Since the early 2010s—a period during which I served as a private educator and collegiate consultant—when the prevailing consensus in Korea favored specific professional degrees and engineering as the undisputed keys to the labor market, I have maintained the following assertions:

Pursuing a career based on current news is a fallacy of following lagging indicators. Those entering medical school without sufficient capital backed by their family must realize that the market they will encounter after 13 years of training will not sustain the fancy figures of today.

As engineering remains a requisite for survival in a manufacturing-based economy like Korea’s, those outside the top-tier institutions should prioritize Computer Science or Mechanical Engineering. Contrary to domestic undervaluation, the standing of software/hardware engineers in the global market is formidable, and code remains the only truly universal language of the modern era.

If one’s scientific aptitude lies within the biological sciences, the focus should shift toward bio-engineering and agricultural engineering to secure food resources. As evidenced by the ABCD oligopoly―ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Dreyfus―controlling 70% of the global grain market, future conflicts will transcend energy resources to center on the strategic autonomy of food supplies."

For those lacking STEM aptitude yet still prioritizing employability―not learning―out of college education, 4 years at college must be devoted to the dual mastery of foreign languages and accounting to enhance communication capacity in the global market and financial valuation aptitude. Combining professional linguistic proficiency with financial literacy—which can be typified by the fiscal discipline required for a CPA or CFA, simply speaking—is the only pragmatic competitive advantage for non-STEM students. I deliberately omit economics as a recommended major for this group; a genuine understanding of economics is unattainable without a command of undergraduate-level mathematics, just as modern economic analysis is impossible without some proficiency in programming language.

Lastly, I recommend pure humanities only to the selected few who possess an undeniable, innate talent for reading and critical thinking. As the capitalist paradigm fractures and the AI era matures, the world will eventually revert to a struggle of ideologies, where the discourse of those with profound humanistic insight will dictate the trajectory of society.