shane hummus: is an animal science degree worth it? career paths, job growth, & regret rates

Is an animal science degree worth it? That's what we're going to be talking about today, but before we do that, let's make sure to 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 going to lead you to success. And we also go over how you can avoid some of the common traps that so many people end up falling for. Now, if that sounds like something that interests you, then go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. Now, with that being said, let's jump right into it. Is an animal science degree worth it? That's what we're going to be going over today. So, first of all, let's talk about what exactly animal science is. So, it's the study of animals and the biology of animals that are going to be under the supervision of humans. So, this could include your pets, animals that are in a zoo, as well as farm animals. So, let's be real here. Everybody loves animals, okay? If somebody doesn't like animals, don't be friends with them. Don't trust them, okay? What? Just kidding. But everybody enjoys walking their dog or walking their friend's dog. And so, you know this is going to be a really popular degree. So, every year, around 5,800 people graduate with a bachelor's in animal science. So, you can work as a farmer, a zoologist, or a wildlife biologist by getting this degree. So, if you love working with animals, this might be a great direction to go down. However, the most common career path that people go down is working with farm animals. So, not working with our furry pet friends, unfortunately. But with that being said, let's talk about the kind of salary that you would be making with this type of degree, which makes sense because this is a personal finance channel. I think that's what most of the people are here for. So, when it comes to the salary, you can expect to make around $38,000 a year in your first five years after graduating and $64,000 in mid-career pay. Mid-career pay means 10 years after you start working and then after that. Now, to compare that to a really good degree and a really bad degree when it comes to salary, with a petroleum engineering degree, you start off making $94,000 a year and mid-career pay is $176,000. Whereas, with a recreational therapy degree, you start off making $35,000 and mid-career pay is $51,000. So, you can definitely see that animal science is on the lower side, unfortunately. And that kind of makes sense because, let's be honest, everybody loves animals and so this is probably a relatively popular degree that a lot of people want to go in because they want to be able to work with animals professionally. And unfortunately, the laws of supply and demand, which is just basic economics, kicks in. If lots of people want to do something as a career, it's probably going to get saturated relatively quickly, which means there's going to be lower pay. So, one career path you might go down is becoming a farmer and they make around $71,000 a year. But technically, you don't actually have to get a degree to become a farmer. You can do it with just a high school diploma. Another career path you could get into is becoming a zoologist and they make around $63,000 a year. And when it comes to salary, obviously, this is not the most important thing, but I always like to talk about studies on happiness. Studies have shown that the more money you make up to a certain point, the happier you are. Another way you could think about this is when you make more money, you decrease your unhappiness because you don't have financial stresses. Now, usually it's going to peak out around $75,000 to $80,000 a year in terms of your maximum amount of happiness. And then past that, making more money isn't going to make you any more happy. Now, of course, that's going to be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, et cetera. But overall, I like to say, generally speaking, you want to aim for a career where you can make at least $75,000 to $80,000 a year just so you can maximize your happiness. Now, unfortunately, a lot of these careers are going to be on the lower side. And so when it comes to salary, I have to give this one a pretty low score. It's going to be 5 out of 10. Next, we're going to be talking about satisfaction. And I always like to break this down into meaning as well as job satisfaction. So meaning is going to be how much you think your career positively impacts the world. So it might be a career where you're really stressed out. But at the end of the day, you go home and you know that you did a lot of great things for the world, whereas job satisfaction is just how much you enjoy your job. Now, when it comes to meaning, this one does have a relatively good score. It has a score of about 64 percent. And just to compare that radiation therapy has a very high score at 90 percent and plastics engineering technology has a very low score at 30 percent. So it's definitely above average. And this makes a lot of sense because people who love animals really love animals. And honestly, just about everybody loves animals. But people who really love animals really, really like animals. We're talking like cat ladies here, you know, nothing wrong with that, by the way. Okay. Cat ladies are great. I like ferrets. Maybe someday I'll be like a ferret man. Okay. Now, when it comes to job satisfaction, when you look at a zoologist, for instance, it also scores relatively well. I like to use the same website just to compare apples to apples. And their score is 77 percent, which if you look at a really good one like clergy, for instance, that's 90 percent. I think that's the highest one on the list. And then one of the lower ones would be a parking lot attendant, which has a relatively low job satisfaction score at 41 percent. So 77 percent is definitely on the higher side there as well. Now, another thing I like to talk about is how much people regret getting their degree. And unfortunately, the biological sciences, which is what animal science falls under, has a really high regret rate. So it's the second most common type of degree when it comes to regret at about 35 percent of the people getting the degree saying they wish they didn't get it. And the biggest reason for that is because it was very hard for them to find a job with just a bachelor's level degree. This is relatively unknown. And I talk about it all the time on this channel. But a lot of people who get science degrees think that they're going to be able to get a job with just a bachelor's. And then they find out, unfortunately, at the last moment that they have to go back to school and get a master's or a doctorate a lot of the time just to Now, I also like to mention here that satisfaction is completely subjective. It could be one out of 10 for one person and then the same exact job is 10 out of 10 for another person. Some people like fast paced jobs. Some people like super slow, easy jobs. So it's always difficult for me to give a satisfaction rating because it's so subjective. But with that being said, another thing that's really going to influence the outcome of your satisfaction is going to be the industry that you work for, as well as the company that you work for. Sometimes it's not about the job itself. A lot of the time it has to do with how well your company treats you or how much opportunity is in the industry that you're in. So if you're in a dying industry, one that's really struggling, it's being disrupted right now. You know, people are getting laid off left and right. Chances are you're probably not going to get treated as well as if you were in a flourishing industry like tech or finance. And same thing goes for a company. If you work for a company that's really struggling, they're going to be pinching pennies left and right. They're going to work you really hard and you're probably not going to get paid as well and you're not going to have as many opportunities for promotions, etc. So with all that being said, you know, keep that in mind. I'm going to go ahead and give this one a relatively good score of 7.5 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about demand. And in my opinion, demand is the most important out of all of the different factors. Now, when it comes to farmers, for instance, this industry is currently being disrupted by technology. They're expected to grow at negative 6 percent over the next 10 years. Zoologists, on the other hand, are expected to grow at a positive rate of 4 percent, which is around average over the next 10 years. Now, when you search the keyword animal science degree on Monster.com, which is a neat little trick you can do just to get an idea of how many people are actually advertising job openings for this type of degree, what I got was 1292 listings. Now, compare that to a relatively bad degree like anthropology where you get 829 and then computer science where you get one hundred and forty one thousand. It's definitely on the bad degree side of things, unfortunately. So that is kind of a sign that it doesn't have very much demand. It's not a perfect test by any means, but it's generally a sign because if people aren't putting the degree as a keyword in the description, then that probably means that they're not really looking for people who have that degree. So when it comes to demand, this one is going to score relatively low, a little bit below average. I'm going to give this one a score of four out of 10. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about X factors, and this is basically going to cover anything that we haven't talked about before, but that I think is still important. So things like automation, outsourcing, the skills that you learn, how flexible the degree is, et cetera. So when you look at biological sciences as a whole and you see how much people make over a lifetime, it's a little bit below average. They make two point million dollars over a lifetime with a biological science related degree. The average for all types of degrees is two point four million dollars over a lifetime. So that's a little below average. However, some of the skills that you learn with a science related degree are going to transfer both the soft skills as well as the hard skills over to different types of careers. So one great example of that is let's say you went into the technology industry and you became a software developer. According to this chart, if you worked with computers, you'd make around three million dollars over a lifetime. So you could argue that some of the skills you learn as a scientist in general, you know, biological science do transfer over to other types of careers. You could also make the argument that if somebody is smart enough to do a science related degree, which is on the harder side, you know, it's definitely not one of the easier degrees, then they're more likely to make more money throughout a lifetime no matter what career path they go down. So it's kind of the question of chicken or egg, you know, which one came first? Did the person make more money because they're smart enough to do the degree or did they make more money because they did the degree? Did the degree itself help them to make more money? It's the classic question of correlation and causation, and I think usually it's a little bit of both. Now, when it comes to skills, I always like to look at the Zip Recruiter Skills Index, and the closest skill that I could find would be farming, and that scores around 27 out of 100, which is on the lower side. Compare that to the best one, which is software engineering, and one of the lower ones, which is industrial sewing, at 88 and 8 respectively. So the skill itself, when you're thinking monetarily in terms of how much companies are willing to pay you for those skills, doesn't score very high. That doesn't mean that it's not a valuable skill to have. Obviously, farming is extremely valuable. We owe everything to farmers. They're the ones who feed us. But in terms of how much companies are willing to pay for that skill on the open market right now, it doesn't score very well, unfortunately. However, like I said before, some of these soft and the hard skills that you learn getting a science degree can carry over into other types of careers. With that being said, science-related degrees are not as flexible as a lot of other types of degrees, like business degrees, for instance. With a business degree, there's so many career paths you can go down. You can work for almost any company in almost any industry. Unfortunately, with science-related degrees, it's not always the same. Your career paths are relatively narrow, especially if you want to go down the science route, and it's not going to be as easy for you to switch careers as if you got a business degree, for instance. Now, when it comes to how likely something is to be automated as well as outsourced, science-related degrees do tend to shine here. So, for instance, with an animal scientist, you only have around a 6% chance of automation, which is really low. Now, when it comes to difficulty, I always like to talk about this. Science-related degrees in general can be pretty difficult. They're not the most difficult, in my opinion. You know, I was somebody who took a lot of science classes. I'm pretty sure engineering is quite a bit more difficult. Mathematics is more difficult as well. So, for instance, this list I found on the tab.com. I'm not sure how accurate this is. They kind of use dropout rates and things like that to calculate the list. They ranked animal science 31 out of, you know, 55 possible degrees. So, overall, when it comes to x-factors, I'm going to go ahead and give this one a 5 out of 10. So, some of the pros here is that if you get into a career where you're working with animals, you're probably going to feel very satisfied. It's also not likely to be automated anytime soon or outsourced, and it is going to teach you some soft and hard skills that might not directly translate into you being successful and getting a good job, but indirectly, it might translate, you know, you might do something that has absolutely nothing to do with animal science, but the skills that you learn there are going to help you in other parts of your life. Some cons here is that relatively low salaries, especially for the types of careers where you'd be working with animals. It's a pretty niche degree, you know, that's pretty narrow career paths that you're looking at, and so, you know, the skills that you learn, etc., are probably not going to translate all that well to a lot of other types of careers. At least they won't directly translate. Like I said, they might indirectly translate, but, you know, if someone sees an animal science degree on a resume, they're not going to freak out and be like, oh, we got to get this person, you know, especially if it's for an unrelated career. And then, unfortunately, the job growth also isn't going to be amazing. And so, overall, I'm going to give this one a score of 5.375 out of 10. If you do your research, you really know exactly what you're getting yourself into, you talk to people that are in the positions that you're going for, sure, this one can definitely work out for you. But I think it's super, super important when it comes to these types of degrees, specifically, you know, these science degrees where people think that they know what they're into, but, you know, they find themselves four years in a situation where they're like, well, I can either be jobless, not be able to get a job or get a minimum wage job or a job that has absolutely nothing to do with science, or I can go back to school for a bunch more time, get a master's or a doctorate, get hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and spend a ton of time. And a lot of people end up choosing the other option, unfortunately, and sometimes it turns out well for them, but a lot of the time it doesn't. And I always like to say that it's a good idea, generally speaking, you know, not for everybody, but it's a good idea to secure the bag, you know, get the bag and undergrad, make sure that you can get a job with just a bachelor's level degree. Speaking of bachelor's degrees, I made a list down below. It's going to be behind my Patreon paywall, unfortunately, but it is going to be the college degree ranker. And this, in my opinion, is the best college degree ranking list in the entire world. We spent tons of time on this. We went all across the internet, did tons of research, found the best possible resources to help you figure out what type of college degree you want to go for. I even hired somebody to help me with this because I wanted to make sure that the product was as good as possible. And that is going to be down in the description below in my Patreon. I'm also going to be posting things like my stock portfolio in there. I'm going to be posting exclusive content that doesn't make sense for me to go on YouTube. So maybe answering some of your guys's questions, for instance. If haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button, hit the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. that you have on the video. Share the video. And definitely before you leave, make sure you check out all my other videos right here because I made them just for you.