We’re just back from three weeks overseas for my wife’s high school reunion (the 60th — wow!) and visiting friends and family. In foreign travel, one learns about other people and their ways, but what you really learn most about is yourself. So, listen up: Here’s a bit of what I’ve learned about from some of my adventures.
As I finished undergrad, Dad said I needed to have some overseas experience, so I found a summer program in London. Dad came to see me off on the ship in New York and told me not to come back until I was ready.
Carson Varner
The summer turned into more than a year with study, adventure and a girlfriend. Five nights full room and board on the ship (imagine this today!) was cheaper than eight hours on a jet plane. When we arrived in Southampton, there was a train right at the dock to take us to London. I bought my train ticket while still on the boat and was asked if I wanted first class or second class. That was a bit of a shock because, as an American, I arrogantly thought there was nothing second class about me — although tourist or economy class were quite all right! Despite this initial jolt, frugality won and I got that second class ticket, wondering if I might end up sitting on a bale of hay in a boxcar.
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Of course there was no problem and I was quickly in London. When I arrived, I went into a small place and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. They asked if I wanted it ice cold, which of course I did. Guess what? It came with ice cubes in it. I got what I asked for, of course, so I had no real complaint, but the lessons about me continued without end.
Now to our more recent trip. Our first stop was with my wife’s school friend Uli near Freiburg, my wife’s college home. It is on the edge of the Black Forest and is very classy and — now — expensive. Uli showed us some want ads in the local paper with pictures of people who were looking for an apartment or house to rent. They told about their jobs and how friendly and responsible they were. Both here and even more so in Germany, if you get someone who doesn’t pay their rent, it might take a year or more to get them out, so prospective tenants need to sell themselves first. Then in Germany, as here, most who rent are responsible for the utilities. But there, the renter pays to the landlord, who sends it on to the utility.
Now on to our greenie cousin Ingo. He is the family hero because, using his trucking license, he has made six runs with medical supplies deep into Ukraine. He is single with a grown son and lives just a few miles (or kilometers there!) outside Münster which, he brags, is the bicycle capital of Germany. It sure looked like that to us. He heats his small place with wood and his diet is all bio, which is German for organic. His bio milk is from cows that get no hormones and eat only bio fodder. In a lapse from total purity, the milk is pasteurized, but not homogenized, and is not contaminated with vitamin D.
Ingo is, however, unsure about our EV future. He says his gasoline-powered car is clean and efficient. He feels there are serious environmental concerns with battery manufacturing and disposal. EV vehicles are also much heavier, so what will they do to Germany’s well-built roads? I would add, what will they do to our not-so-well-built roads? And where will the electricity come from? Germany has made a major commitment to wind and solar. While there is generally lots of wind by the North Sea, by my count, a bit more than half of the inland turbines I saw were sitting waiting for a puff of wind. Also, the southern tip of Germany is north of northern Maine, so especially in winter, the sun can be rather faint.
Next was niece Sabine, who has four grown children. Her husband and a son and daughter have part-time jobs/hobbies as hunters. They have a lease for about 2,500 acres of hilly country made up of fields and forests, with the game being mostly wild boar and deer. Their job is partly to control the population of those animals. If they fail to keep that population in check and those animals cause crop damage, they could be liable to the farmers for that damage.
Sabine’s husband, Andre, told me he came from a small town of 350. To compare, I pushed the button of my phone and asked how many people live in Hume, Illinois, which is near our farm. Loud and clear, my phone said “325.” Amazing, but what energy does it take to store and send out all this data?
As we drove from place to place, I noticed some changes in the landscape. For instance, corn used to be rare in Germany, but seems now to be much more common. There are some challenges growing it, though. With that climate, the corn only dries to about 27% moisture, but you need 15% for storage. The solution for Germans is to chop the whole plant as sileage.
Next, a bunch of us travelled to cousin Gudrun in a small village near the North Sea. When you think of dikes, the Netherlands comes to mind, but up where they speak Plattdeutsch or Low German, there are plenty of them, too, including one right outside Gudrun’s house, with heavy doors that keep high water out, she said. Her house is about 200 years old, and back then it was common to include a sort of barn for pigs, a cow and other farm animals. The barn has now been redone for guests, but the old hoist that lifted the animal fodder to the loft remains as decoration.
While there, we went to Bremerhaven, where we saw several tall ships at anchor and then the Auswanderer Museum, or the Emigrant Museum. They said that since the 1830s over 7.2 million people from Germany and Eastern Europe left from there for new lives across the seas. How many of you have an ancestor who came this way?
Each visitor to the museum is issued a card with a picture of an immigrant. Mine was a big shot in the Weimar legislature and attorney general. Then came 1933, and his Jewish grandparent was discovered. It was then off from Bremerhaven to New York with his wife and kids to escape the Nazis.
I was and still am haunted by another story. The band played “Muss I’ den” and the ocean liner MS St. Louis left Germany in 1939 with over 900 mostly Jewish passengers holding papers for Cuba and later for the United States. The Cubans changed their minds and refused entry, and then at Miami the same thing happened. It was slowly back to Europe and doom for most of them. Google this to check out newsreels from that time of this sad story.
Now, for us Americans a German highlight is often the no-speed-limit Autobahn. Cousin Hardy, a recently retired long-haul trucker, drove us from Gudrun’s to niece and Illinois State University grad Christina in Frankfurt. It was an awesome cruise on that silky-smooth road. With German discipline and their intense driver training, fatalities per mile driven are only half of what we have in the US.
Hardy told us of an episode not that long ago. A Dutch trucking firm fired all of its drivers and brought in a busload of Russians to do the work. In the first week, he said, there were three major accidents and two trucks simply disappeared. I don’t know if this true, but it was easy for Hardy to believe it. Then I noticed an interesting lapse in that German discipline. Trucks on the Autobahn have a speed limit of 55 mph. But what do they really do? Hardy told us they generally end up driving 75 mph or more. We drove beside several trucks and he sure was right.
Germany is about the size of our Three I League (Iowa, Illinois and Indiana), with about 80 million compared to just 20 million in these three states. When my wife and I got married, of the dozen or so households at the wedding, only three had cars and another had a motorcycle with a sidecar. Today, of course, almost every household has a car or two. This makes stau, or traffic jams, a very commonly used word in the German language.
We took the early Frankfurt to Chicago flight back, arriving on time at about 11 a.m. It took over an hour to get through immigration, so we were lucky to have a three-hour layover before our connecting flight to Peoria.
Well, there it is. A lot about others, but when we think about it, there’s just as much about ourselves. Bon voyage!
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Which common college majors have the highest earning potential?
Which common college majors have the highest earning potential?
More Americans than ever are earning diplomas, which boosts earnings and decreases their risk of unemployment. However, as tuition costs continue to rise, higher education is coming at a greater cost to many Americans.
Learner analyzed data from the Census Bureau via the University of Minnesota IPUMS to determine the most common college majors for American workers.
In 2022, among adults 25 and up, 37.5% had at least a bachelor’s degree, up from around 28% in 2009. The rise, in part, may be due to a shift in job requirements: Roles that once required just a high school education now call for a college degree. Americans holding bachelor’s degrees had an unemployment rate of just 2.2% last year, compared to 3.9% for those with only high school degrees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
New York Federal Reserve research published in 2019 found that college graduates had a substantial premium over workers with only high school degrees, earning about $30,000 a year more on average. They estimate that for students who complete their degrees, the return on investment for a college degree is around 14%.
What are the most common degrees?
Business is by far the most common undergraduate major. As of 2022, around 8.5 million adults working full-time had a bachelor’s degree in a business-related field, while 2.9 million of them also earned some kind of postgraduate degree in the field, such as a master’s degree in business or accounting.
Common jobs for business majors include accountants, who make a median income of $80,000 yearly; financial analysts, who make around $100,000; and market researchers, who take home about $75,000, per BLS data.
Engineering and education were the next most common fields for full-time workers, with around 4.5 million graduates each.
In most fields, bachelor’s degrees tend to be more common than postgraduate degrees, but life science is an exception to that rule.
In 2022, there were 1.7 million full-time American workers with both a life science undergraduate degree and at least some kind of postgraduate degree, but only 1.1 million workers with just a bachelor’s degree in the field.
Many research jobs require a postgraduate degree, and biology is a common major for doctors. Biochemists and biophysicists, who earn a median salary of $107,460 annually, can get entry-level jobs with a bachelor’s degree but tend to need an advanced degree as well.
Who earns the most?
Not surprisingly, workers with postgraduate degrees typically earn more than those with only bachelor’s degrees. The highest earners with a bachelor’s degree tend to be engineering and computer science majors, with median annual salaries of $96,000 and $91,000, respectively. By comparison, a postgraduate degree boosts their annual earnings to $127,000 and $120,000, respectively.
In some fields, there’s a significant difference in earnings between workers holding undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Communications majors with an advanced degree earn a median salary of $107,000 a year, nearly double that of their peers holding just a bachelor’s degree.
In recent years, increased awareness about the burden of high-interest student loan debt has challenged the value of a college education. The average U.S. household with bachelor’s degree debt owes $29,100, while households with graduate school debt owe over double that amount, with an average of $77,300, according to a 2023 Nerdwallet study.
The New York Fed found that the return on investment for college graduates has fallen slightly in recent years due to increasing costs. The College Board found that four-year college costs amount to around $20,000 yearly at public schools with in-state tuition and $35,000 a year at private schools after accounting for financial aid.
For many prospective students, college can be an expensive proposition. In a shift from the last decade, some employers that once considered a four-year degree a vital requirement no longer do. And, in recent years, wages for many lower-paid jobs are catching up to office jobs that require a college education. However, for some, especially those with an academic aptitude, earning a degree can still make financial sense.
Story editing by Alizah Salario. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Learner and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
Which common college majors have the highest earning potential?
Carson Varner is a professor of finance, insurance and law at Illinois State University.
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