Deciding Your Major In College

It’s college acceptance time. As a parent, you are anxiously waiting and combing through all the mail as college acceptance and rejection letters come in.  Instapundit has chronicled the rising costs of college over the past couple of years, so many parents are adding financial aid packages to the equation like never before.

Fellow Illinois graduate Stephen Moore wrote about why America is on the brink of bankruptcy today in the WSJ.  He makes a great point.  We all know that we have entitlement problems due to Medicaid and Social Security.  But look at where the jobs are in the individual states themselves.

“Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.”

Tax incentives are part of the reason manufacturing has left the US. So is the cost of labor. But the fact remains, we don’t have enough entrepreneurs and engineers. Everyone is working for the government. Hey, you can’t beat the hours. You can’t beat the pension. There is little or no risk of getting fired. If you do a sloppy job, you just get paid to do it over again. Want an outright comparison? Take a stopwatch to a FedEx or UPS facility and measure the wait in line speed with the US Postal Facility in your area.($FED, $UPS)

We need to cut the size and scope of government and trust our entrepreneurs to figure out a better way.

So when your son or daughter goes off to college to gain a little knowledge, tell them they can major in engineering, math or a science. Pick up a skill like a language or major in business. Otherwise you won’t pay. Sociology majors are almost guaranteed to become tomorrow’s government workers. Ayn Rand called them looters and she was right.

Read more at Points and Figures