Every college student is told to walk the line between chasing a passion they truly love and being realistic in the likelihood of success in those aspirations. The paradox is that many of the most popular fields to pursue are where people are predicted to not find success. Forbes ranked degrees in the arts and humanities as the worst to receive. On the other hand, jobs in statistics and computers, fields that definitely have acquired tastes, show the best projections in the coming decades in terms of employment and overall job satisfaction.
The problem is Forbes references data based off predictions from today’s economy. When looking at trends that lead us to the future, predicting them from today is incoherent when there may be a dramatic paradigm shift in American jobs. As the more liberal monthly The Atlantic explained in its July edition, the time when technology dramatically shifts the job market may be upon us.
Those content statisticians release data that should scare just about everyone. According to The Heritage Foundation, about 20 percent of manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 2000 alone. The most common jobs today in retail — making up 10 percent of the labor market — are predicted not to exist due to technological development by 2030.
These sectors may be irrelevant to a college graduate who saw that part-time job as only temporary, but the future looks bleak for even the most educated. By the next 30 years, many economists predict software and computers will develop to a level where surgery performed by robots will be more commonplace than using actual surgeons. Today’s health care has already shifted to where walk-in clinics, such as the ones found at CVS Pharmacy, compete with private-practice physicians — and win.
You know no one is safe when the doctors aren’t. In fact, no job field looks to be safe. While the fastest growing job market may be in STEM fields, the rise of technology has minimized the rate of job growth in terms of numbers. Google, worth more than $370 billion, only has around 55,000 employees. Students may want to look to professors to guide them, but even their jobs aren’t secure anymore. As The Washington Post pointed out, colleges have begun to hire more part-time adjuncts to replace tenured professors. With adjuncts barely making minimum wage, professors can’t compete and will soon have to enter the same market as the recent college graduates they once taught.
You can either believe the job market will look exactly the same 10 years from now or believe in the data pointing to a dramatic shift in the American economy. The fact of the matter is no one knows for sure what the future holds. What we can be certain of is, like the past two centuries, the brightest and most creative are the ones that will reap success.
But because one can’t major in inventing and leave school with a degree in creativity, it will be minds that triumph over degrees. So why not pursue that art degree? Who knows, with self-employing websites like Etsy, Inc. becoming more popular, it could be you making the big bucks while the doctors are the ones living off bread and water.
Joshua Udvardy is a UF engineering freshman. His column appears on Wednesdays.
