Agreed. These resources have been mentioned elsewhere on the forums, but may also be helpful here, to future readers of this thread.
1) The US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, has an Occupational Outlook Handbook (
OOH) which may be helpful for looking into various fields of study.
2) The "Big Future" feature of the College Board also provides information about
majors and careers.
Thinking of career choices brings to mind a
post in an old thread:
... Forty or fifty years ago, the US offered lots of manufacturing jobs that paid a living wage, and people who weren't bright enough to be lawyers or engineers or whatever (or who couldn't afford college) could find a decent job.
Now we've outsourced a lot of these jobs, and we've decided that everyone should just go to college and become a knowledge worker. IMO, this is insane. You can't make people smarter by wishing it so, and the results are predictable. People with college degrees end up working as security guards, at Starbucks, and in other low-skill jobs (but they have huge loans to pay off). We're building an entire economy around a fantasy.
On top of this, we put so much effort into average and below-average students, we forget about the bright students who actually have the talent to be high-caliber knowledge workers. This happens through a combination of ignoring them in elementary school and then watering down math, science, and English courses in middle school and beyond.
And then everyone wonders why things don't improve. We hear that the real problem is that we need to throw more money at the issue, while ignoring how we spend the money and the fact that the US education expenditures are above average among OECD countries. We even spend more than the much-vaunted Finland as a percentage of overall public expenditure....
