 Is a political science major or a political science degree worth it? Is it worth going $40,000 in debt and spending four years of your life to get this degree? That's what we're going to be talking about today and let's jump right into it. First of all, what is political science? Political science is going to be studying all of the various branches of government from the local level all the way to the top level. They're also going to be studying social, cultural, and economic factors that tend to drive policy as well as behavior. And this is one of the most popular degrees here in the United States. Around 33,000 people graduate with a bachelor's every year. Now some career paths you might go down are becoming a political scientist, public relations specialist, or fundraising manager. Now we're going to talk about four important factors that go into evaluating a college degree and whether it's worth it, whether it's worth that $40,000 in student loan debt. And the first one is going to be earning potential or salary. So with this degree you would expect to make around $47,000 a year starting out and $89,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to a high and a low earning degree and you'll see that it's kind of average, maybe slightly on the higher side of average for a liberal arts degree. Now as a political scientist you would make around $122,000 a year. However, generally speaking you're gonna have to have at least a master's degree. If you became a public relations specialist you'd make around $61,000 a year or $29 an hour. And if you became a fundraising manager you could make $116,000 or $55 an hour although this is going to require quite a bit of experience. So you can see that a lot of these careers pay pretty well. Now when you look at this degree over a lifetime, social science degrees earn around $2.5 million compared to $2.4 million for all degrees and all career paths. Keep in mind that this is kind of like the last 40 years or so. So you know maybe 40 years from now this could be completely different but it is kind of a sign and if it's not good that's a little bit of a red flag. So overall I'm going to give this one a score of 7.5 out of 10 when it comes to earning potential or salary. Next we're going to be talking about satisfaction and this is the most subjective section and I like to break it down into meaning and job satisfaction. So meaning which is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world. You're going to see that political science has a score of 48 percent. You can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one and you'll see that it is on the lower side. I was honestly surprised to see that. I figured people who are really interested in politics and they go into political science would have higher meaning scores because they would be trying to make the world a better place. Now one career path you could go down public relations manager you can see that the meaning score is a little higher at 65 percent and then when you look at the job satisfaction you see it's 73 percent which again you compare that to a really good one and a really bad one and you'll see that they are both on the higher side. Now when it comes to how much people regret getting their degrees social science degrees tend to be the fourth most regretted type of major and the main reason for that is because they're too general impractical hard to find a job without further studies. However I will say that political science is one of the more practical types of social science degrees out there. There are quite a few jobs in the government for instance. There's lots of jobs in your local government and then you know there's at the state level and then there's the federal level as well. On top of that you could work directly for different campaigns and different politicians or you could work for nonprofits and if you are able to land a job the satisfaction for a lot of the different careers does seem to be okay. Now the key word here was if you are so if you're not able to land a job which a lot of people aren't then you know that could be completely different. You might end up working in a completely unrelated career that you never saw yourself working in. So for instance I knew a Starbucks barista that had a political science degree. I would talk to him all the time when I was studying. Super smart guy. If I remember correctly he got a philosophy degree and undergrad and then a political science degree in a graduate school and just super smart guy but he wasn't able to find a job and he ended up working at Starbucks as a barista. However if you are able to get a job I think your satisfaction is going to be relatively good. With that being said satisfaction is extremely subjective it depends on the industry you're in the business you work for your co-workers your boss all kinds of different things the area of the country that you live and so for one person it might be 10 out of 10 another person might be one out of 10 so just keep that in mind and take this with a grain of salt. But overall when it comes to satisfaction I'm going to give this one an 8.5 out of 10. Next we're going to be talking about demand and I mainly focus on supply and demand so basically how much business owners and hiring managers need to hire people who have these specific degrees or the specific skills that are taught with these majors. So for instance for a political scientist there are 7,000 jobs out there and it's growing at 6% which is faster than average. For PR specialists there's a lot of jobs though there's around 274,000 and it's growing at 7% which is faster than average. And for PR relations and fundraising managers there's 88,000 jobs and it's growing at 9% which is much faster than average. Now of course I'm not going to show any data on this just because everything is happening in the world right now it's not accurate but generally speaking social science liberal arts degrees tend to have the highest level of unemployment rates and when you type in political science degree onto monster.com you'll see that only around 1100 jobs pop up compare that to a really good one and a really bad one and you see that it's on the lower side. And when big companies are surveyed about what types of college degree majors they're looking to hire you see that social science degrees comes in in the middle or even a little bit lower than average. So it's not one that's you know super hot a lot of people are looking to hire. So for instance around 83% of these big businesses we're looking to hire business majors and only 20% we're looking to hire social science majors. So overall when it comes to demand I'm going to give this one a 7 out of 10. Next we're going to be talking about x factors this is anything that I think is important but didn't make the list on any of the other ones. Now I talked about this before but how much you're going to make over a lifetime social science degrees are slightly above average at about 2.5 million versus 2.4 for all types of degrees and all types of careers. With that being said it is going to depend on what career path you end up going down. So for instance if you work in the computer field and technology you'll make around 3.2 million. If you work in management it'll be 3.4 million but if you work in community service or legally you'll make 1.8 million. So it really depends on what career path you end up going down. There is a lot of variance there it's not one of those degrees where it does well no matter what career you go into. Now if you look at Zip Recruiter Skills Index public relation comes in at a 46 out of 100 score you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it's very mid tier. This basically just means that public relations is somewhat of a valuable skill. Some businesses are looking to hire people who have that skill but it's not a super hot one at least not at this particular time in history. Next is something that liberal arts and social science degrees do really well in which is how easily automated that skill set is and usually it's pretty much impossible to automate these types of skills because they're soft skills that involve a lot of communication and human-to-human contact which robots will probably never be able to do. So for instance political scientists only have a 4% chance of being automated according to WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com. Now one thing that's very interesting is political science was number 10 on the top 10 degrees that create the most millionaires. However they say it's usually not because of the salary you earn as a politician but rather your personal financial investments and that would make sense because in politics there is a lot of economics involved there and so you'd probably have an upper hand on a lot of people on the inner workings of the economy and you'd be able to better predict what's going to happen and therefore make good investments. When it comes to difficulty, political science is not going to be one of the harder ones. It ranks 34 out of 55 overall and that could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you're looking for but overall I am going to give this one a score of 8 out of 10 when it comes to x factors. So when you take all of those and you divide them by four you'll see that it's going to come out to a score of 7.75 out of 10. This is definitely one of the better social science degrees however I will say that there's a good chance that you're not going to be able to get a job. So one thing that I have to do in these videos is I have to kind of set some expectations. I'm making the assumption here that you are going to thoroughly research this that you're the right person for the degree. You know you never want to go into something just because I say it's good or because some website says it has a good salary you want to make sure that you're actually interested in it. So I'm making those assumptions here and with that assumption I could say that this is a pretty good career path pretty good degree for you to go down. However if you want to be careful here I would highly recommend either minoring in political science or double majoring in something else that would also be beneficial for you because a lot of the time you might plan things out really well but things end up changing down the line. You might meet somebody you end up moving somewhere where there's no political science jobs. I mean there's so many different things that could potentially happen. So keep that in mind here you don't necessarily have to get a political science degree in order to become a politician for instance or even a PR person. There's a lot of other degrees that you can get and still go down that career path. So if you do your due diligence you do your research you reach out to people that are in the career that you're trying to get into and ask them what they recommend that you do and this is what they recommend that I would say you know go for it. However you still want to be very careful with this one and I recommend focusing on internships skills work experience and networking. Now if there's a video you're waiting for on a college degree and I haven't gotten to it yet then check out my college degree ranker down in the description below. I think it's the best resource out there for doing research on college degrees and it is in my Patreon. It's in version 1.1 right now I'm hoping that everything kind of calms down on the world employment goes back to normal and then I'm going to start working on version two. If you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video share the video if you thought it was helpful and you want to help some of your friends out and before you leave check out my other videos right here I made them just for you.