Indecision: Major Edition

Throughout this semester I have been battling the impossible task of trying to find my major.  While I came in to the University hopeful that I would take classes that would steer me in the right direction, I found my self too occupied with all of my classes to take time to research different careers.  I wanted to find a career that I would enjoy, but there had to be one criteria.  This major would have to be desirable enough to allow me to get a job when I left school.

Who doesn't want to be a train driver?

While researching careers, I began thinking about the days when my Kindergarten teacher would ask me what I wanted to be when I was older.  Unlike other kids that decided they wanted to be a doctor at age 8, I picked a less desirable job as a train driver.  This career is obviously out of the question today, as I only picked this career because of my love for Thomas the Tank Engine and without consideration to any income or demand for the job.  However, this caused me to think about how we assign importance in our careers.  How come the job of a doctor is considered a better job than a menial job such as a train driver?  In section last we, we talked about legitimacy and how we assigned importance to people and tasks.  What makes a doctor legitimate?

For those of you that are not in my section, we talked about how the topic of legitimacy is apart of multiple readings that we have done.  From the social contract theorists, to the civil rights leaders, the question always comes up of how are our laws and leaders deemed legitimate laws and leaders.

In regards to my current choice, I was wondering how the higher careers such as doctors, lawyers and engineers were deemed legitimate upper class jobs.  I decided to make a list of what makes a job better than another.  Here's what I could come up with:

1.  Importance to Others
O.K. maybe a doctor is a little more important than driving a train.  I mean, I guess trains can't heal people.  But, how about something like a farmer vs. a lawyer.  How are lawyers paid a larger amount of money, when farmers make the food for us to live?

2.  Demand
Certain jobs are paid more because that specific skill provided is need in society.  Jobs such as doctors are need because of #2.  Without them, we would die every time we got the flu.  In a perfect world, every one would be healthy all of the time and we would all drive trains.

3.  Difficulty
Jobs that are difficult to do seem to be deemed better jobs for the most part.  While anyone can try to paint, their is only a certain amount of artists that have the skill required to be successful at their trade.

4.  Barriers
While almost anyone can walk down to McDonald's today and get a job, not everyone can become an engineer in one day.  There is a large amount of schooling, networking and hard work needed just to be considered for a job.

Now this takes care of about 85% of all jobs in the world, putting fast food workers and salesman on one side and doctors and engineers on the other.  But there is about 15% of jobs that are deemed as either better or worse jobs and yet seem to be paid less as the opposite.  Jobs such as policeman, firefighters and teachers seem to be just as important, if not more important than lawyers, politicians, and company owners.

This brings me to the questions of how did we deem these jobs as legitimate upper class jobs if they seem just as important as the other jobs?  Is it possible that we will have a lack of these lower class jobs at some point in the future and they will become more legitimate?  Who is it that assigns these jobs as legitimate?