Photo: David D. Muir

Most people think the benefit of attending a top tier school is the ability to nab a high paying job – investment banking, consulting, CEO, etc. Sure those opportunities are great, but I am going to argue that the real advantage is the ability to pursue work that the individual finds interesting. Right now you are probably thinking – can’t anyone do that? Yes, but a top tier degree enables you to do it without worrying about money – you have a great degree to fall back on if things don’t work out. It’s not the maximum salary opportunities that matter, but rather the high minimum salary that can be expected with a degree from an elite university.

The focus of students at these schools is not merely passing versus failing – all the students admitted to top tier schools are capable of doing the work, in fact thousands of capable students are rejected every year. Keeping this in mind, these students are going to have a focus other than passing and failing: grades, social life, sports, clubs, job, girls, etc. I won’t go into what their focus should be in the post, only what they should do in the meantime – get a technical degree! Not all college diplomas are equal, even if they do come from the same school. Graduating with a technical degree will prove valuable later when it comes to your career.

Many college students make the mistake of choosing a major because it is easy and they will be able to get a higher GPA while working less. A technical major is much more important for job demand than GPA. In fact, leave GPA out of the consideration – after your first job, who cares? The answer is graduate schools, but that is not a job. Who is going to have a harder time quickly finding a job, someone with a aerospace engineering degree and a 3.1 GPA or someone with a classics degree and a 3.4 GPA? These majors may be harder but it is well worth a sacrifice of a couple tenths off your GPA in exchange for job demand.

A good major from a top school sets the minimum you can expect to make very high. An engineer from Stanford will almost always be able to find a job with a sixty thousand dollar salary (keep in mind these are rough estimates). Can you say the same about the classics major? The classics major will likely have the same ability to land an eighty thousand dollar consulting job, but if that doesn’t work there isn’t an obvious fall back option. Without some connections and a good amount of luck this individual may land down closer to the Stanford degree “minimum” forty thousand. The same principle applies to degrees from the lowest ranked colleges as well, although the numbers would all be knocked down significantly. A non-technical degree from one of these schools does not come with any job guarantees significantly above a high school education.

Running with this idea, I’d like to share my definition of job security. It is not the security that you feel with regards to your current employment, but the ability to find a similar salary if you are suddenly forced to switch companies. There will likely be several instances throughout your lifetime where you will be forced to unexpectedly find a new job — layoffs, bankruptcy, moving to a new city, or just plain fired. No matter how big a control freak you are there are some situations that are completely out of your control. In these emergency situations it is important to be able to expect a high minimum salary.

With this new definition of job security comes the ability to pursue something that you are interested in. Unless your personal minimum salary bar is set high enough to support your lifestyle, it may not be prudent to switch jobs. For example, a psychology major from Montana State has a job making good money that he hates. This individual is not very likely to quit in search of a job that interests him because if it doesn’t work out he is screwed.

Now let’s examine a MIT graduate with a technical degree. She is in a similar situation – hates her job but is making good money. The difference is that she is in a position to switch jobs in search of something that interests her or even start her own company. If this individual spends 6 months trying to start her own company which massively fails, she can easily go back to a job in her prior field and be able to support her lifestyle. All that she has to risk is 6 months of her time, but she has the peace of mind that after 6 months she can return to an equally payed, equally despised job. As a result, graduates from top tier universities are much more likely to find work they are passionate about or strike it rich by starting their own company.

I’m not saying you have to be passionate about your technical degree, or that getting a tech degree should be your reason for going to college. If you know your passion is 18th century French poetry then by all means you should major in it. But if you are like most college entrants and have yet to discover your passion, take the conservative approach in college by getting a technical degree – it will free you up to take risks later in your career.