<p>I look at it this way - for some majors, how well you do in class determines how well you perform in your first job; in others, the majority get jobs where what’s required to do well has little to do with the actual material taught in class - it’s people skills, sales skills, and others like these that college gives an opportunity for one to develop, but not necessarily by whatever’s taught in class.</p>
<p>So secure parents and children who take the risk of mastering these skills often times do better in the world with degrees in “useless” majors, but if they don’t make it, there aren’t as good safeties as those who went for a more vocational track, which gives that much more incentive to be aggressive to attain their goals. DW, me and kids all chose the less risky path, but we certainly don’t begrudge those who reached for the stars with “useless” education and struck gold, but aren’t sympathetic if things don’t work out and they whine.</p>
<p>Whine? More likely their morale is under constant attack by idiots like the author of this piece and by self-satisfied drones who will want TONS of sympathy when their STEM job is outsourced to India or they wake up at the age of 39 and decide they are miserable. And while we’re at it, let’s be unsympathetic to the MDs who constantly whine about not making enough money and how tough it is when their incomes are in excess of $300K and they live in multi-million dollar McMansions. (I know several of those…)</p>
<p>My son’s current field is in the list of “useless” majors. He majored in Econ. for undergraduate but did not want to be an economist or work on Wall Street. He changed his field completely for graduate school. Well, not completely, since he had minored in this field in college (yes, he did work hard and applied himself and majored and minored as well).</p>
<p>He is graduating with an MA in May. He also has a nice job lined up that he is excited about and that has a future. But the reason he has the job is because he interned at this place for a year while studying full time for the MA (he worked 3 days a week for 10 hours a day). So, not sure his education or his experience got him the coveted job…but we’re happy he stuck to his guns and I am happy that I supported him in his decision.</p>
<p>I love the “related occupations” lists with these too. The fact that they can’t see what people with these degrees really do pretty much tells me the list is meaningless. Take the Political Scientist major, they list “related careers” as being "political scientists’, how about “attorney”. Most lawyer friends were poly sci majors in college. Also, Philosophy and Religious Studies majors–how about the obvious career that would go along with that-Priest, Minister, Rabbi, etc.? They list “post-secondary teacher” as the related career, yet say an “experienced” person with that degree averages $45,000/year. All of the college professors I know make a LOT more than that. How about acknowledge that most people in that field are working for churches/etc. and know full well the salaries are low.</p>
<p>No busdriver. My son did major in Econ but after he graduated he did not want to have much to do with Econ. or Wall Street. His minor was Film and Media Studies and he chose that as his graduate school subject. His job is in that field and he loves it…I mean he will join soon and he is excited about it.</p>
<p>Here is the condensed version of the Three’s Dad’s casa. WW (wonderful wife) was a Psych Major in college. She went to work in the HR Dept of an advertising agency as a secretary right out of college. She moved on to doing non-exempt recruiting, actually using her Psych Degree when interviewing applicants.</p>
<p>The CEO of the agency needed an Executive Assistant as he burned through them quickly. She was sent over on a temp basis to fill in and left the spot 15 years later when he retired. She is now the assistant to a managing direrector of a leveraged buyout firm.</p>
<p>I have a degree in landscape architecture and environmental planning. I’m employed in private equity real estate. Our company build homes, shopping centers, apartment buildings and golf courses. My daily activities involve all aspects of permitting and entitlements, construction management, project financial analysis, writing many letters, financial underwriting and public speaking at public meetings. I have two other college classmates who perform similar tasks; one for a large retail chain, the other for a regional convenience retailer.</p>
<p>Never understood why anyone has to major in art or music. Unless they are pursuing a career in academia, I really see no point. No one is telling engineers and scientists that they can’t play music or paint during their free time…</p>
<p>^and I never understood why anyone would want to study engineering (except to land a job). It seems dull as hell to me. Good thing there is a place for everyone and all interests and gifts.</p>
<p>Amen! Everytime I say something about “my daughter the accounting major,” I swear I can hear crickets chirp - as if the only reason she chose accounting was its marketability. Believe it or not, there really are people out there who enjoy the complexities of auditing and GAAP, just as much as other kids love English or philosophy.</p>
<p>I skipped the magazine article, and read the PDF that accompanies it. Rather heartening actually… Unemployment in ‘worst’ major was 13%…and best was 7.5… Big ado about nothing. </p>
<p>Sure majors might pay different but very many reasons to get an education besides starting salary. My first degree was in an apparently ‘useless’ major… And now Im a 1%er using that degree every working day.</p>
<p>Perhaps a possible career would be writing about math/science/engineering subjects for general or non-math/science/engineering audiences? If so, he may want to include some such courses in his college course list while majoring in something else. Many writers have poor understanding of math/science/engineering subjects, and many mathematicians/scientists/engineers write mainly for other mathematicians/scientists/engineers in ways that may not be particularly appealing to others.</p>
<p>Math courses involve writing down how you solved the problem or proved the theorem. Of course, the use of various symbols makes the volume of writing much smaller in math, although the density of information may be much higher.</p>
<p>You can say that again, UCB. When I was getting thru my thesis defense I had 100+ pages of writeup and another 40-50 appendix. There was this random Math dept guy whose thesis included all of 17 pages including the cover and signature pages . All done in TeX. All it was in there was 1. This is the statement of the problem. 2. This is the proof. 3. Thank you for the degree :)</p>
<p>Writing for a non-technical audience is an art indeed…</p>
<p>There has been a huge increase in theater majors. Many of these people would be much better off minoring in theater for fun, and studying a more practical major. </p>
<p>Instead, we have a whole generation of college grads who are underemployed - but who are really good at drama.</p>
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<p>It is also interesting to see how the selective colleges are differing from the less selective colleges. Many selective colleges are still pumping out tons of philosophy majors and people working towards unmarketable PhDs, while I see many less selective colleges becoming more and more specialized in health care careers and other fields that provide instant jobs after college. </p>
<p>The more pretentious a university, sometimes the more divorced they become from the job market.</p>
<p>None of these fields should be offered undergraduate majors. If someone wants to minor, then fine. But these majors are jokes and basically career suicide.</p>
<p>Duecey- you should get out more. Elite employers love nothing better than an undergrad degree in Philosophy, Art History, or Comparative Literature. I’ve worked for two CEO’s of Fortune 50 companies with BA’s in Renaissance Studies (one fluent in Latin and Italian, the other fluent in about 5 languages.) My last boss (made close to $2million in a bad year) was a Classics major.</p>
<p>The mistake is majoring in something you don’t like and aren’t good at in the erroneous belief that it will make you highly desirable to an employer. My company hires dozens of entry level accounting and finance majors every year- we can afford to only hire the ones who did really, really well at it. Why hire the kid who wanted to study Drama/Film but thought accounting would be lucrative (and then discovered they were a mediocre accounting student)? I can hire the top Drama/Film student for an entry level role in Media Relations or to be a junior speechwriter for senior management- I know they can write, typically are skilled at weaving in historical allusions or literary quotations with panache.</p>
<p>In fact, I just hired that kid. We can’t wait for him to start. We gave him an exercise as part of the interview process to write a first draft of a commencement speech that a pretend CEO might deliver at a pretend university. It blew us away- people were crying as they read it!!!</p>