Does Your Degree Matter?

It helps you clear the gatekeeper but other than that it's pretty irrelevant. My cofounder is a communications major (lol) but was the CEO of a well known company with a 3 letter domain @ 25.

The main issue with most programs is that they are full of irrelevant content that doesn't actually help you in any way fwiw.

Now that I think about it, not a single cmo or even I've hired has had a relevant degree. One was an ex mutual fund trader and the other a dropout with a really sexy GitHub.

I would still recommend going to school though because it makes things easier in general later.

It absolutely should. But for far too long there's been a rampant trend of just going after GPA + School name.

I have a B.Sc + M.Sc in Engineering (EE + Applied Math and Physics), and a BBA + MBA. Getting a 3.5 GPA in BBA required almost no effort, other than showing up and not being comatose during your finals. The average (class) grade in EE was just below 3.0, and the workload easily felt like double.

Not once did I see any Business students stay late at school - meeting people around midnight at the EE Labs were usually a weekly occurrence. During crunch time (before finals, large projects, etc.) those rooms were sometimes packed with students, in the middle of the night.

My biggest problem with the BBA degree, that I took at least, was that it was so full of laughably easy electives. Objectively easy classes with minimal work required. We had one "entrepreneurship" class where we just had to brainstorm for ideas, write a business plan, and do a presentation - the whole duration was 7 days. 80% of the class got A, and the groups were so large that some didn't even bother showing up, while still getting credit for other peoples work. It was insane.

Of course, students COULD take "hard" classes, like econometrics, advanced macro or micro, advanced economic math (basically lin alg + Calc 1-3 condensed into one class) - but almost no-one did. Why would they? The only thing people cared about was getting good grades, because that's what the recruiters were looking at, and what other schools were looking at - if you wanted to transfer, or apply for a more prestigious graduate school.

Some students had made, and annually updated a list of classes with highest avg. grades, which professors handed out most A's, what classes had least workload, etc. It was all about playing the system to your best advantage.

Maybe it's more a recruiting problem than anything else. If you present me with a 3.9 student that only took easy peasy chickenshit classes, vs a 3.1 STEM student that busted his/her ass, I'd probably root for the latter student.

There are lots of circumstances that make something matter or not, For instance...

-A 4.0 STEM major from a non-target is more desirable than a 3.0 STEM major from a non-target. However, a 3.8 STEM graduate from H/Y/P is more desirable than both of those two put together.

-A 4.0 Finance degree from a community college with no internships means nothing against a 4.0 Finance degree from a state school. However, a 3.8 finance degree from a semi-target with one internship is a lot better than the previous ones. And a 3.6 art history major from H/Y/P (for whatever fucked up reason) is better than everyone else.

GingerGuy:

I found this interesting Forbes article that outlined 6 reasons why your major doesn't matter.

1. Your degree is a prerequisite for the competitive workforce; the topic is irrelevant

2. Certain fields yield higher incomes, but your major does not need to align with the industry

3. Your experience, be it on the job or off the job, is what people notice

4. Soft Skills > Topics you'd learn in school

5. Happiness drives success, not skills

6. Your network matters way more than your college major

There is definitely merit in a lot of those points, however in the job market for entry level positions in finance (Investment Banking, Consulting, Sales&Trading, etc) the applicant pool is so competitive that good performance in a relevant major from a top school is not even a differentiating factor anymore. Everyone's got an Applied Math/Economics/Statistics Degree from a Top 20 school these days.

With that being said, how much is your degree relevant these days, both from an entry level job perspective and later in your career? Those of you later in your careers, how relevant is what you studied to what you're doing today?

Just proof that prestige is the only delimiter, if you're trying to pick a school and have no traditional contacts.

This has always been the case.. Degrees were meant to be academic pursuits that led on to a life in academia or they were simply checkboxes/finishing schools for bright folks to transition from teenage life to adulthood in a safe environment with very little responsibilites.

Apart from a few fields that are regulated (architecture, engineering etc), most jobs undergrads graduate into can be done by largely anyone with any type of degree given that they're smart.

Some jobs that require a more technical mindset (quantitative jobs using data, non-front end software engineering etc) will tend to draw on talent from specific majors (CS, Physics, Engineering, Math etc) because it rationally makes sense that people who do those subjects tend to exhibit the traits and mental thought processes to be successful in one of those roles. Ditto careers in design and design/art degrees etc. But there's absolutely nothing stopping someone who has the capability to do those jobs from getting into them with a different major - if you sift through Berkeley's or Penn's career destinations reports there are several examples of history, sociology, politics, econ etc majors going into technical jobs over a few years.

Business/finance/political jobs? you learn everything through osmosis of being in the field. There is no "required training" to become a "qualified" banker or politician or consultant or HR professional. The model we tend to use in the UK (and the model most consulting/banking etc employers use) is to pick up bright kids regardless of major from good universities place them into a graduate training program (often rotational) then stick them into an area of a business. This model also works pretty well if you're at a good university in the states as far as I'm aware.

The idea that the only worthwhile majors are STEM majors is, frankly, ridiculous. So long as the major you do is "academic" you will be learning skills (critical thinking, writing, analysis etc) that are valuable in a multitude of white collar environments. (sidebar: I personally don't see the point in having undergrad business degrees.. they're not academic in anyway and largely are just 3-4 years of common sense + recruiting).

I'd caveat all the above with: it depends on the school you go to.. if your school isn't a "good school" and you major in sociology or history - your direct options (teaching, academia, med/law/dent school) are limited unless you network your ass off and/or build tangible hard skills. Which is why STEM majors have an easier time from those types of schools: their skillset is more readily proven and/or they're going into a regulated profession.

All in all, the formula of "good school" + "good academic subject" + "good grades" + " good ECs/internships" will always yield healthy results in resume screens - if one of those components falls short, it's on you to make up for it.

I feel like investment banks should start giving liberal arts majors from top schools more credit. They're generally more interesting and communicative. Why? Because they spend their time in the classroom discussing, debating, and listening to their peers rather than doing math equations that are a dozen times harder than anything you'd have do in investment banking. Investment banking isn't rocket science, so as long as you can work with numbers, and it's ultimately, as with anything, a relationships business once you move up the ranks.

Does your major ACTUALLY matter in terms of performing the job? No.

Does your major matter to recruiters/HR in getting the initial interview? Yes.

Unless Daddy can put you in touch with all of his banker friends, good luck breaking into high finance with a degree in History.

I dont get it.

I use IRR, yield curves, discount rates, or make amortization tables, etc. every day. Shore, I could have learned it on the job, but I would have had a lot of awkward meetings to learn that I needed to learn that. On top of that, if I didnt know all that stuff and how it related to my job and knew I would be doing it everyday, why would the interviewer take me seriously when they try to figure out what I know about the day to day of the job/if I would even be interested after a week? "Oh, hi, so what do you think you will be doing as an analyst?" "No clue, but I have a lot of soft skills", "Oh, why do you want to be in this industry?" "I read a cool article on it this morning."

I guess that is me coming from a semi-target and living in the real world. Maybe the Ivy leaguer's spend their entire life in an alternate universe floating from one entitlement to the next.

I think the more "non-target" your school is the more the major matters. If you go to southwest bumfuckville state you'd better major in something competitive (like accounting or computer science) otherwise you might find yourself working retail after college. Then there are the fields where you can't practice without the major. You (generally) can't be an engineer without some sort of engineering (or related) degree. A literature major from Harvard isn't getting hired as a chemical engineer over a chemical engineering major from Non-target U.

I actually think that what you major in, i.e. what you repetitively study over the course of 4 years, plays a major role in what kind of person you become. I've come to notice that how folks i) carry themselves and view the world ii) form values and iii) think (analytical vs. emotional) are greatly influenced by their undergraduate background. Albeit this could somewhat, but not totally, be an effect of self-selection.

Whatever the ratio is, I wouldn't go around telling high-schoolers that major doesn't matter. That would just exacerbate the student debt crisis.

Honestly, if you’re gunning for IB, just do finance or the easiest degree you can given it has good recruitment prospect.

I made the mistake of doing EE. Worked my ass off for a 3.5 gpa and it never played much in recruitment. The extra time in school could’ve been used to build more useful skills like programming, or doing more social activities in school to develop soft skills, or prepare for interview.

Even for CS, I think you can get pretty far with just a minor. Just make sure you master data structure and algo and have some side projects to show. Most of the stuff you learn in class is useless shit.

Having a good GPA doesn’t guarantee much but at least it won’t work against you. A signaling tool if you will.

Most people from my circle who ended up in IB knew how to play the “game” early. There’s exceptions but they could’ve done well for themselves, IB or not.

I understood the game early on and tried switching out but it didn’t work out. Imagine how frustrating my whole college experience was. I ended up competing with these business student who had a high gpa but lackluster experience. And lost to them on most occasions despite having a much more difficult major and front office experience. It’s not a fair process that you have to learn to accept. I m pivoting away from finance to tech instead of this bullshit

Degree is important for your first gig since you have nothing else to trade on...yet. But once you have that first gig and a handful of years of experience beneath you, no one gives a crap about your degree or GPA, only that you have a degree, period, so they can check the box that you met that bit of requisite. The work experience is the real measure of your value then. Even just spending your sophomore and junior summers as an SA, but your degree is in equestrian showmanship? Doesn't matter. They'll care way more about your work experience than your results in a dressage ceremony (obviously if you have a great story behind it to share, do so). For instance, if you're still putting your scholacstics on your resume four-five years after graduating, you're doing it wrong. All that matters is that you graduated with something since it shows the discipline and ambition. That's it.