Study Hacks

Willpower as a Limited Resource

In January, I posted an article titled The Science of Procrastination. It reported on the work of Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist from Florida State University. Baumeister had demonstrated an effect called ego-depletion. The idea was simple: self-control depends on a limited resource — a resource that, like a muscle, depletes during repeated, continuous use.

The experiments were elegant and convincing. Give a subject two tasks that require self-control and they’ll do worst on the second. Replace the first task with something that requires no self-control and their performance on the second increases.

The conclusion: willpower is a limited resource. The more you use, the more you lose. So use it wisely during the day.

A Problem Emerges

In February of this year, an article appeared in the journal of Social and Personality Psychology Compass. It was written by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, a pair of pioneering social psychologists from the University of Rochester, who, over the past three decades, have innovated our understanding of motivation.

Their message to Baumeister: your experiments are nice but your conclusions, unfortunately, aren’t quite right.

Enter Self-Determination Theory

Ryan and Deci have been amassing, for more than a decade, a substantial body of evidence supporting a model of energy and vitality that they call Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

This model overturns Baumeister’s “willpower is like a muscle” message, and provides us with a more nuanced view of why sometimes we’re energized when we face work, and why other times we are very much not.

Self-Control is Hard; Except When it’s Not

Ryan and Deci’s SDT framework describes how we maintain and enhance vitality. The concept of vitality captures, roughly, physical and mental energy. Among other things, it’s often associated with “vigor,” feelings of positive affect,” and “calm energy.” In short: the opposite of the mood that fuels procrastination.

The SDT model makes several predictions about what affects our vitality levels. Perhaps the single prediction most relevant to our discussion of willpower:

• Autonomous self-regulation (decisions made based on your own deeply held interests) is less depleting than activities that are controlled (decisions made based on other sources, from societal pressures to external control).

Ryan and Deci’s response to Baumeister is that self-control can deplete willpower. But, if the activity is autonomously self-regulated — if it derives from a deeply held interest or value — then willpower (as described by vitality) will not be depleted; in fact, it might even be enhanced.

In short: the effect self-control has on your willpower (vitality) depends not on how much work you’re doing, but the ultimate reason why you’re doing it.

Putting the Theory to the Test

In a series of experiments, conducted in 1999 by Ryan and Deci, along with Glen Nix and John Manly, also of the University of Rochester, this hypothesis was put to the test.

Experiment #1. The subjects were given the Wisconsin Card Sort, a standard cognitive problem-solving task. Half the subjects were self-directed. They could solve the task however the wanted. The other half were other-directed. They had to follow the strategy of the previous subject.

Happiness and vitality were tested before and after the task. As predicted by SDT: vitality decreased for the other-directed subjects but stayed the same for the self-directed. Happiness increased for both cases. (People are temporarily happy when they do well.)

Experiment #2. The researchers investigated a more subtle form of control. They turned their attention from external control (the experimenter giving instructions) to internal control (in this case: ego.) The subjects, who, like in the first experiment, were college students, were given a series of puzzles to accomplish. The task-directed group were given some background on the artist and told about the comics in which the puzzles originally appeared. The ego-directed group, on the other hand, was told that the puzzles were increasingly being used to measure intelligence and perceptual skills. A story was weaved about the Air Force using the puzzle to screen pilots. Both groups were given positive feedback throughout the experiment.

Once again, the non-controlled, task-directed group had vitality stay strong, while the ego-directed group crashed and burned.

Same task. Same positive feedback. No external control in either case. By simply turning the framing of the experiment to one of supporting ego, the task became not about a freely made decision or interest, but, instead about the maintence of others’ perception of the subject’s abilities. By doing so, the task became a willpower drain.

Implications for You

As college students, we’re quick to blame feelings of burnout or mental malaise on the amount or type of work we face. (”Not another paper! I’m tired of this!”)

The work of Ryan and Deci, however, gives us new insight into the source of these student slumps: The “why” matters. We can harness this insight to generate a collection of concrete strategies to avoid such low points:

• As much as possible, engineer your student life to make the source of your actions intrinsic — that is, freely chosen and connected to an honest interest.
• Run fast as hell from any large commitment that you feel like you’re expected or have to do. Over time, these will keep draining your vitality until you spiral into a burnout.
• Be careful about asking for advice from authority figures. Hearing, for example, a parent telling you that you should follow a certain path can have the effect of making the related actions feel controlled — even if you might have arrived at the same conclusion on your own. Mentors are safer as they exist outside of an existing framework of control in your life.
• Spend the time necessary to figure out what’s important to you and what’s not. Without real values, almost any activity will be arbitrary or controlled by outside forces.
• Leave your schedule open enough that, on a regular basis, you can pursue random, interesting opportunities as they arise. These provide the vitality equivalent of booster shots; keeping your zest for life strong.

In Conclusion

Procrastination remains inevitable. But the hope provided by Ryan and Deci is that for many activities it’s allure can be weakened. When you’re doing something that you choose to do, it’s just not that bad.

Not surprisingly, this empirical research resonates well with the optimal lifestyle approach described by my anecdotal experiences. I’m talking, of course, about the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. When you read the story of a ZV-practioner like Tyler, with his defiant choice of a classics major, a focus on research he enjoys, the lack of resume-fodder activities, and his open, random-event rich schedule, it’s hard not to imagine Ryan and Deci smiling with approval.

Keep these experiments in mind next time you feel like your college schedule is becoming too much to bear. Remind yourself often of what is perhaps the most important question you can learn to ask: why?

Dr. Happiness Speaks

A few weeks back, I went to see a talk by Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar. The topic: How to be happy. Dr. Ben-Shahar helped kick off the recent happiness-mania that seems to have infiltrated the American zeitgeist. His positive psychology course at Harvard begin as a six-student seminar and expanded over the subsequent few years to over 1400 students — making it, at its height, the university’s most popular offering

What this tells me: his advice rings true for college students.

From Him to Me to You

In the spirit of last week’s Radical Simplicity Manifesto, I want to share Dr. Ben-Shahar’s insights. Below I have included his most interesting points — drawn from both his lecture and his book. I follow this summary with some observations and questions about what would happen if you were to apply this philosophy to your student life.

We start with the basics…

What is Happiness?

Happiness is the “overall experience of pleasure and meaning. A happy person enjoys positive emotions while perceiving her life as purposeful.” The balance here is key. Neither hedonism nor rat-racing delayed gratification can satisfy alone.

Allow Yourself to Be Human

An important caveat: don’t expect to be “happy” all the time. You will sometimes be sad. You will sometimes be anxious or nervous, you’ll get dumped, and you’ll feel overwhelmed. These are human emotions. Don’t fear or be embarrassed of them. Instead, embrace them; they are part of life. Your life. As Dr. Ben-Shahar said: “there are some people who always feel happy, they’re called psychopaths.”

The goal should be that over the aggregate of your life you have a large number of pleasurable moments and feel, on the whole, engaged in meaningful activities.

Happiness is the Ultimate Currency

This is a dangerous thought for college students. Increasingly, however, I’ve been pushing it: Make happiness the ultimate goal in your life. Build everything around this; from your course schedule to your career path.

Enough big picture ideas, let’s get to the specific advice…

Tip #1: Set Goals

Research shows that the pursuit of goals that are concordant with your values can produce significant increases in your sense of well-being. Interestingly, the data show that achieving goals (or failing to do so) doesn’t seem to matter so much. There is something about having a focus on something important that helps us get more out of each present moment.

Tip #2: Seek Flow

The magic state for increasing well-being is to be neither bored nor overwhelmed. This means you should seek challenges that exactly meet or slightly surpass your current abilities. For college students, in particular, this translates to finding that perfect course load that pushes you intellectually without overwhelming you with more work than you can easily manage.

Tip #3: Simplify Your Life

Psychologist Time Kasser has shown that time affluence consistently predicts well-being whereas material influence does not. For the uninitiated: Time affluence is “the feeling that one has sufficient time to pursue activities that are personally meaningful, to reflect, and to engage in leisure.” In other words, under-schedule what you have to do so you have plenty of time to deal with what you want to do at the moment. For college students, this means resisting the urge to fill all of your time with coursework and activities. Instead, purposefully under-schedule, and then use the excess hours for the cool stuff that randomly pops up.

Tip #4: Focus on Happiness

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.” The practical translation: put in an effort to both seek out happiness-boosting experiences and learn to express gratitude for what you find. There will always be crap lying around in your life. This will never go away. If you focus on it, your world will become Emerson’s hell. The real trick is to learn how to keep moving amidst this crap — acknowledging that its a part of life that spares no one — and continually seek out or construct experiences that make you happy. Don’t just have these experiences, but also reflect on them later and show real gratitude. Dr. Ben-Shahar points to compelling research that mindful reflection on what you enjoyed during your day can significantly boost self-reported well-being.

Case Study: The Happy College Student

Let’s take Dr. Ben-Shahar’s advice out for a spin. Here’s an interesting question: Assume you built your undergraduate life around the concept of happiness, what would it look like? Here’s one proposal:

• Our hypothetical happy-focused student has a single major that he finds interesting. He is careful to keep his course load light; mixing easy with hard courses each semester so he is never overwhelmed with work. By deploying a smart arsenal of study habits he further reduces the difficulty. This allows him to really dig into the material; spend extra time thinking about the bigger implications, arguing in class discussions and finding himself often getting struck, at the most unexpected moments, with little shivers of inspiration. He doesn’t dread schoolwork, because he doesn’t have enough of it to make it painful.
• He’s involved in some activity that he finds really important. For example, as a philosophy major, perhaps he believes in the movement to re-emphasize the importance of the liberal arts in college education. This might translate, practically, into him being an editor of the undergraduate philosophy journal and helping to organize the journal’s guest lecture series that brings interesting liberal thinkers onto campus.
• However, this is his only real time-consuming extracurricular activity. Combine this with his manageable course load, and he has plenty of free time. He uses this for all sorts of purposes. Maybe he’s taken up Yoga, and has learned to take advantage of the daily shuttle from campus to a local ski slope. We can imagine that he’s constantly hanging out with friends and has been known to spend an afternoon reading random books at the bookstore cafe. He attends talks that seem interesting. Watches a lot of movies. And has become a beer snob, to the endless amusement of his natty-lite swilling roommates. At the same time, these extra hours also let him take advantage of more unexpected (and impressive) random opportunities: like writing an op-ed, pitching an article to a magazine, or volunteering to help setup a conference. He’s flexible, engaged, and low-stress. This leads him to interesting places.
• This combination of being engaged in his schoolwork, doing something important, and finding lots of opportunities to inject some pleasure into his day leads to one happy undergrad.

My Questions For You

This is, of course, just a hypothetical scenario. But the big ideas are concrete:

Like what you have to do; don’t do too much of it; get the most out of the free time that remains.

It’s a simple philosophy. Yes, some might say radically simple. But it’s worth thinking about. Here are the key questions to ponder:

• What changes would you have to make in your student life to make happiness your ultimate currency?
• How would this impact your potential paths after college?
• Does this impact matter?

I’m curious to hear the results of your ruminations…

Clinging to the Laundry List

Earlier this week I gave a talk at a Boston area high school. I decided this venue would provide a good opportunity to test out my new Radical Simplicity Manifesto. The students were generally receptive. But it became clear to me that there was still wide skepticism regarding one of the central tenets of the manifesto: the laundry list fallacy.

As you may remember, the laundry list fallacy claims that the longer your list of accomplishments, the more impressive you become. For the students at this high school, many of whom had just completed the college admissions process and were currently awaiting, with exhausted anticipation, the results of this struggle, the rejection of the laundry list fallacy did not come easy.

As one young woman asked, in response to my presentation: “Right. But do you think I did enough to get into Dartmouth?”

Unexpected Bedfellows

How can I be sure that the laundry list fallacy is indeed a fallacy? I’ll admit: I conceived of the concept based on intuition and anecdotal experience. I was pleased to discover, however, that over the past several years, the scientific community has been reinforcing this idea with mathematical and experimental rigor.

To better understand this unexpected support, we must turn our attention to an unlikely source: a pair of economists, working alongside a Bureau of Labor statistician, who, starting in 2002, waged a campaign to change the way we think about bragging.

Too Cool for School

In 2002, economists Nick Feltovich and Rick Harbaugh, in collaboration with statistician Ted To, set out to answer a simple question: Why don’t the smart kids raise their hands more in school?

To address this social anomaly, they turned to the field of signalling theory. Originally developed by evolutionary biologists in the late 1970s, and since expanded to a variety of fields, from sociology to economics, signalling theory studies systems in which agents send costly signals to convey value. It can provide insight into problems as diverse as the peacock’s plumage to men’s fascination with sports cars.

In classical signally theory, agents send costly signals to transmit desirable traits. Because the signals are expensive, only the most fit agents can afford to send them. Accordingly, the signals are honest. That is, if you receive a braggadocios signal (think: the peacock with the outrageous plumage) you can trust that the sender is worth bragging about (only a fit peacock can afford to grow such an extravagant display).

In this new paper, however, the authors added a twist: a side channel that sends extra signals about the sender with a probability based on sender’s fitness. In other words, miss peacock will likely hear some rumors on the street about the prowess, or lack thereof, of her potential suitors.

The Peacock in the Classroom

When Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To applied this model to the classroom, they defined the side channel to convey extra information about the intelligence of the students. The smarter you are, the higher the probability that people will hear, through the grapevine, about your abilities.

Once this crucial extra element was added, it turned out that the best strategy for the smartest kids to communicate their intelligence was to not answer many questions in class. When you deconstruct the mathematics of the result, the finding follows a graceful logic. The medium ability students have to signal their ability through answering questions. If they don’t, and the side channel does not happen to convey positive information about their skills (a definite possibility as their skills lie only in the middle of the range), then they will be indistinguishable from the low ability students — a bad fate.

The top students, however, with their high probability of the side channel saying good things about them, are best off not answering questions. They make this decision exactly because the medium ability students can’t risk it. In other words, only a student who is truly confident about his skills can afford to avoid constantly trying to show them off.

They named this strategy: countersignalling. And the more they looked, the more it popped up.

Beyond the Classroom

The researchers went on to validate this concept in the lab: putting real students in real scenarios, and paying them for successfully conveying value. With actual money on the line, the cash-strapped student’s behavior soon converged to the countersignalling approach predicted by the math.

Soon, more behaviors were examined and then explained by this framework. In a job interview, for example, it turns out that if you’re a top candidate, it’s best not to brag about your good grades. Similarly, for a new professor, the better the school where you teach, the less need you have to emphasize that you have a PhD.

(This last prediction was verified in an elegant experiment in which professors in the California public university system were called late at night so their voice mail would pick up. Sure enough, the better the school, the less likely you were to hear: “You’ve reached Doctor…”)

Debunking the Laundry List

These results shed powerful insight on the laundry list fallacy. Consider your resume. Each item is a signal. In addition, you have a side channel conveying extra information about your ability. If you’re applying to college or graduate school, this might include your recommendations. But it also covers intangibles, such as the type of awards or honors you’ve received or the impression left in an in-person meeting.

Countersignalling theory predicts that the best strategy for the best candidates is to have a short resume. If you have many items, this will brand you as a medium ability candidate desperate not to be mistaken for a lower ability candidate. Only the top applicants have the confidence to trust the side channel.

Applying Countersignalling

These studies point toward a few conclusion for maximizing your impressiveness:

1. Don’t send mediocre signals. An easy way to represent yourself as a medium ability candidate (be it for college, grad school, or a job) is to present a laundry list of activities none of which are all that difficult to achieve; e.g., club memberships, a summer program, a two-week mission trip. None of these signals convey a particular impressive trait, and the list as a whole makes you seem like someone desperate to differentiate yourself from the low ability candidates. The top people don’t have this worry.
2. Send a small number of strong signals. The real world is messier than what math predicts. Help the reviewer follow a high ability story line by having one or two activities that are really impressive — that is, required an desirable trait, like creativity or deep values, and not just persistence. Seeing a small number of excellent things, and no low-value bragging, will convey a strong sense of confident ability.
3. Prime the side channel. In the formal model, you have no control over the side channel. In the real world, you do. Be interesting. Make people like you. Actually convey the traits that you want the channel to communicate. If you’re a high school student, for example, this means you should actually be a curious, nice, energetic person that engages the class material. Teachers notice this, and admissions officers admit that such traits easily come through in the recommendations.

In Conclusion

This philosophy, like most, is riddled with exceptions and caveats. But the general point is clear. Less is more. Not just for your health and sanity, but also for the power of value you communicate.

The Willpower Mystery

We all know the feeling. Some days, you have a project you know you need to work on, but find it impossible to summon the energy needed to close your e-mail and get to work. It seems so simple. Click the “X” in the corner. Open the word processor document. Start typing. But you might as well be considering knocking off a quick triathalon. Your leaden, sluggish, no-motivation mood overwhelms.

On other occasions, however, you welcome the challenge. Time to work? No problem!

What gives?

Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist from Florida State University, has been studying this question for over a decade. In a recent paper, published in the Journal of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Baumeister reviews what his work, and similar studies by others, have revealed about that elusive trait we call self-control.

In this post, I summarize the main findings of this research and conclude with some practical tips for re-aligning your daily habits to leverage the conclusions.

The Strength Model of Self-Control

In a seminal 1994 paper, Baumeister introduced a hypothesis that overturned the established thinking on willpower. He proposed that self-control might depend on a limited resource — a resource that, like a muscle, depletes during repeated, continuous use.

Up to this point, most scientists assumed that self-control was a behavioral mode; a cognitive schema activated under certain conditions and not under others. This approach, for example, might blame fear of failure for your procrastination. The mental loop of failing prevents the juke box of your mind from flipping over to that ever-popular record: “productive work.”

Baumeister disagreed. And he challenged this notion with a simple experiment:

1. Two groups are given a task. The first group gets a task that requires self-control (e.g., memorizing sequences of numbers). The second group gets a neutral task.
2. Next, both groups are given a task that requires self-control. Their performance is measured.

According to the cognitive schema hypothesis, the first group should have the appropriate scheme activated in the first phase and therefore perform better in the second phase. In the experiment, however, the opposite occurred. The group that performed a neutral task in the first phase outperformed the other group in the second phase. This fit Baumeister’s theory. The first group had depleted a resource that the second group did not.

Chocolate, Radishes, and Ego Depletion

Subsequent experiments reinforced this limited resource hypothesis for a variety of traits related to self-control. One of the most interesting studies presented three groups with a plate full of both chocolate and radishes. The first group was told only to eat the radishes. The second group was told to eat chocolate. The third was allowed to eat whatever they wanted.

Next, they were all given an unsolvable task. The radish group gave up after around 8 minutes. The chocolate and no rules groups, on the other hand, both lasted closer to 20 minutes.

The term ego depletion was coined to describe this “state of diminished resources following exertion of self-control.” Further experiments helped rule out other potential contributing factors. Through careful controls, for example, researchers were able to show that these depletion effects did not come simply from subjects getting bored with the task or developing a belief that they were not good at it.

No matter what angle they attacked it from, the same conclusion arose: Self-control is a limited resource. After a while, your tanks will run empty, like a marathoner’s muscles failing in the 20th mile. This cannot be avoided.

Improving Ego Depletion

Even though ego depletion is a reality, you shouldn’t give up hope. Following our athlete analogy, through practice and control over your environment you can still work to reduce and delay these effects to a significant degree.

Here are the strategies that Baumeister, and others, have found to be effective:

1. “Just as exercise can make muscles stronger, there are signs that regular exertions of self-control can improve willpower strength.” Studies show, for example, that introducing a small number of targeted, regular self-control activities in your daily routine — such as “spending money or exercise” — can generate improvements in unrelated areas such as “studying and household chores.”
2. “When people expect to have to exert self-control later, they will curtail current performance more severely.” If you spread work out over more days, you’ll be able to accomplish more in each sitting.
3. “People can exert self-control despite ego depletion if the stakes are high enough.” This is how you are able to get through those all-nighters. However: “there are levels of depletion beyond which people may be unable to control themselves…despite what’s at stake.” Which is why the paper you finish at 4 am sucks something fierce.

In addition, the following activities or behaviors have also been shown to to “moderate or counteract the effects of ego depletion”:

1. Being in a state of positive emotion such as humor.
2. Having a detailed plan before beginning the task.
3. Cash incentives.
4. Replenishing glucose. (Subjects given lemonade did better than those given an identical tasting, sugar-free substitute.)

The Implications for You

The main conclusion I draw from these analyses: you must treat your daily work like a competitive athletic event. Your self-control is a muscle. If you don’t tend to it through rigorous training and careful schedules of use, you’ll perform well below your potential.

The following practical tips can help you re-align your work habits to this reality:

1. Spread out your work. Marathon sessions, spread over many consecutive hours, will prove impossible to sustain unless you have a looming deadline. If you want to avoid falling into a pattern of doing all of your work in panicked all-nighters, start early and work in small chunks.
2. Have a plan. The more specific your plan the easier it will be to finish the task. Never again head off to the library with only the vague intention to “study.”
3. Practice self-control throughout the day. Many students balked at my advice to “make your bed” in my first book. But there was, it seems, a method to my madness. The more daily practice you get with exerting small doses of self-control — from waking up at a regular time to getting to the gym — the easier it will be to summon your willpower during important projects.
4. Eat good meals. You might feel heroic skipping breakfast or pushing through with your work until 9 before grabbing dinner, but the lack of food energy will tank your ability to actually accomplish hard work during these times. Taking 20 minutes to grab an energy-rich meal might save you hours on your total workload.

Conclusion

In the final accounting, the best advice is to pay attention to your own body. Observe when you get tired and when you are able to get a lot done. Experiment with your habits in an effort to increase the time you spend in the latter state. Above all, this research should make one thing clear: the worst strategy is to have none at all. If you work only when you feel like it, or deadlines demand, and just let the day roll past, you’re likely to spend more time than you’d like battling an empty willpower reserve.

(Hat Tip: Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times Blog Post)

The Importance of Your College Major

Late last week, Ryan Healy, over at the Employee Evolution blog, put up a post titled: Choosing a college major. His message was simple:

I believe the smartest thing a confused undergrad can do is to choose a major with a good job market.

The response was quick and heated. Within days, 15 comments popped up. Many of the reactions, including one written by me, strongly disagreed with Ryan. “Employers don’t care what you major in,” we said. “Choose something that interests you and do well.”

But were we right?

The Experts Weigh In

I decided to do some research. The first study to catch my attention had been conducted by the job search web site CollegeGrad.com. They had recently conduced a survey of “top entry level employers” to determine what they were looking for in a new hire. The results:

#1 – The student’s major (42%)
#2 – The student’s interviewing skills (25%)
#3 – The student’s internships/experience (16%)
#4 – Other miscellaneous qualifications (10%)
#5 – The student’s computer skills (3%)
#6 – The student’s personal appearance (2%)
#7 – The student’s GPA (1%)
#8 – The college the student graduated from (1%)

In other words, this particular survey supports Ryan. Your major, it seems, is important. Choose the right major for the job market or you won’t get a good job.

But Wait…

Before closing the book on the topic, let’s be good scientists, and take a closer look. The press release for the study includes quotes from 22 of the participating companies. A review of these quotes reveals the following:

• Four companies said major matters because their employees need a specific technical skill. For example, Intel really does need people who majored in computer engineering.
• Three companies said that major matters in the more general sense. For example, a business degree might look more attractive than a liberal arts degree.
• Five companies didn’t explicitly describe what they are looking for in their hires.
• Ten companies either explicitly said that major doesn’t matter or listed traits other than major as the most important in their hiring criteria.

This paints a completely different picture.

Only 3 out of 22 companies in the sample quotes described one’s major as being important outside of the case where specific technical skills are needed for the job.

This suggests a different interpretation. Perhaps, most of the 42% who choose an applicant’s major as being the most important were companies that were hiring for a specific technical skill. If this is the case, then we haven’t learned anything new. Aspiring rocket scientists know they need to major in engineering.

But what about the rest of us…

A Better Study

The CollegeGrad.com survey makes me nervous. For one thing, the sample data doesn’t square easily with the summary results. For another, the survey is not scientific. It was a voluntary web-based poll. And, in general, I tend to treat with skepticism any study that is presented alongside banner ads of dancing aliens hawking low mortgage rates.

As I usually do in this situation, I turn to my favorite academic journals. In this case, I soon found my way to the always illuminating: Economics of Education Review.

The article that caught my attention: Education and job match: The relatedness of college major and work.

This study was conducted by John Robst of the University of South Florida, and was published in August of 2006. Robst analyzes data from the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates dataset. He was interested, roughly speaking, in how many students enter careers that are related to their college major and how this affects their wages.

The Findings

The study includes several interesting findings:

• Around 55% of graduates land a job that matches their major. Another 25% have jobs that partially match their major. The remaining 20% have jobs that don’t match at all.
• The majors that are most likely to lead to unrelated jobs include: “English and foreign languages, social sciences, and liberal arts.” Majors such as computer science, engineering, library science and business management tend to lead to related jobs.
• Graduates with jobs unrelated to their major tend to earn less money than graduates with related jobs. If their job partially matches, however, the difference in wages from having a matching job is small.
• This “mismatch penalty” comes almost entirely from graduates with technical majors taking on unrelated jobs. If you major in “business management, engineering, the health professions, computer science or law,” you can face a more than 20% drop in wages by taking a job unrelated to your major.
• For liberal arts majors whether or not your job matches your major does not effect your wages. The results here were statistically insignificant.

Conclusions

The Robst study illuminates the some interesting mechanics lurking behind this issue. My read of this data is as follows.

• Jobs that require a specific technical skill — such as engineering or computer science competency — pay more money. This is not surprising. Therefore, if you want to maximize the amount of money you make out of college your best bet is to major in a technical major.
• Outside of these technical majors what you study doesn’t matter when it comes to later wages. The Robst analysis demonstrates that for liberal arts majors your salary is basically unaffected by whether or not your job matches your field of study. For social science and education majors there is some effect, but it’s minor.
• More analysis is needed to tease out the importance of business majors. The study shows that business majors that take business jobs make more money than if they take jobs unrelated to this field. That is not surprising. Business management jobs tend to pay more than other non-management jobs. The question, however, is whether these same business jobs are open to non-business majors. The data could be read two ways. One is that these jobs are not available to non-business majors. This is why we do not see liberal arts majors having an increase in wages by working in unrelated fields (which includes business). The other interpretation is that liberal arts majors, in general, are not interested in business jobs. So the increased salary effect doesn’t show up due to lack of interest, not lack of access.

My conclusion for undergraduates looking ahead to the job search:

• Major in what you like. If you don’t like science or engineering, but major it in for the money, you are likely to end up, down the line, in an unrelated job you like more. And once you leave your field of study your salary benefits disappear. You would have been better off studying something you liked in the first place. Similarly, if you are not interested in a technical job, then choose the liberal arts or social science major that interests you most. The data shows that it won’t matter whether or not your job matches your major.
• In some sense: all non-technical majors are created equal. And if you like what you do, you are more likely to get better grades and become involved in the type of projects recruiters like.

What is your experience regarding the importance of the college major in the job searching process?