Attending college is a significant investment, with the average private university tuition reaching $43,505 per year. Public state universities are the most affordable, but the average university in that category still has a $11,011 tuition.
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Despite putting a lot of money into college tuition and incurring debt along the way, not every student ends up in a high-paying career. Luckily, there is a way to increase your chances of success.
Money influencer Vivian Tu offers a career hack you can use before attending college to increase how much you earn in your lifetime.
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Vivian Tu’s career hack involves researching the median annual salary of each career in any potential major. She recommends using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook to obtain this information.
You can filter occupations based on your interest and see how the median annual salaries compare. The handbook also reveals how much you can earn in each sector. This career hack offers a good starting point, but earnings vary for each person.
Daniel “DanFromHR” Space, a senior human resources (HR) business partner director turned HR content creator said it’s better to be informed about the factors that determine your paycheck.
“Telling people to go to ‘glassdoor’ or ‘salary.com’ isn’t the worst advice, but it’s important to know that it’s just directional in nature. Instead, it’s much better to be informed on how compensation works and the six elements that factor into it — job family, job level, tenure, industry, location and job family and industry alignment,” said Space.
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Space has worked in HR for more than 20 years for companies like Spotify, EA and Epic Games. He’s reviewed many applications and conducted interviews, but in most cases, he says it’s not important to choose a good major.
“With the exception of pipeline majors — medicine, legal, education — most majors have nothing to do with the ability to do most corporate roles since business majors like marketing, advertising, public relations, etcetera, teach academic theory as opposed to applied methodology. I hire new grads all the time and most of the time the majors really don’t matter,” he said.
Space isn’t the only one who has said a major isn’t the end-all-be-all. Adnan Rasool, associate professor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, explained how conversations about majors have shifted in classrooms.
