 Is an education major or education degree worth it? That's what we're gonna be going over today. Is it going to be worth it to go $40,000 in debt and spend four years of your life to get this degree? So first of all, let's go ahead and define what education is exactly. Thank you. And this one, of course, is a little bit self-explanatory. It's gonna be all about teaching people. And oftentimes, people who graduate with an education degree will become public school teachers in either middle school, high school, or grade school. And you can teach any number of subjects from physical education to mathematics. Now, when it comes to bachelor degrees, around 3,000 people graduate with a general education degree here in the US. However, overall, there's around 85,000 people who graduate with an education degree in general because most of them are going to specialize. But you can also become an administrator, a school counselor, or a principal. Some career paths you could go down outside of education would be an interpreter, human resource manager, or a technical writer. But like I said before, by far, teacher is going to be the most common career path. Now, I'm gonna break this video up into four different sections. And the first one we're gonna talk about because this is a personal finance channel is going to be earning potential or salary. Now, I gotta be honest with you guys. When it comes to salary or earning potential with an education degree, it doesn't look great. Now, I personally think teacher might be one of the most important jobs in the entire world. And unfortunately, they aren't compensated all that well. With an education degree, you would expect to make around $41,000 a year starting out and $64,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare this to a really high-paying degree and a low-paying one, and you'll see that it's definitely on the lower side. Now, let's say you move to the very top of the chain in a school and you become a principal, for instance. They make around $96,000 a year. However, you're generally gonna have to get a master's degree, and it's gonna take at least five years of work experience. Let's say that you become a teacher, and I'll just go ahead and pick a random one, special education, that makes around $61,000 a year. I'm also gonna cover a couple career paths you could end up going down with an education degree that don't necessarily have anything to do with a teacher career path or education. So let's talk about human resource manager, for instance. They make around $116,000 a year, but again, it's usually gonna take quite a bit of experience in order to get to that level. Technical writers, on the other hand, make around $72,000 a year, which is $35 an hour. And if there's some other career paths you wanna look into, I'll actually have some of them pop up on the screen right now. You can just pause the video and check them out if you want to. And you'll see that all of them are kind of average paying, maybe slightly above average. Now, if you look at how much an education degree graduate makes over a lifetime, it gets even worse. So according to the latest US Census Barrow, they only make around $1.8 million over a lifetime, which is one of the lowest on the entire list. This is compared to $2.4 million to all other types of degrees and all of the types of careers. So yeah, not amazing pay, especially when you consider how important the job is and all the stuff they have to go through dealing with little kids all the time. I know I was a pain in the butt when I was a kid, so sorry to all the teachers out there. So unfortunately, they aren't paid very well and I wish they were paid more, but I have to give you guys a fair ranking. Overall, when it comes to salary, this one gets a score of 5.5 out of 10. Next, we're gonna talk about satisfaction. And I like to go over two important aspects here. The first one is going to be meaning, which is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world. So with an education degree, you're gonna see that it has a 67% meaning score on pay scale and again, you can compare that to a really good one and a bad one, so you can kinda see where it is. And you'll see that it is on the higher side, which is good news. And that totally makes sense. Teacher is a very important job. You are making a huge impact on people's lives at a very influential age and so if you do a good job as a teacher, you could literally change the world in some ways. And if you look at a specific career, which would be teacher or instructor on pay scale, you'll see that it's 82%, which is even better. On top of that, the job satisfaction score is gonna be around 71%, which is on the higher side. Again, if you can compare it to a really good one and a bad one. Now, when it comes to how much people regret getting their college degree, unfortunately, education is the third most regretted type of major with around 31% of people regretting it. And the main reason why is because low pay, job satisfaction and limited job opportunities. So I think the big problem there is people probably don't understand exactly what they're getting themselves into when it comes to getting an education degree. This is not a career you're gonna go into for the money. Definitely not. However, it can be extremely rewarding for the right person. So it's very important, especially with college degrees these days because of the fact that they're so expensive and they take so much time that you make sure that you're doing your due diligence and researching them properly. Now, another thing I like to talk about when it comes to job satisfaction and meaning is that this is the most subjective section by far. For one person, this could be the best job in the world, most amazing job ever. And for another person, it could be a nightmare. There's so many other things that will influence this as well, like where you live, who you work with, you know, state regulations, federal regulations, the business you work for, the company you work for, the industry that you work in, all kinds of different things are going to affect your job satisfaction. So honestly, take this section with a grain of salt because it's gonna be different for everybody who watches, but overall, I'm gonna give this one an 8.5 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next, we're gonna be talking about maybe the most important section, which is demand. And the reason it's the most important is because everything else tends to come from demand. When it comes to economics, the most important rule is supply and demand. It always goes back to that simple rule. And so if there's a lot of supply and not a lot of demand, chances are the price is gonna go down and the same sort of works when it comes to how much you get paid. If you have skills that are in high demand, likely you'll get paid really well and you'll get treated better just because of the fact that they don't want to lose you. Now I will say that this doesn't necessarily work when it comes to careers where you go into the government and education of course is one of those types of careers. So it can get a little weird when there's a lot of regulations or it's a career path that a lot of the time you're gonna end up going into the government for. However, it tends to hold true nevertheless. Now let's say you're gonna become a principal. There's around 283,000 jobs out there and it's growing at 4% which is about as fast as average. For a special education teacher, there's 443,000 jobs available and it's growing at 3% which again is around average. For an HR manager, there's 165,000 jobs available and it's growing at 6% which is faster than average. And for a technical writer, there's around 58,000 jobs out there which is growing at 7% and that is also faster than average. Now interestingly enough when I was researching this and I was looking at a lot of different forums and different self reports and that sort of thing, I saw that a lot of people were saying that there's not many jobs out there for teachers. However, when you look at the unemployment rate at least a few years ago before the whole thing that's happening right now in the world that I'm not gonna mention because I don't wanna get demonetized, you saw that the top three degrees for the lowest unemployment rate were all education related. So you had general education, elementary education and education other. So it does seem like a lot of people that graduate with education degrees end up getting a job, which is a good sign. Now another thing I like to do is type in the name of the degree onto monster.com or indeed.com and you'll see that education degree has around 30,000 job listings that have that keyword in the job description. You can compare this to one that has a lot of demand and one that doesn't have very much and you'll see that it's on the higher side. So that is a good sign, but I think a lot of the advertisements on there likely come from government agencies. The reason for that is because when big businesses are surveyed, education usually comes out as one of the least likely degrees that they are looking for. So for instance, only about 1% of big businesses that are surveyed were actively looking for people who have education degrees. You can compare this to around 81% for engineering and 78% for business degrees. So there honestly is a lot of conflicting evidence here when it comes to how much demand there is. So overall, all things being equal, I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a 7.5 out of 10. Now next we're gonna be talking about X factors and this is basically anything that I think is important that I didn't already go over. So I mentioned before that over a lifetime, people who graduate with an education degree will likely make around $1.8 million compared to the average degree which will make 2.4 million. However, if you break it down a little bit further and look into specific career paths, it gets even worse. So for instance, liberal arts degrees don't necessarily have a great reputation for getting high earning jobs. However, if you go into a management career path, you'll earn 3 million over a lifetime. So there are some good options out there for liberal arts degrees depending on what career path you end up going down. However, if you go into management with an education degree, you only earn slightly less than average, around 2.3 million. And you'll see that pretty much all across the board, no matter what career path you go down, it's either below average or slightly above average at best. Another resource I like looking at is the Zip Recruiter Skills Index because at the end of the day, companies aren't necessarily hiring you for your degree. They're hiring you for the skills that your degree supposedly taught you. And when it comes to a skill of preschool teacher, for instance, it ranks around 29 out of 100, which if you compare it to a really good one and a bad one, you'll see that it's on the lower side. So I do wanna mention here that when it comes to value, the Skills Index basically shows the value on the open market, AKA how much companies, hiring managers, and business owners are willing to pay people for different types of skills at this particular time in history. That doesn't necessarily mean that these skills don't have any value. In fact, I'd say teacher, like I mentioned before, is one of the most valuable skills out there. And also this doesn't necessarily apply to government jobs either because that just works completely differently than the open market, AKA how much business owners and hiring managers are willing to pay you. However, with that being said, you do have to be somewhat realistic here. And when you see a skill ranking that low, it's not great. One good thing though, is that a lot of the skills you learn will never be automated. So teaching somebody, being a teacher, that is never gonna be automated. People are always going to need teachers in order to understand somebody's issue, figure out what their problem is, and then help them to solve that problem. Teaching people things requires a high level of education and communication. There's just no way, at least in my opinion, that a teacher will ever be able to be outsourced or automated and will robots take my job tends to agree with me here, only a 1% chance of automation. And if you look at human resource manager, it's even lower at 0.6% chance. So these skills you learn, luckily one of the plus sides is it probably will never be automated. Now another thing I always like to talk about is flexibility. There are certain degrees where you don't really need to plan ahead all that much, just because of the fact that it doesn't matter what career path or life path you end up taking, your degree is going to serve you well. There's other degrees where you have to plan way into the future. You basically have to know that you're going to get a doctorate or something along those lines. So you have to really put a lot of thought into it if you want to go down that degree path. And then there's other degrees yet where maybe you don't need to plan all that much, but it's kind of pigeonholes you into a certain set of careers. So unfortunately education does fall under that category where there's not a lot of career paths you can go down with this degree. It's pretty much teacher, teaching related degrees like principal. There are a couple others you could go into like technical writing. You can teach people foreign languages if you know another language, but there's honestly not a lot of flexibility there. So this is really one of those degrees where you want to do your research and make sure you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. Because if you change your mind down the line, there's not all that much room for error. This is one of those degrees where the best laid plans, a lot of the time they don't end up working out the way you saw them. And so, you know, that can turn out kind of not so good with this degree in some cases. So overall, when it comes to X factors, I'm going to give this one a five out of 10. Now, if you add all four of those up and divided by four, you get a 6.65 out of 10. So that's a ranking where it could be okay. Again, if you really do your research, you know what you're getting yourself into, but it's not amazing. Now, again, I wish it was better, but I have to give you guys my honest opinion after researching this. And for many people, it's not gonna be a great choice. However, if you are somebody who is born to be a teacher and you know that's your passion in life, don't let this video stop you from doing that. These scores are totally subjective. For one person, it could be a 10 out of 10, and another, it could be a one out of 10. So keep that in mind, but I highly recommend considering maybe double majoring in this one, minoring in it, just taking extra classes in it, something along those lines. Also, I do think that one advantage of becoming a teacher is you have a unique ability to teach other people information. So you might wanna consider starting a podcast, a YouTube channel, something along those lines. I see a huge trend in the entire field of education in general, just moving towards being more online and decentralized. So in the past, there was pretty much only one way to get educated, and that was to go to school. Now there are many different options for people. There's tons of different certifications, online school, online courses, et cetera. You can hire tutors, you can watch free YouTube videos like you're doing right now. There's just a lot of options out there for people to educate themselves. Now if you're enjoying my videos, but there's one that you're waiting for because I literally have hundreds of videos in the backlog that I'll eventually get to, you might wanna consider checking out my Patreon down below where I have the college degree ranker, version 1.1. This will make the whole process a lot easier because I basically took all of what I considered to be the best metrics from all over the internet, put them into one very easy to use resource. 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, et cetera that you have on the video. Sharing the video always helps quite a bit as well, and don't leave. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.