The big, bad Patriarchal, colonialist, imperialist, capitalist, white male power structure is oppressing Humanities students. Graduates of these sorts of programs will be oppressed by serious underemployment as they try to build careers as professional left-wing political agitators. If you're surrounded by statistically improbable numbers of vegans that sound like Lyndon Larouche, you need to re-assess.
Kindergarten teachers, and pharmacy techs also help people… by helping people. This is the real sticking point.
In the 's, there were more college-degree-preferred jobs than there were college graduates. It was easy to get into professional entry-level employment. That is not the case today. Liberal arts, humanities, and soft majors of all types now face competition for entry-level positions from people with far more vocationally relevant degrees.
The Accounting degree gets the good starter job, and with that, work experience. When confronted with this, liberal arts diehards refused to attend to the problem. It was far easier to retreat into simple rhetoric about "broad-based education laying a foundation for life and civics and careers twenty years from now," even as colleges created financially ruined, unemployable wastrels. Courses of study that are attached to an actual career track can become worthless if the number of graduates greatly exceeds the available number of jobs.
The graduate program of Law is an example. Those soft skills are necessary to successfully practice law. The problems happen when law schools blast out far too many graduates for the job market.
Left out of the legal field, those graduates are forced to navigate a job market with what is essentially a Liberal Arts degree. Electrical engineering is a good major. Mining engineering is as well. An AA in Computer Networking would also be a pretty good choice. Geology is probably a better major than Geography, which would be valuable on Jeopardy but not necessarily in the job market. As an year-old, I had no idea that the job I have now even existed , because the world moves so fast now.
Instead of working from the inside out, choosing paths based on who we are, sometimes we end up trying to retrofit ourselves to careers that may or may not be right for us in the first place.
But when it comes to big decisions, listening to someone else before ourselves can leave us with regrets that last a lifetime. Maybe they wanted to be a teacher independently, or maybe they felt pressured to to uphold the family tradition. Yes, even family. We risk never reaching our full potential. She had two choices:. She decided to go to the state school.
As a kid who found refuge in sci-fi stories growing up, a career in books is part of her identity, and doing anything else would have been denying her true self. A few months ago I came across a post from an old financial independence blog about an engineer reflecting on some English papers he wrote in college. I was only a few paragraphs in when I felt tears streaming down my face, because it was clear to me: here was an engineer who was meant to be a writer.
Needless to say, it went against every fiber of my being to choose a career to work toward. If you had asked me what my skills were, you would have been met with a blank stare. Since I had no existing framework for how to choose a major or career track, I made decisions based on what made sense to me:. For me, a lack of direction where I could take one small step was better than barrelling down the wrong direction. By getting experience outside of my major, I have a job that engages not just one interest, but weaves four or five of them together.
And I make more money than I need. If I had majored in Underwater Basket-weaving, would it have mattered, as long as I actively pursued my interests? There IS actually one thing that has stuck with me from my Shakespeare class. See these sexy statistics for how college graduates out-earn everyone else? Within the school context, the measure of success is completing tasks within a defined set of parameters. Do X, Y and Z, and you get a gold star. That means that one critical skill graduates need is the ability to adapt.
Most of us learn that by doing stuff, not sitting in a classroom. If people continue to rely on their classes alone to qualify them for entry-level jobs, then they will be in for a rude awakening. And so I hire people that I think can already do the job. My best hires have been the kids with the least amount of technical skills—my best one was a Sociology major—but who know how to learn stuff. All kinds of different stuff. I ask them a lot of open-ended questions in the interview to see how their mind works.
Older workers must learn these new skills on the fly, while younger workers may have learned them in school. Skill obsolescence and increased competition from younger graduates work together to lower the earnings advantage for STEM degree-holders as they age.
This is by design. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers. Large differences in starting salary by major held for both men and women. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. But what about the other perceived pitfalls — like a higher unemployment rate and lower salaries? Yes, in the UK, the top earnings are pulled in by those who study medicine or dentistry, economics or maths ; in the US, engineering, physical sciences or business.
Some of the most popular humanities, such as history or English, are in the bottom half of the group. Take law. There are similar examples in other industries too. And even while overall salary disparities do remain, it may not be the degree itself. Humanities graduates in particular are more likely to be female.
Since more than six in 10 humanities majors are women , the gender pay gap, not the degree, may be to blame. Given that, is it any wonder that English majors, seven in 10 of whom are women, tend to make less than engineers, eight in 10 of whom are men? This is a big part of why there is one major takeaway, says Mangan. Then go and develop within that job. This speaks to a broader point: the whole question of whether a student should choose Stem versus the humanities, or a vocational course versus a liberal arts degree, might be misguided to begin with.
Plenty of people know what they love most. This is part of why parents and teachers often need to take a step back, Mangan says. Amanda Ruggeri is a senior journalist and editor at BBC.
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