9. No Jobs

Labor economists often look at combined employment quality outcomes, meaning someone is:

1. Unemployed
2. Underemployed – working in jobs not requiring a degree
3. Employed – but not working in a job related to their major

By that combined measure, the gap between STEM and liberal arts can be large:

STEM Fields: Typically smaller shares (often ~20–30 %) of graduates fall into unemployment + underemployment combined.

Liberal Arts & Humanities: Often ~50–60 % or higher of graduates fall into that combined category — meaning a much larger share of liberal arts grads don’t secure jobs that use their degree in the way that field traditionally would.

You can see from this analysis that taking the easy way out selecting a less rigorous degree major becomes the hard way later when jobs are scarce. The hard majors are not immune but better off.

You can further refine this by whether STEM grads were from selective colleges and how they ranked by GPA.

Life is competitive. Employers want to hedge their bets. In an age of intelligence recruiting the best talent is crucial. Meta recently offered a top tier AI engineer $300 Million for a 4 year employment contract. This while countless thousands of average software engineers are getting canned. It’s a glaring example of winner take all economics.

You are competing for the same job with the best and brightest graduates. Good luck with that.

So if you are not the top one in a billion AI researcher what is your future? Is it worth the endless years of study and toil to be unceremoniously tossed in the trash heap of yesterday’s talent?

Do you really expect to go to Vegas and beat the
casinos at their game. No you won’t. You will take the bus home and sell your car to eat.