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Parent of a HS junior here: I’d love for him to major in humanities or liberal arts. It’s very difficult to find schools that are a good fit, most kids are studying engineering or business.

It's not idiotic, it's just outdated. For most of the 20th century you could do that.

It's more accurate to say that they just abandon the skillpath because their life priorities just don't align with having that much formal schooling/training. Unless you think there's some unknown mass of unemployed but competent doctors.

I was saving this . en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vartan_...

it’s grim but there is going to be an increasing disparity between people who can read a paragraph (and so should be less susceptible to a society filled with cons and scams) and those who can’t

Preach it, brother.

I had a similar path, took chemistry (which I did like a lot) but always more attracted to politics and writing

As an English/creative writing prof who has also taught a bunch of career development courses (basically helping English majors see what jobs they can do), I just wish this message could get like 1/100th the attention that coding stuff gets

Have a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Masters degree. BFA has been very beneficial. Developing the ability to intensely observe details, ability to compose objects in an interesting way, ability to give and receive constructive critiques, have all been business critical skills in my software product job

Agree, with one request: include a rigorous probability/statistics course in the required curriculum.

I have a double major in history & media studies and the history education is much more useful for my career in communications

What’s discouraging is how hard it is to convince hiring managers (or automated applicant tracking systems) that these skills are valuable when they all want to hire someone who’s already been doing that exact role at that exact company for 5 years.

Yes, but: when young adults are taking on potentially 10s of 1000s of dollars in loans (even with scholarships!), you really can’t fault people for trying to figure out how to get the best return on that investment as directly as possible. My English degree was mostly useless for that.

People can and should do both if they have a chance, a hiring bubble is one of those chances. Unlikely the skills they acquired go unused or don’t open some other doors.

I have a degree in anthropology and a career in IT infrastructure working with things that didn't even exist when I graduated in 1994

I keep telling my 20-year-old to go ahead and major in fucking Art History if that's what she wants, it's not a job-training program. But it's hard for her to hear, what with all the screaming to the contrary.

Hubby and I got degrees in English as well. Many thought that was ridiculous (“what can you even do with that?”), but we learned to problem-solve and communicate well. Also, literature inspires curiosity and creativity. Both have been instrumental in my adult life.

a degree with curiosity for the world is better for your brain but you know what's better for your wallet? one where you have to only learn the input-output process and go work at Amazon.

Before retirement (I'm a Mechanical Engineer), I did software development for 20+ years. IMO, the hardest part of software dev is NOT the coding, the testing, or even architecture design Hardest part by far is defining the problem to be solved

I also work in IT and also have an intl relations degree (3/4 of an MA but who's counting) and yes

Good writing helps in any field where you need to communicate ideas succinctly. An English degree doesn't guarantee good writing, but the odds are a LOT better than STEM.

yes, I was a religion major and yet became a Nurse Practitioner (some years after deciding a music career wasn't for me...)

“Choose a degree that plays to your strengths” is my new favorite phrase for my oldest. They’re also trans and on the autism spectrum. They’re on the fun sassy end of the spectrum, they just need a good nights sleep.

Same! I did journalism/film and now work in comms, so it was pretty applicable, but none of what we actually learned beyond some basic guidelines ("don't make things up") is relevant now. But I learned how to read people and analyze situations, and built a career on that.

The goal of education (on top of making you well-rounded as you say) should be to teach critical thinking, work ethic, and a desire to learn which makes one a valuable employee no matter what industry you end up in

Transitioned from political organizing to corporate banking due in no small part to my speaking and presentation skills learned from my liberal arts degree!

Also, while the education requirements for nursing are not as onerous as many other fields (especially other healthcare fields like pharmacy), direct care nursing is an incredibly demanding job physically, cognitively, and emotionally

I'm going to guess the reason some of these comp sci jobs paid well is because they are also pretty complex and most people can't get in. Sure there are some frameworks that are easier to learn then others, but it's not like bootcampees are learning how to make their own compilers

Yeah, no job is immune, but I feel relatively safe as a chemical engineer simply because the field is so complicated. It also has a mix of pure knowledge work with physical work in labs/plants that would be very challenging to replace with AI.

It's also missing the point of an undergrad degree: a BA isn't vocational training! There are things I did as an undergrad that have one-to-one equivalents in my professional life (e.g., write emails, use Word, read a lot), but mainly it's just a framework for critical thinking.

A while back a friend who works at a college told me that current students are terrified of debt in a way they weren't in years past. A few decades of horror stories about student loans have really warped kids relationship with higher ed.

(This was kind of a fluke but you never know)