Speaker 1: Is a business administration degree worth it? That's what we're gonna be talking about today. But before we get into that, gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success. And we also go over some of the common financial traps that so many people end up falling for. If that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. And with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. Today, we're talking about a business administration major or a business administration degree. So a business administration degree is gonna focus on developing core skills related to a business's function. Now, usually this is gonna focus on the day-to-day operations of a business. It's not necessarily very forward-looking, like a finance degree would be, for instance. And this degree is kinda gonna be a little bit of a sample platter of a bunch of other types of degrees. So you're gonna learn a little bit of accounting, human resource management, management skills in general. You're also probably gonna learn a little bit about logistics and marketing, but you're not gonna be an expert in any one area. This is a bit of a generalized type of degree. Now, with this degree, a whopping 138,000 people graduate every single year with a bachelor's. And there are a ton of different career paths that you can go down. But starting this off, we're gonna be talking about salary. With a business administration degree, you can expect to make around $49,000 a year starting out and $81,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare this to one of the highest earning degrees, which would be petroleum engineering, and they make around $92,000 a year starting out and $102,000 in mid-career pay. Or you could compare it to one of the lowest earning degrees, which would be recreational therapy, which makes around $36,000 a year starting out and $49,000 in mid-career pay. Now, like I said, there's a ton of different career paths that you can go down. One career path you could go down would be a compensation and benefits manager, which make $122,000 a year. Another one would be a cost estimator, which makes around $65,000 a year. And another one would be a training and development manager, which make around $113,000 a year. Overall, when it comes to salary, people who graduate with a business degree tend to do extremely well when you compare that to other types of degrees. So for instance, the average person who graduates with a college degree will make around $2.4 million in a lifetime, and the average business graduate will make around 2.6 million. However, if you look at business graduates who go into business-related careers, they make around 2.8 million, and those who go into management make around 3.3 million. When it comes to earnings over a lifetime from their salary, they are in the top four types of degrees, so it's relatively high. And one other thing to note here is they can work for almost any type of business or any type of industry. Pretty much everyone hires business majors. So overall, I'm gonna go ahead and give this one an 8.5 out of 10 when it comes to salary. Next, we're gonna be talking about satisfaction. And the first thing that I like to talk about when it comes to satisfaction is meaning. And meaning is basically how much you think your job positively benefits the world. So business administration degrees have a 50% meaning score according to PayScale. That means that 50% of the people who got this degree thinks that their degree significantly, positively impacts the world. Compare this to 31% for plastics engineering technology and 91% for radiation therapy. Business degrees do tend to be average or maybe slightly above average when it comes to meaning. Now, the second part of this I always like to talk about would be job satisfaction, and that's how much you enjoy doing your actual job. So for instance, if you were a professional food taster, you might enjoy your job quite a bit, so you'd have really high job satisfaction, but you might not necessarily have really high meaning. So one career path you might go down is becoming a business operations specialist, and they have about 69% job satisfaction, which is relatively high. Compare that to a really high score, which would be clergy at 90%, and a very low score, which would be a parking lot attendant at 41%. Also keep in mind that business degrees are the second least regretted type of degree. So only about 15% of people who get business degrees regret getting the degree, but the reason for that is because they tend to be a little bit too general. And that is a huge problem here because a business administration degree is one of the most general types of business degrees. And when doing research, reading different forums and different testimonials of people who graduated with this degree, that definitely was the biggest downside. So overall, when it comes to satisfaction, I'm gonna give this one a seven out of 10. It's good, but not great. Next, we're gonna be talking about demand. So overall, business-related careers are growing at about 5% over the next 10 years, which is above average. Now, when it comes to having a business degree, it's pretty nice because of the fact that it's so flexible. You can literally work for just about any business and any industry out there. There's also a ton of different career paths that you can go down. So if you get tired of one career path, you don't wanna do it anymore, you can easily switch to a different one. And a lot of companies are looking for people who graduate with business degrees. For instance, one test that I like to do is typing in the degree name into monster.com to see how many keywords are across the site. So for the keyword business administration degree, there's about 31,493 jobs that pop up. You can compare that to a really good degree like computer science, which has around 141,000 jobs that pop up and a really bad degree like anthropology that only has around 800 jobs. So that's actually pretty good. Additionally, when surveyed, when you're just looking at the raw numbers, companies do tend to hire more business degrees than any other type of degree. So for instance, companies hire more business degree graduates than engineers or even computer and information science grads. However, a very general degree like business administration is not gonna look as good to a company as something that's more specialized like finance or accounting. Still, this one is pretty good. So I'm gonna go ahead and give it a score of 7.5 out of 10 when it comes to demand. Next, we're gonna be talking about X factors. And this could be anywhere from flexibility to how easily outsourced something is to how easily automated it is and all kinds of different things like that. Basically, anything that's not covered in the other three categories. So I mentioned the fact earlier that you do make more with a business degree than other types of degrees over a lifetime. And I also talked about how flexible it is. And you can see this in the table, business-related degrees can work in just about any industry and they make pretty good money. And the reason for this, in my opinion, is because of the fact that you learn extremely valuable skills. So for instance, one skill you might learn is business process management. And according to a ZipRecruiter Skills Index, this is one of the most valuable skills you can learn at 86 out of 100. Compare this to the most valuable skill, which is software engineering at 88 and a skill that's not very valuable, which would be industrial sewing at eight. And the cool thing about learning a skill like business process management is you can take your skills to just about any company or just about any industry out there. Whereas let's say you learned a skill in the healthcare field, there's pretty much only a few types of professions that you can work in and use those skills. So I said this before, but that's one of the huge advantages to getting a business degree is how extremely flexible they are. And in my opinion, I think they're relatively future-proof as well. I don't think business-related careers are going to be automated, or if they are automated, it will be very easy for you to switch into another career and use those skills that you've learned. So for instance, on willrobotstakemyjob.com, a business operations specialist has around a 23% chance of being automated, which is on the lower side. Compare that to a manufacturing-related job, and they have around an 84% chance of being automated. I briefly mentioned this before, but business-related degrees are all over the list when it comes to the degrees that lead to the most millionaires. And I think it's not just because of the fact that you earn a pretty good salary. The salary is pretty good, but I think it has more to do with two different things. One, I think you learn the types of skills that are going to lead to financial success and personal finance success in general. Things like budgeting, saving, and investing, you're gonna be learning these things at a very young age, whereas a lot of other people don't start doing it until they're in their 30s. I've taken a few different business-related classes on the side, and pretty much all of them teach you the basics of budgeting. And if you can do budgeting for a business, then you can definitely do it for yourself. And people who start saving and investing at a young age and keep doing it all throughout their career, even if it's just a little bit of money, end up becoming millionaires. I've talked about this in other videos. If you invest a few hundred dollars a month into your Roth IRA, you will become a millionaire by the time you retire. And then I think the second big reason why business-related degrees end up producing the most millionaires is because of the fact that a lot of them end up going on to start their own businesses. People who start their own businesses tend to make more money than people who work a normal nine-to-five job. Now, of course, there's a ton of risk associated with that. Many businesses ended up failing. All you have to do is look at all the businesses shutting down in 2020, as an example, unfortunately. So business degrees do tend to be a little bit high-risk, but also high-reward, especially if you try to start your own business and go in that direction. But let's say you're more of a nine-to-five type of person, which everybody's different. A lot of people think that working a nine-to-five job is great. If you go the business route, later on in your career, there's gonna be a lot of room for improvement. So for instance, you could go up to becoming a manager. Managers make a lot more money than just normal nine-to-five jobs. Or even down the line, you could become an executive. You could even work your way up to becoming the CEO of a company. Some CEOs of companies make tens of millions of dollars a year. Business degrees also tend to not be as difficult as some of the other types of degrees. So I get a ton of comments on this channel. You know, Shane, I don't like math. A lot of your videos talk about math-related degrees. I don't like math. I'm horrible at math. Give me degrees that don't require all that much. Well, a lot of the time, you have people who are kind of book-smart or math-smart, and then you have people that are more business-smart, and you might wanna consider getting a business degree if you're in this category. A general business degree, for instance, ranks about 53 out of the 55 most common degrees when it comes to difficulty. So business degrees are already general enough as they are, and then business administration is one of the more general types of business degrees, and that's kind of a huge weakness. So if you do wanna get this degree, I would recommend considering maybe double majoring in something else that's a little more specific. You also might wanna take extra classes so you can learn specific skills. You're gonna wanna figure out what career path you're gonna try to go down so that you can reverse-engineer those steps and figure out how you're gonna get there. And you're gonna wanna get some real-world experience, maybe go for some internships that are gonna teach you those specialized skills that companies want. But overall, I'm gonna give this one a score of eight out of 10 when it comes to X factors. So some of the pros here is that there's gonna be a lot of demand in all kinds of different industries for business-related majors. Another pro here is that business majors do tend to end up wealthy, and I've told you guys why I think that is. And then another pro is it's not one of the more difficult degrees. So if you're one of those people in my comments section that thinks that getting a math degree or a computer science degree is too hard, then this would be one that you might wanna look at. Cons would be that it's too broad and too general. The reason you go to college is so you can learn specialized skills. Learning general skills is something that you can do for free now. You can literally go on the internet and learn all kinds of surface-level general skills about just about anything. Another thing is that it might be a little bit too easy, so it is kind of what you make of it. So if you just wanna get by, do general business classes, and not do anything extra, this might be the degree for you. But unfortunately, that's gonna mean that there's so many other people that can do the exact same thing. And so the barrier to entry is gonna be very low compared to something like engineering. This means there's a higher chance that it becomes saturated in the future. Another con is that you might need to double major if you decide to go for this degree just so that you can specialize a little bit more. At the very least, you're gonna have to take extra classes or do internships, something along those lines so that you can learn those specialized skills that companies want you to have. Overall, I'm gonna give a business administration degree a 7.75 out of 10. This is better than average when you compare it to all types of degrees, but when you compare it to other types of business degrees, it's actually on the lower side. The most important thing is that you figure out what you want to do, figure out what your goal is, and then reverse engineer it and figure out what steps you need to take in order to get there. If you know exactly what you want to do, this degree might be a perfect fit for you. Everyone's going to be different, however, and everything is subjective. For some people, this degree might be really bad. With that being said, check out my other degrees down in the description below. I'm basically making a list where I rank all of the different types of degrees, and you can access that by getting on my Patreon. If you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell so that you never miss out, and comment down below your thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera. Share the video, and whatever you do, do not leave. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. ♪ Oh, ♪