> At 40 you’re comparing engineers vs a group that suddenly includes lawyers and MBAs.

Sure, the fact that the career paths diverge is... the whole point. The cohort didn’t change, one part of it went to law school and the other didn’t. Your analogy is totally off base.

When you explicitly select people who are between 23 and 25 and have entered the work force, you are intentionally selecting for people who do not have a JD and are not actively earning one. The set of 23 year old lawyers is essentially nonexistent. The set of 23 year olds working full time and also enrolled in law school is hardly much larger.

Ah, I see what you mean. I’ll grant that the “currently employed” requirement artificially inflates the starting salary figures, probably more so for history majors than engineers. The broader point remains, though, that history/social science degrees can lead to paths that, if pursued, end at higher salaries.

Also, I expect salaries are also higher for engineers/developers with a masters or PhD than just a BS, so there’s some of the same effect in that population too. (Although I suppose it’s more likely that engineering students seeking advanced degrees, especially PhDs, are also working full time).

Where is the evidence that they selected for employed grads?

It’s in the part of the article I quoted.

“Computer science and engineering majors ... who were working full time earned an average of $61,744 ... higher than the average starting salary of $45,032 earned by people who majored in history or the social sciences...”

Plenty of engineers get JDs and MBAs too. It sounds they are selecting for engineers that didn't get postgraduate degrees.

Article is paywalled for me, but that’s not what the quote says.

I think it is a fair comparison, because this is measuring career progression. Social science professions progress toward management positions or law. What would be a similar path for engineers? If that doesn't exist, then it is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

It isn’t measuring career progression. That’s the point. It is conflating entirely unrelated career progressions. The set of people who have a sociology degree at 23 and are working as salespeople or office managers or whatever else are almost entirely disjoint from the set of people who have a JD or MBA at 40. Largely that second category is made of people who were not working at 23 because they were actively pursuing a postgraduate degree.

There is actually no career progression that results in a post graduate degree being earned. That is simply not part of career progression. Earning an advanced degree is something that one can choose to do instead of investing in one’s present career. No amount of hard work at your job will turn a four year English degree into a law degree or MBA.

>are almost entirely disjoint from the set of people who have a JD or MBA at 40

My S.O. has a sociology degree, and worked at JC Penny's after college. She now has an MBA and a JD, and is COO for a healthcare delivery network of several hospitals and a whole load of clinics.

I doubt she is the only one like that.

I’m fairly confident that your SO’s case and educational path is extremely atypical. Even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t say that a sociology degree is a good way to earn a high income or become a COO. It would say that a sociology degree followed by a JD and MBA is a good path for those things.

That's nonsense. 90% of MBAs had jobs at age 24, before MBA school.

Citation?

Even if this is true, it is very misleading to conflate this with 4-year liberal arts degrees being lucrative long term. “English majors out-earn engineers at 40” is an extremely different statement than “English majors who also earn a JD out-earn engineers at 40.” If you have to get a second degree to make a good living as an English major, that says that the first degree itself isn’t very lucrative.

This is not misleading when you realize that people earning a JD today are the same people who some time ago graduated with a liberal arts degree. They're not engineers or mathematicians.

The point isn’t that they aren’t engineers. The point is that the 4-year liberal arts degree isn’t what earns them a high income. It is extremely misleading when you claim that “X leads to Y” when the reality is that “X+Q leads to Y” and the X is virtually irrelevant.

The article claims that what leads to higher earnings are the “soft skills” that liberal arts majors learn that somehow part of later in their careers, but the data they rely on doesn’t point to that at all. What helps liberal arts majors’ average earnings in the future is almost entirely attributed to the sudden inclusion of people holding advanced professional degrees.

Your contention that a liberal arts education doesn't contribute to someone who later in life becomes a lawyer is unfounded. It is similar to say that high school doesn't contribute to higher earnings: of course it does, how would someone otherwise go to college and make those big bucks? If X is a requirement to do Y, then X certainly contributes and must be counted among the factors that lead to high salaries for people who have Y.

>it is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

Well, I think it's definitely a problem. Maybe while engineers and techies are young and working and making all that money, you use some of it and get an MBA or law degree or some other professional degree? Even better, go to med school. (That one's really hard though, only do this if you really want to be a doctor.)

In any case, education like that would deal with the mid-life income growth issue fairly effectively. (And in the tech industry, with all the ageism, it can be a mid-life "having any income at all" issue. Which is even worse.)

See my top level comment, but you don't have to explain the 'facts' in this article since it appears to be based on useless data, and it doesn't even present that useless data correctly, so there aren't any facts.

But the large majority of eng lit and history etc grads don't get high flying jobs.

But it does show that compared to peer professions Engineering is badly paid even more so in places like the UK and EU