 What's happening? It's Shane here. And in today's video, we are going to be talking about the college majors that earn the most money over a lifetime. And this is going to be based off of data from the latest US census. So we are basically going to be able to see which college degrees have been worth it over the last 40 years or so. So without further ado, after you gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell. Let's get right into it. So first one on the list number 13 and the lowest paying college degree out of all of them is going to be education. This one is going to come in at an earnings of $1.8 million over a lifetime. Now people who get education degrees tend to become teachers and teachers unfortunately aren't paid very much. They also work really hard. And that's why teaching is one of those professions a lot of people are burning out of. It also came in as one of the most regretted degrees in the video I did on zip recruiters survey. Now one of the positives, one of the benefits of getting an education degree is it does have a very low unemployment rate. Now another thing to mention here is you can make more as a teacher. If you go back to school, get a master's or a doctorate, but generally speaking, not a career you want to go into if you want to make a ton of money. Next one on the list number 12 is going to be arts degrees. And this of course encompasses a bunch of different degrees out there basically anything related to art. And they make about $2 million over a lifetime. Now I think this one's pretty self-explanatory. You know as hard as it is for artists to make money these days, it's been even more difficult historically. Many famous artists that you hear about were actually poor their entire lives and they didn't get famous until after they died, right? So even the fact that you're able to make a living from art these days is a minor miracle compared to what it was like historically. But with that being said in my opinion, and I've made videos on this before, if you're someone who wants to go into the arts, except in incredibly rare circumstances, I don't think it's a good idea for you to go to college and get a degree. A much better idea would be for you to figure out where there's a bunch of people doing whatever art that you're interested in and move to that place and then spend those four years just hanging out with those people and maybe even pay some of them for coaching. It's going to be a lot cheaper. You're going to learn a lot more and you're going to get like practical experience of doing the art yourself. Whereas sometimes in a classroom setting, you're kind of going to be learning like, you know, the formal rules and everything. And in my opinion, art is all about breaking the rules. I think if you compared two people who did those two different approaches, the one who went to art school, spent four years in art school probably got $40,000 in debt. I think that person would be in a much worse situation than the person who didn't go to art school, got like a normal job, was actually making money during those four years. So maybe they actually have $40,000 after those four years. And on top of it, I think that they would have learned a lot more. So person A is in a hole, right? They're $40,000 in debt, not in a great situation. They're probably not going to be able to get a job with their art degree, whereas person B has four years of real world experience. Maybe they tried to start a business, for instance, of whatever type of art that they're doing. Maybe they're one of those people who's doing art out on the street. Those people can make a good amount of money, surprisingly. Maybe you started a YouTube channel and it took a few years to build up. But now that you're at the four year mark, maybe you have a couple hundred thousand subscribers, right? Pretty much any way you slice it, I think option B is the better option. Now, again, there are very, very rare circumstances, like let's say you're a classical guitarist and you're like world-class good, maybe it would be a good idea for you to go to a really fancy art school like Juilliard and learn from other classical guitarists, right? But that is a small minority of the amount of people who are actually going to art school. Next one on the list, number 11 is going to be psychology. Very, very popular major. I can see why so many people like it, but unfortunately they only make about two million dollars over a lifetime. So this is one where I think it can be a good idea if you know what you're getting yourself into, right? So if you know that you're probably or almost certainly not going to be able to get a job in psychology with just a bachelor degree, and you know that you have to go back, get a master's or a doctorate, and you're fully aware of that and fully ready to do that, this can be a decent one. But I think a lot of people get into this not understanding that that's the way things work, and so they end up extremely disappointed. Next one on the list is going to be liberal arts, and they make around 2.1 million dollars over a lifetime. Now this encompasses a bunch of different majors as well, right? So an example of liberal arts degree would be all the different studies degrees, renaissance studies, peace studies, gender studies, all of these different degrees that probably should just be maybe like a few classes that you take as electives, but for some reason they turned into full blown degrees. But some liberal arts degrees are relatively decent. I've done videos about this. But yeah, one other thing to note here is some of the degrees on this list are even worse than it seems, because a lot of the time they won't be able to do the career that has anything to do whatsoever with the degree that they were actually studying. So in the case of education, for instance, you can definitely become a teacher if you get an education degree. So you know, as long as you know what you're getting into and you realize it's not going to be very high paying, it's not necessarily as bad as some of these other degrees, because these are ones where you know, you think you might actually be able to get into a career that has something to do with that. But in most of the cases, you aren't and then you're just going to end up doing something completely unrelated, like you might go and be a factory worker or work, you know, fast food or something. But next one on the list is going to be literature and they also make about $2.1 million over a lifetime. So the way they did it in the census is basically literature would be something like, you know, English, obviously, creative writing, but also other types of foreign language study. So they kind of bunched all of those together into one category. And yeah, this is another one. You could almost include this under arts, where you know, it's very valuable in some ways to learn this stuff, like being able to learn some of these soft skills, formulate an argument, you know, tell a story, for instance. But when it comes to getting a job in real life, it's just not as practical. And there are many, many cases of people who have gone on to become famous authors, who didn't get like an English degree or a creative writing degree in college. Again, I think this is something where you could either teach yourself, or you could just make friends with other people who are writers and learn things that way. Next one on the list is going to be biological sciences at $2.3 million over a lifetime. So this would include degrees like biology. A lot of people are probably surprised to see it so high on the list. Many people think that science degrees are STEM degrees. And so therefore, you know, you're going to make a lot of money, right? But you know, out of the four types of STEM degrees, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, science degrees are by far the weakest when it comes to the financial part. So a lot of people are very surprised to hear that, you know, degrees like biology, for instance, you know, there are many people out there who get a biology degree, and they aren't able to find a job, or the jobs they are able to find are very entry level, and don't pay very well. So many people end up going back to school getting a master's or a doctorate just to be able to get an entry level position. Next one on the list is going to be communications at $2.3 million as well. Now communication as a skill is one of the most valuable skills you can learn. The problem with communications as a degree is that it's just way too general. There's so many different types of communication, right? You can communicate over the phone, you can communicate through video like I'm doing with you right now on YouTube, even the different types of video are completely different. The way people make TikTok videos is completely different than the way people make like long form YouTube content, right? So there's just so many different types of communications that studying a degree like communications is just way too general, right? So that's why you see communications degree holders making less than average. The average for all majors was about $2.4 million, like I mentioned before. The next one on the list makes slightly higher than average, and that is going to be social science degrees at $2.5 million. And social science could be anywhere from sociology, geography, anthropology, all the way up to something like economics. Now one thing I will say here is there is a huge disparity. A degree in economics, for instance, is one of the better paying degrees out there, whereas a degree in sociology or anthropology is one of the worst. So it's kind of interesting to me that they decided to bunch all of them in together. Also, psychology is a social science degree, so they kind of decided to take psychology and social science and separate them. But yeah, definitely one of those majors where you really need to do your research, make a good plan if you decide that you want to go down that road. Next one on the list is going to be physical science at $2.6 million over a lifetime. Now whereas biological science is more focused on like living human beings, living organisms, physical science is basically just the science of non-living things. So geology, chemistry, physics, astrology, just kidding on that last one. But yeah, there are 16 total different types of physical science degrees, and they do tend to pay better than some of your social science, as well as biological science degrees. Now one thing I will say about the physical science degrees is sometimes, depending on what you want to go into, you're going to have to get like a master's or a doctorate. So for instance, if you go into physics and your goal is to become a physicist, you're probably not going to become a physicist without getting at least a master's, sometimes even a doctorate. But with that being said, if you do go into those fields, you're going to make really good money. But with that being said, let's say you don't end up going into a field, let's say you get a physics bachelor's degree, for instance, a lot of the time companies will want to hire you anyways, because they know how hard your studies are, and they know that you're probably a very hardworking and you know, very creative person, right? Figuring out how the world works and being able to figure that out mathematically is not the easiest thing in the world to do. So they likely won't have to train you all that much in order to get you up to speed in whatever job they're offering you. So an example of this, for instance, is a lot of the time companies in the finance industry, instead of hiring people who are finance grads, people who graduate with degrees in finance, instead, they will seek out people who are physics grads or mathematics grads. And their whole strategy here is to just hire people who they think are the smartest, right? So instead of hiring people in finance who already kind of know what finance is all about, but maybe they aren't as smart as people who graduate with a physics degree, they're going to take their chance on this person, this raw talent, so to speak, who graduated with a physics degree, and then teach them the finance stuff later on. Next one on the list is going to be business degrees at $2.6 million over a lifetime. Now this is one that I like for many different reasons. Out of the top five, six on this list, many of them are very difficult majors, right? So they're going to stress you out to the extreme, especially something like a physics degree very, very hard. However, getting a business degree isn't going to be as hard. I mean, I have anecdotal evidence of this. There's a lot of objective evidence as well. And I know everyone's different. You know, some people are going to say, oh, well, you might be good at math, and so a math degree would be easy, but a business degree would be hard. But realistically speaking, business degrees are going to be easier than a math degree, a physics degree, or an engineering degree, right? So I took extra business classes in college. They weren't all that difficult. I also lived in a scholarship hall full of 50 guys, and many of them were business majors, many of them were math, engineering, science majors, etc. And I'm telling you that the business majors did not study very much. They were partying all the time, the math, science, etc. engineering majors, they were studying a lot. So this is a great option for you if you're somebody who doesn't want a super rigorous education, I get comments and emails all the time on asking, you know, what majors are the hardest? I want something that's a little more chill so I can enjoy my college experience. And usually it's going to be a business major. They're also very flexible in college. So you can double major in business and then something else. And that's going to make you look a little bit better to employers. They teach you a lot of soft skills that are going to be very valuable throughout your life. So, you know, it'd be tough for you to go through a business major without learning some of the fundamentals of planning, saving, and investing. On top of that, it's probably going to set you up for better chances of starting a successful business if that's something you're looking forward to in the future. So yeah, a lot of positives to becoming a business major. Next one on the list is going to be science and engineering related degrees. So these are degrees that didn't quite fall under science or engineering. And so they kind of threw them into this category that was kind of a hybrid of both of them. And they make about $2.6 million over a lifetime. So an example of some of these would be some of the engineering technology degrees might fall under this category. There's a lot of degrees out there where it says engineering technology and that does not mean that it's an engineering degree. It's not accredited as one. But it can still be relatively good. Next one on the list is going to be computers and math related degrees. So this is going to be like computer science, mathematics, and statistics. And they make about $3.1 million over a lifetime. So huge, huge jump right here. Now, I think this comes to no surprise to people who've watched the channel a little bit. Computer science, very, very good degree. Just so much opportunity in the future. And just generally speaking, people tend to not be very good at math. So if you're somebody who has mathematics skills, you just have a huge competitive advantage over other people, because there's a lot of jobs out there that require you to be really good at math. And there's just not that many people that are. So not surprised at all to see this one here. This is number two on the list, but I wouldn't be surprised if this one ends up, especially computer science, ends up being number one. Because of course, this was the last 40 years. And the next 40 years, it might end up being number one. But number one on the list is going to be engineering. They make about $3.5 million over a lifetime. You know, this tends to happen to careers that get a lot of hype. So for instance, you know, careers that have gotten a lot of hype over the last 40 years would be medical doctor, lawyer, and engineer. You can see that lawyer definitely isn't nearly as good as it used to be. Medical doctor is still pretty solid, but again, not as good as it used to be. And then same with engineering, it has gone down a little bit just because of supply and demand. If something gets a lot of hype, a lot of people go into it, and then there is an over abundance of supply. And so, you know, the demand goes down. And so therefore they end up not getting paid as well. The working conditions isn't as good and there's not as much opportunity. But with that being said, engineering is still very good. I would say engineering is on the downturn, whereas computer science is just going to keep going up and up. That's how I see things going in the next 20 years or so. Hope you enjoyed the video. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead, gently tap that 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. And I will see you next time.