Posted on 01/23/2014 12:45:38 PM PST by Borges
The cliche about majoring in humanities is that it's a lovely way to spend four years of college and poor way to land a lucrative job. To some extent, that cliche may be true. On the whole, humanities grads earn less than students who study disciplines like business or engineering. So sayeth the statistics.
But the Association of American Colleges and Universities would like you to know that getting a degree in English or History, while perhaps not the most financially rewarding choice, doesn't require an oath of poverty either. Over a lifetime, they note, typical humanities and social science majors earn similarly to graduates who study practical, pre-professional fields such as education or nursing.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Value is entirely subjective, on an individual basis. But if you look on a more macro scale, as the average return on that investment increases, so too does the average value. I know several people are happy working a job, paying their bills and buying the beer. They’re content with the status quo, and don’t mind if that’s how the rest of their lives go. An expensive engineering degree has little value to them, but the cheap humanities degree they have is well worth the position they’re in. But some people want to achieve more (or less) and for them, a higher-earning degree has more value, and a humanities one, none (or no degree has value if they don’t need it).
Yes, while one is standing in line at the Church Pantry, after having been to the UIC office and by the County Services office to reapply for SNAP, etc., they can reflect on the real meaning and import of selected choices from The Canterbury Tales and relate that to current times of “Party in the USA.”
Funny... I’ve got an English Literature degree, but I knew early on that I had ZERO interest in teaching. I started out copy editing tech books for McGraw-Hill, and parlayed that into a career as a technical writer, first on a contract basis and later on salary. Now I do tech writing in the pharmaceutical industry at a manufacturing site, and while I’m not in the top 0.5% of income, I’m doing well enough to be supporting my family of six, of which two are in college.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Bingo. Took the words right off my keyboard.
I expect the real problems arise when one has an expensive humanities degree, unless your parents were rich and paid cash. I knew some of these people in college, as well as the ones on scholarship getting the degrees that would move them up into a high-earning job, compared to their parents.
One of the kids has a BS in Chem, a Masters in Biology and and Doctorate in Physiology and is working outside those fields with great satisfaction. Another kid as a BS in Chem and General Science, a minor in Physics and didn’t want to battle the reasearch bound guys in Masters programs so is teaching science.
Another family major started with a BA in History but also later got an MBA and spent a good career in Healthcare Management managing clinical people with clinical educations.
While formal education can be a qualifier, it doesn’t dictate where you end up. It sure didn’t with me.
I had a double major: Frisbee and Euchre. Minored in Beer. I can't put a value in dollars on those degrees, but I sure had fun getting them.
Thank you. I don’t want to sound like an Occu-whiner, but if people no longer have well-rounded grounding in Western Civilization and the Humanities, society is going to suffer in little, gradual, subtle ways.
Students who were going there primarily to get a truly universal education and whose goals were to learn from the great art and literature of the past and help preserve and advance it going forward.
It would be so great if the humanities were once again seen as a guilty pleasure rather than as some sort of humanizing program. A luxury that only the wealthy could afford to partake in full time.
Eliminate all of the psychobabble and sociobabble from the humanities and replace it with good research and well-considered analysis.
“Liberal Arts is supposed to be about thinking critically, not reciting mush.”
+1
Degree in Psychology; now I am Director of IT for a Southeastern Corporation (self-taught).
Sure, just “Do What You Love” and soon Skittle-pooping Unicorns will be showering you with love. But not money.
Read his book:
http://www.npr.org/2013/10/21/236207605/scott-adams-explains-how-to-fail-at-almost-everything-except-dilbert
Well, my hobby is building blinky things that go “beep”. It’s just that if I spent 40k on a hobby I’d make sure first to be able to sell the blasted thing.
Exactly. The value is entirely subjective, and variable.
I’m a drop-out English major, and a little bitter. But a lot of the problems with my so-called college career had to do with other problems I had at the time, some of them of my own making.
To me one if the re al problems is what I call “education inflation”. That is you need a degree to even apply for a job that a high school or e en 8th grade grad could have done in grandfathers day. This may seem to contradict what I said earlier about a foundation in Western civ etc., but people can get some of that in grade and high school. We studied Shakespeare in high school(ok, it was in an elective class). Homeschooled people are very likely to have that type of stuff.
I have a friend who claims that the reason Mickey Mouse jobs require coege degrees is that they would like to give people I Q tests, but can’t, so figure that will serve the same purpose. Rush Limbaugh claims its just an arbritrary screening device for jobs that get a gazillion applicants. I don’t really buy either of these theories.
I also heard Michael Medved say that having “some” college but no degree on your application or resume is worse than none because it makes you look like a quitter. That’s pretty sad, because despite all the pain and problems, I have no doubt whatsoever that my bit of college has enriched my life and made me smarter. I probably would have never read Ulysses on my own, for example.
Medved is a turd. Don’t let anything he says get you down.
As individuals and society, we must perform a cost benefit analysis of 4 years of life and $50K to $200K of cost.
A religious or philosophical group can say the benefit is beyond measure. A college cannot, when there are many lower cost options and better uses of personal and collective (taxpayer) money.
I know that I should quit him, but can’t. It’s the same with Michael Savage.
My ex-bf used to come over when Medved was on and scream “Turn it off, turn it off.” He couldn’t stand even a few seconds of Medved, but it was fun to torment him with it.
Yikes! Your life would improve dramatically if you got thee away from both of those asshats ASAP. This I promise you.
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