Like everyone else says, that aviation degree is worthless outside of the aviation industry (and most of the time, even inside of it). I always tell people to go and get a regular business degree, then supplement it with an aviation minor to scratch the bug. You can even take 141 flight classes if you want to.

Thirty grand is not something you want to add on to the already outrageous college costs. If you're dead set on the flying degree for some reason, keep all other costs low and start savin' now...you'll need every penny!

 

To address some of the things said about the degree being worthless for me, it isn’t. I do not have a BA yet. After I had started two semesters in I did believe it was worthless, but now with new legislation (such as the restrictive ATP) it does seem to carry a bit more weight. While I feel like its “weight” needs a little work, I do feel it is a growing degree that will someday carry more weight.

In addition, someone had mentioned that life doesn’t work out the way you plan. I am no stranger to this in both my personal and professional life. Currently, I work as a paramedic. I am a critical care paramedic and am pretty happy in the medical field as well. If this did not work out, I could always work as a paramedic. In fact, I intend to keep my paramedic license up for just that very reason—it’ll always be a backup. Furthermore, if I decide aviation is not for me in any capacity, for one reason or another, I could always consider going to PA school. My girlfriend is in Medical School, and PA school works very similarly. In that, you can have ANY BA degree. My girlfriend is currently in a class with someone who has a BA in “History of Modern Arts.” People oftentimes think that to go to Med/PA School you need a “pre-med” degree when, in fact, you don’t. So considering I don’t have any BA degree at this moment, no other degrees really interest me, and to further my medical training should I go that route will not be directly affected by this degree, I don’t see it as a detriment.


I know you may see this as a read flag, but it really isn’t. To graduate, you have hour minimums you need to acquire for the BA. So the hours are actually PART of the degree. So when I apply for a loan to help pay for my flight time too graduate, I obviously have to have the money I borrow working TOWARD the degree. If I were to be going to a BA in, say, Art, and then was like “By the way, I need 30K to fly as well” I don’t know any bank that would give you a school loan for that—as it’s not directly related to school. This isn’t a school thing, but a bank thing. Maybe there is something I’m missing about this that you can point out?

 

My main issue is the money and the risk of getting a specific major like Commercial aviation that is so expensive. How would somebody go about getting an aeronautical engineering degree getting a job in such field then working up flight hours until you have enough to apply somewhere regional or something like that. How would that work? I am a senior in high school just trying to pursue my dream right now but I am a little lost.

 

Lol, before you post on a forum you might want to look at the date of the last post in the thread. This thread is over 4 years old. Most people on forums will give you a hard time for resurrecting such an old thread. Just as a heads up.

You should start a new thread with the same info/questions you just posted. Your likely to get more answers with a better title for your specific question.

 

Hiring studies show aviation degrees do well as pilots. For pilots the degree is a plus.

Save your money. If anything you’ll get a Masters degree in the future.

 

In the past I would have said hands-down get a degree is something marketable (any engineering, accounting, computer science, etc) as a fall-back position in case of furlough or medical problems.

An aero-space engineering degree would be great, the background knowledge will help you as a pilot and it's still a viable fall-back degree since airline hiring/firing does not tend to correlate directly with employment in aerospace engineering. Plus an aero engineer can work in other tech fields as well.

But today there are a couple advantages to a flight ops degree:

1. R-ATP: You can get hired at a regional with 1000 houirs instead of 1500, so you'll get started a few months sooner.
2. A few legacies now seem to grant some preference to graduates of the big aviation universities.

Is it worth the big bucks? Hard to say. If you end up going out on medical you'll wish you had a marketable degree and less debt for sure.

If in doubt get a real degree.