 is an environmental studies degree worth it. That's where we're gonna be going over today, but before we get into that, 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 gonna lead you to success, and we also go over how you can avoid some of the common financial traps 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. But with that being said, we are gonna jump right into it. The subject of this video is, if an environmental science degree and an environmental science major is worth it. Everybody knows how expensive college degrees are. It's not a secret anymore. There's a huge student loan debt bubble and everybody knows about it. And so you probably wanna know whether this degree is gonna be worth it for you or not. So first of all, what the heck is environmental studies exactly? It's all about developing sustainable strategies to protect the environment. Around 6,500 people graduate with this one every year. And a few career paths you might go down is becoming a surveyor, an environmental scientist or an environmental consultant. Next, let's talk about the salary or earning potential of an environmental studies degree. With this degree, you can expect to make around $45,000 a year starting out and 80,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to a very high-paying degree like petroleum engineering, which is 92,000 starting out and 182,000 in mid-career pay or one that's not so good like recreational therapy, which is 36,000 starting out and 49,000 in mid-career pay. Now at this one, there's a lot of different career paths that you can go down and usually these are gonna be working for either the government or some type of nonprofit, but sometimes there are going to be some jobs available with companies as well. So one career path you might go down is becoming a surveyor. They make around $63,000 a year. If you wanted to become an environmental scientist, they make around 71,000. Now these are some of the career paths that you can go down with just a bachelor's degree, but the truth is there's a lot of different career paths where you're gonna have to get a master's or a doctorate. This is very common with a lot of the different science-related degrees. Unfortunately, you really have to specialize in whatever area you're studying. Now, when it comes to lifetime earnings of a degree, this one falls under the category of biological science and physical science. And you see that over a lifetime physical science degree earners make around $2.6 million, whereas biological science degree earners make around $2.3 million. This is around the average of all different occupations, which is 2.4 million. Still, a lot of the time, like I said before, you're gonna be working for some sort of government agency, and so they usually don't tend to pay all that well. Overall, this one is gonna get a score of six out of 10 when it comes to salary or earning potential. Next, let's talk about satisfaction, and as always, I'm gonna break this down into two separate categories. The first one is going to be meaning. So when it comes to meaning, as you could probably guess, this one has a relatively high score, and meaning is all about how much you think your career, after getting a degree, positively impacts the world. So this one has a score of 59%. That means 59% of people think that their career positively impacts the world in a significant way. Compare that to a really high score, like some of the healthcare degrees have the highest scores, like radiation therapy at 91%, and plastics engineering technology comes in at 31% with one of the lowest scores. So you can see that this degree definitely has a higher than average score when it comes to meaning. When you look at the second category, which is job satisfaction, and I always like to talk about this one as just how much do you enjoy doing your job. So for instance, if your job was to just watch Netflix all day and then report to people what shows you like and what shows you don't like, you might enjoy that job quite a bit, but it might not have a very high meaning score. So one career path you might go down is becoming a surveyor, and according to PayScale, the same site, they have a 70% job satisfaction score, meaning 70% of them are highly satisfied with their career. Compare this to the highest rated one, which is clergy at 90% and one of the lowest rated ones, which is parking lot attendant at 41%. And you can see that this is also above average. Now, as a broad category, a lot of people end up regretting getting their science degrees. And the reason for this is because a lot of the time you're gonna have to get a master's or a doctorate in order to get your first job. It's actually the second most regretted type of degree, around 35% of people who get science degrees unfortunately regret getting them. However, this is a very, very subjective section. There's so many different factors that go into this. For some people, salary is huge. You know, you'll just about do anything if you have a high salary. For other people, salary doesn't matter. Maybe you're like a minimalist and you can live on $20,000 a year. Well, then you probably don't really care all that much about salary and you just wanna do a job that you enjoy. For some people, when it comes to the enjoyment, meaning matters more and for some people's job satisfaction is gonna matter more. And on top of that, a lot of it is gonna have to do with the people that you work with, your coworkers, the company you work with, the industry you're in and all kinds of other different factors. Maybe you like a fast-paced job. Maybe you like a slow-paced job. But with that being said, all things being equal, I'm gonna give this one a pretty high rating when it comes to satisfaction. I'm gonna give it an eight out of 10. Next, we're gonna be talking about demand. And this is probably the most important out of all the different sections. Now, surveys, for instance, is gonna be growing over the next 10 years at about 2%, which is less than average. Environmental scientists will be growing around 8%, which is higher than average. And that might sound really good, but if you look a little bit closer at Surveyor, for instance, you'll see that there's really only about 48,000 jobs available. And so that means over the next 10 years, only 800 jobs are gonna be popping up. And you see this with a lot of the science-related careers. There's not that many jobs out there, so sure, it might be growing at a steady rate, but the total number of jobs isn't gonna be that impressive. Now, when you do a search for environmental studies degree on monster.com, you see that 4,400 jobs pop up. Compare this to a degree that has really high demand like computer science with 141,000 jobs or a degree that has pretty low demand like anthropology with only 829. But we all know that the degree you get isn't necessarily something that means you're gonna go down a certain career path. We see it all the time where somebody gets like an art degree, for instance, and they end up going into business or something along those lines. Now, with the skill set that you're gonna learn with environmental studies, it's going to be relatively narrow and it's not necessarily going to translate to something else very easily. This is common with a lot of the different science-related degrees. You know, you get a degree like business, for instance, and it's very easy to see how you could learn something like business and work in almost any company out there and almost any industry. It's a little bit more difficult when it comes to a science-related degree, unfortunately. So you'd probably be looking for government jobs in either your city, your state, or even the federal government. You might become an environmental consultant. You might become a teacher. A lot of people end up going down that route. Overall, this one is gonna have a score of 5.5 out of 10. Next, we're gonna be talking about X factors. And this is anything that we didn't talk about before. This could include the likelihood that it's going to be automated or outsourced, how flexible the degree is, how well respected the degree is, how difficult it is. And the first thing I wanna talk about here is the projected work-life earnings of all degrees is gonna be around 2.4 million. And for science degrees, if it's either a biological science degree, it's 2.3 million. And if it's a physical science degree, it's 2.6 million. And this one kind of falls somewhere in between. So science-related degrees are pretty much about average when it comes to your work-life earnings over an entire lifetime. However, a lot of people get science degrees and they end up going into a completely unrelated career. And you can see that the people who do get these science majors make pretty good money if they go into a technology industry, for instance. So if they work as a software developer, you see here that they're making around 3.4 million dollars over a lifetime, whereas somebody who gets an art degree and goes into software is only gonna make around 2.7 million. So it's hard to say exactly why this is. It could be that people who go into science tend to just be really intelligent, especially when it comes to technical sort of things. And so it's easy for them to go into other types of careers and do well. Or it could be that people who get science degrees learn skills in school that translate into other careers, maybe not directly, but indirectly. It's the whole chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Nobody really knows which one comes first. Is it correlation or is it causation? Realistically, I think it has a little bit to do with both. But when you look at the Zip Recruiter Skills Index, you'll see that environmental-related skills score kinda low. So for instance, the first one that's related to environmental skills is 44 out of 100. And then environmental field work is 27 out of 100. You can compare that to a really good one, like software engineering at 88, or a really bad one, like industrial sewing at eight. So I would say this one is kind of either average or below average when it comes to being a skill that's extremely marketable. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have value, of course, but all I'm saying is on the open market, business owners and hiring managers probably aren't going to get super impressed when they see an environmental science degree. Now when it comes to the likelihood of automation, the career of Surveyor, for instance, has about a 38% chance of being automated, which is kinda average, I'd say. I think there's a lot of careers out there that are gonna be partially automated, and I think a lot of people overstate how much automation is going to change things. A lot of the time when a job gets automated or partially automated, other jobs pop up in its place. It's kinda like Whack-A-Mole. You automate one job and just another mole is gonna pop up somewhere else. So for instance, when refrigerators came out, ice truck drivers, they lost their jobs, but then a bunch of other jobs popped up for HVAC people, people who can repair refrigerators, bunch of factories popped up of people who are preparing refrigerators, getting them ready. There were refrigerator technicians, all kinds of things like that. The skills you learn with science degrees in general, it can kinda be difficult to say, but they're sort of narrow. So let's say you spent a lot of time in the lab, for instance. If you don't end up going into a science-related career, for whatever reasons your plans don't work out, a lot of stuff that you learn in the lab isn't going to directly help you doing other types of careers. Now the skills that you learn and the experience that you gather might indirectly help you, and that's probably why you see the lifetime earnings being pretty good, but directly helping you, that might not actually happen. And so for this one, I'm gonna go ahead and give it a six out of 10 when it comes to X factors. So the pros here are that you're probably gonna be relatively satisfied with the career that you get. You do learn a lot of soft and hard skills that might not directly translate to you making more money, but they might indirectly translate to that in the future. And because of that, if you are able to get a good job and you work, you know, maybe 10 years or more, you're gonna get to a level where you're gonna have a pretty decent mid-career pay. Cons here are that there's gonna be a low ratio between graduates and actual jobs that are available, and it might become saturated relatively quickly because it's getting more and more popular. There's also a relatively low salary for a lot of entry-level careers. And some occupations are gonna require a lot of additional study, which means grad school. Overall, I'm gonna give this one a 6.375 out of 10. This one can work out for you, of course. If you have a really good plan, any degree out there can work if you have a good plan going in and you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. However, you're gonna have to have a really good plan. You're gonna wanna be networking like crazy, doing internships, getting job experience, learning extra skills. A lot of the time, like I said, you're gonna be going for jobs that are either in the government, maybe for a nonprofit, something along those lines. However, there are other jobs available out there. Funny enough, there's jobs for environmental studies majors in oil and gas companies. And oil and gas tends to pay really well, whether you're just at an entry-level position, somebody who's kind of just a handyman, they just pay really well across the board. When I was researching this, I saw that the website Engineering News Record posts a list of the top 100 environmental companies. So you can definitely check that out, but I gotta be honest with you, a lot of the jobs that are gonna be available out there, you're gonna have to get a graduate-level degree for. So just be prepared for that. I try to be as honest as possible with these videos, and I wanna make sure that you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. Some degrees are kind of pipelines into working government jobs, and when it comes to those types of careers, nobody really knows what's gonna happen. There's a lot of things that could change in terms of the economy, politics can change things as well. So maybe five years from now, this will be one of the best degrees out there, or maybe it's even worse. This is always extremely subjective, so please make sure to do your own research. For one person, this degree might be 10 out of 10, and for another person, it might be one out of 10. Check out my college degree ranker in the description down below to make your research a lot easier. 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, especially if you're an environmental studies major who graduated with it. I'd love to hear what you think about this video. And of course, share this with all your friends and check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. ["The World's Greatest"]