Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?
Some data for the word-weary
In the week since TCQ launched, several people have noted that it has included a lot of words. One of them made this point while drinking her coffee in our kitchen and wondering aloud if anyone really needed that many words.
Message received! Here’s a Sunday Charticle on how bachelor’s degrees have changed over the years. And if you want to provide me with some words, I’d love it if you took the TCQ Survey! (It’s very short.)
Let’s start with high school degrees. The chart below starts in 1869 when the Office of Education first collected this data. Orange bars show the number of 17 year-olds and blue bars show the number of high school degrees conferred.
For the last 40 years, we’ve basically had four million 17 year-olds, as you can see above.
As the chart below shows, since 1970 the proportion of them getting bachelor’s degrees has risen from about a quarter to about half.
What do students major in? The U.S. Department of Education has that data here, but below I have calculated the change in each field of study from 1971 to 2022. Huge increase in students getting degrees in business and the health professions. Big decrease in Education. And yes, fewer English degrees.
That bar chart is pretty darn hard to read - so here’s a table with the same information:
During this time, the number of college degrees more than doubled, but the number of college-aged Americans was pretty level.
There is a lot more I could say about this, but the point of the Sunday Charticle is to go light on words. I’ll pick up tomorrow with #8 in my list of Ten Things We Get Wrong About College:
“Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA!”
dgc
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Ten Things We Get Wrong About College
#9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)
#8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)
#7 - Colleges are closing! (No school you’ve ever heard of is going to close. But yes, some colleges are closing.)
#6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there’s a grad school debt problem.)
#5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)
#4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)
#3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)
#2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)
#1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)
I’m new to your Substack and catching up on prior post. I love the data driven approach. Have you ever seen analysis on what it really costs a high quality university to deliver an education?
interesting shift bug also interesting lack of shift 🤔