This story is presented as part of The Stranger’s Back to School 2018 issue, out now.
If you treat your education as a means to an end, you’re going to wind up shooting yourself in the head. Worse, you’ll wind up dying long before they bury you. Worse still, you’ll be so boring that nobody will even want to bury you.
Though I have great respect for my colleague Lester Black, I couldn’t disagree more with his advice for students. His “unpopular” suggestion to earn a degree in “the natural sciences” so as not to be like those sad-sack “English majors” is actually a very popular cliché—and it’s wrong.
As giant tech companies continue to gobble up entire industries, demand for graduates with degrees in the life sciences, the physical sciences, and engineering has gone way down. The ratio between science degrees and job openings is now dismal, and, according to an analysis of information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics published in the New York Times, the future doesn’t look good: “In the decade ending in 2024, 73 percent of STEM job growth will be in computer occupations, but only 3 percent will be in the physical sciences and 3 percent in the life sciences.”
