Quote: (05-01-2015 11:28 AM)Ice Wrote:
Quote: (05-01-2015 10:55 AM)jamaicabound Wrote:
I know plenty of careers can make over 100k or over 150k, however most are going to require some very specialized skillset not a lot of people have or lots of schooling. Assuming you don't want to spend the next 8 years becomming a doctor or lawyer your best chances of making 100k plus are either going to be in sales with an uncapped commission structure or by starting your own business.
Anyone going for a liberal arts degree or some garbage degree, and I say that as someone who has a liberal arts organizational communictions degree, unless you get into sales or do something yourself expect to come out making 35k to 40k. granted some may land a 50k 60k job but really imho if you want to make any real money you have to get into sales or start your own business.
That's not really true what you said about the salary for lib arts grads. For example, you can go into brand strategy, management consulting, UX strategy, advertising, marketing, digital consulting, business development, project management, product management etc - all these roles pay quite well after a couple of years. (If you're good).
Some marketing directors earn 150k too, so you can definitely reach that number with a lib arts degree too.
True but the vast majority of students comming out with a liberal arts degree are not going to be making that in the first couple years or even first half of their career or anywhere close to that.
Also, when you come out with a liberal arts degree basically that piece of paper is what gets you in the door. Many companies won't even hire or promote without having a degree so its good for that, aside from that with a liberal arts degree you have to sell yourself as well as skills and experiences you've earned outside of college be it internships or specialized skills you've taken the time to learn and hone on your own. Your degree really in no way prepares you to walk into a job and start day one like an accountant may be able to or someone with a specialized degree where they actually learned their job in school. IMHO and I think as most employers view a lib arts degree. It shows your smart enough to get through college, to show up to classes, you don't have answers to things but the research skills you need for school at least show you know how to find answers.
Some of the jobs you mentioned are not jobs but vague industries like advertising and marketing where you have a range of people making from $10 an hour to millions. I know lots of grads who are going crazy because half these marketing professionally advertised jobs they are going to they show up to find its some kind of door to door sales. We all know those job listings "do you love sports" or "do you love rock and roll and a fun workplace?" Advertising and Marketing can pay well but are extremely hard to get into and are very demanding.
As far as the consulting stuff not sure if your talking about working for a consulting firm or getting into it independently but your average lib arts grad not only isn't going to have the skills nor life experience to get into consulting but nobody would hire some fresh grad with no experience to consult them.
I know being an entrepreneur is demanding but at least you have the chance at big rewards and also when you work for yourself though demanding and in many cases more hours than working a job, at least you have some flexibility in terms of when and how you do your job.
I'm no really familiar with UX strategy and some of the other things. That said my sister came out with a marketing degree so a little bit different than lib arts but she's worked for D&B, Netratings, Comscore and a few other pretty good jobs and about 10 years in she's making like 60k and thats with job moves which are typically higher pay bumps than just promotions and she's smarter than most. I myself worked in online marketing, analytics, etc for some startups as well as orbitz and pay was decent but nothing to write home about.
I think 95% of people comming out with liberal arts degrees are going through the motions of getting a degree and are going to come out and grab some corporate 35k a year job and a very small percent are going to learn additional skills or be mentored and try to enter some of the fields you mentioned.
Honestly looking back unless I had a specific career track to be on I would skip college all together and just educate myself online learning different programming languages, web design, graphic design, etc and just have a wide skill set which would be used freelancing, working for myself as well as in demand in a corporate setting as well.