Corey Moss-Pech
Subject: Does Your College Major Matter?
Bio: Professor of Sociology at Florida State and author of Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry Level Jobs
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next.
My name is Larry Bernstein.
What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Does Your College Major Matter?
Our speaker is Corey Moss-Pech who is a Professor of Sociology at Florida State and the author of a new book entitled Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry Level Jobs.
I want to learn about the consequences of choosing a liberal arts major. I also want to hear about the interplay between college majors and internships. After Corey finishes up, I am going to play excerpts from a discussion with my former interns at What Happens Next so you can hear about this podcast’s internship program.
Corey, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Corey Moss-Pech:
I'll jump right in and tell you about the book. What motivated is this discourse around the return on investment in college. College is expensive. A middle-class job is not guaranteed for all graduates, as some people end up underemployed or searching for work for a long time.
And so, a big emphasis in the national conversation is students should choose majors that lead them to labor market success like engineering, nursing, et cetera. We've seen articles about how English majors are useless and I wanted to investigate what explains these differences.
I found that skills didn't explain the differences. Most of the engineering and business majors that I spoke to did a lot of clerical work in their entry level jobs, data entry, emails, but still had impressive job titles and were paid pretty well. Whereas lots of the Liberal Arts majors like English majors do a lot of substantive work in their entry level jobs, create content for organizations that draw directly on their English major, but they're not paid very well.
What's going on here? If it's not the skill differences, what explains these differences in outcomes? My book focuses on two things. One is organization al processes between firms and colleges where students in so-called practical majors are recruited for formal internship programs on campus. In the book, I call them career conveyor belt internships because they lead into entry-level jobs that are high paid. Liberal arts majors often don't have access to these kinds of internships and so that's a real barrier to enter the labor market successfully.
I should say though that at very elite institutions places where a lot of your listeners went to college, there's not as much labor market sorting by major because if you graduate from a highly rated schools like Penn or Harvard chances are you're to be okay regardless of your major. But for the vast majority of students who go to non-elite schools, there's a lot of differences in outcome by major.
Second, there is a huge difference in the cultural value of these majors and who study them. Technical skills, like engineering, are highly culturally valued in the U.S. in 2025. People who have those skills are highly valued and therefore command a higher salary.
The two big takeaways that the majors themselves are not as different as we make them out to be. All students use a mix of practical and liberal arts skills. And it's hard to know which of those skills will be used in the labor market, even though we assume certain majors prepare students with practical skills more than others. And second has to do with labor market uncertainty. Careers are not linear. A more general education that prepares students for a variety of job opportunities in the future might be the best way forward. And so, even though I didn't intend to write a book defending the liberal arts, the natural conclusion is having more students study the liberal arts.
Most defenders of the liberal arts use arguments that they create a well-rounded education or an engaged citizen. But even in narrow economic terms, the liberal arts can be beneficial for students, and universities are uniquely suited to provide a liberal arts education. You can go to coding bootcamp and learn how to code. There are very few venues to get a liberal arts education outside of a university. It reasserts the essential value of universities in American life.
Larry Bernstein:
I was trained in economics and you in sociology. The models that I was trained with supply and demand, and your field uses a different approach. I'm going to ask people. Society is really complicated. And we have some assumptions about how it works, but we should dig in and understand what's really going on. And we can ask questions, and we can probe and find surprises in those discussions.
Corey Moss-Pech:
That's Sociology in a nutshell. You've just explained the discipline.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us what you did, how you applied sociology to answer these questions, and why it's counter to what the economic discipline concluded.
Corey Moss-Pech:
I did a longitudinal interview study. I interviewed 91 college seniors about what they were learning in their classes, their internships, their ambitions, and I interviewed the following year in their first year in the labor market.
Larry Bernstein:
Laura Hamilton a sociologist at UC Merced spoke at my book club about her book Who is Paying for the Party. She did an ethnographic study of a freshman hall at a major Midwestern public university where she tried to see what influences long-term success.
Laura expected to find grit, hard work and intelligence to be the primary drivers and what she found instead was that parental involvement in helping with school problems, choice of major, and finding an internship was critical.
Laura compares two roommates. The first is a Jewish girl from Highland Park whose parents pamper her and help her get a fabulous internship at ESPN that later turns into a full-time job, and the second is a rural, first generation, college student whose parents don’t know how to support her who ends up transferring to a local university to be near her high school boyfriend.
10 years later the Highland Park girl had the best financial performance of the girl’s on the hall and the rural roommate was middle of the pack.
Life is complicated with lots of variables. Tell us how sociology and ethnographic studies can get help understand what drives financial success.
Corey Moss-Pech:
One is you find the social processes behind the outcomes. The example from Laura's book is a great one, because if you just took a huge data set and looked at people's class background and their household incomes, you would see that the woman from Highland Park ended up doing really well in her household income later in life, but you wouldn't necessarily know why.
Maybe she was better prepared academically because she had an SAT tutor. But that's actually not the reason, right? When you dig into Laura's findings, it has to do with like her dad knows a person and she married this guy that makes a lot of money. Getting at those social processes, but also explaining the variation among people who are otherwise similarly situated.
You could use a large and statistical analyses to get really good average effects of things. Like on average, this person from this major is going to make this much more money. Or on average a graduate from Princeton is going to do this much better than a graduate from Rutgers. But what the longitudinal and qualitative data gets at variation among people who should be otherwise similarly situated.
A big thing that I found that I thought was really interesting is the socioeconomic class sorting occurs at different times with the different majors. English majors have inferior labor market outcomes from engineering majors. But within those English majors, there's huge variation.
People from higher SES backgrounds can wait longer to find a job they want. They're more likely to go to graduate school. Whereas if you look at something like the engineering majors, a lot of the class sorting happens before you get into that major. You need certain science prerequisites, you need a certain GPA, you need letters of recommendation. And so, a lot of students from lower SES backgrounds can't even get into the major.
I got my PhD, Ohio State. There are students from rural Ohio who might be great at science and math, and get into Ohio State because their grades and SATs are good, but don't have the science or math prerequisites to get into engineering, so that option is totally closed to them. These processes are hard to observe if you don't do qualitative projects.
Being able to explicate the social processes behind these average effects and also to see why two English majors from the same town with similar GPAs having very different outcomes. Trying to understand that is something that's hard to do with statistics. That's one of the big advantages and surprising findings I found were these class sorting differences.
Larry Bernstein:
Students today think that the employer should be working to make it fun and educational for that new entry level employee. That's something new.
The young person has been hired to support their manager, and he's not going to spend his day thinking about how to make that young person happy, engaged, and on top of the Maslow hierarchy of needs. He's focused on his job, and this young person is there to help him.
There's going to be disappointment, and that's why when you ask them about their job and you said, how's that going, engineer? They got me doing crap. I don't like it.
Corey Moss-Pech:
I used to have a boss who used to say that sometimes a job is work. There are two things behind what you're saying that are totally right. One is entry level jobs, what they are, how much they pay, what your life is going to be like are opaque to students, and it does allow for disappointment or unrealistic expectations.
These business operations and logistics students are getting this cultural input of you're learning these really valuable technical things that are so important for society. And it does set them up for disappointment, because in your entry level job, you are unlikely to be redesigning what a Toyota Corolla looks like.
Then the flip side of that is the English majors are told your degree is useless. And then when they get these jobs, even though they're not really well paid, where they get to do all of this writing, it's like, I'm using my degree. The expectations part of it is really important for how people experience them.
Investment banks hire English majors from Princeton. And it's not that the students are being hired because they have a deep familiarity with Chaucer, but it's not like that the English major from Princeton is less equipped to do the job than an engineering major from MIT. They might do different kinds of jobs.
I think what an organization would say is we want broadly talented people who have critical thinking and analytical skills, not that we want to hire people who know how to use the exact content of their undergraduate education. That's part of argument in the book is if we're just matching it like the content of the degree to the entry level job. Like often there's not a match there, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to do interesting things in their career, even if their entry level job is disappointing to them.
Larry Bernstein:
I started in the corporate finance analyst program in 1987. I was a Wharton finance undergrad. Salomon Brothers hired seven kids from Wharton that year. We were the major feeder. We did hire one English major from Princeton. Her name is Jodi Picoult and she is now a bestselling fiction writer. In October of 1987, Jodi's department was closed and she was terminated. And she had to make a life decision. What do I do? I've seen investment banking, it lasted two months and two weeks. And she said I'm going to try fiction. And now she's a number one bestseller.
We as a society are seeking to match skills, interests and jobs together so that you can perform to your comparative advantage. Majors for me are indicative of that. I didn't go to Princeton to major in English. Although I enjoy reading fiction, I prefer finance more.
Jodi wouldn't have majored in finance at Wharton. She wanted to major in English at Princeton. Why? Because she has an unbelievable true passion for literature and writing. And to her credit, she was able to pursue her passion. Corey, I imagine that you went to some sociology class and said, this is amazing. I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.
Corey Moss-Pech:
If you go to a very elite school, your major is not as important. There will be opportunities for you. A lot of schools that cater to lower income populations, open access schools don't even have liberal arts majors. It's just narrow practical fields to get people ready for the labor market. And I'm not sure how many people in those contexts would tell you they're following passion. Say I'm from a working-class background; I need to make a living. Like being a dental hygienist is a way to do that, not that I love teeth.
The advice that I would give somebody who's going to a big four-year college is major in what's interesting to you. And there are going to be trade-offs into what your opportunities are. But you'll find something that you like, and the market will value those things differently. And you have to decide if you want to be the English major that goes at work at Chase because you desire the stable income or the English major who wants to go work for a small marketing firm because you desire the interesting work. And there's going to be a trade-off in compensation.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell me about internships, what should we be doing, how can we make it better?
Corey Moss-Pech:
I think students really like when they have an internship-level project.
I would say that the two big things I would advocate for internship programs are make it clear what the hiring parameters are. And giving students a project, because I found when asking students about internships, those who had regular tasks were not as satisfied as those who had some big deliverable for the internship.
Larry Bernstein:
I worked at a stamp and coin shop on Saturdays from the age of 12 to 17, and it was an incredibly informative experience for me. I had to go downtown Chicago from the suburbs, took the train. I had to work with customers, learn about inventory management, about sales, and managing people. It was incredible. Tell me about the value of part-time work.
Corey Moss-Pech:
After college I spent some time working at a Starbucks. Even though it wasn't as fun or interesting as my internship or as aligned with what I thought of as my career goals, not only did I need the money, but it gave me an appreciation for a different kind of work.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about choice of major and choice of internship?
Corey Moss-Pech:
I am optimistic about the long-term value of the liberal arts. A lot of technical tasks are relatively easily automated, and a lot of employers are starting to realize that students who are able to write and communicate and think critically are valuable.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Corey for joining us. I want to expand on one of Corey’s key points which is the growing importance of internships to entry level employment after graduation.
Over the past five years, I have had 30 interns for the What Happens Next podcast. I am going to provide excerpts from a previous podcast where my former interns described working for me.
With my interns, we have a weekly zoom meeting. The first order of business is to review the last podcast to provide constructive criticism. Each week an intern is required to read a book and then make a case as to whether the author should be on the podcast.
I work directly with each intern to improve their editing skills, critical thinking, and oral communication. They love freedom of action, so I tried to give the interns choices of what books to read, podcasts to create, and projects like website design or marketing.
Many of you have teachable skills that would be valuable for young people, and I encourage you to reach out and find interns. It is very satisfying to interact with intellectually curious college and high school students, and they will learn a lot from you.
We are going to hear first from Justin Benjamin who started my intern program when he was taking a gap year before starting college at Yale. Justin just graduated and is working at BCG Consulting.
Justin Benjamin:
I chose this internship out of boredom. It was July 2020, and my family and I huddled over our computer to tune into Larry's What Happens Next calls every Sunday at 3:00 PM. I was curious whether I could help, so I shot Larry an email asking if he needed an intern.
The best part of my podcast internship was the exposure to current events. I was required to read the latest issues of the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Foreign Affairs, and new books.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you know what speaker or subject is worthy of being on the podcast?
Justin Benjamin:
There has to be a novel takeaway. I knew you did not want a rehash of ideas from last week’s New York Times. You were always looking for something provocative and entertaining.
Larry Bernstein:
You sent me an email and got the job.
Justin Benjamin:
It really speaks to the old saying “there's no real harm to trying.”
Larry Bernstein:
What are your suggestions for kids looking for internships?
Justin Benjamin:
There's often a focus on resume building and less on skill building. Think more holistically about internships and not about finding your next job.
Larry Bernstein:
How did you find your next internship?
Justin Benjamin:
I was able to leverage my What Happens Next position to obtain an internship with Josh Haghani who had been a previous guest on the show. I emailed him emphasizing our mutual connection and got the job.
Not all of my internships have been intellectual. I worked over the summer at Levain Bakery which taught me a different set of skills. I had to be punctual and ensure that every customer was treated with respect.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Justin, let’s move next to Thomas Triedman, a classmate of yours at Yale. Tell us about the summer when you worked as an intern with me.
Thomas Triedman:
I've had an interesting experience with internships because I had three of them. I worked at a think tank, a macro hedge fund consultancy, and this podcast. I'd switch from researching energy policy to looking at the shape of the Eurodollar curve before editing a transcript for Larry. Some days I'd barely do any work. Another day, all three jobs collided at the same time. But I'd much prefer to be busy than bored. Internships are about trying new things and crossing potential careers off my list. I scratched off working at a policy think tank. These internships are extremely valuable for people my age who are trying to figure out what to do with their life.
Larry Bernstein:
Thomas, you got three internships that summer, how'd you get these jobs?
Thomas Triedman:
The first job I got applying through an application portal online for the think tank. The second one I got online through LinkedIn. And the third through my friend Justin who was also an intern at your podcast.
Larry Bernstein:
What skills did you learn?
Thomas Triedman:
I learned was how to use a Bloomberg terminal. I learned about markets that I didn't even know existed—swaps markets, futures markets, option markets. The Bloomberg has lots of information that I can’t find in textbooks. It is how finance professionals follow the market.
Larry Bernstein:
What suggestions do you have for employers who have internship programs?
Thomas Triedman:
I learned the most when I was listening in on a meeting. Having interns shadow meetings, or even interact with clients or industry experts is really valuable.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Thomas. Our next speaker is Carly Brail who joined as an intern while she was in high school and now attends Harvard.
Carly Brail:
I wanted to become a What Happens Next intern because I was fascinated by economics and love podcasts. I sent Larry an email expressing my interest and he called me five minutes later. The next Monday I was on the intern call. We would meet once a week to go over the previous episode and evaluate new guests. I read two books a week and decided if the author should be invited onto the show.
Larry wrote a college recommendation letter, and I called him 10 minutes after I got into Harvard to thank him.
Larry Bernstein:
You had a substantial influence on programming. The first show you planned was on industrial labs with speakers on Xerox Park and Bell Labs. What happened?
Carly Brail:
I read both those books in the same week. And I thought they would work very well together. And then you took the idea and ran with it.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Carly. Our next speaker is Ryan Claffey who was an intern while he was getting a master’s in international relations at Columbia. Ryan is now with the Center for New American Security.
Ryan Claffey:
On Day 1 on What Happens Next, Larry informed me that editing the process of turning shit into gold. As a summer intern, I learned firsthand the painstaking process of converting over two hours of guest recorded content into a 20-minute segment.
Larry labeled me the show’s China's czar. I was tasked with reading and listening to all things China.
Larry Bernstein:
You were tasked with making a special podcast episode on a possible invasion of Taiwan.
Ryan Claffey:
The invasion of Taiwan is the most important issue in the world today.
The What Happens Next archive has several important speakers on China such as Admiral James Stavridis and Navy War College Historian James Holmes who focused his presentation on a potential Taiwan invasion. I've culled the most relevant information.
But we needed fresh material to converse with these past insights. I selected Richard Fontaine from the Center for a New American Security who led a war game over the fight for Taiwan with congressmen and former defense officials. See this China Invades Taiwan podcast here.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Ryan. Our next speaker is Dora Wedner who just finished her first year as an MBA student at Stanford.
Dora Wedner:
Larry was doing a podcast on the alcohol industry with the panel of industry leaders and Mike Novy had just taken over as President of 818 Tequila. Larry offered the interns the opportunity to join the prep call.
Once I was on the call, I mentioned to Mike how excited I was about the brand and I ended up chatting for about 30 minutes. At the end of the call, he said, I'll send you some 818, and I said, I don't need any tequila, but I would love to work for you.
He said, “Come on board. We'll have you focus on international expansion since that's where your expertise lies.” And I was like, oh my God, this is an incredible opportunity.
Larry Bernstein:
Our next speaker is Ross Armon who recently graduated from Yale and joined Endeavor Global. Tell us about your internship with What Happens Next.
Ross Armon:
Each week I read at least one book of my choosing to determine whether or not the author should be on the show. The Language of Cities by Dejan Sudjic sparked my interest in urban studies. I produced my own greatest hits episode on urban planning, where I combined segments from previous episodes. I got to hear from economists, sociologists, and museum curators about the challenges to using public spaces, how they change over time and what can be done to make the city more affordable and enjoyable for everyone.
Larry Bernstein:
I empowered you to make your own podcast. What happened?
Ross Armon:
I mean, it's huge. You take ownership and responsibility for a product that you make. I feel like these respected internships that my friends have at different banks, they're not actually doing anything most of the time. At the end of the day, there's no personal responsibility for anything.
There was one week at the podcast where I was literally responsible for the episode from start to finish. You get to take ownership.
Larry Bernstein:
If you were advising another young person about how to choose an internship, what advice would you give them?
Ross Armon:
Make sure you feel like you're doing something that matters to you. If you're just filling out spreadsheets, you're not learning anything. You can put a fancy line on your resume, but it doesn't make a difference.
Larry Bernstein:
What suggestions would you give to someone charged with managing a corporate internship program?
Ross Armon:
Having constant communication with your boss is critical. You call me four, five times a day and we’d just spend an hour talking about what the plan for the podcast would be for that week. A lot of internships, you’re not interacting with higher ups. There are no real opportunities to find a mentor.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Corey and my interns for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was The Future of the Movie Theater.
Our speaker was Greg Marcus who is President of the Marcus Corporation which owns hotels, restaurants and movie theaters. Greg spoke about the communal benefits of movie theaters and how they will change in the years ahead.
Our second speaker was Darren Schwartz who is the What Happens Next Culture Critic. Darren spoke about what he loves and hates about going to the movies.
I would like to make a plug for next week’s podcast with Monique Parsons who will discuss her new book Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, The Future of Movie Theaters, here.
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