 Boy, it's time to go over one of my favorite subjects, which is college degrees. What's happening? It's Shane here. So we need to talk. I posted a poll on what types of videos you guys want me to make. And a lot of you say that you want me to make videos about specific degrees. Now that's great. I'm happy to make videos like that, but let's be real here. There are over 9,000 degrees. Just kidding. There's actually just over 1,000 degrees here in the United States. But if I made a video on all 1,000 of these degrees, I would look like this by the time I got done. Now I'm still going to make some videos on specific degrees, but it's definitely not going to be a thousand of them. And even if I did do all 1,000 of the degrees, it would probably be years and years until I got to yours. And by the time I got to it, it might be outdated. And I want this channel to be as useful as possible. So instead of giving you a fish, I want to teach you guys how to fish for yourselves. So in this video, I'm going to show you guys how to research exactly how much your college degree will earn. And at the end of this video, you won't have to worry about how to smash like or how much you can make just because I will be breaking it down into the little details. And when I say the little details, I'm going to tell you how much you're going to make from specific degrees depending on which school you graduate as well as which region you live in the United States. I'm even going to break down the difference between when you first graduate, how much you get paid, and then mid-career pay. And you'll notice that some degrees you have a really good salary right up front, where there's not much room for growth. And then some degrees you probably don't get paid very much up front, but there's a lot of opportunity when you get into the mid-career range. Now, I've already made a video on how to kind of look into different degrees to see if that's something that you'd be interested in doing. This video is going to be purely about how much money you can make from the degrees. Obviously, how much money you make is not the only thing. I wouldn't even say it's the most important thing, but it is an important factor when it comes to your career. Now, the first place I would look after you have a list of let's say 10 degrees that you're interested in looking into is pay scale. I've looked into a ton of different resources and the ones that I mentioned in this video are the ones that I think are the most accurate. And pay scale made an incredibly amazing tool that's also extremely easy to use. And they will actually break it down into what you can expect to learn after your first five years graduating as well as mid-career pay. So let's say I'll just pick a random one. Let's say you're interested in geophysics, for instance. With a four year bachelor's degree, you can make $56,000 a year right off the bat and then 127,000 after 10 years, which is your mid-career pay. You'll see the ranking on the left, which is its number 19 overall on the list. Now that includes pay as well as what they call the meaning score. But still, if it has a ranking that's really high like 19 out of 1000, that's pretty good. Now there is one weakness to pay scale and that is the fact that they rely on reporting data. So they send out surveys. And so let's say there's a degree where there's 30,000 graduates. The survey data is probably going to be relatively accurate, whereas a degree where there's only maybe 100 or 200 graduates, that survey data will probably be wildly inaccurate. So for that reason, the next thing you want to do is go to NCES, which is the National Center for Educational Statistics. You can check this website to see all of the 1000 degrees that are commonly offered here in the United States. And if you use the control F function and then search for geophysics, you'll see that there's about 94 geophysics degrees awarded every single year. That's really low. And so the numbers that they show on pay scale are probably very inaccurate. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't pursue geophysics. Sometimes when there's only a few degrees awarded per year, that means there's a lot of opportunity there. But what I would recommend is that you contact someone who graduated with a geophysics degree and then talk to them. Maybe also contact a hiring manager for a company that hires these types of degrees and ask them what they think of a geophysics degree. The important thing here is to actually talk to real people who can help you and maybe make sure to talk to a few people as well. This is honestly the only way to make sure that you get good information, especially when it comes to a degree where there's only 94 people graduating with it every single year. Now, as a general rule of thumb, if you see that more than a thousand people graduate with a degree every year, I think it's relatively accurate at that point. Now, let's take a step back and let's say that you go for a computer science degree as well. Let's look that up on pay scale. So on pay scale, it says you're going to be making around 68,000 a year in the first five years. And then after 10 years, you're going to be making around $114,000 a year. Another thing that pay scale can show you is that this degree is commonly combined with other degrees and the stats are also really good. So for instance, the combination of electrical engineering and computer science ranks number two on the entire list, starts off at $88,000 a year and goes up to $142,000 a year. That is excellent, obviously. And you can see that almost all of the ones that have computer science in them, even the ones that are mixed with business or mathematics, rank extremely high on the list. This is a really good sign when you see pretty much every single one that has computer science in it and it ranks really high on the list. That's a sign that this is a very solid degree. Now, when we search computer science on NCES, you'll see that it actually does have over 9,000 degrees awarded every single year. That means that the survey data that pay scale does is likely pretty accurate. Now, the next thing you want to consider is what type of industry and career that you're going into. So for instance, let's say we're sticking with computer science here for the example. The way that I researched these is actually pretty simple. I start by typing in BLS into the Google search engine and then whatever career or degree that you're looking into. So for instance, you could do BLS business degree, BLS computer science degree or BLS geology degree. And the search engine will automatically pop up with different career paths that you can go down with a degree like that. Let's say you chose geoscientists, for instance. They make $92,000 median pay per year, which is pretty good. Now, you also want to make sure you look at the typical entry level education and make sure that it only requires a bachelor's degree if you're looking at four year college degrees. Now, if you're looking at BLS computer science degrees, you'll see that there are a ton of different options and pathways that you can go down and the pay and the stats and everything is going to be completely different depending on which pathway you go. So for instance, computer programmers make around 86,000 a year, whereas software developers make over 105,000. Now, keep in mind that this is a circular process so you can always go back to the beginning. If anything happens, let's say you go down a road, you kind of don't like where it's going, go all the way back to the beginning and start the whole process over again. So for instance, you might be looking into geology and you discover that a mining and geological engineer is a career that you might be interested in. Go down to the bottom and click how to become a mining or geological engineer. When you start looking into this, you'll discover that you can't become a geological engineer with just a geology degree. It requires a mining or geological engineering degree. So you'd go back to the beginning, you'd go back to pay scale and you'd type in geological engineering. You'd look up the stats and you'd see if they're good, which they are. You make around 56,000 a year starting out and then you move up to $94,000 a year mid-career pay. Then you would go back to NCEES, you would find the geological engineering degree and see if it has at least 1,000 graduates a year, which it doesn't. Now, again, this could be a good or bad thing depending on the competition and how coveted you are, but generally speaking, it's better to go with the ones that have more degrees and people that are graduating. But if you're still interested in this, I would recommend maybe looking up Facebook groups, contacting someone on LinkedIn, reaching out through your network and speaking with someone who actually has this degree. Additionally, you can speak to a hiring manager and see what they think about this degree and an industry that's relevant. Now, let's say you've chosen your degree. Let's say you know that you want to go down the computer science path. What you can do at this point is you can actually look up which universities have the best salary for people who graduate with that particular degree. You can do this with a tool called collegescorecard.ed.gov. And with this tool, you can not only see how much you're going to be in debt generally after graduating, which is an indicator of the overall quality of the school. This means how much do they help you out with student loans, how much scholarships do they give, how much grant money do they help you with, and then also how much the average graduate earns right after graduating from the university. So for instance, a really good example of this would be the University of Washington with a computer science degree. The stats for that are very good. Now, when you're doing research on this, you can take it even further using BLS. Once you've decided what career path you want to go down, you can actually look at how much they get paid by area of the country. So here you can see that geological engineers get paid a lot in Texas and not so much in Hawaii. And again, keep in mind, this is a totally circular process. So if you come to a dead end at any point, you can just go all the way back to the beginning and start doing more research. This is something where you really wanna keep an open mind and just look into a lot of different things. And like I said before, it's always a good idea to reach out to someone who's currently either doing the degree or finished with a degree, or maybe they're in the career that you're looking for. And it's also a good idea to reach out to hiring managers or people who would maybe be hiring these types of people. And if you're really respectful about how you do it, most people are more than happy to either email with you a little bit or talk with you for a little bit. And if you're really interested in something, I would recommend actually asking them if you can shadow. That's where you go in for a day and you just see what they do on a day to day basis. Check out my videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead, smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, and then comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera, that you have on the video. Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.