“If you were to study again, would you choose the same major? This is the question that many students ask themselves when they have been facing the struggle of the world of work for some time. Despite the fact that the success of that choice is less and less assured, yes one thing is clear: there are certain qualifications that register more regrets than others.Obviously: getting a job is usually the biggest reason for regret.
In fact, more than one in three undergraduate students in 2014 stated five years later that they either would have preferred to study another degree or directly regret having gone to university, according to one job placement survey of the INE of 2020.
the repentant. But some careers make students regret more than others when they finish and arrive in diapers on the infojobs or indeed portals. A clear case is Tourism: 45% of those who finished five years ago say they would not study that career again. This recent survey of ZipRecruiter and of LinkedIn News Spain have tried to trace the phenomenon further. According to their results, 44% of job seekers with a college degree regret their chosen major. In Spain: 38%. And the careers with the highest number of regrets are Journalism (87%), Sociology (72%), Art (72%), Communication (64%) and Teaching (61%).
Also, more than half of those who finished degrees in the field of documentation or audiovisual techniques considered that they were wrong five years later. On the other hand, the careers that register the least regret are Medicine, Nursing and Mathematics, in which at least 80% of former students would repeat if they went back.
Why? They tend to be many and very diverse. But there is one that is elementary: getting a job. The unemployment rate and the degree of regret often go hand in hand.. As we said, journalism, sociology, communication and education top the list of the most lamented university degrees. And most of them attribute their discontent with the exit to the world of work, salary and opportunities.
And of course, most of them affirm that if they could study again they would choose more technical careers such as computer science. It is obvious: the branches with less employability are those of Humanities or Fine Arts, while computer science and telecommunications careers have greater job success.
The most demanded careers. According to various national studiesthe most requested degree continues to be Business Administration and Management, since 10.6% of job offers ask for that degree. Behind her is Industrial Engineering with 4.6% of the total offers. In third place is Computer Science (3.8%). In the last position of the ranking are the careers of Psychology, Hospitality and Tourism, with a demand of 1%. In the queue there are also others such as Geography and History, Political Science or Journalism.
The humanities are in crisis, but not in Spain. In practically the whole world, humanities careers such as History, Language and Literature, Philology or Philosophy have registered a drastic drop in the number of students enrolled between 30% and 50%. Most have moved on to more scientific and, above all, technical careers. In the US, the number of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and health students has gone from 400,000 in 2010 to more than 800,000 in 2020.
However, the situation in Spain is very different: degrees related to the humanities maintain, in general, the number of enrollees and some even increase the number of students. History has added 300 more students in this period, Philosophy more than 2,000 and Arts and Humanities has added more than 4,000, going from 140,027 students in 2015 to 144,052 in 2020.
A generation of philosophers? Yes, more and more young people decide to study Philosophy in our country. According to data from the Ministry of Universities, the number of students has increased by almost 10% in the last three years. And be careful, because technology companies consider the value that philosophers can have in their companies due to their critical thinking and creativity, as we have commented in other articles.
As our colleagues from Xataka explainedCompanies such as Google, IBM or Microsoft have been hiring dozens of Philosophy graduates for several years to help them solve ethical and moral problems posed by certain technological advances. suffice to say that reid hoffmanfounder of LinkedIn, Peter Thielco-founder of PayPal, or Mauricio Lapastora, a former head of Toshiba and Fujitsu Siemens, have university degrees in Philosophy. Not everything is black or white.