 what's happening guys it's Shane here and in today's video we are going to be ranking the top 10 degrees and we're not just talking about bachelor's degrees here we are talking about all different types so all the way from associate to bachelor's to master's to doctorate and professional degrees we're going to be going over all of them comparing them and then i'm going to be telling you which ones i think are the best now it's very difficult to compare something like an associate's degree with a doctorate right it's almost like comparing apples to oranges so on some level you do have to take this with a grain of salt but with that being said i'm going to try to compare them purely from a financial perspective we're going to be focusing on your return on investment and return on investment is going to be calculated by how much you put in in terms of time money and effort versus how much you are going to be getting out of that from a financial perspective so with that being said i think you're going to get a lot out of this video um make a prediction in your head right now which ones do you think are going to rank the highest is it going to be a lot of associate's degrees bachelor's master's doctorate's professional degrees which ones do you think are going to dominate this list so let's jump right into it now after you gently tap that like button um let's say the goal for this video is going to be 2500 likes also hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell only about 20 of you that watch my videos on a regular basis are subscribed the rest of you are just lurkers come on now and then out of the 20 that are subscribed i think only a little bit less than 10 uh actually hit the notification bell so definitely do that it helps the channel out a lot so coming in at number 10 on the list we're going to be talking about mechanical engineering now this is an engineering degree and engineering degrees in general are very good but the reason i included this one on the list is it's probably the most flexible out of all the different engineering majors all right super loud motorcycle just drove by while i'm trying to record this cool anyways this one does have about 32 000 graduates per year so it's a very common degree and because of that it kind of has like a brand name reputation among people who make the decisions when it comes to hiring people and this would be of course recruiters hiring managers bosses etc and what i mean by that brand name reputation is a lot of the time you know whether you're talking to a recruiter a hiring manager or a boss they have worked with people who are mechanical engineers before so they kind of know what they're getting and human brain human psychology just has this bias towards things that you are familiar with you would rather kind of stick with something that you are familiar with it's it's called loss aversion then try to get something that is a little bit different but could possibly be better so basically human beings are more afraid of losing a hundred dollars than gaining a hundred dollars and the same type of psychology works when it comes to brand awareness people would rather go to the same restaurant where they know exactly what they're going to get then try out a new restaurant in many cases even though the new restaurant might very well be much better than the one that they've been going to so yeah with this one you're going to start off about 66 000 a year and mid-career pay is 110 thousand so the salary is pretty good right off the bat doesn't like pop off the page compared to some of them you're going to see on this list but it's very good and by the way i am sharing these statistics directly off of my college degree ranker version 2.0 which you can access in my college 101 course and i do have a discount for a limited amount of time it's probably only going to be for the rest of this month and then the price is going to go up and that is down in the description below so when it comes to the demand score it's actually 105 out of a hundred so very very good when it comes to demand pretty much all the ones on this list are going to be very good you know off the charts and when it comes to demand now one thing i will mention about this list uh this is something i did include in past years and i decided to take it out just because it's a little bit confusing and that is difficulty difficulty is something that i did include in past years lists because let's be real you know there's some majors where they have a dropout rate of well over 50 percent because it's so hard engineering majors you know do have a relatively high dropout rate it's very difficult it's going to be one of the hardest things you've ever done so i do have to assume that you're interested in this you're ready for a challenge and you're someone who is somewhat decent at math because you know there is going to be quite a bit of that in mechanical engineering if you're not good at math or you're not interested in these obviously they wouldn't be in your top 10 so this is just kind of like an objective top 10 list where i assume that you can do it because you can you know if you really push yourself if you're passionate about it you can do it even if you're not the best at math and by the way this is a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering next one on the list number two is going to be becoming a radiation therapist and this is usually an associate level degree it takes usually about two to three years and if you become a radiation therapist you make an absolutely ridiculous 86 thousand dollars a year on top of that it is growing at a very healthy nine percent over the next 10 years to put that in perspective the average is about four to five percent so yeah if you're somebody who does not want to do the full four-year bachelor's degree there are pretty decent options at the associate level now most of them are going to be in health but there are some options here and there in technology as well as engineering but yeah health has fantastic options especially at the associate level and health degrees are just good at every single level whether you're looking at professional degree doctorate uh masters bachelor's or associates next one on the list number eight is going to be a business degree and this is going to be management information systems and it's going to be at the bachelor's level so this is basically a combination of technology skills as well as business skills which is a super super great combo it's good right now and in my opinion it's only going to get better into the future so last year about 7800 people graduated with a bachelor's in this one but what's interesting here is check out the amount of job listings that have management information systems degree as a keyword over 39 000 job listings with 7800 graduates so there is obviously not enough graduates to fill all of those positions that have this as a keyword in their job listing another thing to keep in mind is my methodology for doing this is not perfect because it's a lot harder to put management information systems degree in a listing and it's a lot less likely that they put that in there because it's four words whereas someone putting like accounting degree or finance degree is much easier so it's likely even better than this when it comes to the demand and on top of that you make about 60 000 a year starting out and 105 000 in mid-career pay and if that wasn't enough you will likely get a job in the technology industry which is probably the best industry to work in when it comes to opportunity when it comes to benefits getting stock options getting bonuses etc not to mention quality of life and job satisfaction this is also an incredibly flexible degree because you can work for just about any company in a multitude of different roles now i know that i said i didn't factor difficulty into this list but you know if you're somebody who is worried about doing engineering or something along those lines management information systems i think has a healthy level of difficulty definitely one that you should look into number seven on the list is going to be a nurse practitioners master's degree so you can become a nurse practitioner and get a doctorate that's called dnp and this particular case i'm talking about the masters nurse practitioner is one of my favorite careers you can prescribe you can diagnose you can treat patients you don't have to be under the supervision of a doctor it's also an extremely flexible career as well there's so many different directions you can go you can work your way up you know on an administration level in the hospital become like you know the president of a hospital or the ceo of a hospital oftentimes you do see nurses in a lot of those high level positions because nurses know hospitals better than pretty much anybody on top of that you can seek further education further certifications if you want to go down more specialized paths and one thing that's really cool is you can just get your bachelor's degree in nursing and then if you want to you can work or if you don't want to you can go back to school it's kind of like whatever you feel like doing maybe you want a little bit of both so you get your bachelor's in nursing your bsn and then you work for two or three years then you go back to school and get your masters and as a nurse practitioner you will make about a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars per year and the thing that just absolutely pops off the page about this one is 45 percent for demand nurse practitioner has expected to grow 45 percent that's actually maybe the highest on this entire list it's absolutely ridiculous like i said before four to five percent is average so this one is growing like nine to ten times faster than your average career next one on the list is pretty much tied with it and it's going to be the one right before a nurse practitioner and that's going to be a nurse so getting your bsn about a hundred and thirty four thousand people graduated with this one last year whereas about 28 000 or so graduated with a nurse practitioner masters the early career pay on this one is going to be 60 000 dollars mid career pay is about 79 000 and this one has one of the highest demand scores on the entire list which is 135 on top of that it also has one of the highest meaning scores at 83 percent and meaning does tend to be a very good indicator of your long-term job satisfaction so yeah both of those fantastic options for the right people nursing is such a flexible degree there's so many different paths you can go down if you go down one and you don't like it for whatever reason it's so easy for you to just switch your specialty into something else the next one on the list is going to be an electrical engineering bachelor's degree so this is another degree that's relatively flexible and i really love that about degrees because the truth is even if you've really done your research you make a fantastic plan something might pop up in the future where you're like you know what i don't really want to go down that career path i kind of want to go down a different one and if you have a degree that is too specific that might hinder your ability to be flexible and go in a different direction whereas if you have a relatively flexible degree it's going to be a lot easier to do that now last year about 16 000 people did graduate with this degree at the bachelor level early career pay is about 70 000 mid career pay is 119 000 which is fantastic on top of that the demand score is a very good 109 one thing that's great about electrical engineering is you will likely end up working in the technology industry as well now sometimes you can go down the hardware route but there's quite a few electrical engineers that also learn how to code and they go more down the software side of things and electrical engineering is just such a flexible degree that you are gonna have that ability next one on the list number four is going to be another master's degree it is going to be becoming a pa or physician assistant now known as physician associate so this is an absolutely fantastic degree somewhat similar to nurse practitioner you can prescribe diagnose treat etc you do have to be under the supervision of a doctor though now when it comes to the numbers you do make slightly less than a nurse practitioner and there's slightly less demand but there's a reason that i rank this one a little bit higher so you'll make around 115 000 a year and it's growing at 31 percent which is i think the second highest on this list still absolutely off the charts but with that being said it's not as good as the nurse practitioner numbers so why did i rank this one a little bit higher well there's two main reasons and i stumbled upon this when i was doing research on it and i got really really deep into the research the first thing is physician associate is an even more flexible degree than nurse practitioner and by that i mean it's super easy for you to change your specialty so let's say you are working as a pa and you're doing surgical right and for whatever reason you're tired of doing surgeries you just don't want to do it you don't want to wake up early in the morning or in the middle of the night there's just something about surgeries you don't want to do instead you want to transition over into dermatology it is very easy for you to do that as a physician associate you can also do something along those lines as a nurse practitioner but it's a little bit more difficult i actually know a physician associate who works in both of those different settings at once right so she literally has two different jobs and she works in two different settings at once you compare this to a lot of other types of careers out there where it's super hard for you to transition into a different specialty and then the second thing is there is some preliminary evidence that the way that they're accrediting and the way that they're handing out different degrees as well as giving accreditation to schools for nurse practitioners is going to mean that at some point it's likely going to be saturated you've seen this happening with other types of health degrees like pharmacy where for whatever reason the accrediting board is just like handing out accreditations left and right and then you see the opposite happening with medical for medical schools it's extremely difficult to get accredited and that's why you see saturation occurring with pharmacy schools but no saturation occurring with medical and it seems like it may be going down that direction with nurse practitioner although not nearly as bad and then pa it seems like it's going more of the medical direction where they're keeping their standards really high but again you know something could change tomorrow they could change their mind if they see that it's becoming a little bit too saturated it's possible the only reason they're doing it is because there's just so much demand and they have to absolutely meet that demand so that is why i ranked pa a little bit higher but honestly these two both of them are so good they could pretty much be interchangeable next one on the list number three is going to be a computer engineering bachelors now one thing i also want to include is in previous years i put flexibility as a very very high ranking right so the more flexible the degree was the better it was but i realized that it's somewhat unfair for me to put so much weight on flexibility i have to assume with these rankings that you have done your research and you know what you're getting into right so if you hate computers if you hate math if you're not good at engineering don't go into this right uh you're not going to enjoy your life you're not going to enjoy your work so this is a relatively specific degree right computer engineering that's pretty specific and so you need to make sure that you'd probably want to work with computers whether that be software or hardware but with that being said last year about 7200 people graduated with this degree early career pays 72 000 mid-career pay is an astounding 120 000 a year now the next one on the list is actually very similar to this one and you would likely be competing for a lot of the same jobs in many cases and that is going to be software engineering now the demand score on this one is about 107 which again is very solid but the next two have absolutely ridiculous demand so number two on the list is going to be a software engineering bachelor's degree the demand score for this one is 127 i think that's like top three out of all of them on this list you start off making about 69 000 a year and 112 000 mid-career pay so very solid salary score not quite as good as computer engineering but the reason i ranked this one a little bit higher was the demand so not only does it have a fantastic demand score but beyond that only about a thousand people graduate per year with this degree and there is 77 000 job listings that have software engineering degree as a keyword thousand graduates 77 000 job listings that is a pretty nice ratio there 77 to 1 but the number one degree on the list is not going to be a surprise for anyone that is going to be a computer science bachelor's degree it has an absolutely ridiculous 154 demand score that's the highest on this entire list early career pay is 68 000 mid-career pay is 114 000 so very solid there on top of that you're likely going to be working in the technology industry which has all those perks and benefits that i mentioned before it's also a very flexible degree there's so many different things that you can do with it so yeah i made an entire video about like most of these degrees so you can check them out if you want any more information but interestingly enough as you saw here most of the degrees on this list are bachelor level degrees and that's because in my opinion they are the best bang for the buck when it comes to your return on investment i talked about this in several different videos where you know i said like is it worth it to go to graduate school i think that was the title of the video but when you go to graduate school basically you have to take out a different type of loan it's called a grad plus loan and so people who go to graduate school take out a lot more in loans and they have much worse percentages on them right so the interest rates sometimes are over seven eight percent whereas undergraduate loans the interest rates are usually between three and maybe five and a half percent so it's extremely expensive for you to go to graduate school it's a lot harder sometimes it takes a lot longer as well and this is especially true when you're talking about doctoral degrees now uh getting a phd is almost never going to be worth it from a financial perspective only reason for you to do that is non-financial reasons there are certain professional doctoral level degrees that can be worth it from a financial perspective absolutely but the best bang for the buck in my opinion most of the time is going to be bachelor level degrees so what i always recommend is get a bachelor's degree and something that you know you can get a job with right and then if you want to pursue graduate school pursue higher education you have that option right and it's an option for you it's not something that you have to do right it's not a necessity that lets you be extremely flexible with your plans so if you decide you want to go to grad school great you can do that but if you decide you know i've had enough of school i'm totally sick of it i need to get a job make money right now you also have that option as well check out my other videos right here i made them just for you hope you enjoyed this one uh hit the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and i will see you next time