There's no more safe path to a middle class income, though learning to code will work for about four more years. Late capitalism.
I'd guess engineering is still generally a safe choice, provided the individual is engineering-minded.
My cousin graduated law school a couple of years ago and now lives in my parents' old neighborhood. But maybe he married money? I've never talked to him as an adult.
Anyway, 2008 was a really bad year, financially, for the lawyers in my life. It's certainly better but not like before.
I've been surprised lately at how many of my law librarian colleagues have JDs. That would seem to indicate that a law degree is not a safe path to prosperity.
They should just marry for money, like my cousin might have done.
6 and 8: I have an acquaintance from Mississippi who went to a New England prep school, so I think she has family money, and (even though she's fairly progressive, she would not marry someone who wasn't at least upper middle class - and she has).
She went to law school, then became a literary agent in Boston at a firm that was clearly a subsidized hobby of the principal who was heir to the Dialy Mail fortune and threw a lavish birthday party in Venice. She moved to Atlanta and went to library science school and was a law librarian for a while. It appears that she has retrained as a psychotherapist.
Medicine seems to be the only stable job in that way, They're going to come under increasing cost pressure, and it will be less pleasant working conditions for a while - though that may improve over time.
I think it's:
* Career paths out of law school are pretty life-destroying
* Mid-to-low-tier law schools don't even offer such career paths
It's still a cash cow, though.
There's plenty of career paths out of middle-tier law schools. Just not ones with enough income to justify big loans.
The problem was always limited to the lower end of the profession. The big firms were always hiring, and the lawyers who started there had a fine ticket into the upper middle class, even if they left the firm after a few years.
Supply side cause: crappy law schools expanding because they were cash cows for universities, and/or investors at the for-profit schools. These schools depended heavily on mediocre students, usually from working class background, going deeply into debt. This has ameliorated in the past five years due to declining profits. Several of the weakest law schools closed, some of the for profits have gone into bankruptcy, and others are shrinking.
There are also weird trends connected to pop culture, with movies or TV series sometimes leading to increased applications. This actually happened with LA Law, Legally Blond, and Ally McBeal. All we have now is Better Call Saul, which doesn't make lawyering seem attractive (and also doesn't target young people).
Demand side causes: Decades of declining crime reduced demand for prosecutors and public defenders. The good news is that crime is coming back a bit, so I guess demand will recover a little. Also, ACA reduced the number of uninsured Americans, and people with insurance usually don't have to sue anyone to get their medical expenses paid. No recent changes in this area.
Today, I would recommend law school for someone who wants to be middle class, can get into a top 50% law school, and can keep debt manageable.
1 agreed. I don't know if there ever was that safe path in my lifetime, but I'm pretty sure there won't be by the time Atossa is thinking about college.
Although a B.A. in English seems as close as anything. Mine has served me better than I would have expected, especially with anything technical on the side. Not for journalism - the pay there sucks and the soul-crushing kinds of "journalism" far outweigh the interesting kinds - but it's easy to parlay it into technical writing and similar fields, which seems reliably in demand.
Technical writing also lets you be a consultant. Consulting is the key.
Take a look at the distribution of first year associate salaries and see what you think:
https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib#2021
Remember - you will graduate with about 165,000 in debt, payable over 10 years at about 7% interest rate. You will be paying about 2K a month on that debt.
Basically, if you don't get into biglaw, you are fucked. If you do, you are fucked because biglaw is wretched.
Those are the numbers in states that are further along the path of destroying public universities. UNL Law costs about $16,000 a year in state.
There's no more safe path to a middle class income
How about medicine, or dentistry?
Or, if you stick with it, West Point? A major (which isn't a terribly difficult rank to reach) makes about $75k in the US, plus some really nice benefits.
I should have clarified no path left that is broadly available for the uninspired student.
I think uninspired is a default state for majors. The ones I meet, anyway.
Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs-UEqJ85KE
Well, you need to be uninspired and well-connected to get into West Point.
Oh no! It's in the post! How embarrassing!
17: Eh, I was mentally appending "with reasonable quality of life." Medicine is middle-class with 12-hour workdays. Or upper-class with reasonable hours for specialists, but that's selective and requires more expensive education, therefore excluded by "safe".
So I gather. Not in medicine myself but I've seen enough articles about burnout in that profession, and/or pay and working conditions that fail one condition or the other here.
You can't just wake up as a college senior on a stranger's couch after a house party and decide you want to go to medical school. If that wasn't your plan since you were 16-18, you'll need to stay an undergraduate for longer to get the required courses in and you shouldn't even bother if your grades aren't great.
24: I think even GPs do pretty well for themselves once they get through a residency.
Relevant Noah Smith post (which I think is worth reading, but also gets the emphasis wrong in various ways): https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-elite-overproduction-hypothesis
A bunch of humanities careers vanished all at once
If you graduated with a degree in English or History back in 2006, what would you do with that degree? If you wanted a secure stable prestigious high-paying job, you could go to law school and be a lawyer. If you wanted to live on the East Coast and work in an industry with a romantic reputation, you could work in media or publishing. If you just wanted intellectual stimulation and prestige, you could try for academia. If you just wanted security and stability and didn't care that much about money or glamour, you could be a K-12 teacher, or work for the government.
This wealth of career paths probably made young people feel that it was safe to major in the humanities -- that despite the stereotype that you couldn't do anything with an English degree, there was still tons of work out there for them if they wanted it. Studying humanities was fun, it made you feel like an intellectual, and the social opportunities were probably a lot better than if you were stuck in a lab or in front of a computer screen coding all day. And if after a few years enjoying the fullness of youth you felt like going nose-to-the-grindstone and getting that big suburban house and dog and kids and two-car garage like your parents had, well, you could just go to law school.
But in the years after the Great Recession, every one of these career paths has become much more difficult.
First, let's start with the most important one -- the humanity major's ultimate fallback, the legal profession. ...
@27
Francis Bacon in "Of Seditions and Troubles":
Therefore the multiplying of nobility, and other degrees of quality, in an over proportion to the common people, doth speedily bring a state to necessity; and so doth likewise an overgrown clergy; for they bring nothing to the stock; and in like manner, when more are bred scholars, than preferments can take off.
If that wasn't your plan since you were 16-18, you'll need to stay an undergraduate for longer to get the required courses in
This is correct. You should really think of the term of training for doctors as something like as something like 10-14 years. Relevant side note: my wife has told me that she had several Mormon medical school classmates who went into dentistry because it pays well and has regular hours, which allows them more family time, etc. Mormons might be weirdos, but they really have some things figured out.
And although it's become a joke, learning to code is 1) not really all that difficult (provided you have a masochistic streak); you can be hireable after about a year, starting from zero knowledge and 2) still pays pretty well.
30 to 28.
I've also heard that working as a pharmacist offers good hours and solid pay. Anecdotally, "learn to code" (or already knowing how to code) is not as reliable a way to get a job as one ages (I've been at my current job forever so I'm not really paying attention to the job market but I was just talking to a co-worker, in his mid-40s who mentioned an interview that went really well where he didn't get the job and later heard rumor from someone he knew in the company that he would have gotten the job if he'd been younger. I don't know how significant that is.
My sister the pharmacist is learning how to code.
Speaking as an old coder, I think there's definitely a subset of jobs where they won't hire older folks as non-manager coders, and that includes the big tech companies with the highest salaries. But there are still jobs to be had outside of that world.
A different co-worker suggested that, if I thinking about the job market I might be advised to add R and Python to my skills and look for data jobs. It's not an immediate concern, but not bad advice.
There's two young people that use R. They'll shove me out the door at some point, but not before I can retire comfortably.
31: Hispital pharmacy is a good job. I think the chain stores are factories where burnout is high. Independents are getting squeezed - especially w/healthcare consolidation (pharmacy benefits/PBMs) pushing people to go to one of the chains. Margins are tight too.
Hospital pharmacy during covid was not fun according to pharmacists now taking classes in Python.
There's also a whole shit ton of jobs in industries adjacent to all of these. Insurance companies probably secure more middle-class incomes than doctors do, frex. So many corporations with so much middle management.
Or government jobs that don't tie particularly closely to any specific major.
22: good point. But "military officer" in general has been a reliable and safe route to the middle class for centuries. And physically it's probably about as safe as being a doctor these days.
Oh no! It's in the post! How embarrassing!
No it's not! Your link reminded me how great CXGF is.
My link is actually shilling for a bottom-of-the-barrel lawyer with a catchy hook.
How many people listened to CBAT through most of law school?
Even a lower tier law school might be ok, depending on one's ambitions. If someone wants to be a lawyer in Missoula Montana, there is precisely zero reason to go to Harvard, and every reason in the world to go to our local public Blewett school of law. Top rated in the state, of course, ranked 122 (in 2021) nationally, and not all that expensive. (The bottom of the USN&WP rankings is a whole bunch of law schools tied at 151).
44: That link made me look up Pittsburgh's notorious "I think like a criminal" and "Did I mention I'm Jewish" lawyer. (I had a posted a link probably back when were discussing it before.
It was sort of gratifying to see that earlier this year he was convicted of drug dealing. A former defense attorney who became known for his satirical ads offering his ability to "think like a criminal" will spend five years in prison for his role in a large-scale marijuana ring.
One of his ads is embedded in tharticle, or see it here. At one point he says "I may have a law degree, but trust me I think like a criminal*". So Saul Goodman does speak to some.
*He would be a superior commentator on Judge Aileen Cannon and other Trump legal shenanigans than most legal commentators.
42: ROTC, yes. I assume it's still reasonably open to the average student, but I don't know young people.
46: I don't know where it's ranked, but I think Northeastern could be a solid choice for Massachusetts because of its co-op program - particularly if you want to work for a non-profit.
Timely! A friend of mine just wrote and self-published The Truth About Law School: What You Need To Know Before You Commit, available free on Kindle Unlimited (or .99 otherwise for an ebook). Her advice is that one still should probably not go to law school.
47: THAT'S A REAL AD?!?! I'm losing my mind a little.
38: There's a health policy podcast called Trading Places. They did a profile of an independent pharmacist. Her team has been runragged with vaccines, and she can't get enough techs. They also rolled out a program for them to prescribe Paxlovid. She spent time learning about all the interactions, really loved the patient counseling work, but she got paid some paltry amount for each independent prescription, independent meaning there was a collaborating physician for complicated cases under whose name she prescribed, but she did all the work. She made like a dollar on each prescription.
My hospital is degree crazy for middle management and project management positions. (Although the PMP certification is valued.). It's all quantity over quality. I think I would need to get one to advance, and the tuition assistance is small.
I'm interviewing for 2 jobs in the next couple of weeks. A small agency, so a real person reviewed my application, and her title was something other than HR. She talked to me about both. The director was in the right place at the right time and has a Bachelors. It says Masters or 5 years experience, and I looked up the hiring manager on LinkedIn. He has a Bachelors from the university Halford hates most in the world but no postgraduate degree. What I see some of is a Bachelors from a State College or UMass combined with a Master from an online program. Higher tier jobs in management go to people with MBAs or MD MBAs from the fanciest schools who then leave for a start up aftr a few years, because we are just as corporate but don't pay as well.
42: Not a bad route to becoming a lawyer either.
Of course the drawback with being a military officer is moving around a ton.
The nice thing about being a pharmacist these days is that, any time you don't feel like doing your job, you just claim a religious objection and some Trump judge will support you.
"That's right, my pastor says doing inventory 10 minutes before closing is an abomination before God."
Real estate speculator is a classic American occupational and looks like it will stay profitable
How hard is it to get into the FBI? Law enforcement seems like it pays very well, and probably fewer fashy coworkers with the g-people.
Nursing. Pays well, and you can get good hours after the first few years.
At one point he says "I may have a law degree, but trust me I think like a criminal*". So Saul Goodman does speak to some.
And that ad seems to have come out at least two years after the very end of Breaking Bad, so he was probably playing off it.
My nephew is being recruited by a university to play on their esports team. I didn't even know this was a thing. I'm so baffled I don't know how to react. I mean, I recognize that studying comparative literature is not a clear path to career stability either, but I can't help but be horrified. He says he's just like any student athlete and this is normal, which makes me feel like I'm about 150 years old. He's planning to make a career of it (and he's reportedly very good, and has been internationally ranked for years, which says something about his skill level, but also maybe how he was spending his time in high school and why he isn't attending a more academically rigorous college??). I guess this is something people do now. How does this work, though, to have your livelihood so dependent on a single corporation?
58: But you have to touch poop sometimes.
A recent PhD in my field just got a job as an esports coach at a university. It's a real thing!
That said, esports careers are *very* short. It's even worse than regular sports. By the time you're 25 you're going to need to have a plan b.
Are esport athletes specialists in a single game or do do they master many games? Or are there both specialists and generalists? I'm imagining something like an esport decathlon.
If you were once a popular successful esports athlete can you continue to make a living because people will like to watch you play video games even after your reflexes aren't fast enough to compete professionally?
And can you become a casino greeter?
I'm pretty sure they only play one game professionally, you really need to know the game well and they spend a tremendous amount of time practicing.
I for example have spent the last few years attaining semi pro status in the French league for players of Microsoft Fruit Tree Pruning Simulator, or, as it's known in France, L'esport de l'espalier.
How does this work, though, to have your livelihood so dependent on a single corporation?
Pretty much like any corporate job?