is of course becoming a farmer, a rancher or an agricultural manager. They make around $71,000 a year and you don't actually have to get a degree. Now when it comes to the income of farmers and ranchers, it's going to vary quite a bit depending on what type of crop you're growing, depending on what time of year it is, depending on what year it is, you know, some years you're going to have a lot more profit than others. Another career path you might go down is becoming an agricultural engineer and they make around $80,000 a year. Now according to the US Census Bureau, they tracked how much people with certain types of degrees earn throughout an entire lifetime and a biological science like agricultural science earns slightly below average. So all people who graduate with college degrees and all different types of occupations earn around $2.4 million throughout an entire lifetime whereas people who graduate with a biological science degree are going to earn around $2.3 million. So it's a little bit below average. And unfortunately, I have to say this, you know, because I'm very honest with you guys, I'm very straightforward with you guys, STEM degrees, you know, everyone thinks they're amazing but the truth is science related degrees are some of the most overrated. They're not as good as other STEM degrees and that's just the truth. Now that doesn't mean you should never pursue a science degree. There's a lot of great career paths that you can go down if you do your research but it's just not one of those slam dunk type degrees that a lot of people make it out to be. So with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and give this one a six out of 10 when it comes to salary score. Next we're going to be talking about satisfaction when it comes to an agriculture degree. Now satisfaction is probably the most subjective and the most difficult for me to rate. For one person doing a certain career path might be like a 10 out of 10 satisfaction and for another person it could be a one out of 10. But with that being said, there are a few things that you can kind of look at objectively and that's what we're going to be talking about today. So when it comes to satisfaction I like to talk about two different things meaning and job satisfaction. So meaning is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world and with this degree the meaning score was about 60 percent which is above average. An example of a really good one would be radiation therapy and an example of a really bad one where it really doesn't you know positively impact the world is going to be plastics engineering technology at 30 percent. Now when it comes to job satisfaction using the same website pay scale when you look at a farmer or somebody who manages a farm they do have a pretty high job satisfaction score. When it comes to job satisfaction around 74 percent of them said that they were satisfied which is definitely on the higher side. Compare that to the very lowest on the list which was a parking lot attendant at 5 percent and the highest on the list which was clergy at 98 percent. Now another thing I like to talk about when it comes to satisfaction is how much people regret getting their degree. So a lot of people will get a degree and then they don't necessarily end up going down the same career path that they went to school for and that's fine. Things change in life, people change their minds, maybe they realize that they want to go somewhere else. However when it comes to biological and physical sciences 35 percent of people regret getting that degree which is the second most out of any type of degree and the reason for that is because it's hard to find a job without advanced degrees or licenses and this is something that I've noticed over and over and over again when it comes to the different science related majors is that it can be very very difficult to get a job with just a four-year bachelor level degree. A lot of people have to go back to school and get a master's or a doctorate just to get an entry level position and that's a lot more time and a lot more expense just to start being able to work and pay off your student loans. Compare this to a mathematics degree for instance which only around 12 percent of people regret getting and another thing when it comes to satisfaction is a lot of the time it has less to do with what career you do and more to do with what industry you work in or what company you work for. So if you're working in an industry that's really struggling there's not a lot of opportunity they're probably going to work you really hard they're not going to pay you as well and there's not going to be as many good benefits whereas if you work in an industry that's really booming they're probably going to pay you really well there's going to be lots of opportunity for career progression and promotions and all that sort of thing but overall I'm going to give this one a score of 7.5 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction because it was a little bit above average. Next we're going to be talking about demand and I think demand is probably the most important statistic for you to look out out of all of them and the reason for that is because all of the other ones on this list are going to be affected by demand it's the basic laws of economics which is supply and demand. If there's a lot of demand for the skills that a particular degree or major teaches you then they're probably going to pay you more they're going to treat you better so your job satisfaction is going to be better and that's going to give you a lot more options and you're probably going to have a lot more flexibility in case you want to switch careers or something along those lines. Now when it comes to the career of a farmer rancher or farm manager that is declining at about 6% over the next 10 years that's much lower than average but to be fair here most of the careers where you don't need a college degree in order to get into them you do see a negative decline just because of the fact that there's so many people who could very easily get into it. Additionally this is another industry and career really that's being disrupted by technology. Technology has led to increased efficiency when it comes to crop production and there's less farms and the farms are getting bigger and that means that there's fewer farmers that are needed in order to produce the crops that are necessary. Now an agricultural engineer for instance is going to be growing around 2% over the next 10 years that's a little bit better and they're kind of the ones that are involved in increasing the efficiency in agricultural production so they're the ones that are going to be designing all the machines for instance. Now an agricultural food scientist on the other hand is growing around 6% over the next 10 years which is above average. Now one test that I always like to do is I like to type in the name of the degree onto monster.com or indeed.com so for instance when you type in computer science degree onto monster.com you see 141,000 job openings and when you type in anthropology degree you only see 829. However when you type in agricultural degree you only see 773 job postings which is really really bad. Now this isn't a perfect test by any means it's basically just looking at all the keywords that are in all the different job postings and seeing if people mentioned that an agriculture degree is something that they might be looking for. However when it comes to demand overall I have to say this one is not that great. I'm going to give this one a score of 5.5 out of 10. Next on the list we're going to be talking about X factors and that's basically anything else that didn't make it into one of the other three categories. So for instance we're going to talk about how easily outsourced or automated it is. We're going to talk about how flexible the degree is, how many different career paths you can go into, how the skills that you learn getting that degree would help you you know no matter what career path you decided to go down. Now I mentioned the table before where we talked about biological degrees and how you're only going to earn a little bit below average over an entire lifetime you know 2.3 million versus the average of 2.4 million of all college degrees. So that's honestly not the best sign and when you look at the Zippercuter skills index you see that farming as a skill is not something that's very valued unfortunately. So for instance the most valued skill is going to be software engineering with a score of 88 and one of the least valued skills is industrial sewing with a score of 8 and farming comes in at 27. 27 is definitely on the lower side and so you can see here that there's not a lot of demand on the market for people who have the skill of farming. That doesn't mean that it's not an important subject all this measures is how much demand is out there on the market. Another way of saying this is how much are companies willing to pay people who have these different types of skills. Now when it comes to automation I mentioned this briefly but a lot of the careers out there are being somewhat automated. Agricultural engineers they have that at about a 49% chance of being automated which is a little bit above average. However when it comes to outsourcing that's going to be more difficult just because of the fact that you know there does have to be people who are on the farm actually you know dealing with things and using their hands and fixing tractors when they break down and all that sort of thing. So it's going to be a little more difficult to outsource something like farming. Now another thing I always like to talk about is how flexible a degree is. So there's some degrees that you get and it doesn't even matter if you go down that career path it really doesn't matter at all you can go down just about any career path and you're probably going to have some success. There are other types of degrees where you sort of pigeonhole yourself you sort of put yourself in a box where the skills that you're learning are only going to be valuable if you go into that particular career. Unfortunately this degree in science degrees in general really tend to score relatively low when it comes to flexibility. You know let's say you're applying for a sales job or some type of business job and a company looks at your resume and they see you got a mechanical engineering degree they're probably going to be like hey this guy is really smart he's really hard working and he's a good problem solver I'm we're going to hire him let's do it. If they look at your resume and they see that you've got an agricultural science degree it's probably not going to be as impressive. So overall I'm going to give this one a score of six out of ten when it comes to x factors. So some of the pros here is agriculture especially if you became a farmer is going to be pretty hard to outsource you're not going to be able to you know have somebody remotely control some farm there's going to have to be people who are there in person who know all the ropes they know how to repair something if it breaks down they know how to run the operation smoothly. It also has an above average meaning score and job satisfaction score so people who go into this tend to feel pretty satisfied overall and another thing is that this one is very essential that's a you know a big buzzword lately right this is a very essential career and so it is something that people truly do need you know if we went back to like the stone age for instance we would still need farmers. One of the most essential and important careers out there it's kind of like a doctor or a nurse it really doesn't matter what happened in the world we're always going to need doctors and nurses and farmers cons here is the salary is not that impressive the job growth is either average or below average and when it comes to career paths and the skills that you learn it seems like it's a little bit too narrow you're kind of boxing yourself in if you go down this road and on top of that you don't actually have to get a degree in order to become a farmer which is where most of the jobs are so overall i'm going to give this one a score of 6.25 out of 10 if you really plan things out you know exactly what career path you're going for this could be a great option it could work out for you but i highly advise doing lots of research making sure you have a really good plan a really good vision of where you're going before getting into this one if agriculture is your passion and you can't see yourself going down any other road you know hey go ahead go into this one just make sure you do your research and you should probably also consider maybe double majoring in something else like a business degree now if you don't want to wait for a video to come out you can also check out my rankings of other degrees in the description down below that's going to be the link to my patreon on the patreon i'm basically trying to create the best possible resource that is available out there when it comes to analyzing different college degrees i'm going to be updating it all the time i'm trying to make it better and better and easier to read and i'm basically including all of the most important statistics from all of the best sources online it's not a finished product yet at the time of filming this video it's still in version 1.1 but it's getting better and better i'm also going to be uploading exclusive content on there like my stock portfolio for instance and other just random cool stuff that you guys tend to ask me for but it doesn't really make sense to put it on youtube if you haven't done it already go ahead and hit the like button oh but the hell you're waiting for i can't just hit him with the shovel why not excuse me gently tap the like button we don't we don't hit the like button here but absolutely destroy smash the subscribe button into oblivion and then ring that notification bell too i mean come on you got to do that and then comment any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have down below and whatever you do don't leave check out my other videos right here i made them just for you